§88. The Myth of the Given

The idea of the given, more precisely the epistemological given, is that we enjoy an immediate sensuous acquaintance with special objects of know­ledge, an acquaintance in advance of concepts, judgment, or understanding on our part.

Without the empirically given, knowledge seems frictionless, uncon­strained by anything except the opinions of others. Quine worried about that in his argument with Davidson. If nothing physical constrains our so-called science, that seems to make it not science at all. Ancestors of this given in an­cient empiricism were translated into modern empiricism by Gassendi and Locke, and made integral to the empiricist epistemology of Mill, Russell, and Carnap. The given is a present moment of sensory awareness, which verifies the protocol statement that reports its simple content. All wider knowledge of nature is a logical construction from this data. The Epicurean motto, “All perceptions are true” can be paraphrased for logical empiricism, “All well- formed protocol reports are true” According to Sellars's argument, however, empiricists ancient and modern are mistaken to think the senses deliver an empirical content in advance of concepts.

The empiricism Sellars criticizes is theorematic rather than problem­atic, the empiricism of Russell and Carnap, not Epicurus or Newton. Sellars criticizes the use of sensations or percepts as justification for statements about things. He explains that the “heart of the Myth of the Given” is the idea that observation draws its evidence from “self-authenticating nonverbal episodes,” knowledge of which “furnishes premises on which empirical knowledge rests as on a foundation.” Those self-authenticating episodes are “the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge” or, shifting the image from Greece to India, “the tortoise on which stands the elephant on which rests the edifice of empirical knowledge.”⁸

Sellars reformulates Kant's argument against cognitive immediacy in the then-new terms of the linguistic turn in philosophy. Nothing in expe­rience, nothing in conscious awareness, is simply given, immediate, or spontaneously apprehended. Such awareness is invariably mediated, which Sellars understands in specifically linguistic terms. “All awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all awareness of abstract entities—indeed, all awareness of particulars—is a linguistic affair”; that is, a matter of lan­guage and being a speaker of language, a thesis he identifies with nominalism and presupposes without argument. The program of logical empiricism was to construct “the world” (or science's theory of it) from the irrefragable data of the given. The difficulty Sellars presses is that we cannot specify what these privileged moments evince without presupposing objective forms that sup­posedly have no determination until they are constructed from the given. Concepts ostensibly constructed from uninterpreted sensory data turn out to be presuppositions of the data. We cannot say what is given without tacitly relying on more than we say is given.

Sellars addressed a generation of analytic philosophers who cut their teeth on Frege and Russell. Seventy-five years earlier, British idealist T. H. Green formulated much the same argument for his different audience. Green wrote for English colleagues who resisted the German ideas he admired and sought alternatives in Locke and Hume, which Green thinks is pathetic. He describes what he calls Locke's “logical see-saw”—Locke cannot state what he knows (his simple ideas) except in terms that imply substance and relation in the things known, knowledge of which he denies. Locke's seesaw becomes Hume's shuffle when he first ascribes to feeling an objectivity and concep­tual content that derives from concepts and logical thought, then disposes of those objects and their concepts as imaginary because they are not given impressions.

Green's conclusion is that “the relations of substance and quality, of cause and effect, and of identity—all ‘inventions of the mind'—are necessarily in­volved in the immediate, spontaneous testimony of passive sense.” Locke is wrong, Hume is worse, Kant is right, Hegel righter. The sensory given is un­availing for the only reason philosophers had to introduce it, which was to be the empirical foundation of scientific knowledge. A passage from Green gives the gist of his argument:

The “simple idea” with Locke, as the beginning of knowledge, is already, at its minimum, the judgment “I have an idea different from other ideas, which I did not make for myself.” His confusion of this judgment with sensation is merely the fundamental confusion, on which all empirical psychology rests, between two essentially distinct questions—one meta­physical, What is the simplest element of knowledge? The other physiolog­ical, What are the conditions in the individual human organism in virtue of which it becomes a vehicle of knowledge?⁹

This passage is a prototype for Sellars's later distinction between the logical space of reasons and the space of causes, the ur-form of which is the Stoic distinction between corporeal causes and incorporeal lekta.

