Western Philosophy. Группа авторов

very like it is true. The point I wish to make now, however, is that if it is true, then it follows, as a matter of simple logic, that one couldn’t have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many other things as well. And let me emphasize that the point is not taken care of by distinguishing between knowing how and knowing that, and admitting that observational knowledge requires a lot of ‘know how’. For the point is specifically that observational knowledge of any particular fact, e.g. that this is green, presupposes that one knows general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y. And to admit this requires an abandonment of the traditional empiricist idea that observational knowledge ‘stands on its own feet’. Indeed, the suggestion would be anathema to traditional empiricists for the obvious reason that by making observational knowledge presuppose knowledge of general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, it runs counter to the idea that we come to know general facts of this form only after we have come to know by observation a number of particular facts which support the hypothesis that X is a symptom of Y.

And it might be thought that there is an obvious regress in the view we are examining. Does it not tell us that observational knowledge at time t presupposes knowledge of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, which presupposes prior observational knowledge, which presupposes other knowledge of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, which presupposes still other, and prior, observational knowledge, and so on? This charge, however, rests on too simple, indeed a radically mistaken, conception of what one is saying of Jones when one says that he knows that p. It is not just that the objection supposes that knowing is an episode; for clearly there are episodes which we can correctly characterize as knowings, in particular, observings. The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.

      Thus all that the view I am defending requires is that no tokening by S now of ‘This is green’ is to count as ‘expressing observational knowledge’ unless it is also correct to say of S that he now knows the appropriate fact of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, namely that (and again I oversimplify) utterances of ‘This is green’ are reliable indicators of the presence of green objects in standard conditions of perception. And while the correctness of this statement about Jones requires that Jones could now cite prior particular facts as evidence for the idea that these utterances are reliable indicators, it requires only that it is correct to say that Jones now knows, thus remembers, that these particular facts did obtain. It does not require that it be correct to say that at the time these facts did obtain he then knew them to obtain. And the regress disappears …

      The idea that observation ‘strictly and properly so-called’ is constituted by certain self-authenticating nonverbal episodes, the authority of which is transmitted to verbal and quasi-verbal performances when these performances are made ‘in conformity with the semantical rules of the language’, is, of course, the heart of the Myth of the Given. For the given, in epistemological tradition, is what is taken by these self- authenticating episodes. These ‘takings’ are, so to speak, the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge, the ‘knowings in presence’ which are presupposed by all other knowledge, both the knowledge of general truths and the knowledge ‘in absence’ of other particular matters of fact. Such is the framework in which traditional empiricism makes its characteristic claim that the perceptually given is the foundation of empirical knowledge.

      If I reject the framework of traditional empiricism, it is not because I want to say that empirical knowledge has no foundation. For to put it this way is to suggest that it is really ‘empirical knowledge so-called’, and to put it in a box with rumours and hoaxes. There is clearly some point to the picture of human knowledge as resting on a level of propositions – observation reports – which do not rest on other propositions in the same way as other propositions rest on them. On the other hand, I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former.

      Above all, the picture is misleading because of its static character. One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.

Specimen Questions

      1 What does Sellars mean by the ‘myth of the given’? Should it be abandoned?

      2 Why does Sellars question the idea of a ‘privileged stratum of fact’ based on simple observation, and is he right to question it?

      3 Why does Sellars think the empiricist metaphor of a ‘foundation’ to all empirical knowledge is misleading?

      Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)

      1 The full text of Sellars’s paper may be found in his Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge, 1963).

      2 A concise introduction to the problems of ‘foundationalism’ is the article so entitled by William Alston in Dancy and Sosa (eds), A Companion to Epistemology (see under extract 1, above).

      3 For a detailed treatment of many of the issues, see L. Bonjour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

      4 For some brilliant (but quite complex) reflections on some of the issues raised by Sellars’s paper, see J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

      5 Two useful books on Sellars’ philosophy are J. R. O’Shea’s Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), and W. deVries, Wilfrid Sellars (Acumen/McGill-Queens University Press, 2005; online 2013). Of the two, deVries’s book is longer and more detailed, but also more technical at times.

      6 A valuable collection of essays by leading philosophers linking Sellars’s work to topics in contemporary debates is J. R. O’Shea (ed.), Sellars and His Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

      7 Two excellent online resources are the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) with its section on Sellars’s epistemology at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/#4 (by W. DeVries), and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy with an entry on Sellars’s philosophy of mind at https://www.iep.utm.edu/sellars/ (by E. Rubenstein).

      Notes

      ^* First presented as part of a lecture series given at the University of London in 1956, under the title ‘The Myth of the Given: Three Lectures on Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’. First published in H. Feigl and M. Scriven (eds), The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

      1 1 Compare Carnap on ‘observation sentences’ or ‘protocol sentences’, in Part II, extract 11.

      2 2 Compare Part II, extracts 7 and 11.

      3 3 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [1953], §§ 243–315. Compare also Part III, extract 2.

      4 4 German term, meaning a declaration or declarative act.

PART II Being and Reality

Introduction