Synthese

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03258-6

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

What is the myth of the given?

James R. O’Shea1 

Received: 1 December 2020 / Accepted: 10 June 2021

© The Author(s) 2021

Abstract
The idea of ‘the given’ and its alleged problematic status as most famously articu-
lated 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 diagno-
ses 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 replace-
ability of any such presuppositions, whether ‘innate’ or acquired, and including Sell-
ars’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.

Keywords  Wilfrid Sellars · C. I. Lewis · Myth of the given · Categories ·

Perception · Concepts · Epistemology · Categorial given

“It will be noted that the account I am giving of physical objects as individu-
ated volumes of color stuff is essentially what I [call] the child’s proto-theory

This article belongs to the topical collection “Demystifying the Given", edited by Andrea
Altobrando and Haojun Zhang.

* James R. O’Shea
[email protected]
1
School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland

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of the objects of visual perception. This proto-theory is part and parcel of what
I have called the Manifest Image of Man in the World. That this essay moves
largely within the categories of the Manifest Image must be borne in mind
throughout what follows. It must also be borne in mind, however, that it also
moves within the framework of a theory of categories which denies the author-
itative status of the categories of the Manifest Image, i.e., it works within the
framework of a theory of categories which rejects the Myth of the Given.”
Wilfrid Sellars, ‘The Lever of Archimedes’ (1981b, FMPP I §75, note 6).
As a phrase, and as a set of interconnected arguments, the idea of the “myth of
the given” originates in Wilfrid Sellars’s “general critique of the entire framework
of givenness” in his wide-ranging 1956 article, “Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind” (EPM I §1).1 Sellars’s critique of philosophical conceptions of the given
as a “myth” that conceals a variety of philosophical confusions2 was then subse-
quently defended in highly influential books by Rorty (1979), Brandom (1994), and
McDowell (1996). The idea of the given and its alleged problematic status 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 cogni-
tive sciences.3 The question of just what the myth of the given is supposed to be
in the first place, however, is more complex and multi-layered than has often been
supposed in these disputes, and clarification of this prior question turns out to have
surprising consequences. My contention will be that the core of Sellars’s original
conception of the myth has been obscured in a way that has made it seem to be

1
  References to EPM will be by part and section numbers. The original three talks given in London in
March 1956 were entitled: “The Myth of the Given: Three Lectures on Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind.” References to Sellars’s other works will also use the abbreviations that have become standard
in the literature, and by part, section, or paragraph number wherever possible. (All italics in quotations
throughout are as in the original unless otherwise noted.).
2
  It is well known that in the second half of EPM Sellars proceeds to develop “a myth of my own,” a
piece of “anthropological science fiction” (EPM XII §48) according to which a “genius Jones” appears
amongst our behaviorist-restricted “Rylean Ancestors” (named after Gilbert Ryle’s analysis of “mental
concepts” in The Concept of Mind, 1949, for which Sellars had great respect). In the myth, Jones “devel-
ops a theory according to which overt utterances are but the culmination of a process which begins with
certain inner episodes” of thought. Sellars intended this myth to shed light on the actual intersubjec-
tive basis of our own concepts of inner mental events, being comparable in this regard “to the status of
‘contract’ theories in political philosophy” (1968 SM III §25; on the role of myths in Sellars’s EPM,
see Kukla 2000; and for background see deVries 2005, Ch. 7, and O’Shea 2007, pp. 86–105, 204–7).
The helpful myth of Jones is supposed to show how it is possible for us to have direct (i.e., non-inferen-
tial) yet essentially public and conceptually mediated knowledge of our own inner mental states without
the confusions embodied in the myth of the given exposed throughout the first half of EPM. Hence his
remark at the end of EPM: “I have used a myth to kill a myth – the Myth of the Given. But is my myth
[of Jones] really a myth? Or does the reader not recognize Jones as Man himself in the middle of his
journey from the grunts and groans of the cave to the subtle and poly-dimensional discourse of the draw-
ing room, the laboratory, and the study...” (EPM XVI §63).
3
  In this paper my concerns are primarily conceptual and philosophical rather than historical and inter-
pretive, and I make no attempt in what follows to provide a comprehensive survey of the voluminous
literature on the myth of the given or its history.

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simply inapplicable and so irrelevant to certain widespread views to which, I argue,

it was in fact intended to apply and represents a significant challenge.
In section §I, I lay out some familiar Sellarsian dilemmas that raise questions
about how our sense experiences provide warrant for our empirical beliefs about
the world. I then suggest that Sellars’s critique has subsequently been assumed to be
inapplicable to widespread views of two opposed kinds. It is assumed or objected
that either (1) the Sellarsian critique targets an irrelevantly “thin” nonconceptual
form of the given (e.g., ‘sense data’) that is simply irrelevant to more phenomeno-
logically adequate or conceptually “thick” conceptions of the experiential given; or
conversely, it is assumed (2) that Sellars’s myth had an irrelevantly “thick,” over-
intellectualized target concerning conditions on inferential reason-giving justifica-
tion that makes the myth inapplicable to sufficiently “thin” or non-epistemic ver-
sions of the experiential given.
In section §2, I then examine a subtle example of the second sort of assumption
in the form of a view among recent interpreters of C. I. Lewis (1929) that Sellars’s
myth is not applicable to Lewis’s resolutely non-epistemic version of the sensuous
given. In response I argue that a crucial but less well-known line of thought in Sell-
ars’s work concerning the myth of the categorial given4 (which I will argue traces
back to EPM) was both intended to and does apply to Lewis’s nonconceptual given,
and that it is also potentially applicable on similar grounds to any non-epistemic
conception of the given depending on wider questions pertaining to categorial revis-
ability that I seek to clarify in some detail. In section §3, I then argue that the myth
of the categorial given was on similar grounds also held by Sellars to be applicable
to a wide variety of conceptually or phenomenologically “thick” positions that have
been assumed to be shielded by the second sort of irrelevancy. Together these diag-
noses both explain and provide crucial support for Sellars’s late-career remark that
the categorial given is “perhaps the most basic form” of the myth (1981b, FMPP I
§4), and thereby also demonstrate the applicability of his critique to positions widely
assumed to be immune to it.

4
  Sellars himself did not refer explicitly to the “categorial given,” but it is clearly implicit in Sellars
1981b FMPP I §44, to be discussed. 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 by Brassier 2014 and Christias 2015b,
2018, 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.

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1 Sellarsian dilemmas: how do sense experiences justify empirical

beliefs?

Both in recent debates and in Sellars’s EPM in 1956, the primary focus of the cri-
tique of the given as a myth has appropriately enough been on the alleged insuffi-
ciency of any nonconceptual sensory given to fulfil the various foundationalist and
other roles that the given has been supposed to play in human knowledge, empirical
belief, and intentionality in general. It will be best to begin, then, with this familiar
conception of the bare, unconceptualized sensory given and with its critique as a
myth as far as epistemic or justificatory foundations are concerned.5
Consider first a classical if somewhat outdated empiricist picture of human
knowledge as resting ultimately on (to use the traditional terminology) our imme-
diate awareness or sense impression of the proper and common sensible qualities
of objects. Suppose that Sue sees a red building brick on the table. To pursue the
classical line, strictly speaking at present she sees only the red and rectangular fac-
ing surfaces of the brick, the rest of the brick not being visible. More strictly still,
in light of the possibility of illusion or hallucination, she is visually experiencing a
red and rectangular expanse that she takes to be, or sees as, and perhaps believes or
judges to be, the surface of a smooth red physical building brick. On this classical
empiricist view, the visually apprehended rectangular expanse of red or red ‘sense
datum’ is what is sensuously given in the experience, as far as the relevant prop-
erly visual qualities are concerned – though of course this is experienced against
a complex background of other color expanses, and overall exhibiting visual depth
and other properties that are omitted from this oversimplified description. That the
red surface is that of a physical building brick, by contrast, is what the strictly given
element is perceptually taken to be or experienced as, and this will depend on the
conceptual (and/or perhaps the naturally evolved “proto-conceptual”) recognitional
capacities, prior learning, and anticipatory expectations of the experiencer.6
Sellarsian criticisms of the myth of the given in the above traditional empiricist
shape have generally taken the form of arguing that such sensory states of con-
sciousness neither qualify as instances of empirical knowledge themselves (or even
as states with intentional purport), nor are such states by themselves sufficient to
provide any warrant for an empirical belief. My concern here is not to rehearse and
evaluate these arguments and the usual objections to them. For present purposes,
at least to start with, various widely discussed remarks of Sellars’s will for many

5
  See Bonevac 2002 and Koons 2006 for in-depth discussion of arguments (respectively) against as well
as in favor of Sellars’s critique of the foundationalist given. See also deVries and Triplett 2000 and Chris-
tias 2015a.
6
  Below it will become important to note that for Sellars, at least in his later work (1981a MEV, 1981b,
FMPP I), our basic perceptual capacities also benefit from the sophisticated, evolved “animal represen-
tational systems” involving “proto-concepts” of objects and object-tracking abilities that are our natural
animal inheritance, and which are possessed in various forms by both non-language using and language-
using animals. (This need not entail that adult human experience is a “layer cake” in which our adult
human non-conceptual sensory capacities are taken to remain “the same” as those of non-language using
animals, with conceptual rationality “tacked on” as an additional “layer.”).

