vision-joined/lit-reocr-01/b6abbfcf95255fa2e845b1f8fc25142e9b43870b5decd668bbb658fedd7084e7.md

WILFRID
SELLAR
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
With an Introduction by RICHARD RORTY
and a Study Guide ly ROBERT BRANDOM
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
1997

Introduction and Study Guide © 1997 by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Empiricism and the Philosopby of Mind was originally published in Minnesota
Studies in the Philosopby of Science, vol. I., ed. Herbert Feigl and Michael
Scriven (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sellars, Wilfrid.
Empiricism and the philosophy of mind / Wilfrid Sellars; with an
introduction by Richard Rorty, and a study guide by Robert Brandom.
p. cm.
Taken from Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, v. 1,
The Foundations of science and the concepts of psychology and
psychoanalysis.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-674-25154-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-674-25155-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Empiricism - Controversial literature.
3. Analysis (Philosophy). 4. Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the
philosophy of mind. I. Rorty, Richard. II. Brandom, Robert.
II. Title.
BD418.3.S45
1997
128.2- .2-dc21
96-51811

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111
IV
VI
VII
VIlI
1X
XI
X 1I
XIII
X IV
X V
XVI
CONTENTS
Introduction by Richard Rorty
An Ambiguity in Sense-Datum Theories
Another Language?
The Logic of 'Looks'
Explaining Looks
Impressions and Ideas: A Logical Point
Impressions and Ideas: A Historical Point
The Logic of 'Means'
Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?
Science and Ordinary Usage
Private Episodes: The Problem
Thoughts: The Classical View
Our Rylean Ancestors
Theories and Models
Methodological versus Philosophical Behaviorism
The Logic of Private Episodes: Thoughts
The Logic of Private Episodes: Impressions
References
Study Guide by Robert Brandom
25
32
53
57
68
79
85
88
90
24
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102
107
117
119

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

RORTY
INTRODUCTION
THE KIND OF PHILOSOPHY We now call "ana-
lytic" started out as a form of empiricism. It devel-
oped out of the work of Bertrand Russell, Rudolf
Carnap, and others-the work summarized and put
in canonical, easily teachable, form by A. J. Ayer
in his Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). In that book,
Ayer put forward the ideas which make up what we
now call "logical positivism" or "logical empiricism" -
ideas which restated the foundationalist epistemol-
ogy of British empiricism in linguistic, as opposed to
psychological, terms. These ideas are very different
from those which underlie what is sometimes called
"post-positivistic" analytic philosophy-a brand of
philosophy which is sometimes said to be "beyond"
empiricism and rationalism.
The shift from the earlier to the later form of ana-
lytic philosophy, a shift which began around 1950 and
was complete by around 1970, was a result of many
complexly interacting forces, the pattern of which
is hard to trace. Nevertheless, any historian of this
shift would do well to focus on three seminal works:
Willard van Orman Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiri-

2
INTRODUCTION
cism" (1951), Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigation
(1954), and Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind" (1956).
Of these three, Sellars's long, complicated, and very rich
essay is the least known and discussed. Historians of re-
cent Anglo-American philosophy have emphasized the im-
portance of Quine's essay in raising doubts about the notion
of "analytic truth" and thus about the Carnapian-Russellian
notion that philosophy should be "the logical analysis of
language." They have also emphasized the importance of the
work of the later Wittgenstein -especially what Strawson
called his "hostility to immediacy," his distrust of traditional
empiricist explanations of the acquisition of knowledge. They
have not, for the most part, given much weight to Sellars's
role in bringing about the collapse of sense-data empiricism.
This is a pity, since Sellars's attack on "the Myth of the
Given" was, in America (though not in Britain), very influen-
tial in persuading philosophers that there was something
deeply wrong with the sort of phenomenalism Ayer had
advocated.'
Wilfrid Sellars was born in 1912 and died in 1989. He
taught philosophy at Minnesota, Yale, and finally at Pitts-
burgh. He published a great many essays, as well as one
monograph, Science and Metaphysiar (his Locke Lectures at
Oxford in 1967).2 His work was often criticized for its
1. Austin's criticism of Ayer in his posthumous Sense and Sensibilin played the
role in Britain which Sellars's article played in America. Though they greatly
admired Austin, American philosophers had already pretty much given up on
sense-data by the time Sense and Sensibilla appeared.
2. Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 1967). The most important col-
lections of Sellars's essays are his Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge,
1963) — which contains "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"-and his Easay!
in Philrophy and Its History (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974). Commentary on Sellars's work
may be found in C. F. Delaney et al., The Syroptic Vision: Faways on the Philosophy of

INTRODUCTION
3
obscurity. This obscurity was partially a result of Sellars's
idiosyncratic style, but some of it was in the eye of the
beholder. For Sellars was unusual among prominent Ameri-
can philosophers of the post-World War Il period, and quite
different from Quine and Wittgenstein, in having a wide
and deep acquaintance with the history of philosophy.3 This
knowledge of previous philosophers kept intruding into his
work (as in the two rather cryptic chapters on Kant which
open Science and Metaphysic), and helped to make his writings
seem difficult for analytic philosophers whose education had
been less historically oriented than Sellars's. Sellars believed
that "philosophy without the history of philosophy is, if not
blind, at least dumb," but this view seemed merely perverse
to much of his audience.
OF ALL SELLARS'S WRITINGS, "Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind" is the most widely read and the most accessible.
Indeed, this essay is all that most analytic philosophers know
of Sellars. But it is almost enough, since it is the epitome of
an entire philosophical system. It covers most of the aspects
of Sellars s overall project-the project he described as an
attempt to usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and
into its Kantian stage.
The fundamental thought which runs through this essay
is Kant's: "intuitions without concepts are blind." Having
Wilfrid Sellars (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1977), and in Hector-
Neri Casteneda, ed., Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Studies in Honor of Wilfrid Sellars
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975).
3. For Quine's dismissive attitude toward the history of philosophy, see his
robioraphy is sport y ty life (Cambrid and modern piss .5, art
or Wittgensteins spotty readir
Hallett, S.J., A Companion to Wittgenatein's Philosophical Investigations' (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977), pp. 759-775.

4
INTRODUCTION
a sense-impression is, by itself, an example neither of knowl-
edge nor of conscious experience. Sellars, like the later
Wittgenstein but unlike Kant, identified the possession of a
concept with the mastery of the use of a word. So for him,
mastery of a language is prerequisite of conscious experience.
As he says in sect. 29: "
all awareness of sorta, resemblances,
facta, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities -indeed,
all awareness even of particulars — is a linguistic affair." This
doctrine, which he called "psychological nominalism," entails
that Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were wrong in thinking that
we are "aware of certain determinate sorts ... simply by
virtue of having sensations and images" (sect. 28).
Sellars's argument for psychological nominalism is based
on a claim which spells out the moral of many of the apho-
risms of Philosophical Investigations: "The essential point is that
in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we
are not giving an empirical description of that episode or
state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of
justifying and being able to justify what one says" (sect. 36).
In other words, knowledge is inseparable from a social prac-
tice - the practice of justifying ones assertions to ones fel-
low-humans. It is not presupposed by this practice, but
comes into being along with it.
So we cannot do what some logical positivists hoped to
do: analyze epistemic facts without remainder "into non-
epistemic facts, whether phenomenal or behavioral, public or
private, with no matter how lavish a sprinkling of subjunc-
tives and hypotheticals" (sect. 5).4 In particular, we can-
4. This reterence to various attempted reductive analyses presupposes, as do
many other passages in the essay, some familiarity with the literature of analytic
philosophy in the 1940s and early 1950s —e.g., with Ayer's defenses of phenomenal-

INTRODUCTION
5
not perform such an analysis by discovering the "foundation"
of empirical knowledge in the objects of "direct acquain-
tance," objects which are "immediately before the mind."
We cannot privilege reports that, for example, there is some-
thing red in the neighborhood as "reports of the immedi-
ately given." For such reports are no less mediated by lan-
guage, and thus by social practice, than reports that there
are cows or electrons in the neighborhood. The whole idea
of "foundations" of knowledge, basic to both empiricism and
rationalism, disappears once we become psychological nomi-
nalists.
Whereas Quine's "Two Dogmas" had helped destroy the
rationalist form of foundationalism by attacking the distinc-
tion between analytic and synthetic truths, "Empiricism and
the Philosophy of Mind" helped destroy the empiricist form
of foundationalism by attacking the distinction between what
is "given to the mind" and what is "added by the mind."
Sellars's attack on the Myth of the Given was a decisive move
in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist
motives of the logical empiricists. It raised doubts about the
very idea of "epistemology,"
about the reality of the prob-
lems which philosophers had discussed under that heading.
One of the most quoted sentences in the essay occurs in sect.
38: "
... empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated exten-
ism, Ryle's criticisms of Descartes, and so on. Certain sections of Sellars's essay-
e.g., sections 8-9 and 21-23—may seem pointless excursus to those who lack such
familiarity. But the overall argument of the essay is intelligible without reference to
the particular figures whom Sellars discusses.
5. Sellars's work along these lines links up with that of the American pragma-
tists —notably Peirce's polemics against givenness in his essay "Consequences of
Four Incapacities" (1868) and Dewey's in "An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms"
(1935). For a good account of the development of American pragmatism-an
account from which Sellars is largely absent, but into which he fits nicely-see

6
INTRODUCTION
sion, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but
because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any
claim in jeopardy, though not all at once."6 This sentence
suggests that rationality is a matter not of obedience to
standards (which epistemologists might hope to codify), but
rather of give-and-take participation in
a cooperative social
project.
AN ELABORATION AND DEFENSE of the presuppositions and
implications of psychological nominalism, however, is not all
there is to "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." Sec-
tions 48-63 contain Sellars's "Myth of Jones" — a story which
explains why we can be naturalists without being behavior-
ists, why we can accept Wittgenstein's doubts about what
Sellars calls "self-authenticating non-verbal episodes" with-
out sharing Ryle's doubts about the existence of such mental
entities as thoughts and sense-impressions.
At the time at which Sellars was writing, this was a vexed
issue. For the appearance of Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949)
shortly before that of the Philosophical Investigations (1954) had
made Wittgensteinian opposition to the idea of "a private
language," and to that of "entities capable of being known
by only one person,"
seem inseparable from Ryles polemic
against "the ghost in the machine." Sellars's account of inner
episodes as having originally been postulated, rather than
John P. Murphy, Pragmatium: From Peirce to Davideon (Boulder, Colo: Westview
Press, 1990).
philosopher offereda brief a tount of the roles do wine of ls li and lading
in sect. 2 of Chapter IV of my Philoropby and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
abandon the idea that we needed a

INTRODUCTION
7
observed, entities, together with his account of how speakers
might then come to make introspective reports (sect. 59) of
such episodes, made clear how one could be Wittgensteinian
without being Rylean. Sellars showed how one could give a
non-reductive account of "mental event" while nevertheless
eschewing, with Wittgenstein, the picture of the eye of the
mind witnessing these events in a sort of immaterial inner
theater.
Sellars's treatment of the distinction between mind and
body has been followed up by many philosophers of mind in
subsequent decades. He may have been the first philosopher
to insist that we see "mind" as a sort of hypostatization of
language. He argued that the intentionality of beliefs is a
reflection of the intentionality of sentences, rather than con-
versely? This reversal makes it possible to understand mind
as gradually entering the universe by and through the grad-
ual development of language, as part of a naturalistically
explicable evolutionary process, rather than seeing language
as the outward manifestation of something inward and mys-
terious which humans have and animals lack. As Sellars sees
it, if you can explain how the social practices we call "using
language" came into existence, you have already explained
Williams-in his Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realim and the Basis of Scepticism
(Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) — has developed this theme much
more thoroughly and carefully. He argues that it is the unfortunate idea that there
is a natural kind called "human knowledge" which gives rise to both foundationalism
and Cartesian skepticism. Williams's earlier book-Groundleds Belief (Blackwell,
1977) —an anti-foundationalist treatise which laid the foundations for Unnatural
Doubte, was heavily influenced by Sellars.
7. This insistence is most explicit in Sellars's very instructive debate with
Roderick Chisholm, reprinted as "Intentionality and the Mental" in Minnesta Studies
in the Philosoply of Science, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958).

