Sellar's Myth of the Given: Against Foundationalism

[Magical Realist]

Sellar's Myth of the Given

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+myth...u1DIQ,st:0

[C C]

The Epistemology of Perception (b. Sellars and the Myth of the Given)
https://iep.utm.edu/epis-per/#SH3b

Foundationalism in epistemology
https://iep.utm.edu/foundationalism-in-epistemology/

Antifoundationalism and Nihilism
https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/#H4

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Sellars - Epistemology
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/#Epis

INTRO: In his theory of knowledge Wilfrid Sellars attempts to balance competing insights in several different dimensions — empiricist-rationalist, foundationalist-coherentist, externalist-internalist, realist-phenomenalist-idealist — while also keeping an eye on the deep connections between epistemology and the metaphysics of mind. His attack on the ‘myth of the given’ is renowned, so we begin there.

Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.

Traditional epistemology assumed that knowledge is hierarchically structured. There must, it was believed, be some cognitive states in direct contact with reality that serve as a firm foundation on which the rest of our knowledge is built by various inferential methods.

This foundationalist picture of knowledge imposes two requirements on knowledge:

(1) There must be cognitive states that are basic in the sense that they possess some positive epistemic status independently of their epistemic relations to any other cognitive states. I call this the Epistemic Independence Requirement [EIR]. Positive epistemic statuses include being knowledge, being justified, or just having some presumption in its favor. (It was popular to claim that basic cognitions must possess an unassailable epistemic warrant — certainty, incorrigibility, or even infallibility — but this is not as common today.) Epistemic relations include deductive and inductive implication.

(2) Every nonbasic cognitive state can possess positive epistemic status only because of the epistemic relations it bears, directly or indirectly, to basic cognitive states. Thus the basic states must provide the ultimate support for the rest of our knowledge, which I call the Epistemic Efficacy Requirement [EER]. Such basic, independent and efficacious, cognitive states would be the given. Many philosophers have believed that there has to be such a given, if there is to be any knowledge at all.

Some commentators on Sellars take his attack on the given to turn on rejecting the belief that any cognitive state could have unassailable warrant or certainty. Although Sellars was a fallibilist and believed that any cognitive state could be challenged, his argument against the given does not worry about this issue. If the foundationalist picture of the structure of knowledge is itself wrong, the strength of foundational warrant is irrelevant.

Sellars denies not only that there must be a given, but that there can be a given in the sense defined, for nothing can satisfy both EIR and EER. To satisfy EER, a basic cognition must be capable of participating in inferential relations with other cognitions; it must possess propositional form and be truth-evaluable. To meet EIR, such a propositionally structured cognition must possess its epistemic status independently of inferential connections to other cognitions. No cognitive states satisfy both requirements...