Rethinking Sellars’ Myth of the Given: From the Epistemological to the Modal Relevance of Givenness in Kant and Hegel

ABSTRACT

Here, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’ critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from the epistemological role it also played for him. It is argued that Kant’s approach to modality in the Critique of Pure Reason can best be understood as a transcendental variation on Leibniz’s earlier ‘possibilist’ approach that treated the actual world as just one of a variety of possible alternative worlds. In this context, empirical intuitions seem to work like the mythical Givens subject to Sellars’ critique. This Kantian possibilism is then contrasted with an ‘actualist’ alternative approach to modality found in the contemporary work of Robert Stalnaker, but also recognizable in Hegel. In particular, the role of immediate perceptual judgments in Hegel is likened to that played by ‘witness statements’ in Robert Stalnaker’s attempt to distinguish the logic of judgments about the actual world from those about its alternate possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Givens
• witnesses
• modality
• epistemology
• actualism
• Hegel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Davidson had offered this as being ‘in agreement with Rorty’ (Davidson 2001, 141).

2. C.f., Watkins 2008, 518. C. I. Lewis, often taken to be a target by critics as an advocate of the Given, and on McDowell’s criteria would seem so. C.f., Lewis (1929), 47–8). For a defense of Lewis against this charge, see Sachs (2014).

3. Kant’s idea of modality as adding nothing to the content of a judgment may be taken in this way and is consistent with his more specific claim in relation to the ontological argument that existence (actuality) is not a predicate (Kant (1781/87) 1998, A598/B626).

4. This fundamentally de-dicto view of such unified contents has been stressed by Howell (1992, Ch 7).

5. Thinking of Kantian judgments with propositional contents in this sense seems to be behind the popular tendency to stress the Kantian background to Frege. See, for example, Sluga (1980).

6. Note that for Stalnaker possible worlds are these constructs – they are not represented or pictured by them. Stalnaker rejects the idea that propositions ‘represent’ anything. Propositions are abstract objects with certain properties, and are responsible for providing judgments, which are representations, with content. But they themselves do not in turn ‘have’ representational content. Such a conception would lead to an infinite regress.

7. Thus, driving from Boston to New York, one might ask oneself as to whether the strip of highway one is presently on is in Massachusetts or New York State, but the same question can be asked by asking if the ‘world’ one is in is a world in which this strip of road is in Massachusetts or in New York (Stalnaker 2008, 51–52).

8. That locution has a different role and is used where someone has a seventh son and the asserter is not sure of who it is.

9. Brouwer’s approach to mathematics was heavily influenced by Kant’s linking of mathematical truths to the form of intuition, although Brouwer restricted this form of intuition to temporality alone. The development of intuitionistic or constructivist logic was achieved by his student, Arend Heyting.

10. As noted, this objectivistic doctrine of propositions qua abstract entities developed in the nineteenth century, first being made explicit in Bolzano’s notion of the ‘Satz an sich’, the ‘proposition as such’ (Sundholm 2009).

11. A similarity to the philosophy of Hegel should not be surprising here, given Prior’s acknowledgment of the influence on his own tense logic of the views of his former teacher, John Findlay, who Prior described as ‘the founding father of tense logic’ (Prior 1967, 1). Findlay had started his philosophical life as an idealist and after a flirtation with the objectivist approach to propositions returned to the idealism of Hegel to become perhaps the first exponent of the Anglophone Hegel revival that started from the 1950s (see Redding 2017b).

12. Significantly, the constructivist logic developed in relation to the mathematics of Brouwer referred to earlier, with its idea of the role of ‘witness propositions’, was itself shown to be a type of modal logic in the 1930s by Gödel. Later Prior treated intuitionistic and tense logics as formally similar (Prior 1957, ch. 2).

13. In the Subjective Logic, references to comprehensive particulars can be found at Hegel (2010), 571 and 602, and to exclusive particulars or singulars at 549, 623 and 659.

14. Here, treating the singular subject of the judgment, some specific rose, as a universal, seems to be in line with the ontological doctrine of ‘singular essences’ had developed in Medieval philosophy in the wake of the logical treatment of individuals as universals. Thus Socrates, say, could now be understood as manifesting the essence of himself as an individual, and not simply that of the kind, human. See, for example, Klima (2005) and Tarlazzi (2017). This is effectively an individual version of Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’.

15. Hegel might equally have described this as ‘the universal is a particular’ as the subject term had started off as a universal. Perhaps his idea is that the rose is here treated as an ‘immediate’ unity of singular and universal, and so can be treated in either way.

16. In ‘Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy’ (1763) and ‘Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space’ (1768), both in Kant (1992).

17. In traditional logic, ‘infinite’ and ‘indefinite’ had the same meaning.

18. Work for this essay was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, DP130102346. Earlier versions were presented at the University of Tübingen and Potsdam University. I’m most grateful for the very helpful feedback received on both occasions, and in particular, wish to thank Ulrich Schlösser, Julia Peters, Johannes Haag, Eckart Förster, Bill deVries, Jim O’Shea, Carl Sachs and Lionel Shapiro for extended and invaluable discussions.