Peirce and Sellars on Nonconceptual Content

Abstract

This chapter situates Charles S. Peirce with respect to Brandom&s;s inferentialism, and argues that Peirce is a hyper-inferentialist due to his early unequivocal rejection of intuition in epistemology, claiming instead that all thought is in signs. It also argues that Peirce works out an inferentialist account even of qualia such as red through naturalistic arguments which challenge the self-certainty of introspection. The chapter shows that we are not able to tell by intuition whether a thought is an intuition or an inference, and sketches a model of sensory capacities in which many inferences occur below conscious awareness. Peirce accords a more explicit and direct role to experience in an entirely preconceptual percept, but this is overlaid with a level of perceptual judgment which corresponds to Wilfred Sellars&s;s space of reasons. What is most interesting is the relationship Peirce charts between percept and perceptual judgment: the latter does not describe, nor is it justified by the former, rather, it indexes it.