8
INTRODUCTION
all that needs to be explained about the relation between
mind and world.®
A RECENT BOok by Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit,'
offers the first systematic and comprehensive attempt to
follow up on Sellars's thought.'° More specifically, it offers a
"semantic explanatory strategy which takes inference as its
basic concept,"
as opposed to the alternative strategy "domi-
nant since the Enlightenment, which takes representation as
its basic concept."' Brandom's work can usefully be seen as
an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to
8. This is only true, however, if, like Daniel Dennett and unlike Thomas Nagel,
one does not think of "what it is like to see something red" as referring to something
quite different than does "having the disposition to call something red." To agree
that Sellars dissolved the mind-body problem, one has to deny the existence of
qualia. It is not clear that Sellars would be on Dennett's side of this issue, however,
since he was tempted to think that what he called "the scientific image of man"
would be incomplete until we discover special new microstructural properties
capable of accounting for "the ultimate homogeneity" of phenomenological presen-
tations. Be that as it may, Dennett has made clear his own indebtedness to Sellars.
See his The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Books, 1986). At p. 341
Dennett gives Sellars credit for originating functionalism, the school of thought in
contemporary philosophy of mind to which Dennett himself belongs. In a footnote
on that page, Dennett remarks that "Sellars's influence has been ubiquitous but
almost subliminal," and at p. 349 he says, "Almost no one cites Sellars, while
reinventing his wheels with gratifying regularity." This latter remark seems to me
an accurate account of Sellars's role in recent analytic philosophy.
9. Making It Explicit: Reaming, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
ellarss attempt to revive the "picturing
which Wittgenstein formulated in the Tractatus and later repudiated, as well as his
speculations about the need for science to develop microphysical concepts adequate
to explain the phenomenology of perception. In this respect, Brandom stands to
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" as Davidson (who slufts off what he calls
Quine's "adventitious philosophical puritanism") stands to "Two Dogmas." Both
men cultivate their respective teacher's central insight by stripping it of accidental
accretions.
11. Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. xvi.

INTRODUCTION
9
its Hegelian stage - an attempt foreshadowed in Sellars's wry
description of "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" as
"incipient Meditatians Hegeliènnes"12 (sect. 20) and his refer-
ence to Hegel as "that great foe of "immediacy'" (sect. 1).
From Hegel's point of view, taking Kant's point that intui-
tions without concepts are blind is the first step toward
abandoning a bad philosophical habit which the British em-
piricists took over from Descartes-the habit of asking
whether mind ever succeeds in making unmediated contact
with world, and remaining skeptical about the status of
knowledge-claims until such contact can be shown to exist.
That habit is characteristic of philosophers who, in Bran-
dom's terms, are "representationalist" (like Descartes and
Locke) rather than "inferentialist" (like Leibniz, Kant, Frege,
the later Wittgenstein, and Sellars). The former take con-
cepts to be representations (or putative representations) of
reality rather than, as Kant did, rules which specify how
something is to be done. Kant's fundamental insight, Bran-
dom says, "is that judgements and actions are to be under-
stood to begin with in terms of the special way in which we
are responsible for them."13
Following out this side of Kant's thought, rather than the
side which led him to the skeptical conclusion that we could
have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves, means
emphasizing the passages in Kant which anticipate Hegel,
Marx, Dewey, and Habermas, as opposed to those which
connect Kant with his predecessors. This is the side of the
Critique of Pure Reason which links up with Kant's "Project for
12. Sellars is alluding
to Husserl's Paris lectures, published
as Meditation.
Carteviennes.
13. Brandom, Making It Earplicit, p. 8.

10
INTRODUCTION
a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent,"
rather than
with Leibniz and Hume.
I once took the liberty of asking Sellars, "If a man chooses
to bind the spirit of Hegel in the fetters of Carnap, how
shall he find readers?"4 My question was prompted by the
final section of "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,"
one of the few places where Sellars let himself go. In that
section he offers a brief, but synoptic, vision of world
history:
I have used a myth [of Jones] to kill a myth-the Myth of
the Given. But is my myth really a myth? Or does the
reader not recognize Jones as Man himself in the middle of
his journey from the grunts and groans of the cave to the
subtle and polydimensional discourse of the drawing room,
the laboratory, and the study, the language of Henry and
William James, of Einstein and of the philosophers who, in
their efforts to break out of discourse to an arché beyond
discourse, have provided the most curious dimension of all?
(sect. 63)
This question serves to link the Myth of Jones to Hegel's
account, in the Phenomenology, of the transition from sense-
perception to consciousness to self-consciousness-and,
more generally, from Nature to Spirit -and also to Darwin's
amendments to that account. Sellars's inclusion of Henry
James as well as of Einstein reminds us of his justified
suspicion of the science-worship which afflicted the early
stages of analytic philosophy. The final clause serves as a
rebuke to all those philosophers, from Plato to Ayer, who
4. I was attempting a pastiche of W. G. Pogson-Smith's
if a man choose to bind the spirir of Christ in the fetters of Eudlid, hor Shall he
find readers?" Sellars was not amused.

INTRODUCTION
11
hoped to "break out of discourse,"15 and as a reminder that
the moral of the essay as a whole is that, though there is no
such arché, we are none the worse for that.
Brandom begins, so to speak, where Sellars's essay leaves
off. His book makes good on a lot of what Sellars called
his "promissory notes," and it ends with a description of
"the complete and explicit interpretive equilibrium exhib-
ited by a community whose members adopt the explicit dis-
cursive stance toward each other" — an equilibrium Brandom
identifies with "social self-consciousness."16 Brandom offers
a vision of all language-users forming "one great Commu-
nity comprising members of all particular communities - the
Community of those who say 'we' with and to someone,
whether the members of those different particular communi-
ties recognize each other or not."'?
This sort of free and easy transition between philosophy
of language and mind on the one hand, and world-historical
vision on the other, is reminiscent not only of Mead and
Dewey but also of Gadamer and Habermas. Such transitions,
as well as Sellars's and Brandom's prope-Hegelianism, sug-
gest that the Sellars-Brandom "social practice" approach to
the traditional topics of analytic philosophy might help re-
connect that philosophical tradition with the so-called "Con-
tinental" tradition.
Philosophers in non-anglophone countries typically think
quite hard about Hegel, whereas the rather skimpy training
in the history of philosophy which most analytic philosophers
15. And perhaps also as a rebuke to Hegel's occasional suggestions that, at the
end of inquiry and of History, we too might manage to break out of it.
16. Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 643.
17. Brandom, Making It Esplicit, p. 4.

12
INTRODUCTION
receive often tempts them to skip straight from Kant to
Frege. It is agreeable to imagine a future in which the
tiresome "analytic-Continental split" is looked back upon as
an unfortunate, temporary breakdown of communication —a
future in which Sellars and Habermas, Davidson and Gada-
mer, Putnam and Derrida, Rawls and Foucault, are seen as
fellow-travelers on the same journey, fellow-citizens of what
Michael Oakeshott called a civitas pelegrina.

SELLARS
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
I. An Ambiguity in Sense-Datum Theories
1 PRESUME that no philosopher who has attacked
the philosophical idea of givenness or, to use the
Hegelian term, immediacy, has intended to deny that
there is a difference between inferring that something
is the case and, for example, seeing it to be the case.
If the term "given" referred merely to what is ob-
served as being observed, or, perhaps, to a proper
subset of the things we are said to determine by
observation, the existence of "data" would be as non-
controversial as the existence of philosophical per-
plexities. But, of course, this just isn't so. The phrase
"the given"
as a piece of professional-epistemologi-
cal — shoptalk carries a substantial theoretical commit-
ment, and one can deny that there are "data" or that
anything is, in this sense, "given" without flying in the
face of reason.
Vote: This paper was first presented as the University of Londor
Special Lectures on Philosophy for 1955-56, delivered on March 1, 8, anc
15, 1956, under the title The Myth of the Given: Three Lectures on
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind."

14
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Many things have been said to be "given": sense contents,
material objects, universals, propositions, real connections,
first principles, even givenness itself. And there is, indeed, a
certain way of construing the situations which philosophers
analyze in these terms which can be said to be the framework
of givenness. This framework has been a common feature of
most of the major systems of philosophy, including, to usę a
Kantian turn of phrase, both "dogmatic rationalism"
and
"skeptical empiricism." It has, indeed, been so pervasive that
few, if any, philosophers have been altogether free of it;
certainly not Kant, and, I would argue, not even Hegel, that
great foe of "immediacy." Often what is attacked under its
name are only specific varieties of "given." Intuited first
principles and synthetic necessary connections were the first
to come under attack. And many who today attack "the
whole idea of givenness" - and they are an increasing num-
ber -are really only attacking sense data. For they transfer
to other items, say physical objects or relations of appearing,
the characteristic features of the "given." If, however, I begin
my argument with an attack on sense datum theories, it is
only as a first step in a general critique of the entire frame-
work of givenness.
2. Sense-datum theories characteristically distinguish be-
tween an act of awareness and, for example, the color patch
which is its object. The act is usually called sending. Classical
exponents of the theory have often characterized these acts
as "phenomenologically simple" and "not further analyzable."
But other sense-datum theorists-some of them with an
equal claim to be considered "classical exponents" - have
held that sensing is analyzable. And if some philosophers
seem to have thought that if sensing is analyzable, then it
can't be an act, this has by no means been the general opinion.

