Nominalism as Conceptual Phenomenalism:a Defense and Development of a Reading of Sellars

Over a number of papers, I have developed what Robert Brandom calls a “conceptual phenomenalist” reading of Wilfrid Sellars’s nominalism. According to this reading, general conceptual contents are phenomenal in the Kantian sense, to be contrasted with the particular material happenings that constitute the world, as it is in itself. In a recent paper, Chen Liang argues that this conceptual phenomenalist interpretation of Sellars misrepresents crucial aspects of Sellars’s philosophy. The present article has two main tasks. First, I clarify the conceptual phenomenalist interpretation of Sellars and defend it in response to Liang’s criticisms. Second, I provide a novel development of a central idea of this reading: that Sellars’s late process ontology can be understood as better motivated by his ontological nominalism than by considerations involving the character of sensation.