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readers call to mind some of the more familiar arguments that arise in this connec-
tion: for example, Sellars’s claim that to characterize something as a knowing is to
place it “in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what
one says” (1963 EPM §36); or his normativist contention that “the idea that epis-
temic facts can be analyzed … into non-epistemic facts … [is] a radical mistake – a
mistake of a piece with the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in ethics” (EPM §5); or
his view that “Sensations are no more epistemic in character than are trees or tables,
and are no more ineffable” (1963 SRLG §40).
The expansion of these remarks into arguments by Sellars and others has taken
many forms. Rorty, for example, highlighted Sellars’s emphasis on the social aspects
of normative reason-giving in relation to one’s peers, vividly distinguishing ques-
tions of causation from questions of justification. Rosenberg (2007), Brandom
(1994, 2015), and McDowell (1996, 2009) developed the Kantian strands in Sell-
ars’s thought and argued that not only epistemic justification but more fundamen-
tally the very possibility of having any conceptually contentful empirical thought
or intentionality about a world of at all requires a background of conceptual capaci-
ties, normally expressible in a natural language, that serve as implicit criteria of cor-
rectness and incorrectness of application.7 On these neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian
views there is no conceptual content or intentionality properly speaking in the first
place without a background “space” of rational normativity of this kind.8
In contemporary epistemology these debates have coalesced around what has
come to be known in the literature as “the Sellarsian Dilemma” that is argued to
confront all foundationalist responses to the sceptical regress of justifications. Here
the problem concerns how any allegedly foundational basic belief is supposed to be
justified in terms of the supposed immediate experience of or direct acquaintance
with the given. A frequently cited articulation and defense of the Sellarsian dilemma
is from BonJour (1985) (before his later (2003) conversion to foundationalism):
[T]he proponent of the given is caught in a fundamental and inescapable
dilemma: if his intuitions or direct awarenesses or immediate apprehensions
are construed as cognitive, at least quasi-judgmental (as seems clearly the
more natural interpretation), then they will be both capable of providing jus-

7
  I, too, have highlighted the Kantian aspects of Sellars’s views in O’Shea 2007 and subsequent publica-
tions.
8
  As mentioned previously, here one might also seek to accommodate, as Sellars (eventually, in 1981a)
and Rosenberg sought to do, various analogously functioning “proto-concepts,” tracking abilities, and
other natural capacities and evolutionary inheritances possessed by both language using and non-lan-
guage using animals. Note, furthermore, that this Kantian strand in Sellars’s thought will be fully
preserved in the account to be given here. However, the considerations introduced by the myth of the
categorial given to be considered in sections §2 and §3, and in particular concerning the role of the revis-
ability and replaceability of categorial-ontological frameworks, will concern considerations additional to
these crucial Kantian insights. Of course, more broadly considered the latter emphasis by Sellars on the
evolution of categorial frameworks can certainly be considered an adaptation of a fundamentally Kantian
theme, as Sellars himself so regarded it. (I am grateful to a referee for pointing out that Sellars’s critical
realist and “Kantian critique” (as Sellars here calls it) of both classical phenomenalism and direct realism
in his article “Phenomenalism” (1963 PHM VII) is an excellent example of this more broadly evolution-
ary categorial adaptation of Kant’s views in application to the present topic.).

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tification for other cognitive states and in need of it themselves; but if they are
construed as noncognitive, nonjudgmental, then while they will not themselves
need justification, they will also be incapable of giving it. In either case, such
states will be incapable of serving as an adequate foundation for knowledge.
This, at bottom, is why empirical givenness is a myth. (BonJour, 1985, p. 69)
Willem deVries and Timm Triplett put forward a structurally similar account of the
Sellarsian dilemma as a reconstruction of what they called Sellars’s “Master Argu-
ment against the Given” (2000, Ch. 4). Briefly, the “doctrine of the given requires
that for any empirical knowledge that p, some epistemically independent knowl-
edge g is epistemically efficacious with respect to p” (2000, p. 104). The Sellar-
sian dilemma then takes this form: If the given, g, is non-propositional (for example,
a nonconceptual sensory or qualitative state), then arguments are put forward that
g cannot itself function as a premise in any justificatory reasoning for any empiri-
cal belief, and is thus epistemically inefficacious. (Compare Donald Davidson’s
well-known claim (1986, p. 310) that “nothing can count as a reason for holding
a belief except another belief.”) However, if g is propositional, then the Sellarsian
anti-givenists will argue, on the sorts of holistic and normativist grounds mentioned
earlier, that the conceptual response g is no longer epistemically independent or pre-
suppositionless in the way that the givenist assumes.
There have been vigorous objections to the required supporting arguments offered
for each of these horns of the Sellarsian dilemma. In my view these issues retain
their importance despite not being addressed directly to the considerations that I will
be raising in the remainder. As indicated, I am concerned here with the assump-
tion that the Sellarsian critique has a target that renders it irrelevant to certain wide-
spread views even if the epistemic Sellarsian Dilemma’s supporting arguments are
sound. As mentioned, on the one sort of reaction, Sellars’s target is alleged to be
irrelevantly thin in this sense: while Sellars and others before him rightly rejected
the impoverished and atomistic empiricist conceptions of the “bare” nonconceptual
“sense-datum” given that Sellars focused on in EPM, those rightly rejected impov-
erished conceptions are simply irrelevant to the givenist defender’s own (assumed to
be) innocently “thick” given, carefully conceived, for example, as a richly phenom-
enological and concept-laden analysis of our ordinary embodied and social “lived
experience,” taken initially on its own terms.9 Conversely, however, the other sort of

9
 See, for example, Montague’s (2016) thorough and admirably border-crossing (i.e., continental and
analytic) phenomenological analysis in The Given: Experience and its Content. On page one Montague
endorses, only to set aside for the purposes of the book, Sellars’s critique of the given, which is thus
assumed not to be potentially applicable to any view (including Montague’s own) that properly recog-
nizes that our immediate experiences already involve our conceptual capacities. We shall see, however,
that Sellars regarded the latter recognition as insufficient by itself to avoid potentially falling afoul of the
Myth, which ultimately rests on further considerations to be explored here. Montague on the same open-
ing page also sets aside McDowell’s concerns with “how what is given in perceptual experience can play
a suitable role in justifying our perceptual beliefs” (Montague 2016, p. 1). My contention will be that
Sellars’s critique runs deeper than the justificatory issues rightly highlighted by the dilemmas, and that in
this regard it can represent a challenge to both conceptually “thick” and nonconceptual “thin” characteri-
zations of the given. I recommend Montague’s book, and the question of whether it would or would not
fall afoul of the further considerations to follow is not one that I have space to take on here.

