Abstract
This chapter examines whether Lewis’s account of “the given” is vulnerable to criticisms in terms of what Wilfrid Sellars called “the Myth of the Given.” It is argued that the Myth of the Given involves several distinct aspects, but that Lewis’s given is not “mythic” according to any of them. Lewis explicitly argues that the given only has an epistemological function insofar as it is interpreted. For that reason, it is epistemically efficacious for a conceptual framework only insofar as it is not epistemically independent of that framework. Hence Lewis’s given is not vulnerable to Sellarsian criticism.
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Notes
- 1.
At least if the proponents of empiricism still want to stick to an old, deeply rooted empirical tradition of nominalism (Sellars 1997, p. 21); otherwise, they would have to save their position by accepting some sort of realistic assumptions about pre-existence of universals and about our immediate, innate knowledge of them (Brandom 1997, p. 130).
- 2.
Here I only discuss the conclusions of Sellars’s positive account of observational knowledge, focusing neither on his more detailed criticism of empiricism with respect to so called Konstatierungen, nor on wider controversies concerning Sellars’s position. For a thorough discussion of this, see DeVries and Triplett (2000, pp. 67–107).
- 3.
The latter, in principle, can play a role in justifications when rendered in propositional form of “x looks φ,” still they could not “have the foundational status of an epistemological Given” (Koons 2006, p. 147).
- 4.
Despite the existing controversy as to whether Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order is consistent with his An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, and whether Lewis essentially changed his views in the latter (see Gowans 1984, 1989), I take, following Sandra Rosenthal (Rosenthal 2007), Eric Dayton (Dayton 1995), and Lewis himself, that the two works are principally the expositions of the same stance.
- 5.
- 6.
For interesting account of some of these detailed differences, see Sachs’s exciting book: Intentionality and the Myths of the Given: Between Pragmatism and Phenomenology, chapter III (Sachs 2015).
- 7.
Carl Sachs, analyzing a similar issue in (Sachs 2015), made another useful distinction between the epistemological and the semantic given. Sachs argues that while Lewis rejected epistemological given, he committed himself to the semantic given (Sachs 2015, pp. 29–41). I generally agree with Sachs’s arguments, although I have decided to restrict myself only to the epistemic given.
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Zarębski, T. (2017). Sellars and Lewis on the Given and Empirical Knowledge. In: Olen, P., Sachs, C. (eds) Pragmatism in Transition . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52863-2_9
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