In these parts of his paper, Sellars looks more closely at the Myth of the Given and related views and starts to distinguish the aspects he can accept and will incorporate in his own account of thoughts and sensations. Probably the key idea in all of this is the “psychological nominalism” described in §29.

• Part IV. After an introductory section, Sellars considers essentially two ways immediate experiences might be employed as explanations of qualitative and existential lookings. He passes over the first very quickly, but you should think about it since (as he hints here), it will become very important later. He begins to discuss the second way of explaining these lookings in the third paragraph of §22, but he lays it out most explicitly in the displayed text of §23. Of course, you should think through his criticisms of this sort of explanation.

• Part V. Here Sellars digresses to offer an explanation of why 17th century rationalists might have been inclined to regard sensations as confused thoughts. The chief interest of this part for our purposes lies in connections with some things you’ve read and others that you will read.

• The “notorious ‘ing-ed’ ambiguity” Sellars mentions (§24—p. 223) is essentially the act/object ambiguity Russell found in Berkeley (see The Problems of Philosophy, ¶¶1.10, 4.9-11).

• The feature of “propositional attitude” statements, like “Jones believes in a divine Huntress” (§24, p. 234), that Sellars sees as lying behind the 17th century assimilation of sensation to thought is just the feature that Russell found troubling and designed his analysis of belief to deal with (see The Problems of Philosophy, ¶¶12.14-19).

• When speaking of “nonextensional contexts” (§24 p. 234), Sellars has in mind discussions of the sort we will encounter in Quine (who we will read next). Strictly speaking, a nonextensional context is one in which the substitution of a name (or definite description) for another name for the same thing can change the truth-value of the sentence. For example, we might say of Fred, who wishes to visit Chicago, which he believes to be the capital of Illinois, that he wishes to visit the capital of Illinois; but, if he is well aware of the size of Chicago, we would hesitate to say that he wishes to visit the 4th largest city in Illinois even though the capital of Illinois is its 4th largest city. Quine argues that nonextensional contexts also prevent us from drawing conclusions of the form “Some X ...” that would otherwise be legitimate. From “John is visiting a city in the clouds” it follows that “Some city is in the clouds,” but this would not follow from “John wishes to visit a city in the clouds.”

Also remember, when you read Sellars’s references to “objective being,” the way you had to understand the term “objective” when reading Descartes (i.e., “objective” means ‘as an object of thought’ while “formal” means ‘as an independent substance’ so “subjective being” means ‘being as a real subject not as a mere mental object’).

• Part VI. This has 4 sections devoted, respectively, to Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and a view Sellars calls “psychological nominalism.” An example of the “determinate/determinable” distinction Sellars employs in §26 is a distinction between a specific shade of a color (a point in a color space) and a sort of color (a region in the color space)—e.g., between the official Wabash shade of red and red in general. Even a determinate shade can show up repeatedly so it, too, is a “sort” and Sellars compares views about the two varieties of generality. “Psychological nominalism” (§29, p. 240) can be thought of as taking Hume’s view of the relation between our awareness of determinables and our awareness of determinates and extending it to our awareness of repeatable determinates and our awareness of any of their repeated instances. Although Sellars’ focus in this discussion is on the 17th and 18th centuries, you should look for connections between the idea of psychological nominalism and Wittgenstein’s discussion of our grasp of color concepts. (The second problem of §26, p. 236—the one Sellars says is a problem only for those who accept the Myth of the Given—is sometimes referred to as the problem of the “inverted spectrum.”)