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reaction contends or assumes that Sellars’s target in the Myth is irrelevantly thick,
in particular due to Sellars’s (alleged) over-intellectualizing focus on the question of
propositional justification and intellectual reason-giving, thereby not touching the
nature of the defender’s own conception of a safely non-epistemic, non-justification
focused phenomenological conception of the experiential given.
Both sorts of cases are difficult to recognize as even possible instances of the
Myth, but both were in fact central to Sellars’s concerns, and it will be the burden
of the following sections to clarify how this is so. For example, how could a prop-
erly “thick” (for example, Kantian) understanding of direct perceptual experience as
itself already conceptually informed possibly foul afoul of Sellars’s famous critique?
For as mentioned, McDowell, Brandom, and others have rightly stressed that one of
Sellars’s deepest insights, shared with Kant and Hegel, is that nonconceptual sen-
sory processes alone must fail to account even for the content or objective purport
of our world-directed intentionality; so that the key to avoiding the Myth is precisely
to recognize the role of our conceptual capacities as being already operative in sen-
sibility in this regard. Nonetheless, while that is importantly true, we shall see that
Sellars held that a wide variety of conceptually “thick” conceptions of direct experi-
ence (phenomenological, rationalist, “ordinary language,” directly realist “theories
of appearing,”10 and others) have either explicitly or implicitly assumed that their
most basic conceptions of the nature of our experience (i.e., of what sort the experi-
ence is) are in principle invulnerable to the sorts of alternative reconceptions and
challenges to which Sellars argues they are indeed always potentially subject. Fur-
thermore, it is their seeming invulnerability to the accusation that renders such views
all the more important though difficult to diagnose, as Sellars was keenly aware.
Similarly in the opposite direction, where Sellars’s concerns have seemed to be
irrelevantly conceptually “thick” to the defender of the given: How could any view
that presents the sensory “given” as a resolutely non-epistemic, non-justificatory, or
nonconceptual factor in our perceptual experience possibly be subject to Sellars’s
“conceptualist” and normativist critique of the given, which was precisely concerned
only with conceptually “thick” questions about conditions on epistemic justification
regarded solely within the normative “space of reasons”? Furthermore, Sellars him-
self defended his own non-epistemic postulation of nonconceptual sensory represen-
tations, put forward as a best explanation of various aspects of our perceptual cogni-
tion, and which he clearly regarded as innocent of the Myth precisely in virtue of it
nonconceptual nature and its non-justificatory role. Nevertheless, here again it will
turn out that the deepest or “most basic” diagnoses of the Myth concern precisely
those aspects of views that have seemed most invulnerable to it.
Or so I will contend. It is in attempting to expose and clarify the grounds in Sell-
ars’s account for replying to each of these two opposed irrelevancy reactions that the
question of the intended scope and nature of the myth of the given will itself begin
to occupy center stage. In the next section I begin with the nonconceptualist’s “thin
given” in relation to which Sellars’s targeted justificatory given has been regarded

10
  For a defence of a directly realist “theory of appearing” against Sellars, see Alston (2002), and for a
Sellarsian reply, see Rosenberg (2007, Ch. 10).

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as “irrelevantly thick.” Following this in section §3 it will also become clear, on

structurally similar grounds, why it is that no matter how conceptually and phenom-
enologically “thick” and embodied a conception of the given might be, the challenge
represented by the myth of the given remains a further question to be considered.

2 Lewis’s “thin” sensuous given and Sellars on the myth

of the categorial given

C. I. Lewis’s classic 1929 book, Mind and the World-Order: Outline of a Theory
of Knowledge (MWO) provides an excellent example of a sophisticated theory of
a nonconceptual given, the predominant view of which among recent interpreters
of Lewis is that his conception of “The Given Element in Experience” (the title of
chapter two) is a safely non-epistemic conception to which Sellars’s Myth is thus
held not to be applicable. Furthermore, such interpreters argue that Lewis’s over-
all conception of knowledge was not foundationalist, despite this having been tradi-
tionally assumed. Zarębski has recently articulated this widespread interpretation of
Lewis as follows11:
since Lewis’s conception of givenness is not directly epistemological in the
Sellarsian sense and his account of empirical knowledge has roughly a Sellar-
sian [i.e., non-foundationalist] structure, then Lewis’s conception of the given
is immune to Sellarsian criticism of the ‘myth of the given’. (Zarębski, 2017,
p. 200)
Without conceding the historical claim with respect to Lewis and foundational-
ism, we can simply set aside that question since the structure of knowledge, whether
foundationalist or not, will ultimately be seen not to be Sellars’s primary target in
relation to Lewis’s given.12 In fact, for the sake of argument, let us assume along
with some of his recent defenders that Lewis’s nonconceptual given plays no directly
or indirectly epistemic or justificatory role, though this certainly appears to conflict
with his later writings on the given (e.g., Lewis, 1952). We can also fully recognize
the fact that Lewis rejected “sense-data” and “phenomenalism” as Lewis interpreted
those positions. In particular, Lewis argues that such views illicitly import concep-
tualization into what is in fact a nonconceptual given element in our knowledge
(O’Shea, 2021). The question to be considered now, then, is whether Lewis’s non-
conceptual given element in experience, even in its officially non-epistemic causal
and phenomenological roles, is “immune” to, or to the contrary is a proper target of,

11
  See also Dayton (1995, e.g. pp. 270, 278) and Westphal (2017, pp. 177–83), among others. My dis-
cussion of Lewis in this section overlaps in places with my more in depth discussion of Lewis in relation
to Sellars in O’Shea (2021).
12
  For the claim that Sellars’s critique of the given was not restricted to foundationalist views, though
it famously entails their rejection, see O’Shea (2007), pp. 111–16, 208–9, and more recently in depth in
Hicks (2020) regarding Sellars vs. H. H. Price. For an excellent recent defense of the view that Lewis
was indeed a foundationalist, see Klemick (2020).

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Sellars’s myth of the given. For this we need at least a brief look at Lewis’s subtle
account of the given.
Lewis argued that adult human perceptual knowledge involves two fundamen-
tal “elements”: a concept possessed by the knower, and a sensory “presentation” or
given element that is received from the world (1929, pp. 37, 52). He sought by phil-
osophical reflection to “isolate” the “thin given of immediacy” from “the thick [con-
ceptualized] experience of the world of things” (Lewis, 1929, p. 54), while empha-
sizing that knowledge properly speaking pertains only to the latter. He defends two
criteria for the given element: the given is what is unalterable by thought and has
an immediate sensuous quality. Lewis recognizes the difficulty in seeking thus to
abstract, in philosophical reflection, from the inevitable intrusion of concepts into
our attempted descriptions of the given:
While we can thus isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unal-
terability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any
particular given as such, because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we
qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, empha-
size aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways . . . So that
in a sense the given is ineffable, always. Yet no one but a philosopher could
for a moment deny this immediate presence in consciousness of that which no
activity of thought can create or alter. (Lewis, 1929, pp. 52–53)
Lewis’s sophisticated attempts to “isolate” what is strictly or “immediately” given
in experience, while thus seeking to abstract from any implicit “categorial”13 con-
ceptual classifications, is exemplified by the following:
At the moment, a certain ‘that’ which I can only describe (in terms of con-
cepts) as a round, ruddy, tangy-smelling somewhat, means to me ‘edible
apple’ . . . An object such as an apple is never given; between the real apple in
all its complexity and this fragmentary presentation, lies that interval which
only [conceptual] interpretation can bridge. The “objectivity” of this experi-
ence means the verifiability of a further possible experience which is attrib-
uted by this interpretation. (Lewis, 1929, pp. 119–20)
Lewis’s “thin” sensuous given element in our knowledge thus takes the form of
ineffable and fragmentary “qualia” presentations, and the given’s “content is either a
specific quale (such as the immediacy of redness or loudness) or something analyza-
ble into a complex of such” (1929: pp. 59–60). Furthermore, while “the presentation
as an event” is unique, “the qualia which make it up are not. They are recognizable

13
  The term “categorial” is traditionally used, and is so used by both Lewis and Sellars, to mean “per-
taining to the categories” of the sort discussed by Aristotle and Kant, whether in “categorial ontology”
(attempting to articulate the fundamental kinds of being) or in relation to fundamental conceptual cat-
egories of human understanding. “Categorial” should thus be distinguished from “categorical,” which is
usually opposed to “hypothetical.” The categorical nature of an object, for example, is generally used to
refer to its non-dispositional or “non-iffy” intrinsic nature. The categorial nature of any item, by contrast,
would be its suggested correct (implicit or explicit) categorial classification within a given categorial-
ontological scheme of things.

