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The mechanism—the secret—of the given

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Abstract

There is, of course, The Given: what is given in experience. The ‘Myth Of The Given’ (‘the Myth’) is just a wrong answer to the question ‘What is given?’ This paper offers a brief sketch of three possible right answers. (1) It examines an early account by Charles Augustus Strong of why The Myth is a myth. (2) It maintains that a natural and naturalistic version of empiricism is compatible with the fact that the Myth is a myth. (3) It gives proper place to enactivist (physiological, motor) considerations. (4) It is (in spite of (3)) broadly in line with the Sellarsian view as refined by John McDowell. (5) It meets an important constraint: acknowledging the reality of something that seems at first to lend support to The Myth—i.e. the fact that we can engage in ‘non-inferential self-attribution of … sensations’ (McDowell in ‘Having the World in View’, In Having the World in View Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998/2009: p. 20)—without in any way succumbing to the Myth.

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Notes

  1. This paper derives from a talk at a conference organized around Michelle Montague’s 2016 book The Given, which took place at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing in October 2019.

    When I cite a work I give the date of first publication or composition; the page or section reference is to the edition listed in the bibliography. In the case of quotations from languages other than English I cite a standard translation but don’t always use it; I use bold italics to mark an author’s emphasis and italics to mark my own.

  2. This is very different from Sellars’s later statement of ‘the most basic form of what I have castigated as “The Myth of the Given”: the claim that ‘if a person is directly aware of an item which has categorial status C, then the person is aware of it as having categorial status C’ (1981: 11, Section 44).

  3. Schopenhauer (1819–50: p. xxv). Another remark about truth attributed to Schopenhauer: ‘All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.’.

  4. See e.g. Strong (1918: pp. 39–40).

  5. According to Kant, that which affects us in such a way as to give rise to our experiences of tables and chairs is not even spatial—or temporal.

  6. Of which, one might perhaps say, it largely consists: the brain is about 78 per cent water.

  7. Here I adopt Albahari’s useful term (see e.g. Albahari 2019: p. 7). A clumsier alternative might be ‘conceptuosensory’. In the past I’ve put the same point by saying that all perception has cognitive-phenomenological content in addition to sensory-phenomenological content; or that it essentially involves cognitive experience in addition to sense-feeling experience. (The cognitive phenomenology of linguistic understanding is only a small part of cognitive phenomenology; see e.g. Strawson 2011.).

  8. ‘Contrary to the tendency of most “evolutionary epistemologists”, Nietzsche’s main thrust is that it’s errors … that have been … functional. Our cognitive practices are crucially built out of dispositions designed to get things wrong—i.e., out of drives to simplify and otherwise distort reality’ (Richardson 2008: p. 40). See also Nietzsche (1885–8: pp. 15, 21, 35, 56, 109): ‘truth is the kind of error without which a particular kind of living creature could not live’ (1885–8: p. 16).

  9. 1689–1700: Section 4.4.4. In 1979, when we were briefly colleagues, and I was generally confused, John Mackie kindly wrote out parts of of this passage for me on an index card.

  10. What if our perceptual capacities were a product of cosmic fluke? Would we then no longer have knowledge? The puzzle is of a familiar form.

  11. P. F. Strawson 1979: p. 143; 1983: p. 45. See also W. S. Sellars’s distinction between the ‘manifest image’ of reality and the ‘scientific image’ (1963: p. 5).

  12. For the last controversial claim, see Montague (2016: ch. 3). For a more detailed specification of the given, see Montague (2016: pp. 34–37).

  13. On any natural understanding of the term, mental content is as much a matter of ‘internal’ (Twin-shareable) content as ‘external’ content, as much qualitative as conceptual/propositional.

  14. Ruminate: ‘3.a. intransitive. Of an animal: to chew the cud; to chew again food that has been partially digested in the rumen’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

  15. Don’t we also need to say who or what it is given by? No, although this shows that the term ‘given’ is not ideal.

  16. See in particular (Strong 1930; Drake 1925). More recent exponents of the point include Varela et al. (1991), Clark (1997), Noë (2004). Gary Hatfield has pointed out the respect in which Berkeley already has sound enactivist intuitions (Hatfield 2011: 372).

  17. This is not necessarily a rejection of the many-headed theoretical creature called ‘disjunctivism’; it’s simply a matter of how Strong defines ‘given’.

