Although each of these parts is important, they can’t be described as addressing a common topic. However, they do together represent the place where Sellars completes his transition from a critique of the Myth of the Given to a statement of his views on the philosophy of mind, which we will turn to next week.

• Part VII. These sections are in keeping with Wittgenstein’s suggestion that meaning be thought of as lying in the use of a sign and not thought of as a co-existing object, not even a mental one. Think, in particular, about the idea of a “role in a certain linguistic economy” that Sellars uses when speaking about the significance of statements of meaning. The key point of this discussion for Sellars’s purposes lies in the last few lines of §31 (on p. 243).

• Part VIII. In the latter part of VIII, Sellars develops his own view of perceptual knowledge further. He prepares for that in the first few sections by considering a form of the Myth of the Given to which his own view is an alternative. This version of the myth is stated in §32 and discussed in §§33-34. The German term “Konstatierung” (which can be translated simply as “statement”) was used as a technical term by the logical positivist Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), who was the senior member of the Vienna Circle. The role of such reports in Schlick’s account of knowledge was roughly analogous to the role for Russell of truths of perception that are self-evident in his strongest sense (see The Problems of Philosophy ¶13.12).

In the latter part of VIII, Sellars presents his own alternative to the view he discussed in the earlier part. The passage we will focus on is near the end, but I’ll direct you also to the earlier material necessary to set it in context. The key passage is one in which Sellars offers

• a proposed solution to a regress he faces (see the first paragraph of §37, pp. 248ff).

You should think whether this proposal succeeds. But, of course, you also need to think about

• the view that can seem to face this regress, which can be found at the end of §35 (on p. 247).

• the statement of the regress, which appears at the end of §36 (on p. 248), and

And you should follow Sellars’s directions to reread §19 after you finish §37.

• Part IX. This part picks up ideas Sellars began to discuss in §9, filling out the “autonomy” he there ascribed to theoretical language (p. 217). His strongest statement of this appears at the end of §42 on pp. 252f. This espousal of “scientific realism” needs to be balanced by his comment at the end of §40 (pp. 251f) that the discourse of science is the development of one aspect of ordinary usage. Sellars here speaks of his point of view as one that is opened up when one gives up what he calls the “positivistic conception of science” (§43, p. 253) that he sees as tied to the Myth of the Given, but his alternative view of science will have an important role in the particular way in which he gives up that Myth.