by Greg Goode
The Given
Since René Descartes in the seventeenth century, Western philosophy has tried harder and harder to provide a secure foundation for knowledge of the world. The idea of the Given is that it provides such a foundation by guaranteeing that we get at least that part of the world right. How does this happen? According to the dominant Western view of knowledge, our knowledge is divided into two parts: what is given to the mind and what is added by the mind. There are different candidates for givenness, which are given to the mind. Since the Given comes directly from the world, it doesn’t depend on concepts or inference or anything that could turn out to be erroneous. In this way, it guarantees that we get the world right, at least sometimes.
The Critique
First argued by Wilfrid Sellars, the critique is that nothing can be given in this way.
Sellars examines the strongest candidates for givenness in perception and finds them either not to be given, or not to be cases of knowledge. The reason is this:
If it’s given, it doesn’t qualify as knowledge
If it’s knowledge, it doesn’t qualify as given.
Sense data without concepts are blind. The sensory Given is something like a red visual patch, a sound or a texture. But to qualify as knowledge, something doesn’t just have to be something, it has to be taken as something. For Sellars, a state of knowing is not merely the state characterized by the appearance of a color. Rather, knowing consists of placing this state in “the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.”
Sellars distinguishes sentience from sapience. Sentience is like being awake. While you are awake, a red patch of color can appear. Sapience, on the other hand, is knowing what’s going on, which depends on conceptuality, classification, language, inference and the relations between these things. It is the state of knowing the appearance as a patch of red.
For Sellars and many other Western philosophers, knowledge has to be in sentence form, such as “X is Y,” or “X looks Y to me.” It has to have “about-ness” or “referentiality” in order to be knowledge. There has to be classification or judgment of some sort, where X is taken to be Y.
The claim also has to be subject to justification and support. Many modern philosophers define knowledge as “justified true belief,” and require knowledge to have all three of the following components:
The belief component requires statement or sentence form.
The justification component requires placement in the space of reasons.
The truth component requires that the belief reports what is actually the case.
Sellars argues that even if you are a 100% reliable detector of red color patches, and a red patch causes the sentence “This is a red patch” to appear to the mind reliably, this situation doesn’t by itself count as knowledge. A parrot or an electronic photocell can be trained to respond reliably and accurately, but we wouldn’t normally say that they know what they are responding to. The mere appearance of an image is like an itch or sunburn or flash of light: not yet knowledge. To be knowledge it needs to be placed in the space of reasons and be able to be supported by or linked to other knowledge claims.
From this, Sellars concludes that although the red patch is given, it is not by that mere fact known. When it does become known as the red patch, this knowledge depends on knowledge of other things as well, and so is not given.
Therefore, there is no given knowledge, and the myth of the Given is false.
How Can This Help?
The sense that your knowledge rests on a foundational bedrock can lead to suffering if anything comes up that seems to challenge your knowledge claims, or challenges that foundationalist view of knowledge itself. The foundationalist view of knowledge can also lead to rigidity, narrowness and attachment to your own views. And because different people have different views about what is given, this can lead to conflicts. Becoming free from the myth of the Given can feel disorienting at first, but it can subsequently foster open-mindedness, open-heartedness, generosity, curiosity and the possibility of many new options in life.
Meditations On The Given
Mini-Meditation – Red Patch
Visualize a square red patch. Concentrate on the “thereness” of the patch. Your eyes can be open or closed, and it can still appear. When it appears, it is simply there.
Mini-Meditation – Is it Talking?
Is the patch saying anything? Is it making a claim? Does it announce what sort of thing it is or put itself into a category? Does it bear a label? Is it a sentence? Can an image talk?
Mini-Meditation – Put The Sensing In a Sentence:
What is the most basic sentence in which it can appear – something that doesn’t assume too much? “Red here now?” That isn’t a sentence or a fact. To be knowledge, it needs to be something that can serve as the basis for further knowledge claims. Here are three common suggestions from Sellars.
This is a red patch.
This looks like a red patch.
It looks like there’s a red patch here.
Think a little bit about which option is the most basic one. Which seems to be the best candidate for being a given?
Details
Examine the three claims above. They actually do qualify as something that can be knowledge. But they can’t be given because they all presuppose other knowledge:
This is a red patch. Can this be a given? No. It makes a kind of existence claim, as though what appears is already really red and really a patch. Can we be sure that it really is red, and doesn’t just look red? Don’t we need to assume standard conditions, reliable reports and other factors? So this statement can’t be simply given as true.
