Sellars and Lewis on the Given and Empirical Knowledge

This chapter examines whether Lewis’s account of “the given” is vulnerable to criticisms in terms of what Wilfrid Sellars called “the Myth of the Given.” It is argued that the Myth of the Given involves several distinct aspects, but that Lewis’s given is not “mythic” according to any of them. Lewis explicitly argues that the given only has an epistemological function insofar as it is interpreted. For that reason, it is epistemically efficacious for a conceptual framework only insofar as it is not epistemically independent of that framework. Hence Lewis’s given is not vulnerable to Sellarsian criticism