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
15
There are, indeed, deeper roots for the doubt that sensing (if
there is such a thing) is an act, roots which can be traced to
one of two lines of thought tangled together in classical
sense-datum theory. For the moment, however, I shall simply
assume that however complex (or simple) the fact that x is
sensed may be, it has the form, whatever exactly it may be,
by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object
of an act.
Being a sense datum, or sensum, is a relational property
of the item that is sensed. To refer to an item which is sensed
in a way which does not entail that it is sensed, it is necessary
to use some other locution. Sensible has the disadvantage that
it implies that sensed items could exist without being sensed,
and this is a matter of controversy among sense-datum theo-
rists. Sense content is, perhaps, as neutral a term as any.
There appear to be varieties of sensing, referred to by
some as visual sending, tactual sending, etc., and by others as
directly seeing, directly bearing, etc. But it is not clear whether
these are species of sensing in any full-blooded sense, or
whether "x is visually sensed" amounts to no more than "x
is a color patch which is sensed," "x is directly heard" than
"x is a sound which is sensed" and so on. In the latter case,
being a visual sending or a direct bearing would be a relational
property of an act of sensing, just as being a sense datum is
a relational property of a sense content.
3. Now if we bear in mind that the point of the epistemo-
logical category of the given is, presumably, to explicate the
idea that empirical knowledge rests on a "foundation' of
non-inferential knowledge of matter of fact, we may well
experience a feeling of surprise on noting that according to
sense-datum theorists, it is particulars that are sensed. For
what is known, even in non-inferential knowledge, is facts

16
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
rather than particulars, items of the form something's being
thees-and-so or sometbing's standing in a certain relation to some-
thing else. It would seem, then, that the sensing of sense
contents cannot constitute knowledge, inferential or non-
inferential; and if so, we may well ask, what light does the
concept of a sense datum throw on the 'foundations of em-
pirical knowledge?' The sense-datum theorist, it would seem,
must choose between saying:
(a) It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not
knowing. The existence of sense-data does not logi-
cally imply the existence of knowledge.
or
(b) Sensing it a form of knowing. It is fact rather than
particulars which are sensed.
On alternative (a) the fact that a sense content was sensed
would be a non-epistemic fact about the sense content. Yet it
would be hasty to conclude that this alternative precludes
any logical connection between the sensing of sense contents
and the possession of non-inferential knowledge. For even if
the sensing of sense contents did not logically imply the
existence of non-inferential knowledge, the converse might
well be true. Thus, the non-inferential knowledge of particu-
lar matter of fact might logically imply the existence of sense
data (for example, seeing that a certain physical object i red might
logically imply sending a red sende content) even though the
sensing of a red sense content were not itself a cognitive fact
and did not imply the possession of non-inferential know-
edge.
On the second alternative, (b), the sensing of sense con-
tents would logically imply the existence of non-inferential
knowledge for the simple reason that it would be this know!-

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
17
edge. But, once again, it would be facts rather than particu-
lars which are sensed
4. Now it might seem that when confronted by this choice,
the sense-datum theorist seeks to have his cake and eat it.
For he characteristically insists both that sensing is a knowing
and that it is particulars which are sensed. Yet his position is
by no means as hopeless as this formulation suggests. For
the 'having' and the 'eating' can be combined without logical
nonsense provided that he uses the word know and, corre-
spondingly, the word given in two senses. He must say some-
thing like the following:
The non-inferential knowing on which our world picture rests
is the knowing that certain items, e.g. red sense contents, are
of a certain character, e.g. red. When such a fact is non-
inferentially known about a sense content, I will say that the
sense content is sensed as being, e.g., red. I will then say that
a sense content is rended (full stop) if it is sensed as being of a
certain character, e.g. red. Finally, I will say of a sense content
that it is known if it is sensed (full stop), to emphasize that
sensing is a cognitive or epistemic fact.
Notice that, given these stipulations, it is logically neces-
sary that if a sense content be sensed, it be sended de being of a
certain character, and that if it be sensed ad being of a certain
character; the fact that it is of this character be non-inferentially
known. Notice also that the being sensed of a sense content
would be knowledge only in a stipulated sense of know. To say
of a sense content—a color patch, for example-that it was
'known' would be to say that some fact about it was non-
inferentially known, e.g. that it was red. This stipulated use
of know would, however, receive aid and comfort from the
fact that there is, in ordinary usage, a sense of know in which

18
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
it is followed by a noun or descriptive phrase which refers
to a particular, thus
Do you know John?
Do you know the President?
Because these questions are equivalent to "Are you ac-
quainted with John?" and "Are you acquainted with the
President?" the phrase "knowledge by acquaintance" recom-
mends itself as a useful metaphor for this stipulated sense of
know and, like other useful metaphors, has congealed into a
technical term.
5. We have seen that the fact that a sense content is a
datum (if, indeed, there are such facts) will logically imply
that someone has non-inferential knowledge only if to say that
a sense content is given is contextually defined in terms of
non-inferential knowledge of a fact about this sense content.
If this is not clearly realized or held in mind, sense-datum
theorists may come to think of the givenness of sense con-
tents as the basi or primitive concept of the sense-datum
framework, and thus sever the logical connection between
sense data and non-inferential knowledge to which the clas-
sical form of the theory is committed. This brings us face
to face with the fact that in spite of the above considera-
tions, many if not most sense-datum theorists have thought
of the givenness of sense contents as the basic notion of
the sense-datum framework. What, then, of the logical con-
nection in the direction sensing , ende contents → having non-
inferential knowledge? Clearly it is severed by those who think
of sensing as a unique and unanalyzable act. Those, on the
other hand, who conceive of sensing as an analyzable fact,
while they have prima facie severed this connection (by
taking the sensing of sense contents to be the basic concept

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
19
of the sense-datum framework) will nevertheless, in a sense,
have maintained it, if the result they get by analyzing t it a
red denue datum turns out to be the same as the result they get
when they analyze i is non-inferentially known to be red. The
entailment which was thrown out the front door would have
sneaked in by the back.
It is interesting to note, in this connection, that those who,
in the classical period of sense-datum theories, say from
Moore's "Refutation of Idealism" until about 1938, analyzed
or sketched an analysis of sensing, did so in non-epistemic
terms. Typically it was held that for a sense content to be
sensed is for it to be an element in a certain kind of relational
array of sense contents, where the relations which constitute
the array are such relations as spatiotemporal juxtaposition
(or overlapping), constant conjunction, mnemic causation -
even real connection and belonging to a self. There is, how-
ever, one class of terms which is conspicuous by its absence,
namely cognitive terms. For these, like the 'sensing' which was
under analysis, were taken to belong to a higher level of
complexity.
Now the idea that epistemic facts can be analyzed without
remainder-even "in principle"- into non-epistemic facts,
whether phenomenal or behavioral, public or private, with
no matter how lavish a sprinkling of subjunctives and hy-
potheticals is, I believe, a radical mistake —a mistake of a
piece with the so-called "naturalistic fallacy" in ethics. I shall
not, however, press this point for the moment, though it will
be a central theme in a later stage of my argument. What I
do want to stress is that whether classical sense-datum phi-
losophers have conceived of the givenness of sense contents
as analyzable in non-epistemic terms, or as constituted by
acts which are somehow both irreducible and knowings, they

20
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
have without exception taken them to be fundamental in
another sense.
6. For they have taken givenness to be a fact which
presupposes no learning, no forming of associations, no set-
ting up of stimulus-response connections. In short, they have
tended to equate densing sende contente with being conscinus, as
a person who has been hit on the head is not conscious
whereas a new born babe, alive and kicking, is conscious.
They would admit, of course, that the ability to know that a
person, namely oneself, is now, at a certain time, feeling a pain,
is acquired and does presuppose a (complicated) process of
concept formation. But, they would insist, to suppose that
the simple ability to feel a pain or dee a color, in short, to sense
sense contents, is acquired and involves a process of concept
formation, would be very odd indeed.
But if a sense-datum philosopher takes the ability to sense
sense contents to be unacquired, he is clearly precluded from
offering an analysis of it sensed a sende content which presup-
poses acquired abilities. It follows that he could analyze .t
sensed red senue content « as « non-inferentially knowe that « let red
only if he is prepared to admit that the ability to have such
non-inferential knowledge as that, for example, a red sense
content is red, is itself unacquired. And this brings us face
to face with the fact that most empirically minded philoso-
phers are strongly inclined to think that all classificatory
consciousness, all knowledge that something is thus-and-do, or,
in logicians' jargon, all subsumption of particulars under
universals, involves learning, concept formation, even the use
of symbols. It is clear from the above analysis, therefore, that
classical sense-datum theories - I emphasize the adjective, for
there are other, 'heterodox,' sense-datum theories to be taken
into account-are confronted by an inconsistent triad made
up of the following three propositions:

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
21
A. Xuenses red denue content « entails i non-inferentially knows
that i is red.
B. The ability to sense sense contents is unacquired.
C. The ability to know facts of the form. is $ is acquired.
A and B together entail not-C; B and C entail not-A; A and
C entail not-B.
Once the classical sense-datum theorist faces up to the fact
that A, B, and C do form an inconsistent triad, which of them
will he choose to abandon?
1) He can abandon A, in which case the sensing of
sense contents becomes a noncognitive fact—a non-
cognitive fact, to be sure which may be a necessary
condition, even a logually necessary condition, of non-
inferential knowledge, but a fact, nevertheless, which
cannot constitute this knowledge.
2) He can abandon B, in which case he must pay the
price of cutting off the concept of a sense datum
from its connection with our ordinary talk about sen-
sations, feelings, afterimages, tickles and itches, etc.,
which are usually thought by sense-datum theorists
to be its common sense counterparts.
3) But to abandon C is to do violence to the predomi-
nantly nominalistic proclivities of the empiricist tradi-
tion.
7. It certainly begins to look as though the classical con-
cept of a sense datum were a mongrel resulting from a
crossbreeding of two ideas:
(1) The idea that there are certain inner episodes-e.g.
sensations of red or of C# which can occur to human
beings (and brutes) without any prior process of
learning or concept formation; and without which it

22
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
would in some sende be impossible to dee, for example,
that the facing surface of a physical object is red and
triangular, or hear that a certain physical sound is C#.
(2) The idea that there are certain inner episodes which
are the non-inferential knowings that certain items
are, for example, red or C#; and that these episodes
are the necessary conditions of empirical knowledge
as providing the evidence for all other empirical
propositions.
And I think that once we are on the lookout for them, it is
quite easy to see how these two ideas came to be blended
together in traditional epistemology. The firat idea clearly
arises in the attempt to explain the facts of sense perception
in scientific style. How does it happen that people can have
the experience which they describe by saying "It is as though
I were seeing a red and triangular physical object" when
either there is no physical object there at all, or, if there is,
it is neither red nor triangular? The explanation, roughly,
posits that in every case in which a person has an experience
of this kind, whether veridical or not, he has what is called
a 'sensation' or "impression'"' of a red triangle.' The core idea
is that the proximate cause of such a sensation is only for the
mout part brought about by the presence in the neighborhood
of the perceiver of a red and triangular physical object; and
that while a baby, say, can have the 'sensation of a red
triangle' without either seeing or deeming to see that the facing
side of a physical object is red and triangular, there usually looke,
to adults, to be a physical object with a red and triangular
facing surface, when they are caused to have a 'sensation of
a red triangle'; while without such a sensation, no such expe-
rience can be had.

