ABSTRACT
The rejection of what Wilfrid Sellars famously called the “Myth of the Given” has been one prominent strain in the pragmatist tradition stretching from Peirce’s critique of “intuitive cognition” through the neo-pragmatist views of Quine, Sellars, Goodman, Rorty, Brandom, and others. However, an equally prominent feature of classical pragmatism was the explicit embrace of the given, most famously by C. I. Lewis in defense of what he called “The Given Element in Experience” (the title of Ch. 2 of his 1929 classic, Mind and the World Order). This chapter examines Lewis’s defense of the given from the perspective of Sellars’s critique, a matter that has turned out to be controversial in light of recent defenses of Lewis against his Sellarsian critics. While granting that Lewis’s view avoids many of the standard epistemological charges associated with the Myth of the Given, I argue that Sellars’s critique is applicable to Lewis’s thought at a deep level. Ironically, however, I close by suggesting that aspects of Sellars’s own conception of qualitative sensory consciousness cognition are arguably unwittingly subject to Sellars’s own critique of givenness.