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from one to another experience” as “repeatable content” (1929: p. 60, italics added).
At the same time, however, Lewis holds that “such qualia, though repeatable in
experience and intrinsically recognizable, have no names. They are fundamentally
different from the universals of logic” and from the “objective properties” of con-
ceptualized objects (1929: pp. 61, 131, italics added).
Our question, then, is this: since we are for the sake of argument assuming with
some of his defenders that Lewis’s “thin” nonconceptual given is not in the busi-
ness of providing any epistemic justification for our “thick” empirical beliefs about
ordinary objects, is Sellars’s Myth objection thereby rendered inapplicable to Lew-
is’s careful isolation of strictly nonconceptual sensory qualia repeatables within our
experience, as these defenders assume?
This brings us to the heart of the matter. For in fact Sellars’s conception of the
myth of the given was not restricted to debates concerning epistemic justification,
though it was of course intended to have the anti-foundationalist epistemic impli-
cations canvassed in section §1. In an important later attempt to clarify his views
on the given in his 1981 Carus Lectures – but we’ll see that the idea was central to
EPM as well – Sellars articulates what he characterizes as “perhaps the most basic
form of what I have castigated as ‘The Myth of the Given’,” and which he states in
terms of the following “principle”: “If a person is directly aware of an item which
has categorial status C, then the person is aware of it as having categorial status C”
(1981b, FMPP I §44).14 As mentioned earlier, this has come to be known as Sell-
ars’s myth of the categorial given,15 and I will argue that Sellars is right to have seen
that this is in a sense “the most basic form” of the myth of the given. So, first a few
remarks about categories and the “categorial given,” before returning to Sellars in
relation to Lewis’s nonconceptual qualia-repeatables in particular.
Categories, on Sellars’s view, are roughly speaking (meta-)conceptual classifica-
tions of types of concepts, classifying the latter as functioning within some cogni-
tive-linguistic framework that serves to represent the world as being a certain way
and thus as containing various sorts of things and events. The categorial ontologist
or descriptive metaphysician can then analyze such everyday, scientific, or philo-
sophical concepts as implicitly categorizing the world in terms of various general

14
 “To reject the Myth of the Given is to reject the idea that the categorial structure of the world – if
it has a categorial structure – imposes itself on the mind as a seal imposes an image on melted wax”
(1981b, FMPP I §45).
15
  Hicks (2020) emphasizes correctly (in response to Triplett 2014) that Sellars’s critique of H. H. Price
on sense-data does not primarily concern matters of epistemic justification or foundations, but concerns
rather our more fundamental capacities for recognition of determinate repeatable sensory qualities at all.
However, Hicks emphasizes that on Sellars’s view in EPM “what really matters is that capacities for
recognition are acquired” as opposed to being innate (Hicks 2020, note 20). But as I will stress in the
remainder, the importance here is not so much that our recognitional capacities are acquired as that the
implicit categorizations such recognitions involve are criticizable and revisable, and thus in principle
replaceable by alternative re-conceptualizations. We shall see that this is the case whether the revised or
replaced “proto-conceptions” are innate or acquired. A central preoccupation of Sellars’s concerns what
he argues is our innate or natural perceptual “miscategorization” of the ontological “location” of the sen-
sible qualities of ordinary physical objects in the “manifest image.” Innate vs. acquired is not the key
issue, but Hicks’s insight about repeatability is a good one. More on this in what follows.

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sorts of particulars, properties, relations, states of affairs, processes, activities,

dependencies, and so on.16 Sellars holds that our sophisticated common sense con-
ception or “manifest image” of the perceptible world has been analyzed in different
ways by different philosophers, and that there is truth and falsity with respect to
how accurately or coherently these analyses have succeeded in capturing the implicit
categorizations of our common sense framework of persons, bodies, and their quali-
ties and relations (1963 PSIM I–III, 1977 SK I, 1981b FMPP). Furthermore, Sellars
stresses, both scientific theorists and metaphysicians have over time offered various
alternative categorizations of the fundamental nature of the world and of our knowl-
edge and values within it, in seeking how best to explain how it all hangs together.
Sellars’s views on the myth of the given are articulated within this general con-
ception of categorial conceptual frameworks and the metaphysics of epistemology
(see this article’s opening epigraph). The key point in relation to the myth of the
given is Sellars’s contention that philosophers have almost always assumed, whether
explicitly, implicitly, or by unwitting implication, that some fundamental categoriza-
tion of the world or of persons is irrevisable, and so is assumed to be just “given” in
that sense. These categorizations often cut so deeply and only implicitly that in some
cases (though not all – there are many types of cases, including more local ones) the
only way to bring out that they are not compulsory conceptions (in cases where they
are implicitly assumed to be such) might be to sketch or construct an alternative
categorial explanatory framework, for example one that might seek to resolve an
ostensible clash between frameworks. This is one important reason why Sellars’s
writings17 are littered with the question, “But what is the alternative?” – followed by
Sellars’s various attempts to construct or reveal a different conception and in some
cases an alternative categorial reconception of some phenomenon that the given phi-
losopher had, by Sellars’s lights, mistakenly assumed to be innocent or non-contro-
versial. This also helps to account for the dialectical, historical, and indirect nature
of Sellars’s modes of argumentation, and for the resemblance many have thought
these bear to aspects of both Hegel’s and Peirce’s philosophical methods. As many
have noted, it has seemed notoriously difficult (to take the case at hand) to isolate a
single, nicely formulable argument in Sellars that is supposed to apply against all
cases of the mythic given. It has struck many that Sellars always seems to work
with historical philosophical examples, to raise internal tensions within them but
not to attempt any knockdown arguments (Sellars states in various places that phi-
losophy does not provide knockdown arguments), and then to sketch an alternative

16
  For a clear example of this, see Sellars’s categorial analysis of the manifest image in his (1975 SK I).
17
  Searches of Sellars’s works for the phrase “But what is the alternative?” yields more instances and
more types of instances than would be helpful to attempt to catalogue here, though we will encounter
a sample of them in the next section. For the moment, here is one pertinent example of a fundamental
ontological re-categorization: “But what is the alternative? One possible line of thought [Sellars’s own
line] is based on the idea that perhaps the observational level of physical things (which includes one of
[Eddington’s two] tables) has been mistakenly taken to be an ‘absolute’. It points out that if the frame-
work of physical things were in principle subject to discard, the way would be left open for the view that
perhaps there is only one table after all; this time, however, the table construed in theoretical terms” (LT
III §36).

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explanation, and in some cases a fundamental categorial reconception, of the view

at hand. I am suggesting that this is not an accident, and that in many cases this
signature method has to do with “the most basic form” of the myth, the myth of the
categorial given.
The question of the ultimately correct categorial ontology of the sensible qualities
provided perhaps the most important example of this fundamental kind for Sellars,
though as we shall see it was far from being the only type of case. A key motivating
interest in the myth of the given for Sellars in this particular case was ontological.
The extant categorial ontologies of the sense-datum givenists, for example, but also,
alternatively, of the ordinary language philosophers and of directly realist “theo-
ries of appearing,” all in his view served to block the road of inquiry and to render
invisible what Sellars takes to be at least a “live” alternative, though admittedly a
speculative one. The case at hand concerns the ultimately correct categorial analysis
of the “location” of color and other sensible qualities in the ontological scheme of
things. Sellars’s continual career-long efforts to provide a radically different, sys-
tematic alternative to those conceptions of the place of the sensible qualities in the
total scheme of things is supposed to jar us from what has seemed to be at least a
categorially irrevisable aspect of the given conception of things under examination
(however revisable it may be in other ways). The articulation of an at least equally
coherent or plausible alternative categorial scheme is sufficient to dispel the myth
of the categorial given, without the criticized givenist necessarily having to accept
Sellars’s particular preferred alternative conception.
The myth of the given, in perhaps its most basic form, is thus the idea that there
is some implicit categorization of whatever is under consideration that is assumed to
be in principle not revisable or replaceable by a fundamentally different categoriza-
tion in this way. This is due to the fact that the given type of presence or entity is
thought or assumed to be revealed as it really is (following Sellars, call this “sort” or
way of being, ‘C’), simply in virtue of (for the givenist) one’s being directly aware
of it under this implicit, and perhaps unwitting categorization, C. Hence, again,
the myth of the categorial given: “If a person is directly aware of an item which
[ultimately, really] has categorial status C, then the person is aware of it as hav-
ing categorial status C,” that is, just in virtue of being directly aware of it (FMPP I,
§44, interpolation added). In other words, the direct awareness by itself is implicitly
assumed to reveal the item as, in this case, the sort of item it must really, ultimately,
be correctly conceived to be. To the contrary, Sellars contends that there is no spe-
cies of “direct awareness,” whether a non-conceptual or a conceptualized awareness
(the myth will apply to both types of cases), that is somehow invulnerable to poten-
tially being revealed as an implicit or explicit miscategorization in light of a possi-
ble explanatorily superior recategorization of that item’s fundamental nature (using
“item” here merely as a placeholder).
To return now to C. I. Lewis’s particular conception of the sensuous-qualitative
given element in our knowledge, Lewis as we saw explicitly seeks to characterize the
given as a strictly nonconceptual sensuous element in our awareness that receives
active conceptual categorization and re-categorization in terms of our ongoing and
revisable conceptual interpretations, but which the reflective philosopher nonethe-
less can “isolate” as an immediate and ineffable qualitative element in our conscious

