[ausschliessend] with, the ruling out of, other possibilities. These fundamental relations contrast of material incompatibility, what he calls in turn give rise to material “determinate negation”, relations among the contents they articulate: what he calls So for inferential “mediation”. instance being a dog entails being a mammal in that everything incompatible with being a mammal is incompatible with being a dog. To be determinate or determinately contentful just is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and material inference to other such determinately contentful items—whether on the side of thoughts or of facts. These relations are intrinsically modally robust: incompatibilities are of coinstantiation, and the impossibilities inferences they generate are It is as a consequence of this way of counterfactual-supporting. thinking about determinate contentfulness that Hegel secures the result that was so important to Kant, namely that we can never be in the supposed position from which question is Hume’s asked: one in which determinate empirical thoughts or states of affairs are fully in place, but the question of how or relations among them are to be underwritten is still open. lawful necessary It is also an approach that rules out the semantic atomism on which Enlightenment epistemology was predicated. For that traditional picture took it that a stock of determinate concepts could be available to the inquirer, out of which judgments could be constructed that then could be sorted—fallibly to be sure—into true ones and false ones. The gradual accumulation of truths and winnowing of falsehoods then permitted the building of the edifice of scientific knowledge, brick by brick. But according to a conception of, in Sellars’ phrase, as involving laws and inconceivable without the identity and individuation of “concepts them,” concepts does not swing free of the judgments we endorse concerning lawful connections among them—paradigmatically, for Hegel, their modally robust material incompatibilities with and
[ausschliessend] contrast with, the ruling out of, other possibilities. These fundamental relations of material incompatibility, what he calls “determinate negation”, in turn give rise to material inferential relations among the contents they articulate: what he calls “mediation”. So for instance being a dog entails being a mammal in that everything incompatible with being a mammal is incompatible with being a dog. To be determinate or determinately contentful just is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and material inference to other such determinately contentful items—whether on the side of thoughts or of facts. These relations are intrinsically modally robust: incompatibilities are impossibilities of coinstantiation, and the inferences they generate are counterfactual-supporting. It is as a consequence of this way of thinking about determinate contentfulness that Hegel secures the result that was so important to Kant, namely that we can never be in the supposed position from which Hume’s question is asked: one in which determinate empirical thoughts or states of affairs are fully in place, but the question of how lawful or necessary relations among them are to be underwritten is still open. It is also an approach that rules out the semantic atomism on which Enlightenment epistemology was predicated. For that traditional picture took it that a stock of determinate concepts could be available to the inquirer, out of which judgments could be constructed that then could be sorted—fallibly to be sure—into true ones and false ones. The gradual accumulation of truths and winnowing of falsehoods then permitted the building of the edifice of scientific knowledge, brick by brick. But according to a conception of, in Sellars’ phrase, “concepts as involving laws and inconceivable without them,” the identity and individuation of concepts does not swing free of the judgments we endorse concerning lawful connections among them—paradigmatically, for Hegel, their modally robust material incompatibilities with and
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