Wilfrid Sellars is best known for his influential critique of the “myth of the given,” a phrase that has since become central in debates about perception, knowledge, and the role of concepts in experience. Yet the meaning of this phrase is far from self-evident. It has given rise to a wide range of interpretations—some conflicting, many elaborate. I propose that this difficulty arises, in part, because Sellars conflates two philosophical problems that should be kept distinct. These are:
- The structure of justification in knowledge, and
- The conceptual character of human experience.
By running these together under the heading of “the given,” Sellars’s argument risks obscuring important distinctions. This has led to misreadings, or at least ambiguities, in how the myth is understood and what, exactly, it targets.
I. Foundations of Knowledge: Classical vs. Empirical Foundationalism
The first issue concerns epistemic justification—how knowledge is structured and whether there must be foundational beliefs upon which other beliefs rest. Historically, attempts to answer this question have taken two main forms:
(a) Classical foundationalism seeks a base of indubitable beliefs or self-evident truths from which other beliefs can be derived. These foundational beliefs are taken to justify higher-level knowledge claims through inference or deduction. This model goes back to Descartes and found expression in various rationalist and empiricist frameworks.
Sellars’s critique is clearly aimed at this tradition. He argues that even the most basic perceptual judgments—such as “this is red”—are conceptually structured and cannot be treated as non-inferential foundations immune to criticism. Thus, he exposes as mythical the idea that there is a layer of knowledge that is both independent of conceptual activity and capable of justifying all that comes after.
(b) Empirical foundationalism, by contrast, is often associated with the logical empiricists of the early 20th century. Thinkers like Carnap and Ayer held that empirical knowledge rests on observation sentences or protocol statements. These are supposed to be the “terminating points” of inquiry—statements directly given in experience, verifiable through sensory observation, and serving as the base of empirical science.
Crucially, Sellars says very little about this form of foundationalism. He does not directly engage with the empiricist doctrine that knowledge is grounded in sense-data or observation reports considered meaningful because they correspond to given experiences. This silence is striking because logical empiricists, too, invoked “the given”—but in a very different sense than classical foundationalists did.
Sellars’s polemic, then, seems directed primarily against the idea of a given that serves as a justification for knowledge (classical foundationalism), but not against the idea of a given that serves as a grounding for meaning or empirical content (logical empiricism). This raises the question: is Sellars’s critique really as comprehensive as it’s often taken to be? If not, then interpretations that see him as rejecting all forms of givenness may be overstating the case.
II. The Conceptual Nature of Experience: A Kantian Insight
The second issue at stake in Sellars’s argument concerns not justification, but cognition—specifically, the relationship between perception and conceptual capacities.
Here, Sellars revives and extends a Kantian insight: that “intuitions without concepts are blind, and concepts without intuitions are empty.” Kant’s claim was that experience is not a passive reception of sense-data; rather, it requires the active involvement of the understanding, which organizes sensory input through concepts. Perception is not merely the reception of stimuli but the exercise of conceptual capacities.
Sellars’s version of this insight can be found in his insistence that even the most immediate perceptual awareness is shaped by conceptual norms. That is, to see something as red is already to be operating within a conceptual framework—one that includes the concept of color, of red, and of objecthood. There is no pure, pre-conceptual given that serves as a basis for cognition or judgment. What appears “given” is already informed by the subject’s participation in a linguistic and normative space of reasons.
This point is clearest in his famous essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, where he critiques the idea that we can build empirical knowledge on non-inferential “givens” that function outside of the conceptual space. He argues that this view fails to recognize that even reports of experience—such as “this is red”—are expressions within a conceptual-linguistic community and thus already shaped by learning, normativity, and interpretation.
In short, Sellars denies the possibility of epistemic immediacy—the idea that we can access raw data of experience that are both foundational and non-conceptual. The supposed “given” in experience is a myth because it pretends to occupy a space outside of the normative structure of conceptual thought.
III. Two Problems, One Critique?
Given the above, it is worth asking: are these two problems—the problem of epistemic justification and the problem of conceptual structure—the same? Or does Sellars collapse them into a single critique under the phrase “the myth of the given”?
On the one hand, there are good reasons to treat these problems as distinct. A belief may be justified in one way (say, by its coherence with others) and formed in another (say, through perception shaped by conceptual capacities). Justification and genesis are not the same. On the other hand, Sellars appears to treat any appeal to a “given” as suspect—whether it is used to ground knowledge claims or to describe the source of empirical content.
This is why I suggest that Sellars’s critique may suffer from a misplaced focus. In targeting classical foundationalism, he rightly undermines the idea of non-inferential justification. But by extending this critique to all appeals to the “given,” he risks overlooking the different ways “givenness” functions in other traditions, such as logical empiricism. At the same time, his Kantian emphasis on the conceptual structure of experience is independently important—and perhaps should have been treated separately from the epistemological critique.
Conclusion
The enduring influence of Sellars’s critique of the myth of the given is undeniable. It marked a turning point in 20th-century philosophy, shifting focus from atomistic models of knowledge toward a more holistic, inferential, and conceptually-laden view of mind and meaning. Yet, for all its power, the critique may suffer from an internal ambiguity. By conflating issues of justification with issues of cognition, and by failing to clearly distinguish among the different senses in which the “given” has been invoked, Sellars’s polemic risks misfiring—dismissing positions it does not directly engage, and collapsing distinct philosophical questions into a single rhetorical target.
A more careful disentangling of these issues would allow us to appreciate the depth of Sellars’s insight, while also identifying its limits. Perhaps the real lesson is not that the given is a myth, full stop—but that any appeal to the given must be carefully situated within a broader account of how we think, know, and experience the world.