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experience. As we saw, “such qualia, though repeatable in experience and intrinsi-

cally recognizable, have no names” (1929, p. 61). Sellars, however, contends that
our first-order awareness of such sensible qualities as Lewis’s “redness or loud-
ness,” however immediate, always already embodies an implicit categorial ontology,
whether this be (the particular list here is not important): (a) a “manifest” naïve real-
ism that represents such qualities as constituent-characters of physical objects (as
Sellars argues is in effect the case with our evolutionarily inherited, “innate” way
of (partially mis-)representing the world); or (b) such qualities or qualia or tropes
as might be claimed to be reflectively isolated in a philosophical sense-datum the-
ory; or (c) in the form of intrinsically recognizable Lewisian nonconceptual qualia-
repeatables; or (d) in a nominalist “pure process” metaphysical recategorization of
such repeatables (cf. Sellars 1981b, FMPP II); or (e) in a scientific-metaphysical
recategorization and “relocation” of such sensible qualities as adverbial states of
sensing in the perceiver’s central nervous system; and so on. Sellars’s contention is
that Lewis’s ostensibly categorially neutral account of the nonconceptual sensuous
qualia-given, which officially abstracts from all conceptual interpretation, has in fact
implicitly categorized such allegedly intrinsically recognized repeatables in a way
that itself represents a categorial choice among such alternatives as those just men-
tioned. This point will take some hammering home.
Sellars is in agreement with what Lewis called his pragmatic conception of the
a priori (Sellars, 1963 ITSA §7), at least as far as their shared emphasis on the
importance of categorial conceptual change is concerned (though there are signifi-
cant disagreements between them here, too (O’Shea 2018)). But what Sellars thinks
is true of Lewis is in essence the same as what he argued in EPM VI is true of
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume: namely, that the latter three philosophers all took “for
granted that the human mind has an innate ability to be aware of certain determinate
sorts – indeed, that we are aware of them simply by virtue of having sensations and
images” (EPM VI, §28). In this case, as with Lewis’s description of immediately
and intrinsically recognizable qualia repeatables, the form of the myth of the given
that Sellars is targeting is “the givenness of determinate kinds or repeatables, say
crimson” (EPM §29; cf. Hicks, 2020 similarly on Sellars on H. H. Price).
What Sellars makes more clear in other writings, however, is that it is not the
innateness in this case that is the real issue, but rather the unquestioned yet optional
(even if it is innate) categorization that is involved. For he argues, for instance, that
our innate, “proto-conceptual” perceptual categorization of the world naturally
embodies a naïve-realist miscategorization as far as the real ontological nature and
location of the properly sensible qualities are concerned. He usually mentions in
this regard the views of one of his former Oxford teachers, H. A. Prichard,18 and
18
  As Sellars puts his own view in the first Carus Lecture, “The Lever of Archimedes” (FMPP I §121
note 13): “A more subtle form of this view is one according to which although what is given is in point of
fact the sensing of a cool smooth cubical volume of pink, we take this volume of pink (of which the esse
is being sensed) to be a pink ice cube. Something like this view was held by H. A. Prichard. But to make
this move (as we shall see) involves a subtle shift in the concept of what it is to be given. For according
to it a sensing can be ‘given’ and yet (mis)taken to be something quite other than a sensing, namely a
physical object.” The latter sense of being ‘given’ is a non-mythical sense, for Sellars (whatever may be
the case about the details of Prichard’s own view). He elsewhere describes this “(mis)taking” as a mis-

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more generally he endorses the contention that our natural sensory endowments
were designed to get us around the environment rather than to represent entirely
accurately the world’s true categorial ontology.19 What matters is not innateness vs.
acquisition per se, but rather the ever-present possibility in either case of an alterna-
tive re-categorization in relation to any phenomenon, however “immediate,” which
Sellars takes the givenist either explicitly, implicitly, or by unacknowledged com-
mitment to have denied or failed to recognize in the case of our direct awareness or
acquaintance with (in this case) determinate sense-repeatables. What matters is that
the road of speculative categorial inquiry has thereby unwittingly been blocked, by
failing to recognize such a possibility in relation to the seemingly innocent assump-
tion of an immediate nonconceptual qualia-presence to consciousness.
I have several times mentioned Sellars’s notion of “proto-concepts.” Sellars
reserved the unqualified notions of “concepts” and “propositions” for reason-giving
beings who have the logical resources to explicitly represent reasons as reasons, and
who thus have the ability to infer and act in light of principles within a logical space
of reasons (1981a, MEV). But he argued that sophisticated non-logic representing
animals and infants nonetheless have the cognitive resources, thanks to inherited
adaptive capacities and learning mechanisms within a biological “space” of proper-
functioning (as it were), sufficient to “track” and represent objects as having various

Footnote 18 (continued)
categorization: “when the larger story is in, expanses of color in the environment turn out to be miscat-
egorized states of perceivers” (FMPP II, §99 note 12).
19
  There are many passages one could cite from Sellars’s publications in the 1950s and 1960s in this
connection, but in his 1977 Notre Dame Lecture on ‘Scientific Reason and Perception’ (WSNDL Lec.
VII §58, §60) Sellars himself indicates that his later views on this are consistent with, but a more devel-
oped form of, what he had held in 1956 in EPM. First, he remarks in relation to Prichard:
  “Prichard was asked that question, I remember: ‘You mean to say that we don’t really see chairs and
tables and so on?’ And Prichard said, ‘No! Of course we see them.’ But the kind of theory we have about
what goes on when we see them is usually a very over-simplified theory which mislocates various items.
As I said, we take our visual sensations to be features of physical things... The important thing to notice
is that I speak here of a mistaking, but notice that I have been very careful to say that the “mistaking
aspect” simply concerns, for example, the red rectangle. That actually is a red rectangular sensation. But
the rest of it needn’t be mistaken at all. So there is the brick. All this sophisticated theory does is to say
that there is one basic category mistake that is built into our perceptual responses to the world and, apart
from that, there are bricks and chairs and tables and we see them.” (WSNDL VII §58, italics added).
  (On Sellars’s more careful formulations, one of course has to bring in the role of theoretical models
and analogical concept formation in order to clarify the sense in which the sensing is itself, really, red
and rectangular.) Secondly, then, on the continuity of the above picture with his earlier views in EPM
(the end of this passage anticipates his upcoming work on animal representational proto-concepts in his
1981a MEV and 1981b FMPP I):
  “Actually there is proto-physical-object theory: we can think in subtle terms or we can think in terms of
the proto-theory which helps us get around through the maze of existence. Why can’t there be different
levels of conceptualizing? That is all consistent with what I argued in ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind.’ My problem there was the problem of how we construe what I call inner episodes at all, our
model for the conceptual at all. I said our introduction to the idea of conceptual episodes is fundamen-
tally through considering language. But I indicate that, although that is our entering wedge into having
a theory about conceptual episodes, we shouldn’t suppose that everything which deserves to be called
something like a conceptual episode is the sort of thing that is expressed in a sophisticated, syntactically
complex language.... I don’t have anything more helpful to say here because, as I said, for a long time the
theory of animal behavior was a matter of treating them as homunculi.” (WSNDL VII §62).