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
23
I shall have a great deal more to say about this kind of
'explanation' of perceptual situations in the course of my
argument. What I want to emphasize for the moment, how-
ever, is that, as far as the above formulation goes, there is no
reason to suppose that having the sensation of a red triangle
is a cognitive or epistemic fact. There is, of course, a temptation
to assimilate "having a sensation of a red triangle" to "think-
ing of a celestial city" and to attribute to the former the
epistemic character, the "intentionality' of the latter. But this
temptation could be resisted, and it could be held that having
a sensation of a red triangle is a fact sui generi, neither
epistemic nor physical, having its own logical grammar. Un-
fortunately, the idea that there are such things as sensations
of red triangles-in itself, as we shall see, quite legitimate,
though not without its puzzles - seems to fit the requirements
of another, and less fortunate, line of thought so well that it
has almost invariably been distorted to give the latter a
reinforcement without which it would long ago have col-
lapsed. This unfortunate, but familiar, line of thought runs
as follows:
The seeing that the facing surface of a physical object is red
and triangular is a veridical member of a class of experiences -
let us call them 'ostensible seeings' - some of the members of
which are non-veridical; and there is no inspectible hallmark
which guarantees that any such experience is veridical. To
suppose that the non-inferential knowledge on which our
world picture rests consists of such ostensible seeings, hear-
ings, etc., as happen to be veridical is to place empirical knowl-
edge on too precarious a footing-indeed, to open the door
to skepticism by making a mockery of the word knowledge in
the phrase "empirical knowledge."
Now it is, of course, possible to delimit subclasses of os-

24
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
tensible seeings, hearings, etc., which are progressively less
precarious, i.e. more reliable, by specifying the circumstances
in which they occur, and the vigilance of the perceiver. But
the possibility that any given ostensible seeing, hearing, etc.,
is non-veridical can never be entirely eliminated. Therefore,
given that the foundation of empirical knowledge cannot consist
of the veridical members of a class not all the members of
which are veridical, and from which the non-veridical mem-
bers cannot be weeded out by "inspection,' this foundation
cannot consist of such items as reeing that the facing surface of
a physical object is red and triangular:
Thus baldly put, scarcely anyone would accept this con-
clusion. Rather they would take the contrapositive of the
argument, and reason that since the foundation of empirical
knowledge is the non-inferential knowledge of such facts,
it doed consist of members of a class which contains non-
veridical members. But before it is thus baldly put, it gets
tangled up with the first line of thought. The idea springs to
mind that sensations of red triangles have exactly the virtues
which ostensible seeings of red truangular physical surfaced lack.
To begin with, the grammatical similarity of 'sensation of a
red triangle' to "thought of a celestial city" is interpreted to
mean, or, better, gives rise to the presupposition, that sensa-
finn belong in the same general pigeonhole as thoughts-in
short, are cognitive facts. Then, it is noticed that sensations
are ex hypothesi far more intimately related to mental proc-
esses than external physical objects. It would seem easier
to "get at" a red triangle of which we are having a sensa-
tion, than to "get at" a red and triangular physical surface.
But, above all, it is the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak
of unveridical sensations which strikes these philosophers,
though for it to strike them as it does, they must overlook

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
25
the fact that if it makes sense to speak of an experience as
veridical it must correspondingly make sense to speak of it
as unveridical. Let me emphasize that not all sense-datum
theorists -even of the classical type-have been guilty of
all these confusions; nor are these all the confusions of
which sense-datum theorists have been guilty. I shall have
more to say on this topic later. But the confusions I have
mentioned are central to the tradition, and will serve my
present purpose. For the upshot of blending all these ingre-
dients together is the idea that a sensation of a red triangle
is the very paradigm of empirical knowledge. And I think
that it can readily be seen that this idea leads straight to
the orthodox type of sense-datum theory and accounts
for the perplexities which arise when one tries to think it
through.
Il. Another Language?
8. I shall now examine briefly a heterodox suggestion by, for
example, Ayer (1)(2) to the effect that discourse about sense
data is, so to speak, another language, a language contrived
by the epistemologist, for situations which the plain man
describes by means of such locutions as "Now the book looks
green to me" and "There seems to be a red and triangular
object over there." The core of this suggestion is the idea that
the vocabulary of sense data embodies no increase in the
content of descriptive discourse, as over and against the plain
man's language of physical objects in Space and Time, and
the properties they have and appear to have. For it holds
that sentences of the form
X presents S with a Ф sense datum

26
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
are simply stipulated to have the same force as sentences of
the form
X looks $ to S.
Thus "The tomato presents S with a bulgy red sense-datum"
would be the contrived counterpart of "The tomato looks
red and bulgy to S" and would mean exactly what the lat-
ter means for the simple reason that it was stipulated to
do so.
As an aid to explicating this suggestion, I am going to
make use of a certain picture. I am going to start with the
idea of a code, and I am going to enrich this notion until the
codes I am talking about are no longer mere codes. Whether
one wants to call these "enriched codes" codes at all is a
matter which I shall not attempt to decide.
Now a code, in the sense in which I shall use the term, is
a system of symbols each of which represents a complete
sentence. Thus, as we initially view the situation, there are
two characteristic features of a code: (1) Each code symbol
is a unit; the parts of a code symbol are not themselves code
symbols. (2) Such logical relations as obtain among code
symbols are completely parasitical; they derive entirely from
logical relations among the sentences they represent. Indeed,
to speak about logical relations among code symbols is a way
of talking which is introduced in terms of the logical relations
among the sentences they represent. Thus, if "O" stands for
"Everybody on board is sick" and "A" for "Somebody on
board is sick," then "A" would follow from "O" in the sense
that the sentence represented by "A" follows from the sen-
tence represented by "O."
Let me begin to modify this austere conception of a code.
There is no reason why a code symbol might not have parts

EMPIRICISM AND THE PIILOSOPHY OF MIND
27
which, without becoming full-fledged symbols on their own,
do play a role in the system. Thus they might play the role
of mnemonic desiced serving to put us in mind of features of
the sentences represented by the symbols of which they are
parts. For example, the code symbol for "Someone on board
is sick" might contain the letter S to remind us of the word
"sick," and, perhaps, the reversed letter E to remind those of
us who have a background in logic of the word "someone."
Thus, the flag for "Someone on board is sick" might be 'S.'
Now the suggestion at which I am obviously driving is that
someone might introduce so-called sense-datum sentences as
code symbols or "flags," and introduce the vocables and
printables they contain to serve the role of reminding us of
certain features of the sentences in ordinary perceptual dis-
course which the flags as wholes represent. In particular, the
role of the vocable or printable "sense datum" would be that
of indicating that the symbolized sentence contains the con-
text"... looks...," the vocable or printable "red" that the
correlated sentence contains the context "... looks red ..."
and so on.
9. Now to take this conception of sense datum 'sentences'
seriously is, of course, to take seriously the idea that there
are no independent logical relations between sense-datum
'sentences.' It looks as though there were such independent
logical relations, for these "sentences' look like sentenced, and
they have as proper parts vocables or printables which func-
tion in ordinary usage as logical word. Certainly if sense-datum
talk is a code, it is a code which is easily mistaken for a
language proper. Let me illustrate. At first sight it certainly
seems that
A. The tomato presents S with a red sense datum
entails both

28
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
B. There are red sense data
and
C. The tomato presents S with a sense datum which has
some specific shade of red.
This, however, on the kind of view I am considering, would
be a mistake. (B) would follow -even in the inverted com-
mas sense of 'follows' appropriate to code symbols-from
(A) only because (B) is the flag for (B), "Something looks
red to somebody," which does follow from (a), "The tomato
looks red to Jones" which is represented in the code by (A).
And (C) would 'follow' from (A), in spite of appearances,
only if (C) were the flag for a sentence which followd from (a).
I shall have more to say about this example in a moment.
The point to be stressed now is that to carry out this view
consistently one must deny to such vocables and printables
as "quality," "is,
" "red," "color," "crimson," "determinable,"
"determinate," "all," "some," "exists," etc., etc., as they occur
in sense-datum talk, the full-blooded status of their counter-
parts in ordinary usage. They are rather clues which serve to
remind us which sense-datum 'flag' it would be proper to fly
along with which other sense-datum 'flags' Thus, the voca-
bles which make up the two 'flags'
(D) All sense-data are red
and
(E) Some sense data are not red
remind us of the genuine logical incompatibility between, for
example,
(F) All elephants are grey
and
(G) Some elephants are not grey,
and serve, therefore, as a clue to the impropriety of flying

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
29
these two 'flags' together. For the sentences they symbolize
are, presumably,
(ô) Everything looks red to everybody
and
(e) There is a color other than red which something looks
to somebody to have,
and these are incompatible.
But one would have to be cautious in using these clues.
Thus, from the fact that it is proper to infer
(H) Some elephants have a determinate shade of pink
from
(1) Some elephants are pink
it would clearly be a mistake to infer that the right to fly
(K) Some sense data are pink
carries with it the right to fly
(L) Some sense data have a determinate shade of pink.
9. But if sense-datum sentences are really sense-datum
'sentences'-i.e. code flags-it follows, of course, that sense-
datum talk neither clarified nor explains facts of the form t
looks & to Sor air $. That it would appear to do so would
be because it would take an almost superhuman effort to
keep from taking the vocables and printables which occur in
the code (and let me now add to our earlier list the vocable
"directly known") to be words which, if homonyms of words
in ordinary usage, have their ordinary sense, and which, if
invented, have a meaning specified by their relation to the
others. One would be constantly tempted, that is, to treat
sense-datum flags as though they were sentences in a theory,
and sense-datum talk as a language which gets its use by
coordinating sense-datum sentences with sentences in ordi-
nary perception talk, de molecule talk gele its use by coordinating

