1. Sellars aims to defend the claim that there is an isomorphism between the knower and what is known while disputing the Thomistic understanding of this doctrine.
2. According to Sellars, this examination is important because many central Thomistic contentions, such as their belief in the immateriality of the intellect, are based upon their understanding of this isomorphism.
3. He begins his explication of the Thomistic doctrine by contrasting it with the account of intellectual acts found in Descartes and the account found in early stages of contemporary British and American realism.
4. According to Sellars, these latter views are united by the idea that intellectual acts are distinguished in terms of what they are related to, rather than in terms of their intrinsic character as intellectual acts.
5. Sellars suggests that this idea leads to unacceptable philosophical consequences. His preferred alternative is to hold that the intrinsic characters of intellectual acts differ in ways that systematically correspond to differences in what those acts are about. The most serious doctrine of this sort, he claims, is the “doctrine of the mental word”.
6. According to the Thomistic doctrine of the mental word, Sellars claims, a mental word is a nature or form that informs the intellect in a way the enables that intellect to think particular thoughts that are about that nature or form.
7. Since, according to Sellars, we are tempted to say that the intellect does not take on the form that informs it in the same way that material objects do, we are led to conclude that the nature or form is informing the intellect in the “immaterial mode”.
8. Sellars’s Thomist holds that a nature or form can inform the intellect only because it initially informs their sensory faculties in the immaterial mode. The former sort of informing is grounded upon the latter sort. Thus, he says that we can speak of the sensible as well as the mental word.
9. Sellars holds that the Thomistic conception of intellectual abstraction depends upon their claim that our sensory faculties exhibit an independent form of intentionality that can serve as a basis for the emergence of intellectual intentionality.
10. In contrast to the Thomist, Sellars argues that we can formulate an alternative account of sensory forms that is not committed to the idea that sensory faculties are informed in the immaterial mode. According to this alternative account, sensory experiences involve specific forms in a “derivative sense” that can be analyzed in terms of certain causal relations between types of sensations and types of external objects.
11. Sellars highlights the contrast between the views under consideration as follows: According to the Thomist, material objects and sensations involve the same form in distinct (material or immaterial) modes. According to Sellars, material objects and sensations involve different forms that are specified by different senses of the same word.
12. On Sellars’s alternative proposal, there is a structural isomorphism between the types of external objects specified by words used in one sense and the types of sensations specified by those words used in another, derivative sense.
13. Sellars does not focus on arguing for his alternative view of the isomorphism between nature and sensations. Rather, he simply adds that his alternative view entails that the abstractive theory of mental word acquisition is false and that abstractive theories face other difficulties relating to other logical mental words as well (these difficulties can be viewed as a reason to accept Sellars’s view of the isomorphism rather than the Thomist’s).
14. On Sellars’s account, the isomorphism between nature and the senses is a structural isomorphism between external causes and sensory acts that requires no appeal to the possibility of external objects and sensations being informed by a common form in distinct modes. In light of this thesis, he now proposes to argue that there is a similar isomorphism between thought and the world. Furthermore, he holds that this isomorphism between thought and the world is a necessary condition for mental intentionality.
15. Sellars argues that mental words can be understood as “words” in a novel sense that is derived from the sense that applies to linguistic tokens. Like linguistic tokens, he argues, there is a structural isomorphism between specific mental words and specific objects in reality that is determined by a causal relationship between them. This is the isomorphism that he claims is necessary for mental intentionality.
16. Sellars views claims about the isomorphism between mental words and objects in reality as statements that relate certain tokens, considered as meaningless, to other objects in the external world. By contrast, Sellars views claims about intentional significance as statements that relate certain tokens, considered as meaningful, to tokens of our own language (and other languages) in terms of their role within their own “language”.
17. By formulating an account of these two sorts of isomorphism, Sellars aims to explain mental intentionality in a way that 1. Doesn’t require mental words that are related to absolute natures by being informed in an immaterial mode, and 2. accounts for how our mental words are related to mind-independent reality.
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