Sellars, Wilfrid

"Normativity cannot be reduced to facts; it is irreducibly normative."

"We understand the world by learning to navigate the space of reasons."

"The given in perception is always already conceptualized."

"Rational activity is the fundamental form of human existence."

"Meaning emerges from the interplay of language and practice."

"The structure of thought mirrors the structure of language."

"To be sapient is to be capable of grasping logical necessity."

"Objectivity requires not the elimination of perspective but the coordination of perspectives."

"The explanatory order may differ from the logical order."

"Community is not incidental to rationality; it is essential to it."

"We inherit not just language but an entire conceptual tradition."

"The distinction between subject and object is drawn within a conceptual scheme."

"Knowledge requires not just true belief but appropriate relations to reasons."

"The family resemblance among uses of a word need not reflect a common essence."

"Consciousness is not a private theater but a public capacity."

"The normativity of thought is grounded in linguistic practice."

"We do not first have sensations and then interpret them; sensation is already interpretive."

"The unity of the sciences is the unity of a conceptual scheme."

"To be rational is to be responsive to the force of the better reason."

"Our concepts carve nature at its joints only relative to human interests."

"The space of reasons is not a mysterious realm but the ordinary space of justification."

"Understanding requires seeing how parts relate to wholes."

"Rationality is not a luxury but the condition of human existence."

"The given cannot ground knowledge; only the inferential can do that."

"Language is not representation but a form of life."

"The task of philosophy is to make the implicit explicit."

"We are beings for whom things can be true or false."