by NATE SHEFF
Most of us think that knowledge starts with experience. You take yourself to know that you’re reading this article right now, and how do you know that? For starters, you might cite your visual experiences of looking at a screen, colourful experiences. And how do you get those? Well, sensory experiences come from our sensory organs and nervous system. From there, the mind might have to do some interpretative work to make sense of the sensory experiences, turning the lines and loops before you into letters, words and sentences. But you start from a kind of cognitive freebie: what’s ‘given’ to you in experience.
It’s a tantalising idea, and maybe it’s close to the truth. But if we’re not careful, we might run afoul of what the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89) called ‘the Myth of the Given’. While many philosophers consider Sellars’s attack on the Myth to be his legacy, it’s one of his least-understood ideas. That’s too bad, because once we set aside ‘epistemological shoptalk’ (one of my favourite Sellarsisms), the basic idea is simple – and far-reaching.
Let’s start with something easy. You probably know how to read tree rings, the circles-within-circles that appear in the cross-sections of trees. Tree rings form as a tree grows, making new layers of bark. Counting the rings helps you determine the tree’s age, since each ring correlates with one year of growth. Now imagine we’re looking at a recently felled oak, and we count 75 rings. It would be innocent for me to say to you: ‘Those 75 rings mean the tree was 75 years old.’ More metaphorically, the rings ‘tell us about’ the tree’s age.
In a stricter sense, though, the tree rings don’t really ‘say’ anything. The patterns in the tree can give useful information to anyone who can read them, but the rings themselves aren’t actually ‘about’ anything. Remember, a ring forms as a side-effect of trees doing what trees do. They don’t express information in the way that trails, maps or sentences do.
But why not? In short, sentences can go wrong. They can be paradoxical (‘This sentence is not true’), or they can be false (‘Smoking cigarettes is safe’). Thought and speech can be correct or mistaken. While philosophers disagree about what makes things such as assertions and thoughts correct or mistaken, there’s widespread agreement that, when we think and speak, what we think and what we say can be judged according to particular standards, involving something like truth or knowledge.
I could say that the anomalous tree core ‘misleads’ – if you go only by its core, you’d be wrong about its age. But that mistake is on you, not the tree
Let’s go back to our trees. Imagine we have two trees, and we know that they were planted in the same year. Instead of cutting them down, we take a core from each. Counting the rings, we discover something weird: 20 years ago, one of the trees stopped growing, but resumed the next year, giving it one less ring than its neighbour. Going by their rings, you’d think the trees were different ages, but they’re not. That’s anomalous, even miraculous. Now the philosophical question: is the anomalous tree core misleading? Is there any sense in which the tree flubbed that year, and its rings now incorrectly state its age? Did the tree make a mistake?
I don’t think so. The missing ring isn’t like a false sentence. There’s an innocent way that I could say the anomalous tree core ‘misleads’ – if you go only by its core, you’d be wrong about its age. It ‘misleads’ you in that way. But that mistake is on you, not the tree. The tree didn’t do anything wrong, since the rings aren’t really ‘about’ age.
Right now, this might seem neat but a little trivial. Sentences and thoughts are about things, but tree rings aren’t. The former have content, but not the latter. Stated that way, it’s not so exciting, but we can leverage this distinction to see something surprising about sensory experience. According to Sellars, many philosophers have thought that sensations are meaningful in both ways. Sensory experiences themselves are meaningful like tree rings and meaningful like a sentence. And that, for Sellars, is a serious confusion.
To see why, we should turn to sensations and experience. Humans have a lot of sensory modalities, and the world gets into our minds by impinging on our sense organs. Open your eyes, and different wavelengths of light flood in. Sniff at the air, and some of the molecules hanging around you might meet up with an olfactory sensor in your nose. These are the beginnings of experience. So far, so good.
Empiricists think that human knowledge not only begins in experience, it’s exhausted by it.
Psyche for more