ABSTRACT
The account in question sees the capacity to make observation reports, or perceptual judgments, as the product of two in-principle separable component abilities. One is the capacity reliably to respond differentially to some kind of stimulus. This genus of capacity is not restricted to its discursive species. Not only sentient creatures who are not sapients, such as non-human vertebrates, but even sessile invertebrates and various kinds of mechanical devices exhibit capacities of this sort. Blind people and the ten percent of the male population that is red-green colorblind can know that things are red, but they cannot see that they are red, cannot observationally report the visible presence of red things, because they lack the necessary reliable differential responsive disposition (RDRD). The other component ability is the capacity to deploy the concepts applied in the observation report or perceptual judgment. What Sellars calls the “Myth of the Given” is the idea that there could be a kind of state or episode, say perceptual experiences, such that the capacity to be in such a state or undergo such an episode both presupposes no mastery of concepts and also constitutes knowing something, or having evidence for a claim. Observation reports and perceptual judgments are eligible candidates to qualify as knowledge, and so, the view is, they must involve the application of concepts.
