work is part of a reaction against the atomistic models of knowledge found for example in Hume (in the eighteenth century) and in the logical positivists (earlier in the twentieth),2 in favour of a more ‘holistic’ or systematic conception (compare Hegel, extract 9 above). It also follows the lead of Wittgenstein in rejecting first-personal accounts of the basis of knowledge, and acknowledging instead its fundamentally social or inter-personal nature.3 But if the ‘myth of the given’ is abandoned, are we not left with knowledge as a mere network of interlinked statements, each depending on some other statement, without any direct ‘point of contact’ with an actual mind-independent reality? One might fear this would leave us with the picture referred to at the close of the extract, of ‘a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?).’ Sellars ends by suggesting, plausibly, that neither of these two models is satisfactory (the ‘myth of the given’, on the one hand, and the ‘serpent’ of mere systematic coherence on the other); but exactly how to construct a more adequate model for the human epistemic enterprise is still a matter of fierce philosophical debate.
One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is the idea that there is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matter of fact such that (a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case, but presupposes no other knowledge either of particular matter of fact, or of general truths; and (b) such that the noninferential knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims – particular and general – about the world. It is important to note that I characterized the knowledge of fact belonging to this stratum as not only noninferential, but as presupposing no knowledge of other matter of fact, whether particular or general. It might be thought that this is a redundancy, that knowledge (not belief or conviction, but knowledge) which logically presupposes knowledge of other facts must be inferential. This, however, as I hope to show, is itself an episode in the Myth.
Now, the idea of such a privileged stratum of fact is a familiar one, though not without its difficulties. Knowledge pertaining to this level is noninferential, yet it is, after all, knowledge. It is ultimate, yet it has authority. The attempt to make a consistent picture of these two requirements has traditionally taken the following form:
Statements pertaining to this level, in order to ‘express knowledge’ must not only be made, but, so to speak, must be worthy of being made, credible, that is, in the sense of worthy of credence. Furthermore, and this is a crucial point, they must be made in a way which involves this credibility. For where there is no connection between the making of a statement and its authority, the assertion may express conviction, but it can scarcely be said to express knowledge.
The authority – the credibility – of statements pertaining to this level cannot exhaustively consist in the fact that they are supported by other statements, for in that case all knowledge pertaining to this level would have to be inferential, which not only contradicts the hypothesis, but flies in the face of good sense. The conclusion seems inevitable that if some statements pertaining to this level are to express noninferential knowledge, they must have a credibility which is not a matter of being supported by other statements. Now there does seem to be a class of statements which fill at least part of this bill, namely such statements as would be said to report observations, thus, ‘This is red.’ These statements, candidly made, have authority. Yet they are not expressions of inference. How, then, is this authority to be understood?
Clearly, the argument continues, it springs from the fact that they are made in just the circumstances in which they are made, as is indicated by the fact that they characteristically, though not necessarily or without exception, involve those so-called token-reflexive expressions which, in addition to the tenses of verbs, serve to connect the circumstances in which a statement is made with its sense …
It would appear, then, that there are two ways in which a sentence token can have credibility: (1) The authority may accrue to it, so to speak, from above, that is, as being a token [or instance] of a sentence type all the tokens of which, in a certain use, have credibility, e.g. ‘2 + 2 = 4.’ In this case, let us say that token credibility is inherited from type authority. (2) The credibility may accrue to it from the fact that it came to exist in a certain way in a certain set of circumstances, e.g. ‘This is red.’ Here token credibility is not derived from type credibility.
Now the credibility of some sentence types appears to be intrinsic – at least in the limited sense that it is not derived from other sentences, type or token. This is, or seems to be, the case with certain sentences used to make analytic statements. The credibility of some sentence types accrues to them by virtue of their logical relations to other sentence types, thus by virtue of the fact that they are logical consequences of more basic sentences. It would seem obvious, however, that the credibility of empirical sentence types cannot be traced without remainder to the credibility of other sentence types. And since no empirical sentence type appears to have intrinsic credibility, this means that credibility must accrue to some empirical sentence types by virtue of their logical relations to certain sentence tokens, and, indeed, to sentence tokens the authority of which is not derived, in its turn, from the authority of sentence types.
The picture we get is that of their being two ultimate modes of credibility: (1) The intrinsic credibility of analytic sentences, which accrues to tokens as being tokens of such a type; (2) the credibility of such tokens as ‘express observations’, a credibility which flows from tokens to types.
Let us explore this picture, which is common to all traditional empiricisms, a bit further. How is the authority of such sentence tokens as ‘express observational knowledge’ to be understood? It has been tempting to suppose that in spite of the obvious differences which exist between ‘observation reports’ and ‘analytic statements’, there is an essential similarity between the ways in which they come by their authority. Thus, it has been claimed, not without plausibility, that whereas ordinary empirical statements can be correctly made without being true, observation reports resemble analytic statements in that being correctly made is a sufficient as well as necessary condition of their truth. And it has been inferred from this – somewhat hastily, I believe – that ‘correctly making’ the report ‘This is green’ is a matter of ‘following the rules for the use of “this”, “is” and “green”’. Three comments are immediately necessary:
(1) First a brief remark about the term ‘report’. In ordinary usage a report is a report made by someone to someone. To make a report is to do something. In the literature of epistemology, however, the word ‘report’ or ‘Konstatierung’4 has acquired a technical use in which a sentence token can play a reporting role (a) without being an overt verbal performance, and (b) without having the character of being ‘by someone to someone’ – even oneself. There is, of course, such a thing as ‘talking to oneself’… but, as I shall be emphasizing in the closing stages of my argument, it is important not to suppose that all ‘covert’ verbal episodes are of this kind.
(2) My second comment is that while we shall not assume that because ‘reports’ in the ordinary sense are actions, ‘reports’ in the sense of Konstatierungen are also actions, the line of thought we are considering treats them as such. In other words, it interprets the correctness of Konstatierungen as analogous to the rightness of actions. Let me emphasize, however, that not all ought is ought to do, nor all correctness the correctness of actions.
(3) My third comment is that if the expression ‘following a rule’ is taken seriously, and is not weakened beyond all recognition into the bare notion of exhibiting a uniformity – in which case the lightning–thunder sequence would ‘follow a rule’