Givenness in its most straightforward form... is the idea that the authority of Konstatierungen [i.e., reports of the given] rests on nonverbal episodes of awareness—awareness that something is the case, e.g. that this is green— which nonverbal episodes have an intrinsic authority (they are, so to speak, “self- authenticating”) which the verbal performances (the Konstatierungen) properly performed “express.” One is committed to a stratum of authorita­tive nonverbal episodes (“awarenesses”), the authority of which accrues to a superstructure of verbal actions, provided that the expressions occurring in these actions are properly used. These self-authenticating episodes would constitute the tortoise on which stands the elephant on which rests the edi­fice of empirical knowledge.¹⁰

The problem is that “observational knowledge of any particular fact, e.g. that this is green,” presupposes that the knower “knows general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y.” That refutes the idea that observational knowledge “stands on its own feet.” Instead of acquiring a concept of some­thing “because we have noticed that sort of thing,” our being able to notice it is “already to have the concept of that sort of thing, and cannot account for it.” For Sellars as for Green, empirical knowledge depends less on expe­rience, more on the logos that judges it. The justification of statements does not come to a natural halt with the sensory given, and there is no foundation for knowledge in simple sense perception. Instead, perception presupposes concepts and their knowledge, and nothing in knowledge is immediate or given. Knowledge is always mediated, and according to Sellars that means linguistically mediated. That is his nominalism, a term whose “primary con­notation” for him is “the denial that there is any awareness of logical space prior to, or independent of, the acquisition of a language.”¹¹

The refutation of the epistemological given tends to appeal to philosophy’s pragmatists.

A pragmatist might agree with Sellars that knowledge is always mediated, never immediate, but find he ruins the point with the gratuitous assumption that the mediation is invariably linguistic. It sounds like foundationalism all over again, dusting off a stratum to which justification is reduced, con­fined, and finally comes to an end. Sellars replaces an empiricist's myth of the given with a rationalist's myth of the logos. All cognitive mediation reduces to something about language, the sensing, the non-conceptual component of experience being epistemically inert, making no contribution to the reason­ableness of perceptual judgment, which arises instead from coherence, place in a conceptual system. Sellars chastises philosophers who seek to “break out of discourse to an arche beyond discourse.” Having exposed the myth of the given and established nominalism in its place, Sellars says that “The grand strategy of the philosophical enterprise is once again directed towards that articulated and integral vision of man-in-the-universe—or, shall I say, discourse-about-man-in-all-discourse—which has traditionally been its goal.”¹²

In an admired formulation Sellars writes, “In characterizing an episode or a state as one 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.” Green made this argument against Locke, who supposedly confused logical conditions on knowledge with “physiological” causation.

Human experience with art and technology speaks against Sellars's ration­alism, or would if it were suffered to speak at all. Linguistic consciousness and discursive reasons are on one level with other expressions of knowledge, including those of art and technology, and are not a higher-grade episteme. Thought, awareness, choice, experience, intention, and action are invariably mediated—by artifacts, symbols, preferences, memory, neurology, culture, ecology, evolution. Why set all of that aside and claim that all the mediation (or all that matters to knowledge) is linguistic? It is mediation, not language, that goes all the way down. The ubiquity of mediation implies the ubiquity of media, but these are our arts and techniques, which are neither invariably nor preeminently linguistic. The dichotomy between the space of reasons and the space of causes is Cartesian dualism all over again, forcing a choice between extended physical causes and immaterial logical forms. Why only two spaces, and why these two? I think we have no idea how many spaces of knowledge or cognitive mediation might exist. The spaces mediating knowledge are as many as the mediators, which are multitude, and have not stopped multiplying.¹⁴

§89. Apotheosis of a Sensation

The myth of the given may begin with what Aristotle and Epicurus made of a thesis in Democritus, whose well-attested argument declares the truth of all appearances. Aristotle attributes the idea without saying how to understand it. “Because they [Empedocles and Democritus] suppose that intelligence is sensation, and the latter is alteration, they say that what appears to sense is necessarily true.” Ancient commentators remember this point. Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote of “those who say that what appears to be and what is are the same, e.g., Democritus, Protagoras, and their followers.” According to Philoponus, Democritus “said straight out that truth and appearance are identical, and that there is no difference between the truth and what appears to the senses.”¹⁵