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properties and as standing in various relations. Sellars thus held that the “concept
of innate abilities to be aware of something as something, and hence of pre-linguis-
tic awareness is perfectly intelligible,” and that conceptual or “propositional form
is more primitive than logical form” (1981a, MEV §§56–60). He often calls such
“primitive” animal and human infant concepts “ur-concepts” or “proto-concepts” in
order to register the relevant functional contrasts and similarities. In a similar way
he writes of the human toddler’s “proto-theory” of the world prior to the child’s
development of more complex distinctions between how things look or seem as
opposed to how they are (1981b, FMPP I). These late-career notions figured in Sell-
ars’s critique of the categorial given in Lewis (and in Roderick Firth’s developments
of Lewis) roughly as follows.
Sellars explains that “We, as phenomenologists, can bracket the concept of an
expanse of red in that radical way which involves an abstraction from” any particular
categorial determination of what sort of item that expanse of red is in fact determi-
nately conceived to be (FMPP I §84), whether as a part of a visible physical object,
or alternatively as a state of sensing in the perceiver, for example, as noted earlier.
Sellars himself argues that in fact our animal or infant “proto-conceptual” starting
point, and so our initial implicit categorial ontology, is most likely of the former
kind, while the latter “relocational” recategorization is a much further step along
Sellars’s way. The temptation he thinks givenists such as Lewis succumb to, how-
ever, is to characterize their supposedly neutral, indeterminate, isolated, or bracketed
conception in ways that are in fact not categorially neutral or innocent in the way
supposed, or so Sellars or the Sellarsian critic contends.
It is in this way that a merely nonconceptual given can be unofficially and implic-
itly conceptualized, and thus potentially miscategorized (depending on further argu-
ments), while being advertised as innocently nonconceptually given. In the case of
Roderick Firth (discussed in FMPP I), Sellars’s diagnosis of the myth of the cat-
egorial given consists in attempting to expose Firth’s (alleged) assumption that the
bracketed phenomenal “expanse” must in fact be a subjective state of consciousness
in the infant or toddler’s consciousness (while the toddler lacks our explicit adult
“is/seems” distinctions). To the contrary, Sellars argues that there is an alternative,
and as it happens more likely sketch of an account according to which the toddler’s
ur-conceptual representation of the world is interpreted as an unsophisticated direct
(or “manifest”) realism about the “location” of the sensible qualities of physical
objects. Similarly, in the cases of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, as well as of Lewis,
the diagnosis of the categorial myth takes the same structural form, but in this case
in relation to “determinate sense-repeatables.”
So not withstanding the fact that Lewis himself would of course deny that our
immediate awareness or “recognition” of the given in the form of such repeatable
qualia-contents involves any implicit categorization of what sort of item they are at
all, this is in fact the real core of the dispute between Lewis and Sellars on the given,

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and Lewis is guilty as charged.20 Here is how Sellars had put this in his 1953 article,
“Is There a Synthetic A Priori?”:
All classification of objects, however confident and pre-emptory, is a venture,
a venture which at no point finds its justification in a pre-symbolic vision of
generic and specific hearts on the sleeves of the objects of experience. . . . I
am afraid, however, that our agreement with Lewis is more shadow than sub-
stance. For while he writes in this manner of the interpretation of the given by
means of concepts whose implications transcend the given, he also holds that
the sensible appearances of things do wear their hearts on their sleeves, and
that we do have a cognitive vision of these hearts which is direct, unlearned,
and incapable of error – though we may make a slip in the expressive language
by which these insights are properly formulated. In other words, the assump-
tion to which we are committed requires to extend to all classificatory con-
sciousness whatever, the striking language in which Lewis describes our con-
sciousness of objects. (Sellars, 1963 ITSA VII §44; italics added)
Lewis himself, of course, would not call such a vision “cognitive” if this term
is taken to entail “conceptualized” or “known,” since the repeatable qualia-givens
he seeks to “isolate” by reflection are officially not conceptually categorized in any
way whatsoever. The latter, however, is what Sellars’s Myth charge denies has been
achieved: Lewis’s bracketing “isolation” is in fact, in the details, conceptually (and
so categorially) contaminated rather than innocent. (In this Lewis is in the distin-
guished company of many other great philosophers.)
Three decades after EPM in the 1981 Carus Lectures (FMPP), therefore, Sellars
has now developed the same species of underlying charge more explicitly in terms
of the alternative categorial classifications that make clear that there is no avoid-
ing some implicit categorization or other of the sorts of item that are taken to be
involved in our direct (non-inferential) awareness of, in this case, the sensible quali-
ties. In FMPP Sellars explicitly mentions Lewis as subject to the Myth only in pass-
ing as follows (his focus is on Firth’s defense of Lewis’s view), and of course know-
ing full well here that Lewis would not himself describe his quale as a “category”:
“In the grip of the Myth of the Given, a C.I. Lewis might be tempted to say that to
the careful mind the expanse of red presents itself as a quale, the latter being the
one and only basic category which is above the pragmatic competition of the mar-
ket place” (1981b FMPP I §85). Sellars makes clear throughout FMPP that there is
an explanatory competition even with respect to Lewis’s immediately given element
itself, and indeed in his view with the most momentous consequences. By Sellars’s
lights the ontological nature and location of such items is and ought to be wide open
to possible alternative fundamental categorizations:

20
  I explore this accusation in further detail in (O’Shea 2021). See also Sachs 2014, who argues insight-
fully on related grounds, in different terminology, that Lewis falls afoul of what Sachs calls Sellars’s
myth of the “semantic given,” particularly in relation to the conception of “sense meaning” as developed
in Lewis 1946.

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The one thing we can say, with phenomenological assurance, is that what-
ever its ‘true’ categorial status, the expanse of red involved in an ostensible
seeing of the very redness of an apple has actual existence as contrasted
with the intentional in-existence of that which is believed in as believed in.
But notice that the family of concepts to which this contrast belongs con-
sists of transcendental concepts, i.e., concepts which apply across catego-
ries. An expanse of red could be something actual and be either [1] a sense
datum in visual space, [2] a manner of sensing, or [3] a spatial constituent
of a physical object.” (1981b, FMPP I §88; numbering added)
Sellars believes that there are more competitors in the marketplace of catego-
rial competition than between [1], [2], and [3] – his inquiry here is restricted to
competing categorial analyses of the “manifest” framework (as in the epigraph
that opens this chapter) – but that fact serves only to highlight further his basic
point about the fundamental nature of the myth of the categorial given.
My aim in this section has been to explain what is “perhaps the most basic form”
of Sellars’s myth of the given: the categorial given, and in particular how this is
meant to apply to the case of Lewis’s “thin” nonconceptual given. The next section
will show how this perspective also helps to explain what is common to many of the
other very different forms and targets of the myth accusation that notoriously show
up throughout Sellars’s philosophy, which will shed a different light on Sellars’s
own views as a whole. By the end it should also be clear, if only by implication, why
this improved understanding of the myth of the given has widespread consequences
for the various contemporary disputes about of the myth of the given mentioned at
the outset, whichever side of those disputes one might fall on.

3 “The Framework of Givenness”: varieties of the myth

of the categorial given

Although most contemporary debates about the myth concern the sensory given
in relation to the problem of perceptual warrant as discussed in section §1, it is
well known that Sellars opens EPM by listing a wide variety of other versions of
the given:
Many things have been said to be “given”: sense contents, material objects,
universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness
itself. And there is, indeed, a certain way of construing the situations which
philosophers analyse in these terms which can be said to be the framework of
givenness. This framework has been a common feature of most of the major
systems of philosophy, including, to use a Kantian turn of phrase, both ‘dog-
matic rationalism’ and ‘sceptical empiricism’ … And many who today attack
‘the whole idea of givenness’ – and they are an increasing number – are really
only attacking sense data. For they transfer to other items, say physical objects
or relations of appearing, the characteristic features of the ‘given’. (EPM I §1)

