quote:

To counter the idea that our claims about our own beliefs and thoughts are underwritten by a special, introspective faculty that guarantees the truth of those
claims, Sellars begins by ‘‘making a myth ... or, to give it an air of up-to-date
respectability, by writing a piece of science fiction — anthropological science
fiction.’’ (1956, p. 309) For our purposes, Sellars’ myth can be viewed as having
three stages. The first of these is ‘‘a stage in pre-history in which humans are
limited to what I shall call a Rylean language, a language of which the
fundamental descriptive vocabulary speaks of public properties of public objects
located in Space and enduring through Time.’’ (309) At this stage in the myth,
our ‘‘Rylean Ancestors’’ have no terms in their language for beliefs, thoughts or
other ‘‘inner mental episodes.’’ The second stage in the myth begins with the
appearance, in this ‘‘Neo-Rylean culture’’ of ‘‘a genius — let us call him Jones.’’
(314)

quote:

[/I]n the attempt to account for the fact that his fellow men behave
intelligently not only when their conduct is threaded on a string of
overt verbal episodes — that is to say, as we would put it, when
they ‘think out loud’ — but also when no detectable verbal output
is present, Jones develops a theory according to which overt
utterances are but the culmination of a process which begins with
certain inner episodes. And let us suppose that his model for these
episodes which initiate the events which culminate in overt verbal
behavior is that of overt verbal behavior itself. In other words, using the
language of the model, the theory is to the effect that overt verbal behavior
is the culmination of a process which begins with ‘‘inner speech.’’

(317-318; emphasis is Sellars’)

At this stage of Sellars’ myth, the theory is only applied to other people. But in
the third stage Jones and his compatriots learn to apply the theory to themselves.
At first they apply it to themselves in much the same way that they apply it to
others. They infer various theoretical claims by attending to their own behavior.
A bit later, they discover a new way of applying the language of the theory to
themselves. Here is how Sellars tells the tale:

quote:

[O]nce our fictitious ancestor, Jones, has developed the theory that
overt verbal behavior is the expression of thoughts, and taught his
compatriots to make use of the theory in interpreting each other’s
behavior, it is but a short step to the use of this language in
self-description. Thus, when Tom, watching Dick, has behavioral
evidence which warrants the use of the sentence (in the language of
the theory) ‘‘Dick is thinking ‘p’ ’’ ... Dick, using the same
behavioral evidence, can say, in the language of the theory, ‘‘I am
thinking ‘p’ ’’.... And it now turns out — need it have? — that Dick
can be trained to give reasonably reliable self-descriptions, using the
language of the theory, without having to observe his overt
behavior. Jones brings this about, roughly, by applauding
utterances by Dick of ‘‘I am thinking that p’’ when the behavioral
evidence strongly supports the theoretical statement ‘‘Dick is
thinking that p’’; and by frowning on utterances of ‘‘I am thinking
that p,’’ when the evidence does not support this theoretical
statement. Our ancestors begin to speak of the privileged access
each of us has to his own thoughts. What began as a language with
a purely theoretical use has gained a reporting role.

(320; emphasis is Sellars’)

So, in Sellars’ myth, expressions of the form ‘I am thinking that p’ are theoretical expressions which have acquired ‘‘a reporting use in which one is not drawing inferences from behavioral evidence.’’ (321)

Now if, like Sellars, one is concerned to rebut the claim that our reports of
our own thoughts are beyond challenge, the myth of Jones suggests how the
argument might run. For suppose the myth were true. The inner episodes that
Jones hypothesizes in stage two are supposed to be real events that are causally
linked with behavioral episodes. Positing them to account for certain aspects of
the observable behavior of people is, as Sellars stresses, on all fours with positing
molecules to account for certain aspects of the observable behavior of gases.
Thus, for mental states as for molecules, there will be some occasions on which
the inference from the observed behavior to the theoretical claim may be
mistaken. Occasionally, an anomalous event may cause the observed behavior
in the absence of the hypothesized internal state. Similarly, when we have been
trained to give ‘‘reasonably reliable self-descriptions, using the language of the
theory, without having to observe [our own] overt behavior’’ it may occasionally
happen that this process misfires, and that we describe ourselves as thinking that
p, in the absence of the hypothesized internal state. Moreover, though Sellars
himself did not stress the point, there is a more pervasive way in which our
self-descriptions might turn out to be wrong. For it might turn out that Jones was
less of a genius than we had thought — more of a Velikovsky, perhaps, than a
Newton. His entire theory might turn out to be a bad idea. Other thinkers might
discover better ways to explain the behavior that Jones’ theory was designed to
explain — ways that don’t posit internal states modeled on observable verbal
behavior. If that’s the way the myth unfolds, then it may not be just the
occasional theoretical self-description that turns out to be false. They may all be
false.