30
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
sentences about populations of molecules with talk about the presure
of gases on the walls of their containers. After all,
x looks red to S •=• there is a class of red sense data
which belong to x, and are sensed by S
has at least a superficial resemblance to
g exerts pressure on w •=. there is a class of molecules
which make up g, and which are bouncing off w,
a resemblance which becomes even more striking once it is
granted that the former is not an analysis of it looke red to S
in terms of sense data.
There is, therefore, reason to believe that it is the fact that
both codes and theories are contrived systems which are
under the control of the language with which they are coor-
dinated, which has given aid and comfort to the idea that
sense-datum talk is "another language" for ordinary dis-
course about perception. Yet although the logical relations
between sentences in a theoretical language are, in an impor-
tant sense, under the control of logical relations between
sentences in the observation language, nevertheless, within
the framework of this control, the theoretical language has
an autonomy which contradicts the very idea of a code. If
this essential difference between theories and codes is over-
looked, one may be tempted to try to eat his cake and have
it. By thinking of sense-datum talk as merely another language,
one draws on the fact that codes have no surplus value.
By thinking of sense-datum talk as illuminating the "language
of appearing,"
one draws on the fact that theoretical lan-
guages, though contrived, and depending for their meaningful-
ness on a coordination with the language of observation, have
an explanatory function. Unfortunately, these two charac-

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPIY OF MIND
31
teristics are incompatible; for it is just because theories have
"surplus value" that they can provide explanations.
No one, of course, who thinks-as, for example, does
Ayer-of the existence of sense data as entailing the exist-
ence of "direct knowledge," would wish to say that sense data
are theoretical entities. It could scarcely be a theoretical fact
that I am directly knowing that a certain sense content is red.
On the other hand, the idea that sense contents are theoretical
entities is not abrinusly absurd-so absurd as to preclude
the above interpretation of the plausibility of the "another-
language" approach. For even those who introduce the ex-
pression "sense content" by means of the context "... is
directly known to be..." may fail to keep this fact in mind
when putting this expression to use — for example, by devel-
oping the idea that physical objects and persons alike are
patterns of sense contents. In such a specific context, it is
possible to forget that sense contents, thus introduced, are
essentially sense data and not merely items which exemplify
sense qualities. Indeed, one may even lapse into thinking of
the densing of sense contents, the givenness of sense data, as
non-epistemic facts.
I think it fair to say that those who offer the "another-
language" interpretation of sense data find the illumination
it provides to consist primarily in the fact that in the language
of sense data, physical objects are patterns of sense contents,
so that, viewed in this framework, there is no "iron curtain"
between the knowing mind and the physical world. It is to
elaborating plausible (if schematic) translations of physical-
object statements into statements about sense contents,
rather than to spelling out the force of such sentences as
"Sense content ‹ is directly known to be red," that the greater
part of their philosophical ingenuity has been directed.

32
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
However this may be, one thing can be said with confi-
dence. If the language of sense data were merely a code, a
notational device, then the cash value of any philosophical
clarification it might provide must lie in its ability to illumi-
nate logical relations within ordinary discourse about physical
objects and our perception of them. Thus, the fact (if it were
a fact) that a code can be constructed for ordinary perception
talk which 'speaks' of a "relation of identity" between the
components ("sense data") of "minds" and of "things," would
presumably have as its cash value the insight that ordinary
discourse about physical objects and perceivers could (in
principle) be constructed from sentences of the form "There
looks to be a physical object with a red and triangular facing
surface over there" (the counterpart in ordinary language of
the basic expressions of the code). In more traditional terms,
the clarification would consist in making manifest the fact
that persons and things are alike logical constructions out
of lookings or appearings (not appearances!). But any claim
to this effect soon runs into insuperable difficulties which
become apparent once the role of "looks"
or "appears" is
understood. And it is to an examination of this role that I
now turn.
Ill. The Logic of 'looks'
10. Before turning aside to examine the suggestion that the
language of sense data is "another language" for the situ-
ations described by the so-called "language of appearing."
I had concluded that classical sense-datum theories, when
pressed, reveal themselves to be the result of a mismating of
two ideas: (1) The idea that there are certain "inner epi-
sodes," e.g. the sensation of a red triangle or of a C# sound,

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
33
which occur to human beings and brutes without any prior
process of learning or concept formation, and without which
it would - in some sense -be impossible to dee, for example,
that the facing surface of a physical object is red and trian-
gular, or bear that a certain physical sound is C#; (2) The
idea that there are certain "inner episodes" which are the
noninferential knowings that, for example, a certain item is
red and triangular, or, in the case of sounds, C#, which inner
episodes are the necessary conditions of empirical knowledge
as providing the evidence for all other empirical propositions.
If this diagnosis is correct, a reasonable next step would be
to examine these two ideas and determine how that which
survives criticism in each is properly to be combined with
the other. Clearly we would have to come to grips with the
idea of inner episodes, for this is common to both.
Many who attack the idea of the given seem to have
thought that the central mistake embedded in this idea is
exactly the idea that there are inner episodes, whether
thoughts or so-called "immediate experiences," to which each
of us has privileged access. I shall argue that this is just not
so, and that the Myth of the Given can be dispelled without
resorting to the crude verificationisms or operationalisms
characteristic of the more dogmatic forms of recent empiri-
cism. Then there are those who, while they do not reject the
idea of inner episodes, find the Myth of the Given to consist
in the idea that knowledge of these episodes furnishes prem-
ided on which empirical knowledge rests as on a foundation.
But while this idea has, indeed, been the most widespread
form of the Myth, it is far from constituting its essence.
Everything hinges on why these philosophers reject it. If, for
example, it is on the ground that the learning of a language
is a public process which proceeds in a domain of public

34
EMPIRICISM AND THE PIILOSOPILY OF MIND
objects and is governed by public sanctions, so that private
episodes - with the exception of a mysterious nod in their
direction —must needs escape the net of rational discourse,
then, while these philosophers are immune to the form of the
myth which has flowered in sense-datum theories, they have
no defense against the myth in the form of the givenness of
such facts as that physical object r looks red to person S at tune t,
or that there looks to person S at time t to be a red physical object
over there. It will be useful to pursue the Myth in this direction
for a while before more general issues are raised
11. Philosophers have found it easy to suppose that such
a sentence as "The tomato looks red to Jones" says that a
certain triadic relation, looking or appearing, obtains among a
physical object, a person, and a quality.* "A looks $ to S"
is assimilated to "x gives y to z"—or, better, since giving is,
strictly speaking, an action rather than a relation-to "x
is between y and z,"
and taken to be a case of the general
form "R(x,y,z)." Having supposed this, they turn without
further ado to the question, "Is this relation analyzable?"
Sense-datum theorists have, on the whole, answered "Yes,"
and claimed that facts of the form. i looks red to X are to be
analyzed in terms of sense data. Some of them, without
necessarily rejecting this claim, have argued that facts of this
kind are, at the very least, to be explained in terms of sense
data. Thus, when Broad (4) writes "If, in fact, nothing ellip-
tical is before my mind, it is very hard to understand why
the penny should seem elliptical rather than of any other
shape (p. 240)," he is appealing to sense-data as a means of
explaining facts of this form. The difference, of course, is that
• A useful discussion of views of this type is to be found in (9) and (13).

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
35
whereas if i looke $ to S is correctly analyzed in terms of sense
data, then no one could believe that x looks $ to S without
believing that S has sense data, the same need not be true if
•i looke Ø to S is explained in terms of sense data, for, in the
case of some types of explanation, at least, one can believe a
fact without believing its explanation.
On the other hand, those philosophers who reject sense-
datum theories in favor of so-called theories of appearing
have characteristically held that facts of the form i looks $ to
Sare ultimate and irreducible, and that sense data are needed
neither for their analysis nor for their explanation. If asked,
"Doesn't the statement 'x looks red to S' have as part of its
meaning the idea that s stands in some relation to something
that is red?" their answer is in the negative, and, I believe,
rightly so.
12. I shall begin my examination of "X looks red to S at
t" with the simple but fundamental point that the sense of
"red" in which things look red is, on the face of it, the same
as that in which things are red. When one glimpses an object
and decides that it looks red (to me, now, from here) and
wonders whether it really is red, one is surely wondering
whether the color — red - which it looks to have is the one it
really does have. This point can be obscured by such verbal
manipulations as hyphenating the words "looks" and "red"
and claiming that it is the insoluble unity "looks-red" and not
just "looks"
which is the relation. Insofar as this dodge is
based on insight, it is insight into the fact that looks is not a
relation between a person, a thing, and a quality. Unfortu-
nately, as we shall see, the reason for this fact is one which
gives no comfort at all to the idea that it is looks-red rather
than looke which is the relation.

36
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
I have, in effect, been claiming that being red is logically
prior, is a logically simpler notion, than looking red; the func-
tion "x is red" to "x looks red to y." In short, that it just won't
do to say that. i is red is analyzable in terms of t looke red to
y. But what, then, are we to make of the necessary truth-
and it is, of course, a necessary truth -that
x is red •=. x would look red to standard observers
in standard conditions?
There is certainly some sense to the idea that this is at least
the schema for a definition of physical rednesd in terms of
looking red. One begins to see the plausibility of the gambit
that looking-red is an insoluble unity, for the minute one gives
"red" (on the right-hand side) an independent status, it be-
comes what it obviously is, namely "red" as a predicate of
physical objects, and the supposed definition becomes an
obvious circle.
13. The way out of this troubling situation has two parts.
The second is to show how "x it red" can be necessarily
equivalent to "x would look red to standard observers in
standard situations" without this being a definition of "x is
red" in terms of "x looks red." But the first, and logically
prior, step is to show that "x looks red to S" does not assert
either an unanalyzable triadic relation to obtain between x,
red, and S, or an unanalyzable dyadic relation to obtain
between x and S. Not, however, because it asserts an analyz-
able relation to obtain, but because looke is not a relation at
all. Or, to put the matter in a familiar way, one can say that
looke is a relation if he likes, for the sentences in which this
word appears show some grammatical analogies to sentences
built around words which we should not hesitate to classify
as relation words; but once one has become aware of certain

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
37
other features which make them very unlike ordinary rela-
tion sentences, he will be less inclined to view his task as that
of finding the ander to the question "Is looks a relation?"
14. To bring out the essential features of the use of "looks,"
I shall engage in a little historical fiction. A young man,
whom I shall call John, works in a necktie shop. He has
learned the use of color words in the usual way, with this
exception. I shall suppose that he has never looked at an
object in other than standard conditions. As he examines his
stock every evening before closing up shop, he says, "This is
red," "That is green," "This is purple," etc., and such of his
linguistic peers as happen to be present nod their heads
approvingly.
Let us suppose, now, that at this point in the story, electric
lighting is invented. His friends and neighbors rapidly adopt
this new means of illumination, and wrestle with the prob-
lems it presents. John, however, is the last to succumb. Just
after it has been installed in his shop, one of his neighbors,
Jim, comes in to buy a necktie.
"Here is a handsome green one," says John.
"But it in't green," says Jim, and takes John outside.
"Well," says John, 'it was green in there, but now it is
blue."
"No," says Jim, "you know that neckties don't change
their color merely as a result of being taken from place to
place."
"But perhaps electricity changes their color and they
change back again in daylight?"
"That would be a queer kind of change, wouldn't it?" says
Jim.
"I suppose so," says bewildered John. "But we saw that it
was green in there."

