How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable (...) conception of experience which allows it to do the job. The original problem is to show that thought is rationally constrained by external reality. If sensory experience is to provide the solution--in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges--it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be `receptive'--i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief--it must already be `conceptual,' in other words. In arguing against the idea that anything could serve both roles, Wilfred Sellars termed this conception of experience "the Myth of the Given.". (shrink)

In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind Sellars introduces the image of the space of reasons, and delineates a non-traditional empiricism, uncontaminated by the Myth of the Given. Brandom takes Sellars’s drift to be against empiricism as such, against the very idea that something deserving to be called “experience” could be relevant to the acquisition of empirical knowledge in any way except merely causally. In this paper I attack Brandom’s idea that we anyway need a concession to externalism for non-inferential (...) knowledge and suggest that in the space of reasons Sellars’s, the experience play a more than merely causal role in a fully internalist epistemology of observation. (shrink)