  18. These are obviously not merely sensory matters.

  19. See further Strawson 2011, esp. §12, where I equate it with 'non-sense-feeling content'. Anyone who conceives of cognitive phenomenology as something whose existence doesn’t follow from the mythicality of the Myth has misunderstood what it is.

  20. There don’t in this last case have to be any such things as cows and trees.

  21. See the difficulties of exposition faced in Sprigge (1995).

  22. 1930: 17; (Michelle) Montague speaks similarly of ‘the properties we attribute in having perceptual experiences’ (2016: p. 89).

  23. I originally wrote ‘qualitatively identical’, which is just as good as ‘contentfully identical’ in this context. It may, however, cause some who hear it to forget that qualitative identity includes identity with respect to cognitive-phenomenological character.

  24. Strong hesitates absorbingly on its ontological status. At one point he calls it an apparent (see e.g. 1931: p. 218, 1934: p. 323); at another he favours Locke’s term phantasm (e.g. 1930: p. 28, 1931: p. 218).

  25. 1923: p. 24. Strong’s notion of the intellect is wide: ‘when a not-self appears before the self, it does so because we react or tend to react as if we were in the presence of an object—the feeling being that which prompts us to do so, and directs our activity: in such wise that the datum (the object as given) is apprehended, not by the feeling alone, but by feeling and activity combined—in other words, by the intellect’ (1923: pp. viii–ix).

  26. 1932: p. 278. Sellars junior writes that ‘a discerning student of philosophy, familiar with the writings of Sellars père, who chances to read Sellars fils, and is not taken in by the superficial changes of idiom and emphasis which reflect the adaptation of the species to a new environment, will soon be struck by the fundamental identity of outlook. The identity is obscured by differences of terminology, method and polemical orientation, but it is none the less an identity’ (1954: p. 13; this is certainly not true of my father and me).

  27. Strong omits the prefix ‘sense-’ more often than not when talking about perceptual experience, because it isn’t necessary.

  28. I argue for this in ‘Real direct realism’ (2015). I hadn’t then heard of the earlier-twentieth-century critical realists.

  29. Insofar as scepticism is a spectre it is a friendly one; its diaphanous presence is as benign as it is necessary to any sound philosophy. Any theory that purports to refute scepticism thereby refutes itself.

  30. This is the point, made vivid by Thomas Reid among others (see e.g. Reid 1764, Sections 5.2, 6.3), that animates recent discussion of the ‘transparency’ of experience.

  31. 1998: 19. ‘It requires an effort to become aware of sense-data as such’ (Sellars père 1932: p. 35). Sellars fils has a fine passage on how we are able to think of sensations (take them as objects of consciousness) in the way we do: although there’s a clear sense in which ‘the conceptual framework of physical color is … ontologically grounded in visual impressions, the conceptual framework in terms of which common sense conceives these impressions is itself an analogical offshoot from the conceptual framework of physical color and shape. To put the matter in Aristotelian terminology, visual impressions are prior in the order of being to concepts pertaining to physical color, whereas the latter are prior in the order of knowing to concepts pertaining to visual impressions’ (1965: p. 192).

  32. See e.g. Strawson (2003, 2020). Thanks to Jacek Jarocki for alerting me to this misunderstanding.

  33. Some say that one can know that one is having an experience without knowing what it is like, but this claim, even if defensible, isn't what Russell has in mind.

  34. Strawson (1994: Section 9.5). Others disagree: see e.g. Overgaard and Grünbaum (2007).

  35. See e.g. Spelke (1990, 1994), Spelke and Hermer (1996). Compare Strong (1934: p. 318). I’m drawing here on Strawson (1989: Section 23.4).

  36. Leibniz’s precise words are ‘nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu, excipe: nisi ipse intellectus’ (c1704: Section 2.1.2).

  37. Locke nicely acknowledges that what is immediately phenomenologically given is far more than merely sensory even as he adheres in principle to the ontogenetic account. See Locke (1689: Section 2.9.8).

  38. The specification of the corresponding virtual-reality case introduces currently unimportant complications about the content of natural-kind terms like ‘cow’.

  39. Thanks to Michelle Montague and the two anonymous referees.

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    Galen Strawson

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This article belongs to the topical collection “Demystifying the Given”, edited by Andrea Altobrando and Haojun Zhang.

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Strawson, G. The mechanism—the secret—of the given. Synthese 199, 10909–10928 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03273-7

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