38
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
"No, we didn't see that it was green in there, because it
wasn't green, and you can't see what isn't so!"
"Well, this is a pretty pickle," says John. "I just don't know
wbat to say."
The next time John picks up this tie in his shop and
someone asks what color it is, his first impulse is to say "It
is green." He suppresses this impulse, and, remembering
what happened before, comes out with "It is blue." He
doesn't dee that it is blue, nor would he say that he sees it to
be blue. What does he see? Let us ask him.
"I don't know what to say. If I didn't know that the tie is
blue -and the alternative to granting this is odd indeed -1
would swear that I was seeing a green tie and seeing that it
is green. It is de though I were seeing the necktie to be green."
If we bear in mind that such sentences as "This is green"
have both a fact-stating and a reporting use, we can put the
point I have just been making by saying that once John
learns to stifle the report "This necktie is green" when looking
at it in the shop, there is no other report about color and the
necktie which he knows how to make. To be sure, he now
says, "This necktie is blue." But he is not making a reporting
use of this sentence. He uses it as the conclusion of an
inference.
15. We return to the shop after an interval, and we find
that when John is asked "What is the color of this necktie?"
he makes such statements as "It looks green, but take it
outside and see." It occurs to us that perhaps in learning to
say "This tie looks green" when in the shop, he has learned
to make a new kind of report. Thus, it might seem as though
his linguistic peers have helped him to notice a new kind of
objective fact, one which, though a relational fact involving a
perceiver, is as logically independent of the beliefs, the con-

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
39
ceptual framework of the perceiver, as the fact that the
necktie is blue; but a minimal fact, one which it is safer to
report because one is less likely to be mistaken. Such a
minimal fact would be the fact that the necktie looks green
to John on a certain occasion, and it would be properly
reported by using the sentence "This necktie looks green." It
is this type of account, of course, which I have already
rejected.
But what is the alternative? If, that is, we are not going
to adopt the sense-datum analysis. Let me begin by noting
that there certainly seems to be something to the idea that
the sentence "This looks green to me now" has a reporting
role. Indeed, it would seem to be essentially a report. But if
so, what does it report, if not a minimal objective fact, and if
what it reports is not to be analyzed in terms of sense data?
16. Let me next call attention to the fact that the experi-
ence of having something look green to one at a certain time
is, insofar as it is an experience, obviously very much like
that of seeing something to be green, insofar as the latter is
an experience. But the latter, of course, is not jut an expe-
rience. And this is the heart of the matter. For to say that a
certain experience is a seeing that something is the case, is to
do more than describe the experience. It is to characterize it
as, so to speak, making an assertion or claim, and -which is
the point I wish to stress —to endorse that claim. As a matter
of fact, as we shall see, it is much more easy to see that the
statement "Jones sees that the tree is green" ascribes a
propositional claim to Jones'
experience and endorses it,
than to specify how the statement describes Jones' experience.
I realize that by speaking of experiences as containing
propositional claims, I may seem to be knocking at closed
doors. I ask the reader to bear with me, however, as the

40
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
justification of this way of talking is one of my major aims.
If I am permitted to issue this verbal currency now, I hope
to put it on the gold standard before concluding the argu-
ment.
16. It is clear that the experience of seeing that something
is green is not merely the occurrence of the propositional
claim 'this is green' — not even if we add, as we must, that
this claim is, so to speak, evoked or wrung from the perceiver
by the object perceived. Here Nature-to turn Kant's simile
(which he uses in another context) on its head -puts us to
the question. The something more is clearly what philoso-
phers have in mind when they speak of "visual impressions"
or "immediate visual experiences." What exactly is the logical
status of these "impressions" or "immediate experiences" is a
problem which will be with us for the remainder of this
argument. For the moment it is the propositional claim which
concerns us.
I pointed out above that when we use the word "see" as
in "S sees that the tree is green" we are not only ascribing a
claim to the experience, but endorsing it. It is this endorse-
ment which Ryle has in mind when he refers to seeing that
something is thus and so as an achievement, and to "sees" as an
achievement word. I prefer to call it a "so it is" or "just so" word,
for the root idea is that of truth. To characterize S's experi-
ence as a seeing is, in a suitably broad sense - which I shall
be concerned to explicate-to apply the semantical concept
of truth to that experience.
Now the suggestion I wish to make is, in its simplest terms,
that the statement "X looks green to Jones" differs from
"Jones sees that x is green" in that whereas the latter both
ascribes a propositional claim to Jones experience and en-
dorses it, the former ascribes the claim but does not endorse

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
41
it. This is the essential difference between the two, for it is
clear that two experiences may be identical ‹ experienced, and
yet one be properly referred to as a seeing that something is
green, and the other merely as a case of something's looking
green. Of course, if I say "X merely looks green to S" I am
not only failing to endorse the claim, I am rejecting it.
Thus, when I say "X looks green to me now" I am reporting
the fact that my experience is, so to speak, intrinsically, de
an experience, indistinguishable from a veridical one of seeing
that x is green. Involved in the report is the ascription to my
experience of the claim 'x is green'; and the fact that I make
this report rather than the simple report "X is green" indi-
cates that certain considerations have operated to raise, so to
speak in a higher court, the question 'to endorse or not to
endorse.' I may have reason to think that x may not after all
be green.
If I make at one time the report "X looks to be green" -
which is not only a report, but the withholding of an endorse-
ment- 1 may later, when the original reasons for withholding
endorsement have been rebutted, endorse the original claim
by saying "I saw that it was green, though at the time I was
only sure that it looked green." Notice that I will only say "I
see that x is green" (as opposed to "X is green") when the
question "to endorse or not to endorse" has come up. "I see
that x is green" belongs, so to speak, on the same level as "X
looks green" and "X merely looks green."
17. There are many interesting and subtle questions about
the dialectics of "looks talk," into which I do not have the
space to enter. Fortunately, the above distinctions suffice for
our present purposes. Let us suppose, then, that to say that
"X looks green to S at t" is, in effect, to say that S has that
kind of experience which, if one were prepared to endorse

42
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
the propositional claim it involves, one would characterize as
seeing i to be green at t. Thus, when our friend John learns to
use the sentence "This necktie looks green to me" he learns
a way of reporting an experience of the kind which, as far
as any categories I have yet permitted him to have are
concerned, he can only characterize by saying that as an
experience it does not differ from seeing something to be
green, and that evidence for the proposition "This necktie is
green' is ipso facto evidence for the proposition that the expe-
rience in question is seeing that the necktie is green.
Now one of the chief merits of this account is that it
permits a parallel treatment of 'qualitative' and '
'existential'
seeming or looking. Thus, when I say "The tree looks bent"
I am endorsing that part of the claim involved in my expe-
rience which concerns the existence of the tree, but with-
holding endorsement from the rest. On the other hand, when
I say "There looks to be a bent tree over there" I am refusing
to endorse any but the most general aspect of the claim,
namely, that there is an 'over there' as opposed to a 'here.'
Another merit of the account is that it explains how a necktie,
for example, can look red to S at t, without looking scarlet
or crimson or any other determinate shade of red. In short
it explains how things can have a merely generic look, a fact
which would be puzzling indeed if looking red were a natural
as opposed to epistemic fact about objects. The core of the
explanation, of course, is that the propositional claim in-
volved in such an experience may be, for example, either the
more determinable claim 'This is red' or the more determi-
nate claim 'This is crimson.' The complete story is more
complicated, and requires some account of the role in these
experiences of the "impressions' or "immediate experiences'
the logical status of which remains to be determined. But

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
43
even in the absence of these additional details, we can note
the resemblance between the fact that x can look red to S,
without it being true of some specific shade of red that x
looks to S to be of that shade, and the fact that S can believe
that Cleopatra's Needle is tall, without its being true of some
determinate number of feet that S believes it to be that
number of feet tall.
18. The point I wish to stress at this time, however, is that
the concept of looking green, the ability to recognize that
something looks green, presupposes the concept of being green,
and that the latter concept involves the ability to tell what
colors objects have by looking at them-which, in turn,
involves knowing in what circumstances to place an object
if one wishes to ascertain its color by looking at it. Let me
develop this latter point. As our friend John becomes more
and more sophisticated about his own and other people's
visual experiences, he learns under what conditions it is as
though one were seeing a necktie to be of one color when in
fact it is of another. Suppose someone asks him "Why does
this tie look green to me?" John may very well reply "Be-
cause it is blue, and blue objects look green in this kind of
light." And if someone asks this question when looking at the
necktie in plain daylight, John may very well reply "Because
the tie i green" -to which he may add "We are in plain
daylight, and in daylight things look what they are." We thus
see that
x is red •=. x looks red to standard observers in
standard conditions
is a necessary truth not because the right-hand side is the
definition of "x is red," but because "standard conditions"
means conditions in which things look what they are. And,

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
of course, which conditions are standard for a given mode of
perception is, at the common-sense level, specified by a list
of conditions which exhibit the vagueness and open texture
characteristic of ordinary discourse.
19. I have arrived at a stage in my argument which is, at
least prima facie, out of step with the basic presuppositions
of logical atomism. Thus, as long as looking green is taken to
be the notion to which being green is reducible, it could be
claimed with considerable plausibility that fundamental con-
cepts pertaining to observable fact have that logical inde-
pendence of one another which is characteristic of the em-
piricist tradition. Indeed, at first sight the situation is quite
disquieting, for if the ability to recognize that x looks green
presupposes the concept of heing green, and if this in turn
involves knowing in what circumstances to view an object to
ascertain its color, then, since one can scarcely determine
what the circumstances are without noticing that certain
objects have certain perceptible characteristics-including
colors - it would seem that one couldn't form the concept of
being green, and, by parity of reasoning, of the other colors,
unless he already had them.
Now, it just won't do to reply that to have the concept of
green, to know what it is for something to be green, it is
sufficient to respond, when one is in point of fact in standard
conditions, to green objects with the vocable "This is green."
Not only must the conditions be of a sort that is appropriate
for determining the color of an object by looking, the subject
must know that conditions of this sort are appropriate. And
while this does not imply that one must have concepts before
one has them, it does imply that one can have the concept
of green only by having a whole battery of concepts of which
it is one element. It implies that while the process of acquir-
ing the concept green may -indeed does-involve a long

