Sellars’s Sensa Beyond the Given

Wilfrid Sellars’s theory of consciousness distinguishes conceptual thought from sensory consciousness and gives each a different naturalistic treatment; both are identity theories, but of distinct types. Thoughts are functionally classified inner episodes modeled on public language, whereas sensations are nonconceptual, intrinsically qualitative states—“sensa”—postulated to explain the phenomenal presence of color, sound, pain, and other sensible qualities. Sellars rejects sensations as self-authenticating foundations of knowledge, yet also rejects their elimination. He looks to a completed scientific image that must expand beyond present-day physics to accommodate qualitative sensory processes as genuinely physical constituents of sentient organisms, thus maintaining the wholly physical nature of reality (Sellars, 1956, 1962, 1965, 1981a).

Consciousness without the Given

Sellars’s attack on the “Myth of the Given” is often mistaken for a denial of immediate experience. His target is instead the epistemological claim that bare sensations can possess intrinsic authority and justify empirical beliefs independently of concepts, language, and inferential relations. A red sensation may occur without being a judgment, knowledge claim, or awareness of itself as red. For it to support the observation “this is red,” the subject must already possess concepts and know how perceptual reports function within the “space of reasons” (Sellars, 1956; deVries and Triplett, 2000).

Thus, sensory consciousness and perceptual knowledge must be separated. Sensations causally contribute to perception, but knowledge arises only when a conceptually competent subject responds to them through norm-governed classificatory capacities. Sellars preserves non-inferential observation while denying that its epistemic status is independent of the wider conceptual system (Sellars, 1956).

Thoughts, Sensations, and the Myth of Jones

In Sellars’s “Myth of Jones,” a community initially explains behavior without mental concepts. Jones postulates inner episodes modeled on overt speech to explain intelligent conduct occurring without public utterance. These “thoughts” inherit semantic and inferential roles from language; they are theoretical entities that can later be identified with neurophysiological processes. This is an early functionalism about intentional states: what makes an episode a thought is principally its role within reasoning and action, not an introspectively revealed intrinsic medium (Sellars, 1956, 1965, 1981b).

Sensations require a different model. They are introduced to explain why veridical perception, illusion, and hallucination can share a phenomenal character. Unlike thoughts, sensations are neither inherently intentional nor propositionally structured. They are modeled on perceptible qualities themselves, although Sellars’s adverbial analysis avoids treating them as private inner objects: to sense “redly” is a way the perceiver is, not to inspect a red mental particular (Sellars, 1956, 1981a; Corti, 2022).

Intrinsic Quality and the Grain Problem

Phenomenal perception contains more than conceptual taking. In seeing a pink ice cube, one does not merely believe that something is pink and cubical; pinkness and spatial form are sensuously present. Sellars emphasizes the apparent homogeneity of such qualities: a pink expanse seems pink throughout, whereas a neural system described as interacting particles is structurally heterogeneous. Correlations between neural configurations and color experiences therefore do not yet provide an intelligible identity between them (Sellars, 1962, 1965).

This “Grain Argument” anticipates the later hard problem, targeting the idea that phenomenal qualities can be straightforwardly identified with ordinary neurophysiological structures. A visual field may appear as a uniform expanse of red—homogeneous “all the way through.” But the corresponding brain process, described by contemporary neuroscience, is a highly complex arrangement of neurons, electrical activity, chemical exchanges, and spatially discrete components. The phenomenal quality and the neural structure therefore seem to have radically different “grain”: one appears continuous and homogeneous, the other particulate and heterogeneous.

Sellars’s conclusion is not that consciousness is nonphysical. Rather, present-day physical theory may be ontologically incomplete. A future scientific image may need to include intrinsically qualitative physical processes—his “sensa”—instead of trying to reduce phenomenal qualities to structural arrangements of nonqualitative particles. The argument thus anticipates the explanatory gap: correlation and causal function do not yet explain the qualitative character of experience.

Thus, functional and causal descriptions may explain discrimination, report, and behavior while omitting the intrinsic qualitative character of experience. Sellars consequently refuses both reductive identification with currently conceived neural complexes and dualistic correlation with nonphysical-generated qualia. The difficulty, he argues, may expose limitations in the scientific image’s ontology rather than evidence that consciousness lies outside nature (Sellars, 1962; deVries, 2024).

