Beatrice Edgell’s myth of the given

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Bertrand Russell
• Beatrice Edgell
• knowledge by acquaintance
• myth of the given

Acknowledgements

For comments on a previous draft, I am grateful to Matt Duncan and two referees, as well as an associate editor, for British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Edgell was in fact a key figure in the development of experimental psychology in the UK: after a research visit to the University of Wurzburg in 1900, where she worked with Oswald Külpe – at the time probably one of the two most prominent psychologists in the world, along with Edward Titchener at Cornell – she established at Bedford College, the UK’s first higher-education college for women, and what appears to have been only the third experimental-psychology lab in the UK. She was a prominent figure in the philosophical and psychological landscape of the first decades of the twentieth century, at different times serving as president of the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society, and the British Psychological Society. For more biographical and other background information about Edgell, see Valentine’s “Beatrice Edgell: An Appreciation” and Beatrice Edgell.

2 Although the notion of Gestalt structure originates with von Ehrenfels (in “On Gestalt Qualities”), it is with Wertheimer’s article “Experimental Studies” that Gestalt psychology, with its rebellion against the atomism baked into traditional introspectionist psychology, starts to become an ever more dominant framework in psychological research.

3 One could further speculate about ‘diachronically thick’ distributional tropes that would be objects of minimally longitudinal awareness episodes, as opposed to instantaneous awareness acts.

4 Edgell’s original presentation of the argument is somewhat tortured (see Moore, “The Implications of Recognition”), and subsequent modifications were not meant to constitute self-standing presentations. Accordingly, I will reconstruct Edgell’s line of thought as I believe her to have intended it from the outset.

5 Recall the quotation we already saw from Russell (“The Ultimate Constituents”, 402): “the actual data in sensation, the immediate objects of sight or touch or hearing, are extra-mental, purely physical”.