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
45
history of acquiring piecemeal habits of response to various
objects in various circumstances, there is an important sense
in which one has no concept pertaining to the observable
properties of physical objects in Space and Time unless one
has them all —and, indeed, as we shall see, a great deal more
besides.
20. Now, I think it is clear what a logical atomist, suppos-
ing that he found any merit at all in the above argument,
would say. He would say that I am overlooking the fact that
the logical space of physical objects in Space and Time rests
on the logical space of sense contents, and he would argue
that it is concepts pertaining to sense contents which have
the logical independence of one another which is charac-
teristic of traditional empiricism. "After all," he would point
out, "concepts pertaining to theoretical entities— molecules,
for example-have the mutual dependence you have, per-
haps rightly, ascribed to concepts pertaining to physical fact.
But," he would continue, "theoretical concepts have empiri-
cal content because they rest on —are coordinated with -a
more fundamental logical space. Until you have disposed,
therefore, of the idea that there is a more fundamental logical
space than that of physical objects in Space and Time, or
shown that it too is fraught with coherence, your incipient
Meditations Hegeliènned are premature."
And we can imagine a sense-datum theorist to interject the
following complaint: "You have begun to write as though you
had shown not only that physical redned is not to be analyzed
in terms of looking red-which I will grant-but also that
physical redness is not to be analyzed at all, and, in particu-
lar, not to be analyzed in terms of the redness of red sense
contents. Again, you have begun to write as though you had
shown not only that observing that x looks red is not more
basic than observing that x it red, but also that there is no

46
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
form of visual noticing more basic than seeing that x is red,
such as the sensing of a red sense content. I grant," he
continues, "that the tendency of sense-datum theorists has
been to claim that the redned of physical objects is to be
analyzed in terms of looking red, and then to claim that looking
red is itself to be analyzed in terms of red sense contenta, and
that you may have undercut this line of analysis. But what
is to prevent the sense-datum theorist from taking the line
that the properties of physical objects are directly analyzable
into the qualities and phenomenal relations of sense con-
tents?"
Very well. But once again we must ask, How does the
sense-datum theorist come by the framework of sense con-
tents? and How is he going to convince us that there are
such things? For even if looking red doesn't enter into the
analysis of physical redness, it is by asking us to reflect on
the experience of having something look red to us that he
hopes to make this framework convincing. And it therefore
becomes relevant to note that my analysis of a looks red to S
at t has not, at least as far as I have pushed it to date, revealed
any such items as sense-contents. And it may be relevant to
suggest that once we see clearly that physical redness is not
to be given a dispositional analysis in terms of looking red, the
idea that it is to be given any kind of dispositional analysis
loses a large measure of its plausibility. In any event, the next
move must be to press further the above account of qualita-
tive and existential looking.
I. Explaining Looks
21. I have already noted that sense-datum theorists are im-
pressed by the question "How can a physical object look red

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
47
to S, unless something in that situation is red and S is taking
account of it? If S isn't experiencing something red, how does
it happen that the physical object looks red, rather than green
or streaky?" There is, I propose to show, something to this
line of thought, though the story turns out to be a compli-
cated one. And if, in the course of telling the story, I shall
be led to make statements which resemble some of the things
sense-datum theorists have said, this story will amount to a
sense-datum theory only in a sense which robs this phrase
of an entire dimension of its traditional epistemological force,
a dimension which is characteristic of even such heterodox
forms of sense-datum theory as the "another language" ap-
proach.
Let me begin by formulating the question: "Is the fact that
an object looks to S to be red and triangular, or that there
looks to S to be a red and triangular object over there, to be
explained in terms of the idea that Jones has a sensation —or
impression, or immediate experience —of a red triangle? One
point can be made right away, namely that if these expres-
sions are so understood that, say, the immediate experience
of a red triangle implies the existence of something-not a
physical object-which i red and triangular, and if the red-
ness which this item has is the same as the redness which
the physical object looke to have, then the suggestion runs up
against the objection that the redness physical objects look to
have is the same as the redness physical objects actually do
have, so that items which ex hypotheri are not physical objects,
and which radically, even categorically, differ from physical
objects, would have the same redness as physical objects.
And while this is, perhaps, not entirely out of the question,
it certainly provides food for thought. Yet when it is claimed
that "obviously" physical objects can't look red to one unless

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
one is experiencing something that i red, is it not presumed
that the redness which the dometbing has is the redness which
the physical object looks to have?
Now there are those who would say that the question
"Is the fact that an object looks red and triangular to S to
be explained —as opposed to notationally reformulated -in
terms of the idea that S has an impression of a red triangle?"
simply doesn't arise, on the ground that there are perfectly
sound explanations of qualitative and existential lookings
which make no reference to 'immediate experiences' or other
dubious entities. Thus, it is pointed out, it is perfectly proper
to answer the question "Why does this object look red?" by
saying "Because it is an orange object looked at in such and
such circumstances." The explanation is, in principle, a good
one, and is typical of the answers we make to such questions
in everyday life. But because these explanations are good, it
by no means follows that explanations of other kinds might
not be equally good, and, perhaps, more searching.
22. On the face of it there are at least two ways in which
additional, but equally legitimate explanations might be forth-
coming for such a fact as that t looks red. The first of these
is suggested by a simple analogy. Might it not be the case
that just as there are two kinds of good explanation of the
fact that this balloon has expanded, (a) in terms of the
Boyle-Charles laws which relate the empirical concepts of
volume, pressure, and temperature pertaining to gases, and
(b) in terms of the kinetic theory of gases; so there are two
ways of explaining the fact that this object looks red to S:
(a) in terms of empirical generalizations relating the colors
of objects, the circumstances in which they are seen, and
the colors they look to have, and (b) in terms of a theory
of perception in which 'immediate experiences' play a role
analogous to that of the molecules of the kinetic theory.

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
49
Now there is such an air of paradox to the idea that
'immediate experiences' are mere theoretical entities -enti-
ties, that is, which are postulated, along with certain funda-
mental principles concerning them, to explain uniformities
pertaining to sense perception, as molecules, along with the
principles of molecular motion, are postulated to explain the
experimentally determined regularities pertaining to gases —
that I am going to lay it aside until a more propitious context
of thought may make it seem relevant. Certainly, those who
have thought that qualitative and existential lookings are to
be explained in terms of 'immediate experiences' thought of
the latter as the most untheoretical of entities, indeed, as the
observables par excellence.
Let us therefore turn to a second way in which, at least
prima facie, there might be an additional, but equally legiti-
mate explanation of existential and qualitative lookings. Ac-
cording to this second account, when we consider items of
this kind, we find that they contain as components items
which are properly referred to as, for example, 'the immedi-
ate experience of a red triangle.' Let us begin our exploration
of this suggestion by taking another look at our account of
existential and qualitative lookings. It will be remembered
that our account of qualitative looking ran, in rough and
ready terms, as follows:
'× looks red to S' has the sense of 'S has an experience which
involves in a unique way the idea that i is red and involves it
in such a way that if this idea were true, the experience would
correctly be characterized as a seeing that x is red.'
Thus, our account implies that the three situations
(a) Seeing that x, over there, is red
(b) Its looking to one that x, over there, is red

50
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
(c) Its looking to one as though there were a red object
over there
differ primarily in that (a) is so formulated as to involve an
endorsement of the idea that x, over there, is red, whereas
in (b) this idea is only partially endorsed, and in (c) not at
all. Let us refer to the idea that.i, over there, in red as the
common propositional content of these three situations. (This is,
of course, not strictly correct, since the propositional content
of (c) is existential, rather than about a presupposedly desig-
nated object x, but it will serve my purpose. Furthermore,
the common propositional content of these three experiences
is much more complex and determinate than is indicated by
the sentence we use to describe our experience to others, and
which I am using to represent it. Nevertheless it is clear that,
subject to the first of these qualifications, the propositional
content of these three experiences could be identical.)
The propositional content of these three experiences is, of
course, but a part of that to which we are logically committed
by characterizing them as situations of these three kinds. Of
the remainder, as we have seen, part is a matter of the extent
to which this propositional content is endorsed. It is the
residue with which we are now concerned. Let us call this
residue the descriptive content. I can then point out that it is
implied by my account that not only the propositional content,
but also the descriptive content of these three experiences may
be identical. I shall suppose this to be the case, though that
there must be some factual difference in the total situations
is obvious.
Now, and this is the decisive point, in characterizing these
three experiences as, respectively, a seeing that i, over there, is
red, its looking to one ad though it, over there, were red, and its looking

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
51
to one as though there were a red object over there, we do not specify
this common descriptive content save indirectly, by implying
that if the common propositional content were true, then all these
three situations would be cases of seeing that x, over there, is
red. Both existential and qualitative lookings are experiences
that would be seeings if their propositional contents were true.
Thus, the very nature of "looks talk" is such as to raise
questions to which it gives no answer: What is the intrindic
character of the common descriptive content of these three
experiences? and How are they able to have it in spite of the
fact that whereas in the case of (a) the perceiver must be in
the presence of a red object over there, in (b) the object over
there need not be red, while in (c) there need be no object
over there at all?
23. Now it is clear that if we were required to give a more
direct characterization of the common descriptive content of
these experiences, we would begin by trying to do so in terms
of the quality red. Yet, as I have already pointed out, we can
scarcely say that this descriptive content is itself something
red unless we can pry the term "red" loose from its prima-
facie tie with the category of physical objects. And there is
a line of thought which has been one of the standard gambits
of perceptual epistemology and which seems to promise ex-
actly this. If successful, it would convince us that redned! - in
the most basic sense of this term - is a characteristic of items
of the sort we have been calling sense contents. It runs as
follows:
While it would, indeed, be a howler to say that we don't see
chairs, tables, etc., but only their facing surfaces, nevertheless,
although we see a table, say, and although the table has a
back as well as a front, we do not see the back of the table

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
as we see its front. Again, although we see the table, and
although the table has an 'inside,' we do not see the inside of
the table as we see its facing outside. Seeing an object entails
seeing its facing surface. If we are seeing that an object is red,
this entails seeing that its facing surface is red. A red surface
is a two-dimensional red expanse-two-dimensional in that
though it may be bulgy, and in this sense three-dimensional, it
has no thickned. As far as the analysis of perceptual conscious-
ness is concerned, a red physical object is one that has a red
expanse as its surface.
Now a red expanse is not a physical object, nor does the
existence of a red expanse entail the existence of a physical
object to which it belongs. (Indeed, there are "wild" expanses
which do not belong to any physical object.) The "descriptive
content" — as you put it-which is common to the three ex-
periences (a), (b) and (c) above, is exactly this sort of thing,
a bulgy red expanse.
Spelled out thus baldly, the fallacy is, or should be, obvi-
ous; it is a simple equivocation on the phrase "having a red
surface." We start out by thinking of the familiar fact that a
physical object may be of one color "on the surface" and of
another color "inside." We may express this by saying that,
for example, the 'surface' of the object is red, but its 'inside'
green. But in saying this we are not saying that there is a
'surface' in the sense of a bulgy two-dimensional particular,
a red 'expanse' which is a component particular in a complex
particular which also includes green particulars. The notion
of two-dimensional bulgy (or flat) particulars is a product of
philosophical (and mathematical) sophistication which can
be related to our ordinary conceptual framework, but does not
belong in an analysis of it. I think that in its place it has an
important contribution to make. (See below, Section 61, (5),

