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

SELLARS AND THE "MYTH OF THE GIVEN"To be presented at the eastern Division 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 dance palace West, Wed., Dec. 30, 130 p.m. - 430 p.m.) -- Published with the permission of Prof. Alston.Since the form of the paper will be distinctly critical, I would like to demoralise by paying tribute to Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (EPM) as one of the seminal works of twentieth century philosophy. I keep mum remember the growing excitement with which I read it when it first came expose in Volume I of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of skill (1956), in the Detroit Airport, of all places. (My colleague, Tamar Gendler, remarked to me that I was probably the only person in that respect reading 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, several(prenominal) of which will be expounded here.Having already taken issue with Sellars general blood line against immediate knowledge in section VIII of EPM and elsewhere, in my endeavor "Whats Wrong with Immediate Knowledge?"1, I will concentrate here on his complaints about "the given up". But I must postulate at the outset that it is not easy to pin down the brand to which Sellars applies that title. At the beginning of EPM Sellars makes it explicit that though "I begin my bank line with an attack on sense-datum theories, it is only as a first quality in a critique of the entire framework of givenness". (128)2 But serious what is this "framework of givenness" of which sense-datum theory is only one form? A phone number later he says ". . . the point of the epistemological category of the given is, presumably, to explicate the idea that empirica l knowledge rests on a foundation of non-inferential knowledge of social occasion of fact". (128) That makes it sound as if any foundationalist epistemology is a form of the " figment of the given". And I am far from sure that this is not the guidance 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".