Search Results

McDowell’s view is that if infants and animals did have conscious experience, they would be confronted with private objects in Wittgenstein’s sense — bits of unstructured sensory Given. It is argued that since we are obliged to accord conscious experience to infants and animals, McDowell is in effect saddled with supposing that they confront Kantian things-in-themselves, objects which are noumenal with respect to the conceptual. This fits with his location of the world at the level of sense rather than reference in the Fregean semantic hierarchy. On McDowell’s metaphysical picture, objects — the inhabitants of the realm of reference — are banished from the world to a noumenal penumbra. To unpick ourselves from this nominalistic entanglement, we need to follow Frege in locating concepts/properties at the level of reference. McDowell’s hostility to doing so, which seems to be based on a fear of an excessive platonism, must be set aside.

The main focus in this chapter is the relationship between Plotinus' ontology and his epistemology. It is argued that at the level of Intellect being and knowledge coincide, that to be is to be known or thought. It is further argued that this is a necessary consequence of a principle in Plotinus' philosophy claiming that to know something as it is in itself is to know that thing from its internal activity, and that this kind of knowledge is impossible unless the activity of the knower coincides with the activity constituting the being known.

This chapter looks at examples of biological approaches to understanding two mental disorders: schizophrenia and addiction. It shows that biological models in psychiatry depend on an implicit concept referred to as “soma”. Soma is what holds together biological psychiatry's conception of the body—an overarching conception of the kind of thing a body is. As such, it sets the agenda for psychiatric research on bodies: given that the body is such and such kind of thing, psychiatrists expect to find these other kinds of things as part of the body or related to it. It is argued that soma functions in a manner analogous to a Sellarsian Given. As a result, it also suffers the problems of the Given. Biological psychiatry would do better to approach soma in a different way, thereby opening a genuine place for the mind in neural explanations.

‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (EPM) is sometimes read as attacking empiricism in general. But Sellars's announced target is traditional empiricism. In traditional empiricism, experience yields knowledge in a way that does not presuppose other empirical knowledge, so that the knowledge provided by experience can serve as foundations, in a straightforward sense, for other empirical knowledge. To accept this conception is to fall into a form of the Myth of the Given. In EPM Sellars works out a different conception of experience, according to which it is a kind of inner episode that, in the best kind of case, yields knowledge, but in a way that presupposes other empirical knowledge. The knowledge provided by experience can still serve as foundations for other empirical knowledge, but now only in a nuanced sense. The chapter concludes that so far from rejecting empiricism altogether, EPM rehabilitates empiricism, but in a non-traditional form.

In ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, (EPM) Sellars adumbrates an epistemological third way that avoids the pitfalls of the traditional alternatives — foundationalism and coherentism — while preserving their strengths. But what is this third way? Sellars's position can appear to be a form of coherentism, for in his account of observational knowledge, Sellars insists on a principle of epistemic reflexivity. According to Sellars, for a person's observation reports to express knowledge, the person must not only be a reliable reporter on the range of facts in question: the reporter must recognize his own reliability. This reflexive reliability-knowledge appears to introduce into Sellars's epistemology the mutual justificatory dependence between knowledge of particular and of general facts that is characteristic of coherentism. Sellars is aware of the problem, and alludes in EPM to two distinct dimensions of dependence, though he does little to clarify the distinction. To see what he has in mind, one must look beyond EPM to Sellars's attempts to redeem this ‘notorious promissory note’. Sellars's radical fallibilism and his implicit endorsement of a default and challenge conception of epistemic justification allow him to argue that epistemic reflexivity does not entail epistemic circularity, and that reliability-commitments, while presupposed by observational knowledge, do not function in a straightforwardly justificatory role.

This chapter considers the subtle and complex epistemology developed by Wilfrid Sellars over the course of a long career. At the heart of the Myth of the Given, Sellars finds this claim: that in making observation reports we are guided by prelinguistic takings of the given, whose authority our reports inherit. Finding this unacceptably obscure, Sellars prefers a kind of reliabilism. What gives epistemic authority to an observational report is said to be rather this: its manifesting the speaker's tendency to issue such reports if and only if he then observes the state of affairs described by the report (given, presumably, that the issuing of a report on that question is then called for).