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How could everything on this list possibly be taken to be different versions

of a common “framework of givenness”? It will help to look at some of Sell-
ars’s remarks in the context of non-perceptual and non-justificatory versions of
the given.
The following is a version of the myth of the given that Sellars remarks on in
EPM VII (here bearing in mind, as I have argued in section §2, that the acqui-
sition vs. innateness question is not the important one, but rather that of the
neglected availability in principle of a categorial alternative):
There is a source of the Myth of the Given to which even philosophers who
are suspicious of the whole idea of inner episodes can fall prey. This is the
fact that when we picture a child – or a carrier of slabs – learning his first lan-
guage, we, of course, locate the language learner in a structured logical space
in which we are at home. Thus, we conceive of him as a person (or, at least, a
potential person) in a world of physical objects, coloured, producing sounds,
existing in Space and Time … In other words, unless we are careful, we can
easily take for granted that the process of teaching a child to use a language
is that of teaching it to discriminate elements within a logical space of par-
ticulars, universals, facts, etc., of which it is already undiscriminatingly aware,
and to associate these discriminated elements with verbal symbols. And this
mistake is in principle the same whether the logical space of which the child is
supposed to have this undiscriminating awareness is conceived by us to be that
of physical objects or of private sense contents. (EPM VII §30).
In the course of the second half of EPM it then becomes clear that our adult
human categorial “manifest” framework of ordinary persisting and colored physi-
cal objects is in principle in turn replaceable, on Sellars’s view, by an explanatorily
more adequate competitor “logical space” or categorial framework that he argues
is in fact already on the scientific and metaphysical horizon. The first key step is to
appeal to the hard-earned rejection of the myth of the given in the first half of EPM:
. . . once we give up the idea that we begin our sojourn in this world with any
– even a vague, fragmentary, and undiscriminating – awareness of the logical
space of particulars, kinds, facts, and resemblances . . . we now recognize that
instead of coming to have a concept of something because we have noticed
that sort of thing, to have the ability to notice a sort of thing is already to have
the concept of that sort of thing, and cannot account for it. (EPM X §45)
As we saw Sellars argue both in FMPP and in EPM VI (in relation to Locke,
Berkeley, and Hume), it is the myth of the categorial given to assume that the
direct awareness of any sort of thing by itself provides one with a cognition of
that item as the sort of item it ultimately is – that is, as the sort of item it would
be correctly revealed to be by whatever is or turns out to be the best overall
explanatory account of whatever sorts or categories of things there really are in
the world. Such an assumption or presupposition would in effect either dogmati-
cally or sceptically close the door on the marketplace of categorial-ontological
and explanatory reinterpretation.

13
Synthese

When Sellars himself then notoriously goes on to argue in EPM “that there are no
such things as the colored physical objects of the common sense world,” he empha-
sizes that this is to be taken “not as an empirical proposition... within the common
sense frame, but as the expression of a rejection (in some sense) of this very frame-
work itself, in favour of another built around different, if not unrelated, categories.
This rejection need not, of course, be a practical rejection” (EPM IX §43). One
important target of Sellars’s lectures on the myth of the given in EPM was thus to
combat the following implicit dogma:
There is a widespread impression that reflection on how we learn the language
in which, in everyday life, we describe the world, leads to the conclusion that
the categories of the common sense picture of the world have, so to speak, an
unchallengeable authenticity. There are, of course, different conceptions of just
what this fundamental categorial framework is. For some it is sense contents
and phenomenal relations between them; for others physical objects, persons,
and processes in Space and Time. [But each conception] . . . rules out of court
as utterly absurd any notion that there are no such things as this framework
talks about. (EPM IX §43)
This widespread impression is of course not restricted to mid-century analytic
sense-datum theorists, philosophers of ordinary language, or relational theories of
appearing. As Sellars sees it this applies also to the rich tradition of continental phe-
nomenology, which he regularly praised and roughly equated with the analysis of
the “manifest” or sophisticated common sense framework of the perceptible world
(cf. Christias, 2018, O’Shea, 2012, and Sachs, 2014). For he argues that phenom-
enology ultimately reaches “the end of its descriptive tether” and fails to explain
adequately even the perceptual phenomena that fall directly within its own carefully
bracketed domain of the manifest life-world (cf. FMPP I §89, and passim).
Finally, at the end of EPM, Sellars puts forward at least a glimpse of his own prof-
fered explanation of the ontology of perception and its ultimate place in the overall
scheme of things, by means of a fundamental categorial reinterpretation envisioned
in a “micro-theory of sentient organisms” (EPM XVI §61). Without going into the
details, Sellars elsewhere (e.g., PSIM VI, §107, “Is there any alternative?...”; and
FMPP I–III passim) further clarified and developed this same speculative alterna-
tive categorial ontology of ultimate micro-sentience. To use his terminology, this
reconception involves “non-physical2”21 qualitative sensings or “sensa” jostling
cheek by jowl, in (what in “macro” terms is) the central nervous systems of sensing
animals, with other equally fundamental ­physical2 micro-physical processes (involv-
ing quarks, electrons, etc.), within the all-comprehensive “physical1” and mostly
non-living ­physical2 spatiotemporal-causal universe as a whole. (For the details

21
  Sellars articulated this distinction with his co-author Paul Meehl in 1956, and later in FMPP as fol-
lows: “Roughly, those features of objects are ­physical2, which are, in principle definable in terms of
attributes exemplified in the world before the appearance of sentient organisms, i.e., attributes necessary
and sufficient to describe and explain the behavior of ‘merely material’ things. P
­ hysical1, features, on the
other hand, are any which belong in the causal order” (FMPP III note 15).

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 Synthese

and interpretation of this ontology, see Coleman, 2015, Ch. 2, deVries 2005, Ch. 8,
O’Shea, 2007, Ch. 6, Rosenberg, 2007, Ch. 9, and Seibt 2015, Ch. 9.)
Particularly revealing for our present topic of the myth of the categorial given,
however, are some passages in the comparatively neglected second Carus Lecture,
on “Naturalism and Process” (Sellars 1981b, FMPP II). Here Sellars compares his
proposed alternative “pure process” categorial ontology, briefly described above,
with the views of neutral monists such as Bertrand Russell, according to whose
views, as Sellars puts it: “Of course there are minds and material things. But there
really are no minds or material things; for neither minds nor material things are
among the ultimate constituents – sensibilia – of which all things are made” (1981b,
FMPP II §85).22 For the neutral monists, “statements in which we describe the man-
ifest world of changing things [are] capable of correlation with logically complex
statements in a language of which the basic statements ascribe qualities and rela-
tions to sensibilia” (§86). Sellars then suggests that something similar is the case for
his own ultimate categorial ontology of “sensings” and “quarkings,” et al., as a Her-
aclitean flux of “pure processes” in nature. Sellars explains that “the correlations”
established between “this [Russellian neutral monist] ‘alternative’ framework”
and our manifest categorial framework “need not be viewed as offering analysis of
manifest statements, i.e., as preserving sense” (§92): “It is rather to say that the one
framework is, with appropriate adjustments in the larger context, replaceable by the
other – eliminable in favor of the other. The replacement would be justified by the
greater explanatory power of the new framework” (§95). Sellars then proceeds to
take “the radical step of construing all the ‘atoms’ of our neutral monist model as
absolute processes” (§99), that is, in terms of a pure “flux” ontology of ultimate
non-physical2 sensings (e.g., “reddings”) and ­physical2 “quarkings,” and so on.
As Rosenberg (2007, Ch. 9) makes clear, this sort of radical categorial replace-
ment ontology was already generically in view, as far as the relevant radical cat-
egorial change is concerned, in EPM in 1956. One of Sellars’s primary concerns,
accordingly, was that the myth of the given in any of the versions he considers in
EPM (whether logical empiricist, phenomenological, ordinary language, relational
appearing, or directly realist) would unwarrantedly block the very possibility of
such an outlook from the start. Sellars of course defends his own categorial ontol-
ogy as being the best way, he argues, to provide a fully adequate naturalistic (or at
least “physical1”) solution to the intractable consciousness/body problem (cf. FMPP
III). But in these sorts of cases his rejection of the road-blocking myth of the given

22
  It is striking, and not very well known, how close Sellars regarded his own ontology to be to Russell’s
logical atomism and neutral monism, once Russell’s “sense-data” have been entirely de-epistemologized
and thoroughly recategorized. See, for example, Sellars’s correspondence with J. J. C. Smart on 23rd
March 1964 (http://​www.​ditext.​com/​sella​rs/​smart.​html-​m23). Here referring to his own ultimate ontol-
ogy as including “non-physical2-but-physical1” sensa as “micro-micro” constituents of central nervous
systems, he remarks: “This, as I see it, is the sort of thing Russell was trying to say, but didn’t quite bring
off.” Again in his 1986 Perspectives lectures at Notre Dame, he remarked while answering questions
that “basically at heart, I’m a logical atomist” (2015, WSNDL Ch. VIII, Lec. III, §168). (A referee help-
fully points out that Russell’s logical atoms were events only in Analysis of Matter (1927) and Analysis
of Mind (1921); they are universals in Inquiry (1940).) It would be interesting to pursue this particular
comparison further.