Sensa and an Expanded Scientific Image

Sellars famously distinguishes the “manifest image”—the framework of persons, perceptible objects, reasons, and experienced qualities—from the “scientific image” of theoretical entities and causal laws. Although the scientific image has explanatory priority, philosophical understanding requires a “stereoscopic” integration that preserves persons, normativity, and sensory appearances while revising their categorial interpretation (Sellars, 1962).

His later proposal is that future science may recognize sensa as primitive physical processes. They are “physical-1” because they belong to the natural spatiotemporal world, but not “physical-2” if that term is restricted to the entities and properties admitted by present physics. In his process ontology, both familiar particles and qualitative sensory states may ultimately be manifestations of more basic “absolute processes.” Phenomenal qualities would then be neither emergent additions to nonqualitative matter nor reducible arrangements of particles, but fundamental physical features instantiated in appropriately organized nervous systems (Sellars, 1981a; Landy, 2019; deVries, 2024).

Explanatory Reach, Limits, and Classification

Sellars provides a sophisticated architecture for consciousness: conceptual awareness depends on publicly acquired inferential capacities; sensory phenomenality is nonconceptual and intrinsically qualitative; introspective authority is learned and fallible; and qualitative states must ultimately be reconciled with scientific realism. He thereby avoids sense-datum foundationalism, crude behaviorism, eliminativism, and substance dualism.

The account nevertheless remains deliberately limited. It does not specify which neural organizations instantiate sensa, why those processes generate a unified subject, or how qualitative similarities map onto physical structure. Calling sensa primitive physical processes relocates the explanatory burden and revises physics, but does not derive phenomenality from independently understood principles. Sellars’s accomplishment is less a completed causal theory than a principled argument that scientific ontology must accommodate consciousness rather than explain it away. As such, Sellars might resonate with Russellian monism and Galen Strawson’s “Real Materialism” (i.e., panpsychism) (Strawson, 2003).

While Landscape classifies Sellars under the Mind-Brain Identity Theory (MBIT) subcategory, he occupies a highly unorthodox, revisionary position within that group. His theory effectively splits the category in two, depending on which aspect of consciousness is being addressed, which further elucidates how Sellars thinks:

The Conceptual Realm. For thoughts, beliefs, and language (sapience), Sellars is a straightforward identity theorist. He argued that the mental states postulated by the "Manifest Image" (folk psychology) are theoretical entities that a completed science will eventually identify directly with neurophysiological states. In this regard, he is perfectly aligned with classical MBIT founders like U.T. Place or J.J.C. Smart.

The Phenomenal Realm. For sensory experience (qualia or "sensa"), Sellars still technically defends identity theory, but with a massive structural caveat. Because of his "Grain Problem," he argued that phenomenal states cannot be identical to brain states as neuroscience currently describes them (a collection of discrete neurons and particles). He maintained that qualia are identical to physical states of the brain, but only if physics is fundamentally revolutionized to include continuous "absolute processes." He remains a proud, card-carrying identity theorist who believes the physical side of the identity equation hasn't been properly discovered yet.

References

Corti, L. (2022). Demystifying the myth of sensation: Wilfrid Sellars’ adverbialism reconsidered. Synthese, 200, Article 75.

deVries, W. A. (2024). Wilfrid Sellars. In E. N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

deVries, W. A., & Triplett, T. (2000). Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Indianapolis: Hackett.

Landy, D. (2019). Sellars’s argument for an ontology of absolute processes. Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 7(1), 1–25.

Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. In H. Feigl and M. Scriven (Eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Vol. 1, pp. 253–329). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sellars, W. (1962). Philosophy and the scientific image of man. In R. Colodny (Ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (pp. 35–78). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Sellars, W. (1965). The identity approach to the mind-body problem. The Review of Metaphysics, 18(3), 430–451.

Sellars, W. (1981a). Foundations for a metaphysics of pure process: The Carus Lectures. The Monist, 64(1), 3–90.

Sellars, W. (1981b). Mental events. Philosophical Studies, 39(4), 325–345.

Strawson, G. (2003). Real Materialism. L. Antony, N. Hornstein (Eds.), Chomsky and His Critics, Blackwell.