Sellars Contra McDowell on Intuitional Content and the Myth of the Given

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to properly situate and contrast McDowell's and Sellars' views on intuitional content and relate them to their corresponding views on the myth of the Given. Although McDowell's and Sellars' views on what McDowell calls 'intuitional' content seem at first strikingly similar, at a deeper level they are radically different. It will be suggested that this divergence is intimately related to their different understanding of what the myth of the Given consists in and how it should be best avoided. It will also be argued that certain McDowell-inspired objections against the viability of the Sellarsian concept of the Categorial Given actually misconstrue the place of this notion in Sellars' system. If the myth of the Categorial Given can be considered as a genuine version of the Myth (and McDowell has offered no compelling reasons for thinking otherwise) then McDowell's account of intuitional content does indeed fall prey to it. I shall further argue that a McDowell-inspired objection against Sellars to the effect that his account of proper sensibles compromises the openness of intuitional content to the world ultimately fails, and, finally, I shall suggest that Sellars' views on proper sensibles and intuitional content provide a more promising account of the way our thought and experience can be rationally open to the world itself than McDowell's position.

What is the myth of the given?

“…In O'Shea (2007, Chs. 5-7) I highlighted the idea as central to Sellars's view, and it has more recently been put to excellent use byBrassier 2014and Christias 2015b, and in closely related conceptions developed in Sachs 2014 (the "semantic given") and Hicks 2020 (on the "structure of repeatability"). In what follows I argue for the explicitly ontological or metaphysical implications of Sellars's categorial given, and seek to demonstrate not only that this concern was at the heart of Sellars's own critique of the given in the sorts of fundamental instances that I discuss, but also that it holds the key to responding to recent widespread dismissals of that critique, thereby also revealing multiple misconstruals of the Myth's target.…”