As promised, some thoughts on what I advertised as "Sellarsian cybernetic communism": a meandering thread.

I shall start with my musings on what Sellars meant by "the myth of the given", but I don't want to get bogged down in that -- because Sellars is much more interesting as thinker about an alternative to the myth, than as a mere debunker.

The Myth is the idea that mere awareness is sufficient for knowledge of the basic structure of the world or of the mind. That we can 'just look' and the structure is immediately disclosed to us.

This myth could have an exogenous form (the world is immediately disclosed to the mind) or an endogenous form (the mind is immediately disclosed to itself). Aristotle is the paradigm of the former, Husserl of the latter.

I read Sellars as coming very late to the game about what the Myth is and what's wrong with it. Kant diagnosed the Myth of the Given as the fatal flaw in both Lockean empiricism and Leibnizian rationalism; Hegel diagnosed a residue of the Myth in Kant's transcendental psychology.

which is why Hegel thought that taking society and history seriously would liberate us from the prison of thinking that there is only one kind of transcendental subjectivity.

The Sellarsian innovation is that what Kant and Hegel got right about how discursive apperceptive intelligence needs to be understood in terms of animal cognitive ethology.

This is the guiding thread that connects "Language, Rules, and Behavior" (1948) with "Being and Being Known" (1960) with "Mental Events" (1980) and "Behaviorism, Language, and Meaning" (1980).

To unify the reflective analysis of discursive apperceptive cognition with the science of animal cognitive ethology or cognitive behaviorism (Tolman etc.) Sellars undertakes a radical deflation of intentionality by thinking about the pragmatic function of semantic discourse.

This is Sellars's infamous "dot quotation". Dot-quotation shows how to understand semantic discourse as a metavocabulary that illustrates the functional roles of terms. These functions are integrated into a sensorimotor system (language entry and language exit transitions).

But the functionally integrated sensorimotor system can itself be understood as purely syntactical. This is the breakthrough move that Sellars gets from cybernetics: a cybernetic system can systematically map inputs and outputs without needing to "understand" anything.

Semantical discourse is just how we talk about the similarities and differences between non-semantic information processing across differently embodied-and-embedded cybernetic systems.

The crucial role of non-semantical information processing has been obscured by Sellars's use of the term "picturing" for this concept -- which had most Sellarsians to follow Rorty in regarding picturing as an unfortunate relapse to the early Wittgenstein.

Whereas what Sellars recognized is that although the late Wittgenstein is right to emphasize the role of social practices in constituting the discursiveness of discursive cognition, there's still a need for a theory of how cognition is related to the environment.

and that the role of feedback, as theorized by the first cyberneticists, allowed him to put what Wittgenstein called picturing on the gold standard of causal processes.

Meaning and intentionality emerge "in rerum natura" when organisms need to keep careful track of how their sensorimotor cognitive maps are similar and differ, because that is the key to successful coordinated action.

We can't make our distinct individual contributions to a shared goal unless we share a meta-representation of what each action-guiding representation contributes to the realization of that goal.

In other words, language facilitates what we could call "co-picturing": picturings shared across a plurality of embodied-embedded cybernetic systems. Cognition now takes a big step out of being locked into whatever perspectives have been canalized by development and evolution.

But the *possibility* of receiving information from another mind that can correct and *improve* our collective grasp of reality is no guarantee that it will, because complex societies are increasingly structured by epistemically distorting hierarchies.

where people with more privilege and power are awarded a credibility excess and more marginalized people are awarded a credibility deficit. Epistemic injustice is at least as old as societal hierarchies.

We have a better chance of improving our collective grasp of objective reality -- our cumulative, self-correcting co-picturing -- to the extent that institutions and practices generating epistemic injustice are ameliorated.

This is where my thoughts about Sellarsian philosophy of cognitive science finally make contact with social epistemology and critical social theory.

At least with regard to what I shall call, to use Adorno's term, "the utopia of cognition" (ND 10), the ideal of discursive cognition itself demands liberation from epistemically harmful institutions and practices, which are all predicated on hierarchy and therefore scarcity.

In other words, there is an epistemic demand to a post-scarcity society: the removal of the epistemic injustices that thwart the development of an improved comprehension of objective reality.

In short: the adventure of cognition and intelligence that began in the ancient Cambrian seas, with the first sensorimotor cognitive maps in early metazoan animals, started a journey in which we discursive apperceptive intelligences are a distinct step

but the next steps in our journey, discovering and modeling new causal pathways and trajectories, will require overcoming the epistemic harms produced by capitalism in general and by neoliberalism in particular.

FINI