Things Are Seldom What They Seem

Abstract This chapter draws a distinction between the way that things appear at the ‘manifest’ level of description and how things really are at the ‘scientific’ level. It explores Wilfrid Sellars’ famous question as to how these two levels, or ‘images’, can be reconciled. In particular, the chapter recommends a truthmaking framework on which the truths about the manifest image are made true by underlying facts at the scientific (or fundamental) level. A ‘Humean’ picture on which the truths of the manifest image are truth-made by facts in the Humean mosaic is explored, as a test case for the general truthmaking framework that the chapter recommends.