This looks like a red patch. This seems to be on safer ground. It’s simply claiming what the sense datum looks like. But it turns out that this statement can’t be given either. It depends on knowing other things. To know that something looks like a red patch, we must already know what it would be for something to really be a red patch. We need to know the difference between being red and only looking red. Perhaps it looks one way but actually is another way. We might need to know that we are a reliable reporter of red things under standard conditions for seeing them. We are confirming the red appearance, but withholding endorsement on what it really is. We need to know a lot of things to know this statement. So it cannot be given either.
It looks like there’s a red patch here. This can’t be given either, even though it is another attempt to be on safe ground. It still relies on having a concept about how looking like a red thing can be different from actually being a red thing, and it decides to withhold endorsement on the latter. It also relies on the concept of “here.” So this statement can’t be given either.
All of these sentences are very basic statements and quite good candidates for knowledge. They can be known, according to Sellars. But they can’t be known independently of knowing other things. So they are not given in the way required by the myth. Therefore sense data are not both known and given, and the myth is false.
“Objection! It really seems like the appearance and knowledge of it are the same thing, and the distinction between sensing and knowing is artificial.”
Answer: It can seem that way, but there are times in which we can have appearances without knowing them as something. Or without even knowing we have appearances. A witness gives a report, and then later realizes she saw more than she first realized. An adult who sees the blue of the sky now knows that as a baby she was sensing the blue without knowing it at the time. In Buddhist epistemology, there’s a distinction made between the appearing object (the red patch) and the apprehended object (the object that is processed and sent on to the mind). Not all appearing objects become apprehended objects. So sensing and knowing aren’t the same thing.
Quotes
From Wilfrid Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Sellars 1997):
... we now recognize that instead of coming to have a concept of something becau
se we have noticed that sort of thing, to have the ability to notice a sort of thing is already to have the concept of that sort of thing, and cannot account for it.
... all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities – indeed, all awareness even of particulars – is a linguistic affair. The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.
... empirical knowledge... is rational, not because it has a foundation, but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.
From Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, para. 141 (Wittgenstein, 1972):
When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)
This is Indra’s Net!
Foundations and Givens – Concluding Meditation
Find something in your life that seems basic. Something that seems like it is the foundation for other things. They depend on it, but it doesn’t depend on them or anything else. It can be an item of knowledge or a value, or even a state of being. Take a few minutes and try to find something like that.... You could even try this with the famous statement “I think therefore I am.” But try to find your own examples as well.
If you have found something that seems to be a foundation, try this. See if you can find other statements or knowledge claims that it depends on, or how it might have been different. If you can find these dependencies, you have realized the emptiness of this thing. You may be able to feel lighter and freer about it.
Try to imagine how not regarding things as given can help you not take things for granted. You will appreciate more things. You may even develop an “attitude of gratitude.” It will be harder to place yourself in a “given” way above other people and things. It will also be harder to place others in an absolute way above yourself. It goes both ways! Everything becomes sweeter and more precious!
Reference
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1972). On Certainty. New York, NY: Basil Blackwell.
CHAPTER 16 – CHALLENGING A COMMON NOTION OF TRUTH
What we think about truth matters! After all, a sentence is true, we might say, if it correctly expresses a state of affairs in the world. Thus what we take to be true is inseparable from what we think world and reality “truly are.” This intimate connection of truth and reality make them a very significant, potent topic to investigate. After all, your life is lived within and as this reality. Thus, if your view of reality changes even just a little bit, then, as we discovered in the “Loosening up Fixed Meaning In Language” chapter, everything else changes with it.
We will study “truth” and its relevance to emptiness and liberation in this chapter. Our target of refutation will be a widely held notion of truth, the so-called correspondence theory of truth. Very often the notion of truth as correspondence comes together with an allied notion, metaphysical realism.
In a nutshell, we will refute the view that the world consists of mind-independent objects and that true statements are exactly those that correspond to the facts about these mind-independent objects. Not only do these views make no sense when looked into, but they lead to rigid habits of mind and feelings of alienation and separation.
Our approach is inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, Martin Heidegger, and Richard Rorty.
When we are attached to fixed ideas about “truth,” we are unable to appreciate and embrace the many wonderful expressions of life on this planet.
