Wilfrid Sellars by James O'Shea

Author:James O'Shea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

5

Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the Given

As the title of Sellars' most famous work indicates, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (EPM) interweaves classical epistemological and metaphysical issues pertaining both to the structure of our knowledge and to the nature of the mind. We have just witnessed the subtle connections between those two domains in Sellars' ‘myth of genius Jones’ account of the nature of inner thoughts and of our ‘privileged’ epistemic access to them. The two sets of issues concerning mind and knowledge have traditionally been seen to coalesce within what Sellars calls “the framework of givenness,” which is the target of his attack in EPM as a whole (EPM I.1), for what has very often been taken to be ‘directly given’ in conscious experience is precisely the nature and character of our own thoughts and sensations. With Sellars' views on scientific realism, meaning and abstract entities, and inner conceptual thinking now under our belts, we are finally in a position to begin exploring one of the most difficult and fascinating topics in Sellars' philosophy: the metaphysics and epistemology of sense perception. In this case, too, Sellars' story will eventually culminate in the myth of genius Jones, this time in a second stage applied to the problematic status of our ‘immediate experiences,’ as they have traditionally been called.1 Ultimately Sellars' view will be that the rejection of the myth of the given is essential to the modern philosopher's central task of integrating the manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world.

The first section below begins with the general idea of the given and its particular application to the case of perceptual knowledge, and still more particularly in relation to Sellars' critique of sense-datum theories. The second and third sections leave sense-data behind and present Sellars' alternative account of perceptual knowledge, along the way developing further grounds for rejecting the general idea of the epistemic given. In the final section we recover some of the mishandled insights of the sense-datum theorists, and thereby begin to grapple with the problem of how Sellars conceives of the intrinsic nature of sensory consciousness and its problematic relationship to the scientific image of the world.

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