Knowledge by Acquaintance? Phenomenalism? Foundationalism ?

In Knowledge, Mind, and the Given (2000), deVries and Triplett helpfully lay out what they call Sellars’s “Master Argument against the Given,” which they interpret, plausibly, as directed against the doctrine that “for any empirical knowledge that p, some epistemically independent knowledge g [i.e., knowledge of the given] is epistemically efficacious with respect to p" (2000, 104-105). This fits well with Sellars’s statement that “the point of the epistemological category of the given is, presumably, to explicate the idea that empirical knowledge rests on a ‘foundation’ of non-inferential knowledge of matter of fact” (Sellars 1956,1 §3). However, we have seen that Lewis is clear that his given element is not itself an item of knowledge, since the latter for Lewis always requires conceptual interpretation. Similarly, Lewis in MWO firmly rejects the conception, familiar from Russell and many other philosophers of the period, of an immediate or direct “knowledge by acquaintance” with particulars, whether the latter are taken to be sense-data or physical objects (see also Lewis 1929, 133, 138, 292). “What we are directly ‘acquainted with’,” Lewis insists, “are not objects but presentations. Seeing is believing, but quite often the belief based on seeing turns out to be a false one” (Lewis 1929,293).

For this reason, among others, as we shall see, it has seemed clear to many recent commentators, defending Lewis, that Sellars’s myth of the given is simply inapplicable to Lewis’s (non-epistemic) given, since the latter is explicitly not an item of direct “knowledge” properly speaking. Whatever their other differences on this matter, both Lewis and Sellars certainly do agree that the sensing of non-conceptual sensory contents is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for empirical knowledge (see Lewis 1929, 131; Sellars 1956,1 §3). As non-epistemic, therefore, Lewis’s given might appear to fall entirely outside what seem to be the most obvious epistemic-foundationalist, or classical “knowledge by acquaintance,” or traditional phenomenalist targets of Sellars’s attack on the given.⁹ As Zar^bski has most recently argued in defense of this now familiar assessment of the overall situation:

[Sjince Lewis’s conception of givenness is not directly epistemological in the Sellarsian sense and his account of empirical knowledge has roughly a Sellarsian [i.e., non-foundationalist] structure, then Lewis’s conception of the given is immune to Sellarsian criticism of the “myth of the given”.

(Zar?bski 2017, 200)

I think this widespread assessment is mistaken. Sellars’s characterization of the given, as we shall see, is not restricted to foundationalist views (see O’Shea 2007, Ch. 5 and p. 208 n4; and see Hicks 2020), or to views that take the given to be “self-justifying” (Dayton 1995,256-257), or to have any other positive epistemic status considered by itself, although these are of course “widespread” versions of the myth (Sellars 1956, §10). Neither of course is Sellars’s critique restricted to views, unlike Lewis’s, that take the given to be itself conceptually structured, whether propositionally, linguistically, or factually. Nor is it applicable solely to atomistic, or to stream-like, or to non-conceptualist conceptions of either the experiential or the intellectualist given. For our primary concerns here I will focus on illustrating this point in the case of Lewis’s sophisticated non-epistemic conception of the qualitatively sensuous and conceptually unalterable given and on the question whether this is correctly taken to be a proper target of Sellars’s intended critique.

As far as foundationalism is concerned, for our purposes here it will be helpful simply to assume for the sake of argument that Lewis’s overall pragmatist account of our knowledge of mind-independent objects is not foundationalist (see Dayton 1995 and Zar^bski 2017, among others; but see also Klemick 2020). This is plausible if we follow Lewis’s stipulations about how he is using the term “knowledge” noted earlier. Similarly, for the sake of argument I will assume (i.e., grant to the recent commentators mentioned earlier) that Lewis’s given plays no direct epistemic or justificatory role in MWO, though this certainly appears to conflict with his later writings on the given (e.g., Lewis 1952). Finally, the considerations from Sellars that I will raise concerning the myth of the given will not

Relocating the Myth of the Given in Lewis 201 rely upon a foundationalist construal of the given or of the structure of knowledge in general.

Setting foundationalism aside, then, it is also often pointed out that Lewis rejected not only knowledge by acquaintance but classical sensedatum and phenomenalist theories more generally (e.g., Rosenthal 2007, 44-45, Westphal 2017, 180). This is correct, particularly given Lewis’s various clarifications of the conceptions of sense-data, acquaintance, and phenomenalism that he rejects. For example, he rejects C. D. Broad’s act/ object conception of “sensa” as objects or contents that are “capable of existing unsensed,” rejecting them, among other reasons, for having “a dubious metaphysical status” (Lewis 1929, 61). More generally, however, the sense-datum and phenomenalist views that Lewis is primarily concerned to reject in MWO are those that he argues fail “to distinguish what is really given from what is imported by [conceptual] interpretation” (Lewis 1929, 62, italics added). That is, Lewis holds that such alleged phenomenal “objects” as the classical “sense-data” have not been sufficiently stripped down by philosophical reflection or analysis to reveal the genuinely and entirely non-conceptual yet repeatable qualia-contents in which the given, for Lewis, genuinely consists (see §1).