Discusses epistemic foundationalism. Examines the confrontation between Wilfrid Sellars's critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’ and William Alston's defence of ‘immediate knowledge’, and explores and endorses Sellars's strong epistemic internalism and the integrated normative accounts of justification, language‐mastery, concept‐possession, and perceptual experience that support it. The proceduralist thesis that the activity of justifying is prior to the state of being justified is elucidated and defended.

The focus is epistemological. (OV) has certain features that may provoke concerns under the head of the Myth of the Given. An initial challenge from Sellars is set out and dealt with. An extended sketch is presented of how the positive epistemology of empirical knowledge might proceed in the context of (OV). In favourable circumstances, perception constitutes as a source of knowledge, since experience acquaints us with particular mind-independent physical objects in such a way as to enable our conceptual registration of their visually relevant similarities with the paradigm exemplars of various kinds that are involved in our possession of concepts of those very kinds. Thus, in veridical cases, we may see, and thereby know, that the objects in question fall under those kinds. Various cases of error are to be handled separately. An Epistemic Priority Requirement is set out and it is explained how this account meets it.

In 1685, Sarah Fyge Egerton, who was only 14 at the time, wrote The Female Advocate as a response to the poet Robert Gould’s anti-feminist satire Love Given O’re (1682). In The Female Advocate, Egerton presented a polemical defense of women. She also published Poems on Several Occasions, a collection of love poetry, in 1703 in which she denounced gender inequality. This chapter features “The Emulation,” one of the poems in Poems on Several Occasions.

This chapter examines the extent to which given names (birth names) and second names (bynames and hereditary surnames) can reliably indicate the origins or ethnicity of individual migrants between the ninth and the fifteen centuries, and how such names may be used en masse to reveal migration patterns, whether they reflect military conquest, international trade or population movements within England itself. Particular attention is given to the names of Vikings, Normans, Flemings and Jews, among others, and to questions of social class and gender. A central theme is the sometimes complex, ambiguous or incomplete nature of the data and the need for a discriminating methodology in which onomastics(the study of names),historical linguistics and prosopography (the collective study of individuals’ lives) are seen as complementary disciplines, acting as checks and balances on each other’s conclusions.

This chapter explores the anxious, deeply conflicted sense of besiegement characterizing dominant accounts of gender and race relations, as expressed in melodramas set around the NFL produced for television and cinema. The depictions of football’s male-defined spaces highlighted here are often fraught with anxiety and a sense of vulnerability. Real and imagined influences issue challenges to male power, and internal forces continually threaten to break it apart. In these narratives, male collectives are set in opposition to feminine forces, which threaten them (and their individual members) with emasculation. Though football is often celebrated as a symbol of the supposed transcendence of the racial past, narratives of the game are infused with profound ambivalence about black masculinity. The black athlete, celebrated for his impressive and admirable physical gifts, frequently challenges the cohesion of the group. Displays of “excessive” individualism and the homoerotic appeal of black bodies further complicate this racial ambivalence.

This chapter examines Jacques Derrida's notion of time as a possible gift—an original gift, the event of the giving of time that cannot be registered or identified—as well as his description of the specter as a new, suggestive sign able to grant us insight into the medial and thus tell us about the fate of all other signs. In his book Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, Derrida performs an analysis of the inability to distinguish the authentic from the simulated within the context of the symbolic economy. In that book, he also names the medium that manifests itself through this undecidability. For Derrida, it is the medium of the event—understood not as an action that happens “in time,” but rather as the source from which time flows to us in the first place. This chapter also considers Derrida's search for an ideal, absolute, authentic potlatch that cannot be reciprocated; a gift that eludes the ostentation, theatricality, and visibility of the symbolic exchange.

Chapter 3 argues that perceptual experience is the key to make a move from the Levinasian Other to the Great Outdoors. It proposes a notion of receptivity as hospitality where integration of what is perceived into an articulation of concepts emulate the tension between hosts and guests. The risk of the myth of the Given is then considered and dismissed through an analysis of McDowell’s positions in some debates in the last few decades and through the very postulates of indexicalism. The claim that the others are exterior that are part of an indexical co-ordination of experience connects with a broader notion of the equivalent of Kantian spontaneity that revolves around the notion of importance as put forward by Whitehead. As a consequence, the account can be expanded beyond the limits of human perceptual experience.