None of these sources explain how to understand the idea. However, turning to the account of Democritus’s theory of perception in Theophrastus’s De sensibus, we learn that for the atomist everything in nature emits eidola, atom-thin film copies of their surfaces. These impress the organs of sense, which receive them passively, as a pathe. The eidola are active, our reception an affect. Aristotle saw something important in this idea, however inade­quately expressed. Precisely because of its passivity, its pure receptivity, each sense is unerring with respect to its special object. Error arises from judg­ment, but the act of sense is finished before judgment and not conditioned by it. “It never errs in reporting that what is before it is color or sound.” For Epicurus, to whom “all perceptions are true” is also attributed, perceptions have an evidence, a force of clarity, that he equates with the immediate awareness of a present object unbiased by opinion. Only when this pristine presence gets tossed around in the marketplace of opinion does the possi­bility of error arise.¹⁶

The next episode in the apotheosis of the sensory given comes with modern empiricism, especially Gassendi’s new Epicureanism (§51). “[Since] deception, or falsity, is not to be found in the senses themselves, which merely behave passively and only report things as they appear and must ap­pear given their causes, it is to be found in the judgment, or mind, when it does not act with enough circumspection.” Locke silently follows the French pere. “The ideas in our mind, being only so many perceptions or appearances there, none of them are false........................... For truth and falsity lying always in some

affirmation or negation, mental or verbal, our ideas are not capable, any of them, of being false, till the mind passes some judgment on them.”¹⁷

Late antiquity had its own argument about the given. Postclassical phi­losophy considered the reception of a form to be at best a necessary, not sufficient, condition of perception. Reception of forms cannot be enough, otherwise mirrors and the very air would perceive. External stimuli must meet an internal response provided by selective attention, what Epicurus called epibole. For Plotinus, sense perceptions are not passive at all; they are “activities and judgments concerning affections.” It was a thesis of later com­mentary that perception is not complete without judgment; for instance, Simplicius: “Our rational faculty reaches up to perception... perception is rational.”¹⁸

The Neoplatonism buried in this line of thought became even more co­vert when Ibn Sina read a treatise entitled Aristotle’s Theology, believing it to be authentic when it was an Arabic translation of Plotinus. It was in his commentary on this misattributed work that European readers first encoun­tered Aristotle’s theory of sense perception. Following his Neoplatonic source (believing it to be Aristotle), Ibn Sina explains that as mental acts, perceptions are not a passive reception but an active apprehension of phys­ical changes and their cause. Knowledge of nature is based on abstraction of form, and sense perception as the first, lowest level abstraction, requires judgment, appraisal, the consent of reason. After Plotinus and Ibn Sina come Kant, Hegel, Green, and Sellars.¹⁹

Debunking the given usually ends up reaffirming Plato’s argument that the senses do not think, and Sellars is no exception. The problem he finds with the epistemological given is that it treats sensations “as though they were abso­lutely specific and infinitely complicated thoughts” The senses do not think; therefore perception requires something that the senses cannot provide. That

is the master argument of anti-empiricism from Plato to Sellars. Because the senses do not think, we think with them only through the addition of some­thing from ourselves, which for Platonists means the nous-intellect, which alone can judge existence. However, for Democritus and Epicurus it is pre­cisely because the senses do not think that we are right to trust them. They show, make evident, but do not judge. Atomistic aisthesis “is alogon in that it cannot think about what it sees, and thus cannot misrepresent it. But it tells us what it sees, in just the way that a camera does, by presenting it, and thus has maximal evidential value.”²⁰

What neither side considers is that sensation is emphatically not passive. It is active, very active, and this activity is not some higher power of nous; it is the activity of the senses themselves, the evolved neurology of sensation. Here is a point where Darwin changes philosophy. The senses cut, simplify, categorize all on their own and not by logical judgment, but from the mind­less shaping they have undergone through natural selection. Sensation is al­ready cognition, already abstraction, already action.