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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).

McDowell defends conceptualism about experiential content by arguing that contrary views of experience are forms of the Myth of the Given. The direct realist view of experience, which rejects experiential content altogether, is thus, according to McDowell, a mythical view of experience. A series of defenders of direct realism have responded to McDowell’s accusations. However, the recent debate has revealed that there is very little agreement on the details of McDowell’s argument, let alone on how to respond to it. I will argue that the responses to McDowell given by thinkers such as Travis, Brewer, Kalderon and Johnson, all rest on various misunderstandings of his line of argument. The aim of this paper is to provide an interpretation of the Myth of the Given, which lives up to the dialectical role it plays in McDowell’s argumentation. I aim to elaborate the notions of reasons and the notion of conceptuality in play in McDowell’s writings. On this basis I present an argument leading from the requirement that experience provides reasons for thought to the conclusion that experience must possess conceptual content.

‘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.

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.

This chapter shows that if we accept the view that knowledge of the facts may never be possible, then we cannot immunize knowledge of the content of ‘appearances’ against radical sceptical doubt either, which leaves it impossible to explain, without appealing to incoherent notions such as the Myth of the Given and private ostensive definition, how our putative ‘external world’ propositions can have the conceptual content that they do at all. Given that we are able to formulate such propositions, however, it must be false that we can never have knowledge of how things are (only of how they appear).

In the final chapter it is claimed that the history of the debate shows that we must give up the inner–outer distinction. This move was initiated by an anti-Cartesian line of thinking. To this extent this is an externalist move. What is being claimed to be finally achieved is a view which reinterprets the mind–body relation as a relation which is constitutive of both the relata. The author claims that phenomenologists have, in a more substantial way, been able to show how exactly this relation is constitutive of both the relata. There is an affinity between the views of Husserl and the externalist John McDowell. According to the phenomenological view, the mind and world are not distinct entities; rather they are bound constitutively together.

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.

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.