Abstract

Sellars’ attack on the “Myth of The Given” strikes at the very heart of the foundationalist project of empiricism, while yet attempting to preserve the sound epistemological and ontological intuitions on which it draws. To achieve this, the fatal predicaments bound up with the concept of the given first must be identified and defused. The result is a cautious redefinition of both the given as a non-epistemological concept and the relation between observation and theory, direct knowledge and inferential knowledge.