Sellars and Lewis on the Given and Empirical Knowledge

Zarębski, Tomasz

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-52863-2_9

Pragmatism in Transition 2017

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-52863-2_9

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Sellars and Lewis on the Given and Empirical Knowledge

Tomasz Zarębski

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Cited by 5 publications

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“…This is also suggested byWestphal (2017: 181−82) and defended byZarębski (2017), who identifies several uses to which Lewis puts the given and argues that none commits him to Sellars's epistemic given. But my response to Sachs below identifies several of Lewis's uses for the given that Zarębski does not consider, showing that they do commit Lewis to the epistemic given.…”

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Sellars’s Core Critique of C. I. Lewis: Against the Equation of Aboutness with Givenness

Klemick

2022

Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie

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Many have taken Sellars’s critique of empiricism in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) to be aimed at his teacher C. I. Lewis. But if so, why do the famous arguments of its opening sections carry so little force against Lewis’s views? Understandably, some respond by denying that Lewis’s epistemology is among the positions targeted by Sellars. But this is incorrect. Indeed, Sellars had earlier offered more trenchant (if already familiar) critiques of Lewis’s epistemology. What is original about EPM is that it criticizes empiricist positions like Lewis’s not because of their foundationalism, but because of their psychologism about meaning. Since psychologism turns out to be unacceptable by Lewis’s own lights, EPM has a compelling (if implicit) critique of Lewis to offer after all, one that strikes at the heart of his philosophical system.

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Sellars’s Core Critique of C. I. Lewis: Against the Equation of Aboutness with Givenness

Klemick

2022

Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie

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What is the myth of the given?

O'Shea

2021

Synthese

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The idea of ‘the given’ and its alleged problematic status as most famously articulated by Sellars (1956, 1981) continues to be at the center of heated controversies about foundationalism in epistemology, about ‘conceptualism’ and nonconceptual content in the philosophy of perception, and about the nature of the experiential given in phenomenology and in the cognitive sciences. I argue that the question of just what the myth of the given is supposed to be in the first place is more complex than has typically been supposed in these debates, and that clarification of this prior question has surprising consequences. Foundationalism was only one of Sellars’s targets, and this not only in the familiar sense that the more fundamental issues at stake concern the very ‘objective purport’ or intentionality of our empirical thinking in general. When pushed further still, Sellars’s critique in fact hinged on his diagnoses of implicit framework-relative or ‘categorial’ metaphysical presuppositions he exposes in givenist views. Furthermore, the key to his critique accordingly turns out to rest on implicit assumptions concerning the in principle revisability or replaceability of any such presuppositions, whether ‘innate’ or acquired, and including Sellars’s own. Another key result is that widespread assumptions that Sellars’s famous critique is simply inapplicable or irrelevant to either ‘thin’ nonconceptualist views of the given (such as C. I. Lewis’s), since they are ‘non-epistemic’; or alternatively, irrelevant to ‘thick’ conceptualist and phenomenological analyses (since they, too, reject ‘sense-data’ or the ‘bare given’)–both turn out to be mistaken.

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Worldviews and World-Pictures. Avoiding the Myth of the Semantic Given

Morelli

2021

Topoi

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Sellars and Lewis on the Given and Empirical Knowledge

Cited by 5 publications

References 9 publications

Sellars’s Core Critique of C. I. Lewis: Against the Equation of Aboutness with Givenness

Sellars’s Core Critique of C. I. Lewis: Against the Equation of Aboutness with Givenness

What is the myth of the given?

Worldviews and World-Pictures. Avoiding the Myth of the Semantic Given

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