The Given and the Self-Presenting

Abstract

Right now, you should be able to know that you think you are beginning to read a philosophy paper. At least, you should know something about your strictly present (occurrent) experience. How is this possible unless something is at the very moment of your experience? Widespread acceptance of the thesis that the given is a myth may make this question seem old-fashioned (Rorty, 1979). I would like to argue that such a question is still viable and may even help guide naturalistic attempts to deal with mental phenomena. My approach will be novel in that I want to go beyond ordinary analytic epistemology, that is, beyond the analysis of epistemic concepts and beyond the construction of rival foundational or coherence philosophies. I want to test such theories by seeing how well they account for certain aspects of the temporality of experience. My result will also be novel, for the thesis that will emerge is that if we make certain plausible assumptions about time and experience (assumptions that a coherence theorist might typically make) then there are plausible theoretical reasons for positing some form of the given. The temporality of experience generates philosophical problems because beliefs about time and experience are often incoherent. For example, people typically believe that they can perceive in a moment such durational processes as the streaking of meteors. However, taking seriously the idea that such processes are temporal implies that their earlier phases do not exist when their later ones do, so how can both be the objects of a perception? The easy answer that the perceptual experiencing is also a durational process just leads to more questions. Since the earlier phases of the perceiving process do not exist when the later phases do, how exactly do they influence or help to constitute a unitary perception? To use William James' term, since reflection shows that experienced