Beatrice Edgell’s myth of the given

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wilfrid Sellars' ‘myth of the given' had a momentous influence on 20th-century epistemology, putting under pressure the internalist foundationalism so prominent in early analytic philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the core themes in Sellars' argument are anticipated in the work of the London philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell (1871-1948). Edgell explicitly argued that “‘knowledge by acquaintance' is a myth invented by epistemology” (“Is there ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance'?”, 196). In some respects, however, Edgell's argument against the myth of the given is even more compelling than Sellars' - or so I will argue. The core of the paper logically reconstructs and historically contextualizes Edgell's line of argument, as emerging out of a critique of Russell’s epistemology, with the goal of showing that the ‘myth of the given' effectively predated Sellars by four decades.