The mistake that Lewis thus diagnoses is that classical sense-datum and phenomenalist theories, not to mention also the received early modern empiricist conceptions of “simple ideas” and impressions more generally (as traditionally interpreted, and as interpreted by Lewis), all go astray by treating what Lewis himself characterizes as the “fragmentary” or “momentarily” given sensuous quale as if it had the properties of conceptualized objects. According to Lewis such views thus illicitly import predictive meaning into the momentary immediate given, as is implicit in those theorists’ own descriptions of the alleged direct objects of such “acts” of awareness (e.g., Lewis 1929, 62, 124-132). Such theories, for example, typically mistake the subjectively given quale - which Lewis himself wants to recognize as the given element in our experience - for “an objective property of a thing,” and “it is this confusion of subjective and objective . . . which almost inevitably results from the interpolation of a ‘sensum’ between the subject and the object” (Lewis 1929, 126; cf. 57-58).

Lewis thus understands traditional sense-datum and phenomenalist theories of the given as implicitly and illicitly importing conceptual or linguistic interpretation into what should be, on Lewis’s own view, a strictly non-conceptual “thin” given, though one that is unmistakably and “intrinsically recognizable” as having the “repeatable” sensuous content such qualia “immediately” and “momentarily” present (to repeat Lewis’s own various characterizations cited earlier).

Given these construals by Lewis of the theories he rejects, Sandra Rosenthal is certainly right to read Lewis as opposing rather than being “part of a tradition that uses the term [‘the given’] to indicate individual, discrete units of sense-data as the building blocks of experience, building blocks that are usually held to be exhausted in language” (2007, 2). The implicit, but in my view, mistaken suggestion is that Sellars’s critique of the given is also primarily or solely targeting that tradition as well, and so construed. Furthermore, Lewis sees the past and recent positions of classical phenomenalism, representative realism, and (Roy Wood Sellars’s) critical realism as all sharing the mistaken “prejudice of the copy theory that knowledge of objects means qualitative coincidence of the idea and the real” (Lewis 1929, 162, italics added); that is, “that the sense-quale we apprehend should be identically present in the object perceived and in the mind when we perceive it,” whether this identity be conceived as “numerical” or “identity in quality” (Lewis 1929,155-156, italics added). Lewis in this way contends that “Kant, and phenomenalism in general” were thus mistakenly led to conclude “the impossibility of knowing the real as it is in itself” (Lewis 1929, 154), and as Lewis reads him, “Kant’s answer is that the object in experience must itself be subjective or phenomenal” (Lewis 1929, 214, italics added). Here again “phenomenalism,” as Lewis understands and rejects it, mistakenly runs together our knowledge of objects with the merely immediate, non-conceptual “presentations” of “fragmentary” but “repeatable” sensory qualia-contents in which the sensuous, unalterable given genuinely consists for Lewis. All of these are correct characterizations of Lewis’s view, which nonetheless, I will contend, still remains a proper target of Sellars’ critique of the given, despite the recent widespread consensus to the contrary.

An additional “fallacy committed by phenomenalism,” as Lewis understands that position, is to start out from the “relativity of knowledge to the mind” - an unproblematic relativity, for Lewis, that he argues powerfully must in fact follow from any realist conception of our knowledge of mind-independent empirical objects, including his own (see Lewis 1929, Ch. VI; Westphal 2017) - and then to argue (fallaciously) on that basis for the alleged “impossibility of knowing the independent real” (Lewis 1929, 173). Here, too, phenomenalism, for Lewis, is the incoherent attempt to treat the conceptually uninterpreted “immediate” sensory contents of experience as if they themselves constituted the “phenomenal object” known in experience, thus inevitably entailing various subjectivist failures - amongst which he includes Kant’s alleged “phenomenalism” -to know the independently real empirical object.¹⁰

So, for all of the above reasons, we can happily agree to set aside foun-dationalism, phenomenalism, knowledge by acquaintance, and sensedatum theories in the senses in which Lewis interprets and rejects these positions. Let us now return to consider Lewis’s own carefully abstracted non-conceptual and thus (considered in itself, arguably) non-epistemic given element in our knowledge, as we saw it briefly characterized by Lewis in Section 1 earlier.