Abstract
This paper shows that Husserl is not guilty of Sellars’ myth of the sensory given. I firstly show that Husserl’s account of ‘sensations’ or ‘sense data’ seems to possess some of the attributes Sellars’ myth critiques. In response I show that, just as Sellars thinks that our ‘conceptual capacities’ afford us an awareness of a logical perceptual space that has a propositional structure, Husserl thinks that ‘acts of apprehension’ (Akt der Auffassung) structure sensations to afford us perception that is similarly propositionally structured. Not only this, but there is much affinity and shared motivation between Husserl and Sellars accounts of the sensory stratum. Reflection on phenomenological considerations prevents Sellars from denying phenomenal non-conceptual content, whilst Husserlian ‘sense data’ are technical designations; dependant parts of perceptual experience grasped in abstraction, necessary for providing a reflective/philosophical account of empirical knowledge. I show that both Husserl and Sellars assert that the proper description of phenomenal content affords it the function of presenting properties of spatial objects during perception, and reiterate the well-known fact that Husserl thinks that perception is of ‘conceptually’ apprehended spatiotemporal objects (not sense data).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I initially had in mind for this paper the more expansive goal of assessing whether Husserl was guilty of any form of the myth [readers interested in an examination of the question whether Husserl is guilty of the myth of the categorial given can refer to Sachs (2014)]. I was expecting the question of whether Husserl was guilty of the myth of the sensory given be a mere preliminary, but my research revealed that previous expositions (Soffer 2003) had not properly articulated what I think is the strongest case against Husserl (see §3; though Soffer shows that Husserl would not think of Pricean reports on sense data as given because they contain reference to implicit horizons, her work glosses over the potential guilt of Husserl’s own account of sensations). And, it came to pass that this case required a full paper to articulate what I think is the strongest defence against it (§5ff). I shall therefore have to leave to other papers (or perhaps even a full-length monograph) the question of whether Husserl is guilty of one of the various other forms of the myth. Despite these pragmatic determinants, the restricted focus of this paper turns out to have meritorious value in light of recent discussions over Husserl’s conceptualism (see §5) and the import that qualitative experience has assumed in contemporary metaphysics of mind – topics that this paper makes modest exegetical contributions to (§5ff).
For a recent discussion on Sellars, Price, and the myth of the given see Hicks (2020).
Due to the variety of extent editions, I will provide the investigation and section number of the Logical Investigations. Page numbers refer to the Findlay translation cited in the bibliography.
I shall avoid in my own writing some of the interchangeable terms that Husserl uses to refer to this act such as ‘animation’ [beseelt], ‘interpretation’ [Deutung] and ‘meaning’ [bedeuten or Meinen] and refer only to ‘apprehensions’ [Auffassung]. In my citations of Husserl, I will supply the original German for clarification. See also footnote 9.
The schema plays equally as important a role in converse cases, such as when we firstly take a waxwork figure or a store mannequin for a real person but then correct our perception. “The same sensational contents are likewise ‘taken’ now in this, and now in that manner… the same sensational contents… serve to ground perceptions of different objects” (Husserl 2001b, V: §14, p. 103; see also V: §27).
The import of the scare quotes will be revealed in §5.
It is the Logical Investigations where Husserl first and systematically lays out the sensation/apprehension schema. It is commonly (see Sokolowski 1964) though not unanimously (see Welton 1983, van Masijk 2017) thought that Husserl abandons this schema in his later works. Moreover, it could well be argued that the characterisation of the sensory stratum that Husserl provides in his later – particularly ‘genetic’ – works contravene the firm boundary that Sellars draws between intentionality and sensation. There is, therefore, certainly another paper that could be written which questions whether or not the types of descriptions that some think the later Husserl replaces the sensation/apprehension schema with fall prey to the myth of the given.
I do not think the later Husserl is guilty either. Because I take a compatibilist stance towards the alternate schemas of constitution found in the later and early works, I do not subscribe to the thesis that he abandons the sensation/apprehension schema, and I think the split between the early and later schemas is roughly homologous with a split between epistemic and non-epistemic forms of perception, respectively. However, space prohibits a proper defence of these points. So, the achievement of this paper is more properly described as showing that the early Husserl does not commit the myth of the given with the addendum that I think my thesis could be carried over to the later works. But, in order to avoid confusion on this point, I will for this reason be relying from here on mainly on the Logical Investigations for the overwhelming majority of my exposition of the sensation/interpretation schema. In the scant quotes gathered from elsewhere, I have provided the original German to ensure terminological continuity between these works and the Investigations.
