Sellars

A Brief Criticism of Sellars

(The following excerpts from one of my graduate seminar papers criticize Wilfrid Sellars' argument against what he calls "the myth of the given".)

In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars argues against traditional empiricist views that rely on the givenness of appearances as a foundation for perceptual knowledge. Such views maintain that statements of the form "x looks green" are epistemologically more fundamental than statements of the form "x is green", for the latter are analyzed or explained in terms of the former. For example, "x is green" means that x looks green under normal conditions. Sellars, however, denies that there can be non-inferential knowledge of the appearances of things. According to his view, then, it is not the case that I can come to know that grass is green by first knowing that it looks green.

Sellars argues for this conclusion (in part) by means of an analysis which shows that statements of the form "is F" are more basic than those of the form "looks F". A statement of the form "x looks F" differs from one like "x is F" in that the former lacks an endorsement of the F-ness of x. That is, one who says "x looks F" has the same kind of experience as one who says that x is F, but does not believe he is in a position to maintain that x is in fact F. He therefore refrains from making the latter claim. Basically, Sellars' argument is that one first learns the concept "F" (or "being F") and only later, in situations in which one is faced with a problem in applying the concept, does one learn the concept "looks F".

The basic idea, then, is that the concept "looks F" cannot be understood without the concept "is F", and therefore our knowledge that x is F cannot be based on x's looking F. But that just doesn't seem to compute. For let's suppose that in fact the knowledge that x is F is dependent on x's looking F. It doesn't follow that we must be able to understand "looks F" prior to understanding "is F". It is only when we try to show that our belief in x being F is justified that we must resort to the concept "looks F". That is, in order to have the further belief that our original belief "x is F" is justified, we must resort to the concept "looks F". But if our original belief that x is F is justified, it is justified simply because x looks F. It is not justified because we believe that x looks F.