For example, imagine the following. Imagine that you are convinced that the only correct way to think about the world is scientific materialism, which is the view that physical matter is all there is. When you hear about other views, such as a mystic experiencing the universe as divine grace, or a non-dualist arguing that the universe is nothing but awareness, it becomes easy for you to look at them as deluded. Even if you’re tolerant of other religions and viewpoints, you will perhaps secretly be convinced that they are ultimately wrong.
Examples like these are not hard to find. The Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The God Delusion (2006). To quote a review essay, “For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe.”32 The review lists some examples of Dawkins’ rhetoric, according to which “the biblical Yahweh is ‘psychotic,’ Aquinas’ proofs of God’s existence are ‘fatuous’ and religion generally is ‘nonsense.’”
Of course, anyone can be dogmatic, whether they are scientists or religious believers. It’s especially easy to be dogmatic if we are convinced that we have objective truth on our side. These days, religious believers are used to hearing themselves called dogmatic, but scientific materialists usually don’t hear this about themselves. They may tend to feel that they are just neutrally following what nature and science reveal about reality. They may feel that any reasonable, well-meaning human being would agree with them. Is this true?
We will challenge the notion that any view, even science, corresponds to objective facts about reality. Our approach will not be to say that correspondence fails and that all views get reality wrong. Rather, the core objection is that the very ideas of reality as objective and truth as correspondence make no sense when examined.
Why Does Truth Matter?
In this chapter, we aren’t focusing on having truer beliefs. We are suggesting that how you think about truth in general does matter. For example, if you are convinced that there is One Truth, and that all rational and enlightened people would agree about it, then there are at least three undesirable consequences:
You may dismiss other views as obviously wrong; this in turn feeds an attitude of superiority.
You find it harder to relate to a wide variety of people, since you can’t enter into their way of perceiving the world.
You cut yourself off from experiencing the world according to different, perhaps more beneficial truths. You lock yourself into the prison of your “really true” beliefs.
I (Tomas) certainly was convinced that there was something like objective truth. Combine my zeal for what I saw as “objective” truth with my intellectual competitiveness and there’s trouble. For example, in one of the worst cases, I was attending a dharma class on emptiness. Our Western teacher started with the view of the lower Buddhist schools and stated that there is a way to experience “true reality” as our unfiltered, immediate sense perception, without any overlay of concepts. I raised my hand and pronounced in a rather irritated tone, “That doesn’t make any sense. Neither from the way our brain processes information nor from a philosophical perspective.” Outright, I dismissed the presented viewpoint as faulty and naïve, and for the next hour bombarded him with questions and criticism. The atmosphere in the class shifted, and the other students began to look at the floor and the ceiling. When I walked out of the class in the evening I felt really bad. In hindsight, I believed the emptiness class, as taught, was actually very good because it was so intuitive and practical. The approach the teacher took to emptiness was simply based on “truth” different from the one I so strongly believed in at the time. The conviction that I had objective truth on my side was a large part of what made me act in such a hypercritical way in the first place.
Realism, Correspondence and Emptiness
When we think of things in a “realist” way, we think of them as “really existing independently of mind, convention and culture.” When we think of truth as correspondent to this independent reality, we think that a true sentence represents external, independent facts, and somehow matches up to them by corresponding to them.
The Realist Gestalt
We could actually lump realism and the idea of truth as correspondence
under a single heading. The two ideas are so closely related that we can think of them both as a single way of thinking. We will call it the “realist gestalt.” (We did the same thing for the idea of meaning in the “Loosening up Fixed Meaning In Language” chapter, where we lumped everything under the notion of representationalism.) The emptiness teachings are an extremely powerful way of deconstructing the realist gestalt. In its place, there is a free openness. In fact, once you debunk the realist gestalt, if you are a philosopher who likes this kind of topic, you can even adopt other ideas about truth. There will be one major difference. You will see the truth and your ideas about it as empty, not as inherently true.
We would venture to say that most probably adhere to some form of the realist gestalt. Hilary Putnam (1981) puts this view as follows:
[T]he world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of “the way the world is”. Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things.
We are trying to debunk this gestalt. The first step is to see where we might agree with it, or whether we can get an intuitive feel for it. This makes it easier to serve as a target of refutation. As we discuss it further below, perhaps you can try to check in and see if any of the intuitions apply to you...