The Myth of Sellars’ “Myth of the Given”

Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” shows how a little intellectual honesty, a lot of hard work, and the tightest anus on the block can elevate one to Mythical Status in a tradition that values these three things in all the wrong proportions. This status is puzzling, though, for several reasons.

First, Dewey asked and answered essentially the same question about so-called immediate knowledge of presumable givens as the basis for justifying inferences in a chapter called, no less, “Immediate Knowledge: Understanding and Inference” decades before Sellars took up the same issue.

So why the rush to see the issue raised again?

Second, it wouldn’t be a stretch in the least to say that a main theme of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (where that chapter occurs) is precisely what Sellars concludes in EPM — namely, that “justification,” such as it is, must be sought in the public “space of reasons” — a space where, for Dewey at least, competing knowledge claims are tested against one another by their consequences, not their conformity to an antecedent reality apprehended through privileged representations, much less immediate knowledge.

So again, where’s all the excitement coming from?

Finally, in another place Dewey even one-ups Sellars on Kant — a figure Sellars discussed in great detail, and from whom he draws considerable influence. For Dewey noted — and Sellars did not — that Kant places the justification of knowledge claims in the union of two givens (concepts and intuitions), thus violating the “myth of the given” not once but twice. Since Dewey was the first to point out that Kant’s principal error was to place the justifying union of two givens in the private and essentially unknowable realm of transcendental operations occurring ‘in the mind,’ it’s hard to see much novelty in Sellars’ treatment, as noble as it is, at least as far as the essential points go.

So, if the substance of the “myth of the given” was worked out a generation before Sellars, why the Mythical Status he has in anal-lytic philosophy? Why, for that matter, even bring it up now?

Because however unoriginal in main insights, EPM is original in error. That is, although Dewey pre-empted the useful lessons of EPM by about forty years, he didn’t make a critical error Sellars makes, one that undermines the validity of his valid repetitions.

For Sellars, “all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all awareness of abstract entities — indeed all awareness of even particulars — is a linguistic affair. According to it, not [sic] even awareness of such sorts, resemblances, and facts as pertain to so-called immediate experience is presupposed by the process of acquiring the use of language.”[1] Sellars calls this “psychological nominalism,” and it contextualizes his specific arguments against “givens,” without providing them with all of their logical force. But his anal-lysis in the main does hinge upon it, and in any case, however critical, it is both incorrect and unnecessary to dissuade any compulsion towards epistemically foundational “givens.”

It is incorrect in so far as resemblances, sorts, and particulars, not to mention patterns and kinds, have been experimentally determined not just to precede linguistic awareness but also to make language acquisition possible in the first place.

For instance, it is known that infants detect within the undifferentiated (to them!) stream of adult speech specific, particular phonemes, to such an extent that their non-canonical phonetic babbling starts to include actual canonical phonemes through imitation and repetition at about eight months old. How they isolate these particulars from an undifferentiated stream of speech remains somewhat controversial, but the fact that they do does not. However it’s done, it requires — minimally — awareness not just of particulars and resemblances, but also of the repeating particulars which are differentiated from other particulars in a pattern of streaming sounds — in a word, it requires discrimination. Additionally, as infants go from babbling to canonical babbling, recognition of other sorts resemblances, particulars, and patterns go into effect, enabling them to begin forming repeated combinations of these now recognized phonemes into words that resemble adult words — again, particulars. The mechanisms through which this learning occurs — and some remain unknown — certainly require evaluation after discrimination of particulars, within kinds, otherwise resemblance would not be possible.

In other words, if recognition, particularization, differentiation, resemblances, and “sorts” (read “patterns”) did not precede language acquisition, it would be impossible — given what we know scientifically — to account for how language is acquired.

This is a distinct problem for a psychological nominalist who says that the knowledge derived by science is the first and last “the measure of all things.”[2] It becomes even more distinct when one considers how this emerging language comes to refer to or otherwise denote particular things.

Now, all this said, it would be a mere tautology to say the logical conceptions of resemblances, sorts, particulars, facts, kinds, etc. — i.e., all those “abstract entities” — are presupposed by “the process of acquiring the use of language,” since those logical forms do in fact emerge from and are applied to its use — without, it might be added, being reducible to that existential origin, and later application. And this much is true…but…Dewey made that point — one independent of psychological nominalism —long before Sellars; throughout most of his career, he argued that formal logic is the accrual of forms to the ‘use of language’ in its functional capacity in controlled inquiry. He even offered a rather detailed account of the origin and use of some of those forms, including the abstract forms logic usually entails.

In any case, given this preemption, and given he also avoided Sellars’ tortured arguments against any appeal to foundational, epistemic “givens” — and he did this without recourse to an incorrect theory (psychological nominalism) — it’s hard to see how the Myth of Sellars “Myth of the Given” even began.

Perhaps Rorty’s notion of what is familiar in established paradigms explains the near-adulation, for in his own take on “psychological nominalism” — on which his own arguments rely — he says: “nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence.”

Since that ‘truth as the coherence of discourse’ is a main point he and other anal-lytic philosophers are so fond of making, could that be the appeal of the “Myth of the Given”— mere confirmation bias? Does that consequence of the theory account for its endurance?

Either way, it’s best just to scrag the whole approach, for this stripe of nominalism deploys the misleading metaphor that language is something we need to get “outside of,” as though we aren’t always “outside” of it anyway — something evident as infants learn their first words, and we as adults struggle for the right words to say what we want to say about the world and each other, in the process of saying it. Not to mention psychological nominalism can’t even account for new knowledge, only the demonstration of old knowledge, which calls into question its use as a theory on a deeper level, in that it can’t explain what in fact occurs all the time, for just about anyone.

At the end of the day, unless you are willing to throw the baby of knowledge out with the bathwater of absolute or foundational justification in “givens” — as Rorty is but Sellars most emphatically is not — then psychological nominalism of both varieties — both Sellars’ and Rorty’s — has rather unappealing consequences, probably because the first one happens to be empirically false and the second both empirically false and so diluted from the original as to pragmatically useless to boot.

Perhaps it is more satisfying to late-in-coming psychological nominalists to have their own reflections mirrored back to them, but this mirroring defies the essential thrust of pragmatism, and the actual movement of science.

But does not this mirroring speak to the foundation of Mythical Status in anyone?

[1] It is puzzling that despite all the citations and the profound influence of this passage, it’s not mentioned that only by eliminating “not” does the point make sense.

[2] If one finds the use of “particulars” and “resemblances” and what not problematic in this point about language acquisition, the anus refers any skeptical reader to the rather large empirical literature establishing infant cognition regarding — i.e. awareness of — particulars, properties, causality, basic number sense, abstract numbers, object permanence, familiar versus unfamiliar faces, maternal versus non-maternal voices, racial preferences, and helpful intentions. That this literature all came well after Sellar’s own thoughts about awareness and language is no excuse for thinking about it in such in a way that makes investigation into the matter not just impossible but pointless.