In this chapter I survey the various roles that acquaintance might play in the philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, and I then go on to explore the prospects for a naturalistic account of acquaintance to fill these roles. I will continue by arguing that while some roles can be filled by a naturalistic theory, others cannot. Finally, I will briefly present a non-naturalistic theory, according to which consciousness just is the relation of acquaintance, and show both how it accomplishes what a naturalistic theory could not but also how it cannot accomplish everything a naturalistic theory can.

This chapter claims that Vietnamese American cultural productions critically disconnect the Vietnam War’s masculinist hypervisibility from America’s renowned imaginary, imperial memory, and Cold War epistemology. It analyzes the PBS documentary Daughter from Danang, Aimee Phan’s short story collection We Should Never Meet, and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s experimental film Surname Viet Given Name Nam in an attempt to present the complex ways in which these cultural structures differentiate Vietnam from America’s Vietnam. Furthermore, it places the analysis of these Vietnamese American cultural productions side by side with a discourse of the imperialist and gendered racial logics assessing the cultural ground of America’s Vietnam.

This chapter assesses the questions of the commodification of the spectator’s look through overexposure, and the devices of display that construct and determine the experience of art. It begins with some rapid reflections on Marcel Duchamp’s early installations and their impact on his work Given, showing how it put into question the experience of art as visual consumption and display. It also studies the paradox of positioning Given within the museum, and considers Matta-Clark’s and Wilson’s appropriations and redeployments of conceptual and institutional implications at stake.

This chapter deals with the acceptability and interpretation of referential null subjects (NSs) and compares consistent pro-drop in Italian with equivalent sentences in Finnish (a partial NS language), in different syntactic constructions (matrix, completive, factive, and adverbial clauses). This leads to the formulation of an original proposal that opens new perspectives for future research. Specifically, based on the interpretive judgements of 273 native speakers of Finnish, it is shown that a Topic chain analysis (Frascarelli 2007) can (and should) be assumed in partial NS languages as well, and that ‘partiality’ cannot be explained through narrow syntactic constraints. The Locality requirement is thus re-proposed as an Interface Visibility Condition (IVC), according to which in partial NS languages a pro is preferably interpreted as referring to the closest overt link in a Topic chain. The Topic Criterion is thus proposed as a Macroparameter of NS languages and the necessity of a ‘graded analysis’ ascribed to the IVC (as a Mesoparameter).

The main goal of this chapter is to provide a comparative overview of some of the principal aspects of information and discourse structure in Romance, covering such areas as the packaging of information structure according to the encoding of oppositions such as Topic-Comment, Topic-Focus, Given-New; the role and effects of illocutionary force (e.g., declarative, interrogative, exclamative), different clause types (thetic vs non-thetic predications), and the root vs embedded distinction in discourse organization; the encoding of the subject of predication; thematic progression in the realization of arguments; modal subordination and anaphora. Specific topics dealt with include: topic, focus, and sentence types; sentence-focus structures (unmarked word order; verb-subject inversion); predicate-focus structures and topicalization constructions (clitic left dislocation, hanging topic, clitic right dislocation); argument-focus structures and focalization constructions (postverbal focalization and cleft sentences, contrastive focus fronting, information focus fronting, mirative fronting, verum focus fronting, QP-fronting).

Travis thinks my view that there is a myth, the Myth of the Given, to be avoided is based on a conception that would entail that our conceptual capacities cannot make contact with the non-conceptual. I explain why he is mistaken. I explain why he is wrong to connect the supposed Myth with an idea he finds in Kant, the idea that there must be a match in form between our thoughts and what we think about. I take issue with his suggestion that something fundamental to Kant is contradicted by Frege’s insistence that thoughts are not put together out of self-standing building-blocks. And I argue that he misreads Frege about how something non-sensible ‘unlocks the outer world’ for us, about the relation between the conceptual and the non-conceptual, and about the possibility of conceiving thoughts as, not objects, but contents of sensory consciousness.