Ryleans and Outlookers: Wilfrid Sellars on “Mental States”

Abstract Wilfrid Sellars’ well-known “Myth of Jones”, in his classic essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”,¹ is almost universally cited as the original source of the proposal that such “mental states” as beliefs, desires, intentions, and other “propositional attitudes” should be conceived of on the model of posited theoretical entities. That proposal, in turn, is the key- stone of something often called the “theory” theory (henceforth, for simplicity, “the T-theory”), although it is frequently not terribly clear just what the commitments of that theory are supposed to be.³