Beyond The Myth Of The Given

The myth of the given refers to the doctrine that agents can directly obtain something that is undoubtedly true,regardless of the given is the “experience” of traditional empiricists,“the first principle” of rationalists,“sense-datum” of sense-datum theorists,Kant's purely intuitive form,Hegel's overall picture,or the Husserl's direct manifestation of things all fall into the myth.Calling it “myth” means naturally that it is a widely accepted but erroneous doctrine.The doctrine of the myth of the given has been accompanied since the birth of philosophy,and the history of its discussion has been carried out in the various concrete versions.But this also means that the overall picture of the myth has never been criticized.And this remarkable work was made in the mid-20 th century by the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars.The term “the myth of the given” was also first proposed by him.In his influential essay,Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind(EPM),Sellars pointed out the mistakes of sense-datum theory and traditional empiricism based on the dualism between norms and facts,and essentially argued that any awareness of episodes is placing them in the logical space of reasons.Because our cognition is expressed through language,and language acquisition is a normative story in the embracing community,so any of our so-called purely empirical description and intuitive principles all have normative logical status,and the intersubjective endorsement obtained in the logical space of asking for and giving reasons.However,can we get certainty after breaking the myth? In other words,can we still have a “foundation”? Sellars believes there is,because if it does not exist,then the “Hegel's python” which have no foundation will become the whole,a given.So the question is not whether there is a foundation,but what kind of foundation we have.McDowell's interpretation is that Sellars tries to construct a two-way epistemological foundationalism,not only from the bottom-up direction of external causal stimulation,but also from the top to the bottom of the linguistic normative level of the community.Obviously,this is a form of fallibilism.In specific technical details,Susan Haack's foundherentism advances Sellars' s plan.I will prove in the second chapter that this program implies a pragmatic insight,which is also implied in Sellars' thoughts.As Putnam said,the study of epistemology needs to be combined with the study of philosophy of mind.After criticizing the paradigm of the myth of the given,the epistemic foundationalism,Sellars further analyzes the root of the error: the false assimilation and attribution of impressions and thoughts.Sellars' s clarification of their logical status in terms of a kind of Rylean behaviorism,but the difference is that Sellars maintains the terms of ordinary psychology through the insight of the theoretical entities,but functionalizes them.The entailment of this claim is Sellars' s famous claim,scientific realism.Through the idea of theoretical entities,Sellars elaborates the logical status of impressions and thoughts,which is the content of the third chapter.In the last chapter,I will analyze the problem of “is” and “ought”.By examining this issue,we can understand whether Sellars' s criticism of the myth is complete and how we truly get rid of the myth.My idea is to start from the position of late Putnam,that is,we should get rid of the dualism between “facts” and “norms”/ “values”,but this does not mean that we can equal factual statements and normative statements.Even if we agree that the facts themselves carry value judgments,we can still make a relative distinction between them.This allows us to cope with the criticisms to the new Darwinian(Deweyan)philosophers and neo-pragmatic philosophers while preserving the insights in traditional ethics that seek to distinguish between facts and values/norms.This work requires us to naturalize the normative language,fill the gap between language and the world,and think about the rationality and boundaries of the linguistic turn.It is precisely this reflection of the problem of “is” and “ought” that we can examine the imperfections of the Sellars' s critique to the myth of the given,and even the possible contradictions,and thus move toward a thorough critique.