It is worth noting that ‘conception’ is a plausible rendering of Auffasung (cf. Findlay’s translation of the previous passage). However, I would suggest that a strictly exegetical approach is not appropriate here. For example, even if one were to find a passage where Husserl quite literally states something like “Wahrnehmung ist begrifflich,” the problem with this approach is both obvious and instructive. What would remain to be done would be to work out whether the relevant terms are being used in the same way. A variant of the comparative approach is employed by Soffer who asks, when Husserl employs the literal translatory term ‘givenness’ [Gegebenheit], does he employ it in the same way as Sellars?
My approach was to work out what sort of thesis would save one from committing the myth, and then look to whether Husserl seemed to hold this thesis. This approach requires some transliteration between the role the English phrase ‘conceptual capacity’ plays within the Sellarsian framework and the role the German phrase ‘Akt der Auffassung’ and its numerous alternates play within the Husserlian framework. I hope to show in §5 that the role these phrases are playing is similar enough for my purposes. It ought to be borne in mind that for Husserl ‘acts’ are conditions for the possibility of the intentionality of consciousness and are not to be thought of as real causal events. I appreciate an anonymous reviewer for forcing clarification on this and the last point.
Although I think we can say that, in the Investigations, Husserl holds that perceptions are conceptual because he thinks that perceptions have a propositional structure, and that this propositional structure is the result of apprehensions, there is no doubt that Sellars, as a post-Wittgenstinian analytic philosopher, thinks that conceptual capacities structure perceptions in a propositional way because our conceptual capacities are gifted to us only via our induction into a linguistic community. It is unclear whether Husserl thinks that apprehensions perform the function they do because they are informed by our upbringing in a linguistic community (but the answer is by no means obviously ‘no’). The genetic influence that cultural and historical grammars have on acts of perceptual consciousness via its enculturation and genesis within the lifeworld will not be considered by Husserl until his later works, and so we will not seek to answer whether he would follow Sellars here. And, we do not need to answer these questions to answer whether Husserl is guilty of the empiricist form of the myth. We only really need to see whether Husserl deems the sensation or the propositionally structured perception to be the fundamental unit of epistemic givenness, and on this score the early Husserl is crystal clear.
This is one aspect Soffer (2003) overlooks in her generally well-attuned account of Sellars (cf. p. 313). It is remarkable that in her comparison of Husserl and Sellars, she nowhere refers to the latter’s dogged concern with the phenomenology of sensation, and she even goes as far to claim that a central difference in their accounts is that Husserl “respects the crucial notion that conscious experience has an experiential dimension” (p. 321). We might put this down to the fact that Soffer refers mainly to the account in EPM that Sellars later refines, and she does not consult the texts wherein this refining occurs (i.e., SK and particularly FMPP – as I have here). This becomes especially problematic when Soffer discusses Sellars on sensation, struggling, as I also have, to discern whether his account of phenomenal content truly respects the experiential dimension. One cannot answer this question without following Sellars thoughts in FMPP. She concludes, mistakenly I think, that Sellars is led to conclude “that having a green sensation is like being a patch of green.” She of course points out that this is absurd, “since there is no experiential dimension to being an inanimate physical object” (p. 320). The recent trend of micropanpsychism might deny this apparent absurdity, and another interesting line of thought I have entertained is whether Sellars’ account of the metaphysics of sensation is an early strain of panqualityism. But, either way, we should not confuse Sellars metaphysics with his phenomenology. Sellars phenomenological account as provided in FMPP thinks that the most we can descriptively say is that what it is like to undergo an ostensible seeing is what it is like to see (not be) a coloured patch on a physical object (see §7 below).
Much as Husserl was concerned to provide an adequate characterisation of the conscious processes that ground logical thought after his refutation of psychologism. Both authors begin their dialectic with a firm account of what their target is not.
References
Barber, M. (2008). Holism and Horizon: Husserl and McDowell on Non-conceptual Content. Husserl Studies, 24(2), 79–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-008-9035-5.
Berghofer, P. (2018). Husserl’s Conception of Experiential Justification: What It Is and Why It Matters. Husserl Studies, 34(2), 145–170. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-018-9225-8.
Brassier, R. (2017). The Metaphysics of Sensation: Psychological Nominalism and the Reality of Consciousness. In P. J. Reider (Ed.), Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism: Understanding Psychological Nominalism (1st ed., pp. 59–82). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Coates, P. (2007). The Metaphysics of Perception: Wilfrid Sellars, Critical Realism, and the Nature of Experience. Abingdon: Routledge.
