SELLARS AND THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN :: essays research papers

SELLARS AND THE "MYTH OF THE GIVEN"To be presented at the Eastern theatrical role APA Meeting to be held at the Washington Hilton & Towers (Washington, DC) on Dec. 27 - 30, 1998 Book discussion Wilfrid Sellarss Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (International Ballroom West, Wed., Dec. 30, 130 p.m. - 430 p.m.) -- Published with the permission of Prof. Alston.Since the body of the account forget be distinctly critical, I would like to begin by paying tribute to Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (EPM) as one and only(a) of the seminal works of twentieth century philosophy. I still regain the growing excitement with which I read it when it first came out in Volume I of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1956), in the Detroit Airport, of all places. (My colleague, Tamar Gendler, remarked to me that I was probably the only person there denotation Wilfrid Sellars, the others, no doubt, reading best sellers.) Over the ensuing decades the excitement, though never wholly extinguished, has been adulterated by numerous second thoughts, some of which will be expounded here.Having already taken issue with Sellars general argument against warm knowledge in section VIII of EPM and elsewhere, in my essay "Whats molest with Immediate Knowledge?"1, I will concentrate here on his complaints about "the granted". But I must admit at the outset that it is not easy to pin down the target to which Sellars applies that title. At the beginning of EPM Sellars makes it explicit that though "I begin my argument with an fire on sense-datum theories, it is only as a first step in a critique of the entire fashion model of givenness". (128)2 But just what is this "framework of givenness" of which sense-datum theory is only one form? A bit subsequent he says ". . . the point of the epistemological category of the given is, presumably, to explicate the conceit that empirical knowledge rests on a foundation of n on-inferential knowledge of matter of particular". (128) That makes it sound as if any foundationalist epistemology is a form of the "myth of the given". And I am far from sure that this is not the way Sellars is opinion of it. Nevertheless, for present purposes I will construe the commitment to the given as more restricted than that, identifying it with one particular way of thinking of "non-inferential knowledge of matter of fact".