2 What is the ‘Common Sense’ view of the world, according to Moore?
3 Moore argues that there is a difference between knowing what an expression commonly means in its ordinary use, and being able to give a correct analysis of its meaning. What is the point he is making here?
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 G. E. Moore, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ [1925], in G. H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophy, 2nd series (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925). Reprinted with other important essays in G. E. Moore, Selected Writings, ed. T. Baldwin (London: Routledge, 1993).
2 A valuable critical study of Moore is T. Baldwin, G. E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990).
3 See also B. Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969); A. Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
4 For a clear overview of Moore’s central ideas see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore/ (by T. Baldwin), and also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/moore/ (by A. Preston).
5 For a short podcast on Moore’s proposal on how to combat external world scepticism see P. Millican’s Oxford lecture at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/42-possible-answers-external-world-scepticism (2010).
6 You can also listen to T. Baldwin’s podcast lecture on ‘G. E. Moore and Cambridge Philosophy’ by going to https://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/16321.
Notes
* G. E. Moore, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ [1925], extracts from Part I. First published in Contemporary British Philosophy, 2nd series, ed. G. H. Muirhead (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925); repr. In G. E. Moore, Selected Writings, ed. T. Baldwin (London: Routledge, 1993).
1 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty [Über Gewissheit] (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), §§ 94, 105, 151.
12 Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation? Wilfrid Sellars, The Myth of the Given*
The final extract in our survey of accounts of knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition takes us back to the problem of the foundations of knowledge, a problem that had figured prominently in the thought of René Descartes in the seventeenth century (see extract 4, above). In a highly influential paper the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars takes as his target the idea that all our knowledge must be derived or inferred from certain basic authoritative statements, knowledge of which is ‘non-inferential’ – that is, these statements are not themselves inferred from any other statements. As paradigms of such supposedly authoritative statements Sellars instances, on the one hand, basic analytic statements such as ‘two plus two makes four’, and, on the other hand, simple reports of immediate sensory experience, for example ‘this is red’. (This follows a long tradition concerning the two fundamental types of proposition on which all our knowledge is supposed to be based; compare for example David Hume, Part II, extract 7, below).
Knowledge, on the model Sellars is about to attack, is like a complex edifice whose whole weight rests ultimately on its foundations. In the case of empirical knowledge, what supposedly makes the foundations secure is that, at the level of basic sensory experience, I am confronted with a datum (e.g. an impression of redness) that directly validates my speech-act when I declare ‘this is red’. As Sellars puts it, ‘one is committed to a stratum of authoritative nonverbal episodes (“awareness”) the authority of which accrues to a superstructure of verbal actions, provided that the expressions occurring in these actions are properly used. These self-authenticating episodes would constitute the tortoise on which stands the elephant on which rests the edifice of empirical knowledge …’ .
It looks deceptively simple: when I see the red apple, there is an experiential datum – a ‘given’, and it is this that confers authority on my statement ‘this is red’.1 But Sellars acutely argues that under scrutiny this idea – the ‘myth of the given’ as he calls it – turns out to be highly problematic. For the correctness of my judgement about this apple’s being red depends on a whole network of complex linguistic rules about the standard conditions for the appropriate use of the predicate ‘red’ (roughly, something counts as red only if it would be called ‘red’ by a normal English-speaking observer in normal light). So the picture of what is ‘given’ somehow validating my knowledge in isolation must be wrong. It is, Sellars argues, ‘a matter of simple logic, that one couldn’t have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many other things as well’.
Sellars’s work is part of a reaction against the atomistic models of knowledge found for example in Hume (in the eighteenth century) and in the logical positivists (earlier in the twentieth),2 in favour of a more ‘holistic’ or systematic conception (compare Hegel, extract 9 above). It also follows the lead of Wittgenstein in rejecting first-personal accounts of the basis of knowledge, and acknowledging instead its fundamentally social or inter-personal nature.3 But if the ‘myth of the given’ is abandoned, are we not left with knowledge as a mere network of interlinked statements, each depending on some other statement, without any direct ‘point of contact’ with an actual mind-independent reality? One might fear this would leave us with the picture referred to at the close of the extract, of ‘a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?).’ Sellars ends by suggesting, plausibly, that neither of these two models is satisfactory (the ‘myth of the given’, on the one hand, and the ‘serpent’ of mere systematic coherence on the other); but exactly how to construct a more adequate model for the human epistemic enterprise is still a matter of fierce philosophical debate.
One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is the idea that there is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matter of fact such that (a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case, but presupposes no other knowledge either of particular matter of fact, or of general truths; and (b) such that the noninferential knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims – particular and general – about the world. It is important to note that I characterized the knowledge of fact belonging to this stratum as not only noninferential, but as presupposing no knowledge of other matter of fact, whether particular or general. It might be thought that this is a redundancy, that knowledge (not belief or conviction, but knowledge) which logically presupposes knowledge of other facts must be inferential. This, however, as I hope to show, is itself an episode in the Myth.
Now, the idea of such a privileged stratum of fact is a familiar one, though not without its difficulties. Knowledge pertaining to this level is noninferential, yet it is, after all, knowledge. It is ultimate, yet it has authority. The attempt to make a consistent picture of these two requirements has traditionally taken the following form:
Statements pertaining to this level, in order to ‘express knowledge’ must not only be made, but, so to speak, must be worthy of being made, credible, that is, in the sense of worthy of credence. Furthermore, and this is a crucial point, they must be made in a way which involves this credibility. For where there is no connection between the making of a statement and its authority, the assertion may express conviction, but it can scarcely be said to express knowledge.
The authority – the credibility – of statements pertaining to this level cannot exhaustively