derivative, parasitic one in which one can believe of a sentence in Turkish, which one does not at all understand, that it is true. Sellars puts this Kantian point well in the title of one of his essays: as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable without “Concepts Them.” If that is right, then in being able to employ concepts such as cat and mat in ordinary empirical descriptive claims one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to deploy concepts such as possible and necessary—albeit fallibly and imperfectly. Grasp of what is made explicit by judgments formed using those alethic modal concepts is in and presupposed by grasp of empirical descriptive concepts. This is part of what implicit any Kant means by calling them concepts, that is and saying that our access to “pure” “categories,” them is the sense that the ability to deploy them is presupposed by the ability to priori”—in “a deploy concepts, including especially ordinary empirical descriptive concepts. This latter any claim is not at base but epistemological, semantic. What about the concern, on the side of practical philosophy, with the question of how grasp of vocabulary is related to grasp of empirical descriptive vocabulary? A closely normative analogous argument applies. Any rational agent, anyone who can act intentionally, must practically understand the possibility of acting for That means making some distinction reasons. in practice between sample bits of practical reasoning that do, and those that do not, entitle or commit those who endorse their premises to their conclusions. For being an intentional agent means being intelligible as responding differentially to the goodness of practical reasons for action provided by discursive attitudes. The sort of force such reasoning gives to its one’s conclusion is force. Good bits of practical reasoning give the agent to act in normative reason
derivative, parasitic one in which one can believe of a sentence in Turkish, which one does not at all understand, that it is true. Sellars puts this Kantian point well in the title of one of his essays: “Concepts as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable without Them.” If that is right, then in being able to employ concepts such as cat and mat in ordinary empirical descriptive claims one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to deploy concepts such as possible and necessary—albeit fallibly and imperfectly. Grasp of what is made explicit by judgments formed using those alethic modal concepts is implicit in and presupposed by grasp of any empirical descriptive concepts. This is part of what Kant means by calling them “pure” concepts, that is “categories,” and saying that our access to them is “a priori”—in the sense that the ability to deploy them is presupposed by the ability to deploy any concepts, including especially ordinary empirical descriptive concepts. This latter claim is not at base epistemological, but semantic. What about the concern, on the side of practical philosophy, with the question of how grasp of normative vocabulary is related to grasp of empirical descriptive vocabulary? A closely analogous argument applies. Any rational agent, anyone who can act intentionally, must practically understand the possibility of acting for reasons. That means making some distinction in practice between sample bits of practical reasoning that do, and those that do not, entitle or commit those who endorse their premises to their conclusions. For being an intentional agent means being intelligible as responding differentially to the goodness of practical reasons for action provided by one’s discursive attitudes. The sort of force such reasoning gives to its conclusion is normative force. Good bits of practical reasoning give the agent reason to act in
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