DeVries, W. A., & Triplett, T. (2000). Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,.” Hackett Pub: Including the Complete Text of Sellars’s Essay.
Findlay, J. N. (2001). Translator’s Introduction. In D. Moran (Ed.), Logical Investigations. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hicks, M. (2020). Sellars, Price, and the Myth of the Given. Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 8https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v8i7.4270
Hopp, W. (2008a). Husserl on Sensation, Perception, and Interpretation. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 38(2), 219–245. https://doi.org/10.1353/cjp.0.0013.
Hopp, W. (2008b). Husserl, Phenomenology, and Foundationalism. Inquiry, 51(2), 194–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/00201740801956937.
Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. (F. Kersten, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. (R. Rojcewitz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Husserl, E. (1991). On The Phenomenlogy of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) (J. B. Brough, Trans.). Springer.
Husserl, E. (1999). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.). Kluwer. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4952-7
Husserl, E. (2001a). Logical investigations: Volume I (J. N. Findlay, Trans.; D. Moran, Ed. Vol. 1). Routledge.
Husserl, E. (2001b). Logical Investigations: Volume II (J. N. Findlay, Trans.; D. Moran, Ed. Vol. 2). Routledge.
Husserl, E. (2019). Logic and General Theory of Science (C. O. Hill, Trans.). Springer International Publishing.
Madary, M. (2012). Husserl on Perceptual Constancy., 20(1), 145–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2010.00405.x.
Mooney, T. (2010). Understanding and Simple Seeing in Husserl. Husserl Studies, 26(1), 19–48. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-009-9063-9.
Mulligan, K. (1995). Perception. In B. Smith & D. W. Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (pp. 168–238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O'shea, J. R. (2007). Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn. Polity.
Price, H. H. (1932). Perception. Ltd: Methuen and Co.
Roy, J.-M. (2003). Phenomenological Claims and the Myth of the Given. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 33(sup1), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2003.10717593.
Sachs, C. (2014). Intentionality and the Myths of the Given: Between Pragmatism and Phenomenology. Pickering and Chatto.
Sellars, W. (1953). Is There a Synthetic a Priori? Philosophy of Science, 20(2), 121–138. https://doi.org/10.1086/287251 (ITSA).
Sellars, W. (Ed.). (1963). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. In Science, Perception and Reality. Ridgeview Publishing Company (EPM).
Sellars, W. (1975). The Structure of Knowledge. In H.-N. Castañeda (Ed.), Action, Knowledge and Reality: Studies in Honor of Wilfrid Sellars (pp. 295–347). Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill (SK).
Sellars, W. (1981a). Foundations for a metaphysics of pure process: The Carus lectures of Wilfrid Sellars. The Monist, 64(1), 3–90 (FMPP).
Sellars, W. (1981b). Mental Events. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 39(4), 325–345. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4319461 (ME)
Sellars, W. (2007). The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem. In K. Schrap & R. B. Brandom (Eds.), In the Space of Reasons (pp. 350–368). Cambridge: Harvard University Press (IAMB).
Soffer, G. (2003). Revisiting the Myth: Husserl and Sellars on the Given. The Review of Metaphysics, 57(2), 301–337. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20131977
Sokolowski, R. (1964). Immanent Constitution in Husserl’s Lectures on Time. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 24(4), 530–551. https://doi.org/10.2307/2104762.
Spaulding, S. (2015). Phenomenology of Social Cognition. Erkenntnis, 80(5), 1069–1089. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9698-6.
Steinbock, A. (1995). Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Evanston: Northwest Universtiy Press.
van Mazijk, C. (2020). Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell. Abingdon: Routledge.
Welton, D. (1983). The Origins of Meaning: A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian Phenomenology. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
Williams, H. (2020). Analytic Phenomenology (or “What It Is Like”) vs Husserlian Phenomenology. Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 15(3), 427–450. https://doi.org/10.3868/s030-009-020-0025-9.
Williford, K. (2013). Husserl’s sensations and phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12(3), 501–519. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
My thanks to two anonymous reviewers, and also Wenjing Cai and Thomas Byrne, for their comments and assistance with earlier versions of this manuscript. My thanks also to the organisers of the immensely stimulating and memorable Demystifying the Given conference in Beijing in 2019.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Williams, H. Is Husserl guilty of Sellars’ myth of the sensory given. Synthese 199, 6371–6389 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03073-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03073-z