§90. The Given in Pragmatism

Sellars's nominalism denies, ignores, or dismisses as irrelevant any cog­nitive expression that is not linguistically translatable. The work of tools, instruments, and all technical or technological mediation is ignored unless and until they become discourse (Foucault makes the same argument).

The “given” that Sellars refutes is a creature of theorematic empirical foundationalism and psychological atomism. The credibility of the given flows from a stratum of authoritative nonverbal episodes—those “self­authenticating awarenesses”—which are the bedrock empirical founda­tion of science. It is an old argument of course, and many empiricists took it up, but not William James or John Dewey, who belong to the original anti-foundationalists of twentieth-century philosophy. Beliefs are justified when they work, and what works depends on what you want to do. That is pragmatism seen, as Rorty thinks it should be, not as a theory on the na­ture of truth, but as explaining why philosophy does not need such a theory. Whether you are justified in your belief depends on the future and is not de­termined once and for all by timeless formal norms.

“Pure experience” in James may seem to be an example of Sellars's objec­tionable given, but it is not. Pure experience is not given at all; it is the giving, a process, the becoming of experience, in advance of further qualification as objective or subjective (§74). James says pure experience is “the immediate flux of life”; it is pure, “in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what” Not because the form is fuzzy, but because the experience is in flux and not yet form at all.

Dewey foreshadows Sellars when he says, “I know nothing of a perceptual order apart from a conceptual order.” Yet he affirms this in a way that portends their divergence, since for Dewey the perceptual and the conceptual are “aspects, analytically arrived at, of the one existing reality—conscious expe­rience.” Dewey also anticipates Sellars's “Myth of Jones” (Jones is the mythic inventor of the language game of reporting inner experience): “This world of inner experience is dependent upon an extension of language which is a social product and operation.” He describes experience as “full of inference. There is, apparently, no conscious experience without inference; reflection is native and constant.” He says that with “a proper conception of experi­ence,” inference, reasoning, and conceptual structures “are as experiential as is observation.” He opposes the idea “that there is such a thing as immediate knowledge,” or that an immediate given is “an indispensable precondition of all mediated knowledge.” It is not. All knowledge “involves mediation,” and an “inferential function is involved in all warranted assertions.”²³

Sellars's argument refutes the idea of a sensuous given elevated to the fons et origo of scientific knowledge. However, the argument does not discredit the value James and Dewey invest in experience, or even challenge their idea of the given. In a striking passage, Dewey says, “The immediately given is al­ways the dubious... it is a cry for something not given.” Experience begins not with presence but absence, precarious loss. That is the experience we learn from, not the incorrigible protocol “red here now.”²⁴