In a message dated 4/5/2016 1:55:24 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, McEvoy
quotes from Xenophanes:
McEvoy:
"Fragments quoted by Popper provide an earlier formulation of what is a
linchpin of the non-justificationist approach: Xenophanes points out that as
for truth no human has known it (in a justified sense), and even if we were
to utter a truth (correctly) we would never know it (in a justified sense)."
i. As for truth, no human has known it; I know it.
ii. I know that, as for truth, no human has known it -- and that's a truth.
The point about distinguishing correctness versus justification may relate
to 'discovery' versus 'justification', as used in the more complex
collocations, 'context of discovery'/'context of justification'. But of course
they
are not overlapping distinctions, and I take McEvoy's point.
For the record, it was Sellars who spoke of the 'myth' of the given. If
Quine later spoke of the 'dogmas' of empiricism, one wonders if they (Sellars
and Quine) are inviting the wrong implicatures.
Grice thought that if Quine invited any wrong implicature, it was
cancellable, so he (Grice) could propose, with a straight face, something "in
defense of a dogma" -- "try to run to underrally the underdogma".
Similarly, Sellars was perhaps more honest, because he took the idea of
'myth' not from the church, but from who knows where (Cassirer). For Sellars,
to say that x is a myth is not to say that x is something negative.
Similarly, Grice would call some of his 'evolutionary' approaches to meaning,
communication, and language, as involving some 'mythology'.
It may be claimed that Sellars' most famous work is the lengthy and
difficult essay, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind".
In it, Sellars criticises the view that knowledge of what we perceive can
be independent of the conceptual processes which result in perception.
He named this "The myth of the given," attributing it to phenomenology and
sense-data theories of knowledge.
-- i.e. Royce and Company, as we saw -- Royce being the first who coined
that hybrid, 'sense datum' -- obviously having in mind the Continental views
on 'datum' and the 'given'.
Sellars's essay targets several theories at once, especially C. I. Lewis'
Kantian pragmatism and Rudolf Carnap's positivism.
Sellars (not to be confused with Peter Sellers) draws out "The Myth of
Jones," to defend the possibility of a strict behaviorist worldview.
Why Sellers, oops, Sellars, chose Nathan Jones is a bit of a myth.
Sellers's (oops, Sellars)'s parable explains how thoughts, intelligent
action, and even subjective inner experience can be attributed to people within
a scientific model.
Sellars used a fictional tribe, "The Ryleans," since he wanted to address
Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind.
"And if I can ridiculise him, I will." By 'him' meaning the Waynflete
Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, to whom H. P. Grice describes the
'revolution' in philosophy of which he, in a later generation, partake.
(Ryle was never allowed to attend Austin's Saturday morning seminars,
because nobody could be older than Austin, the leader -- and Ryle was -- "Nor
that I EVER thought of _attending_ one!").
Sellars's idea of "myth," heavily influenced by Ernst Cassirer, is, as I
say, not necessarily negative (and it's best to get introduced to "The Myth
of the Given" through Sellars's "The Myth of Jones").
Sellars saw the myth of the given (where both 'given' and 'myth' are used
metaphorically -- cfr. "YOU are the CREAM in my COFFEE, metaphorically
speaking" -- example of conversational implicature disimplicated) as something
that can be useful or otherwise, rather than true or false.
Thus, the myth of the given, metaphorically, goes slightly beyond these
distinctions we are making between justification/correction and
justification/discovery.
But granted, Sellars was, as American, a pragmatist at heart.
Sellars aimed to unite the conceptual behaviour of the "space of reasons"
with the concept of a subjective sense experience.
This was one of his most central goals, which his later work described as
Kantian.
When Grice read that, he said, "Kantian? This is Kantotelian!"
Cheers,
Speranza
References:
Bennett, J. "In the tradition of Kantotle", The Times Literary Supplement.
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