13
Synthese

consists only in exposing the relevant categorial presuppositions and in sketching a

coherent categorial alternative, without one’s having to accept, for the purpose of
diagnosing the myth, his further arguments in favour of his alternative categorial
ontology.
It should be clear at this point that the myth of the categorial given – the myth in
“perhaps its most fundamental form” – is indeed Sellars’s primary way of answering
both the “nonconceptualist” and “conceptualist” irrelevancy objections discussed
in sections §§1–2. Exposing the myth’s applicability where it seems most invisible
requires a different set of underlying considerations than those commonly discussed
in relation to the problem of perceptual warrant discussed in section §1. In these
most fundamental types of cases the diagnosis requires, in particular, categorial-
ontological considerations that are additional even to the pivotal and much debated
Kantian and Sellarsian claims concerning the holistic and normative “space of rea-
son” conditions on the very possibility of conceptual content or objective purport in
general.
Once one sees the myth from this categorial perspective, other very different
remarks on the myth of the given made by Sellars fall into place. In a late article23
on “Hochberg on Mapping, Meaning, and Metaphysics” (1977, MMM), for exam-
ple, Sellars at one point examines Hochberg’s criticism of Sellars’s nominalism. As
discussed in that article, Sellars’s nominalism involves his interpretation of the role
of predicates such as “is white” in terms of the functional classification of linguistic
tokens (e.g., “‘W1’ is a •white•”). As Sellars recounts it, Hochberg’s criticism takes
place against the backdrop of “the background language in which, presumably, we
formulate and dialectically resolve the issues at stake between nominalistic and real-
istic claims”; but in Sellars’s opinion, Hochberg does not pursue this background
aspect further, and he argues that this “accounts for some of the flaws in his [Hoch-
berg’s] argument” (MMM §4, italics added). To come to the key point, Sellars then
clarifies, in relation to his own long-standing nominalist categorial analysis, that it:
. . . is intended as a dialectical move in which the background language itself,
in so far as it uses such terms as ‘refers’, ‘stands for’, ‘property’, ‘fact’, etc.
is being scrutinized. From my point of view Hochberg takes the background
language to wear its dialectical heart on its sleeve. If I were name calling I
would call him an ordinary language philosopher. My Tractarian search for a
perspicuous language is no mere incidental feature of my method. It is reflec-
tion within the background language on the background language which leads
me to the conclusion that expressions which look like names (for example ‘tri-
angularity’) are not names, but rather distributive singular terms. [Footnote:]
The idea that the background language is to be taken at its face value is surely

23
  As an aside, it is interesting that in this late article Sellars writes: “Thus, since my earliest papers I
have held what has come to be called a ‘causal theory of reference’, though I have always been careful
to distinguish it from a causal analysis of the concept of reference” (1977, MMM §20). Sellars’s theory
of reference is Janus-faced, having both causal-naturalistic and normative-functionalist dimensions in a
mutual dependence.

13
 Synthese

the last bastion of the ‘Myth of the Given’. (Sellars, 1977, MMM §24; italics
added)
This makes clear again that the myth of the given, when push comes to shove,
is ultimately grounded in some uncritical groundlevel assumption or other, taking
different forms in different philosophical contexts, about the background categorial
framework that structures the very availability of whatever sorts of entities and cor-
responding conceptions are taken to be unproblematically available for use or for
direct apprehension.
The focus on the myth of the categorial given in the same manner accounts for
the various “rationalist” and other forms of the myth of the given that we saw Sell-
ars canvass at the outset of EPM (I §1), quoted at the start of this section. In these
cases, too, Sellars’s method in his various examinations of the topic of causality,
for example, consists in constructing a categorial (in this case, an epistemically and
semantically inferentialist, and ontologically nominalist) alternative to, for instance,
rationalist conceptions of the direct apprehension of necessary connections among
universals or essential kinds, realistically construed. To put in general terms the cen-
tral alternative animating principle of his various critiques of the Myth in its more
“rationalist” versions, he contends that:
There is nothing to a conceptual apparatus that isn’t determined by its rules,
and there is no such thing as choosing these rules to conform with anteced-
ently apprehended universals and connexions, for the ‘apprehension of univer-
sals and connexions’ is already the use of a conceptual frame, and as such pre-
supposes the rules in question. (Sellars, 1953 IM VI §47)
To this Sellars adds that “it is characteristic of modern science to produce delib-
erately mutant conceptual structures with which to challenge the world” (ibid.), thus
generating alternative categorial principles and offering potentially better frame-
works of explanation as a whole. This is something that he also holds is character-
istic of philosophy at its best, when it is not stifled by one or another version of the
myth of the categorial given.

4 Conclusion

What are the consequences of this perspective on the myth of the given in perhaps
its most basic form for the Myth’s disputed role in the subsequent and ongoing
debates that were highlighted in section §1? Some of the most well-known contro-
versies, which are generally focused on the nature and requirements of epistemic
justification, in many cases can and should remain engaged as they were before, in
the terms originally posed in those debates – for example, as to whether or not prop-
ositional, inferential, or social reason-giving are or are not necessary conditions for
epistemic justification and perceptual warrant. But as we have seen, it is when one
considers either of two of the most widespread types of response (or in most cases,
non-response) to the Myth charge, that the most basic categorial form of the myth of

13
Synthese

the given was brought to bear by Sellars, and this is where I think it becomes most
relevant again today, though usually in an unnoticed presuppositional way.
These rejections of the myth as irrelevant, as we saw in sections §§1–2, typically
regard the Sellarsian myth accusation as construing the given in such a way that it
is simply inapplicable to the defender’s putatively innocent conception of the given.
Put crudely, defenders of any phenomenologically and conceptually “thick” concep-
tion of the given often assume that they are ipso facto safe from Sellars’s attack
on long-forgotten sense-datum theories and other badly impoverished or “thin” mis-
conceptions of the given. Conversely, defenders of any resolutely non-epistemic or
nonconceptual “thin” given often assume that they are ipso facto safe from the Sell-
arsians’ exclusive focus on higher-level epistemic warrant and the holistic conditions
on conceptual intentionality within the normative space of reasons. These are not
unreasonable reactions, for we have seen that it can seem impossible for Sellars’s
Myth to be applicable to either such case, as long as the given is interpreted as either
safely non-epistemic and nonconceptual, or safely conceptually informed and phe-
nomenologically rich. What has been argued here, however, is that it is primarily
these seemingly innocent cases of the given, assumed to be immune to the myth for
either reason, that at the deepest level were targeted by Sellars’s myth of the catego-
rial given, depending on further considerations concerning revisability and the open
availability of possible coherent categorial alternatives.
In a way this puts a burden on the accuser of the Myth, as perhaps it should, since
no doubt every mature philosophical view regards itself as having already consid-
ered relevant alternatives and found them to be wanting by comparison. It is in this
way, however, when no further alternatives seem relevant or even potentially appli-
cable, that further inquiry into a given presupposition has often ground to a halt.
What Sellars’s dialectical conception of the myth of the categorial given attempted
to show was that just about every classic philosophical position has rested on back-
ground starting points regarded as innocent through lack of awareness of an alterna-
tive reconception that reveals that innocence to have in fact been lost from the start.
Whether Sellars’s own view is able entirely to escape this same sort of accusation is
of course another question, and one that he would want us to ask.24

Funding  Open Access funding provided by the IReL Consortium.

24
  I am grateful to many people for the development of this article. My thanks to Andrea Altobrando
(Padua) and Haojun Zhang (Beijing) for their work and for the conference at the China University of
Political Science and Law (CUPL) at which an ancestor of this article was first given in October of
2019. My thanks also to Michelle Montague, Antonio Nunziante, Galen Strawson, and Heath Williams
for stimulating questions and discussions at that same event. Griffin Klemick and Michael Hicks offered
insightful comments on earlier versions of these ideas. I would also like to thank all of the Skype par-
ticipants in the monthly ‘International Sellars Colloquium’ organized by Christopher Seiberth Luz, who
have provided such probing discussions of Sellars’s writings and ideas during the last number of years.
Finally, a special thanks to the industrious referees whose hard work in anonymity led to significant
improvements in the argument of this article.

13
 Synthese

Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
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ses/​by/4.​0/.

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