Sellars's master argument for conceptualism

Abstract

This paper reconstructs what I call Sellars's ‘master argument’ for conceptualism regarding Kantian intuitions—a coherent argumentative thread that appears throughout his works beginning with Science and Metaphysics. In contrast to standard interpretations that focus primarily on the role of the categories, I demonstrate that Sellars defends a robust form of conceptualism in which empirical concepts also play a constitutive role in intuition. The master argument proceeds through three key moves: defining Kantian intuition as a (singular) ‘representation of a manifold’; showing that such a representation is necessarily conceptual; and employing an Aristotelian reading of intuition as a ‘this‐such’ or ‘tode ti’. This reconstruction not only clarifies Sellars's distinctive position in the conceptualism/non‐conceptualism debate but also provides resources for addressing some contemporary objections, particularly those concerning animal cognition and the content of intuitions.