The Myth of the Given today: Perspectives of realistic epistemology

Abstract

The article deals with the reception of Wilfrid Sellars’s The Myth of the Given. The Problem consists in the ontological status of reality and the possibility of empirical knowledge. The ideas of well-known representatives of modern analytical epistemology are analyzed: J. Searle, H. Putnam, J. McDowell, G. Evans, C. Peacocke, W. Child, T. Rockmore, etc. An attempt is made in the article to show that The Myth of the Given is losing its relevance in modern humanistic realism where the world is already becoming a symbolic construct within the epistemological framework. Experience as such is no longer deemed as a linguistic phenomenon in modern epistemology. Sellars’s argumentation is convincing only if universalism, in terms of the interpretation of experience and reality, is criticized from the standpoint of radical pluralism of epistemological theories. In this case, indeed, no “Given” exists, viewed as a correlation between the substance of Sensitivity and the only possible world of Reality. It is illustrated that modern analytical epistemology is an arena of competition between two leading positions in the interpretation of the world: externalism and internalism. Despite the contradiction between these theoretical positions, they are in accord in recognizing a pluralistic worldview, which is, moreover, of a “humanistic” nature. These theories address neither “the given” nor “the world of facts”. The main trouble with The Myth of the Given is the lack of criteria of objectivity in any act of experience.