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
53
pp. 113-115.) But this place is in the logical space of an ideal
scientific picture of the world and not in the logical space of
ordinary discourse. It has nothing to do with the logical
grammar of our ordinary color words. It is just a mistake to
suppose that as the word "red" is actually used, it is ever
surfaces in the sense of two-dimensional particulars which
are red. The only particular involved when a physical object
is "red on the outside, but green inside" is the physical object
itself, located in a certain region of Space and enduring
over a stretch of Time. The fundamental grammar of the
attribute red is physical object or is red at place pand at time t.
Certainly, when we say of an object that it is red, we com-
mit ourselves to no more than that it is red "at the surface."
And sometimes it is red at the surface by having what we
would not hesitate to call a "part" which is red through and
through -thus, a red table which is red by virtue of a layer
of red paint. But the red paint is not itself red by virtue of
a component —a 'surface' or 'expanse'; a particular with no
thickness — which is red. There may, let me repeat, turn out
to be some place in the total philosophical picture for the
statement that there "really are" such particulars, and that
they are elements in perceptual experience. But this place is
not to be found by an analysis of ordinary perceptual dis-
course, any more than Minkowski four-dimensional Space-
Time worms are an analysis of what we mean when we speak
of physical objects in Space and Time.
V. Impressions and Ideas: A Logical Point
24. Let me return to beating the neighboring bushes. Notice
that the common descriptive component of the three experi-
ences 1 am considering is itself often referred to (by philoso-

54
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
phers, at least) as an experience —as, for example, an immediate
experience. Here caution is necessary. The notorious "ing-ed"
ambiguity of "experience" must be kept in mind. For al-
though seeing that x, over there, it red is an experiencing - indeed,
a paradigm case of experiencing - it does not follow that the
descriptive content of this experiencing is itself an experienc-
ing. Furthermore, because the fact that ox, over there, looks to
Jones to be red would be a seeing, on Jones' part, that is, over
there, is red, if its propositional content were true, and because
if it were a seeing, it would be an experiencing, we must beware
of concluding that the fact that ix, over there, looks red to Jones
is itself an experiencing. Certainly, the fact that something
looks red to me can itself be experienced. But it is not itself an
experiencing.
All this is not to say that the common descriptive core may
not turn out to be an experiencing, though the chances that
this is so appear less with each step in my argument. On the
other hand, I can say that it is a component in states of affairs
which are experienced, and it does not seem unreasonable to
say that it is itself experienced. But what kind of experience
(in the sense of experienced) is it? If my argument to date is
sound, I cannot say that it is a red experience, that is, a red
experienced item. I could, of course, introduce a new use of
"red" according to which to say of an "immediate experience'
that it was red, would be the stipulated equivalent of char-
acterizing it as that which could be the common descriptive
component of a seeing that something is red, and the corre-
sponding qualitative and existential lookings. This would give
us a predicate by which to describe and report the experience,
but we should, of course, be only verbally better off than if
we could only refer to this kind of experience as the kind which
could be the common descriptive component of a seeing and
a qualitative or existential looking. And this makes it clear

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
55
that one way of putting what we are after is by saying that
we want to have a name for this kind of experience which is
truly a name, and not just shorthand for a definite description.
Does ordinary usage have a name for this kind of experience?
I shall return to this quest in a moment. In the meantime
it is important to clear the way of a traditional obstacle to
understanding the status of such things as sensations of red
triangles. Thus, suppose I were to say that while the experi-
ence I am examining is not a red experience, it is an experi-
ence of red. I could expect the immediate challenge: "Is 'sen-
sation of a red triangle' any better off than 'red and triangular
experience"? Does not the existence of a sensation of a red
triangle entail the existence of a red and triangular item, and
hence, always on the assumption that red is a property of physical
objecto, of a red and triangular physical object? Must you not,
therefore abandon this assumption, and return to the frame-
work of sense contents which you have so far refused to do?"
One way out of dilemma would be to assimilate "Jones
has a sensation of a red triangle" to "Jones believes in a
divine Huntress." For the truth of the latter does not, of
course, entail the existence of a divine Huntress. Now, I
think that most contemporary philosophers are clear that it
is possible to attribute to the context
.. sensation of ...
the logical property of being such that "There is a sensation
of a red triangle" does not entail "There is a red triangle"
without assimilating the context "
... sensation of..." to the
context "... believes in ..." in any closer way. For while
mentalistic verbs characteristically provide nonextensional
contexts (when they are not "achievement" or "endorsing"
words), not all nonextensional contexts are mentalistic. Thus,
as far as the purely logical point is concerned, there is no

56
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
reason why "Jones has a sensation of a red triangle" should
be assimilated to "Jones believes in a divine Huntress"
rather
than to "It is possible that the moon is made of green cheese"
or to any of the other nonextensional contexts familiar to
logicians. Indeed there is no reason why it should be assimi-
lated to any of these. "
... sensation of ..." or "... impres-
sion of...
" could be a context which, though sharing with
these others the logical property of nonextensionality, was
otherwise in a class by itself.
25. Yet there is no doubt but that bistorically the contexts
"... sensation of ..." and "... impression of ..." were
assimilated to such mentalistic contexts as "... believes ...,"
"... desires...,""... chooses ...,"
in short to contexts
which are either themselves 'propositional attitudes' or in-
volve propositional attitudes in their analysis. This assimila-
tion took the form of classifying sensations with ideas or
thoughts. Thus Descartes uses the word "thought" to cover
not only judgments, inferences, desires, volitions, and (occurrent)
ideas of abstract qualities, but also sensationa, feelings, and imaged.
Locke, in the same spirit, uses the term "idea" with similar
scope. The apparatus of Conceptualism, which had its gene-
sis in the controversy over universals, was given a corre-
spondingly wide application. Just as objects and situations
were said to have 'objective being' in our thoughts, when we
think of them, or judge them to obtain —as contrasted with
the "subjective' or 'formal being' which they have in the
world-so, when we have a sensation of a red triangle, the
red triangle was supposed to have 'objective being' in our
sensation.
In elaborating, for a moment, this conceptualistic interpre-
tation of sensation, let me refer to that which has 'objective
being' in a thought or idea as its content or inmanent object. Then
I can say that the fundamental difference between occurrent

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
57
abstract ideas and sensations, for both Locke and Descartes,
lay in the specificity and, above all, the complevity of the
content of the latter. (Indeed, both Descartes and Locke
assimilated the contrast between the simple and the complex
in ideas to that between the generic and the specific.) Des-
cartes thinks of sensations as confused thoughts of their
external cause; Spinoza of sensations and images as confused
thoughts of bodily states, and still more confused thoughts
of the external causes of these bodily states. And it is inter-
esting to note that the conceptualistic thesis that abstract
entities have only eude intentionale (their ede is concipi) is
extended by Descartes and, with less awareness of what he
is doing, Locke, to include the thesis that colors, sounds, etc.,
exist "only in the mind" (their ease is percipi) and by Berkeley
to cover all perceptible qualities.
Now, I think we would all agree, today, that this assimi-
lation of sensations to thoughts is a mistake. It is sufficient
to note that if "sensation of a red triangle" had the sense of
"episode of the kind which is the common descriptive com-
ponent of those experiences which would be cases of seeing
that the facing surface of a physical object is red and trian-
gular if an object were presenting a red and triangular facing
surface" then it would have the nonextensionality the notic-
ing of which led to this mistaken assimilation. But while we
have indeed escaped from this blind alley, it is small conso-
lation. For we are no further along in the search for a 'direct'
or 'intrinsic' characterization of 'immediate experience.'
VI. Impressions and Ideas: A Historical Point
26. There are those who will say that although I have spoken
of exploring blind alleys, it is really I who am blind. For, they
will say, if that which we wish to characterize intrinsically is

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
an experience, then there can be no puzzle about knowing what
kind of experience it is, though there may be a problem about
how this knowledge is to be communicated to others. And,
indeed, it is tempting to suppose that if we should happen, at
a certain stage of our intellectual development, to be able to
classify an experience only as of the kind which could be com-
mon to a seeing and corresponding qualitative and existential
lookings, all we would have to do to acquire a 'direct desig-
nation' for this kind of experience would be to pitch in,
'examine' it, locate the kind which it exemplifies and which
satisfies the above description, name it — say "$" —and, in full
possession of the concept of $, classify such experiences,
from now on, as $ experiences.
At this point, it is clear, the concept—or, as I have put it,
the myth—of the given is being invoked to explain the pos-
sibility of a direct account of immediate experience. The
myth insists that what I have been treating as one problem
really subdivides into two, one of which is really no problem
at all, while the other may have no solution. These problems
are, respectively
(1) How do we become aware of an immediate experi-
ence as of one sort, and of a simultaneous immedi-
ate experience as of another sort?
(2) How can I know that the labels I attach to the sorts
to which my immediate experiences belong, are at-
tached by you to the same sorts? May not the sort I
call "red" be the sort you call "green" - and so on
systematically throughout the spectrum?
We shall find that the second question, to be a philosophi-
cal perplexity, presupposes a certain answer to the first ques-
tion - indeed the answer given by the myth. And it is to this

EMPIRICISM AND THE PIILOSOPIIY OF MIND
59
first question that I now turn. Actually there are various
forms taken by the myth of the given in this connection,
depending on other philosophical commitments. but they
all have in common the idea that the awareness of cer-
tain sorts-and by "sorts" I have in mind, in the first in-
stance, determinate sense repeatables — is a primordial, non-
problematic feature of 'immediate experience.' In the context
of conceptualism, as we have seen, this idea took the form
of treating sensations as though they were absolutely specific,
and infinitely complicated, thougbt. And it is essential to
an understanding of the empiricist tradition to realize that
whereas the contemporary problem of universals primarily
concerns the status of repeatable determinate features of par-
ticular situations, and the contemporary problem of abstract
ideas is at least as much the problem of what it is to be aware
of determinate repeatables as of what it is to be aware of
determinable repeatables, Locke, Berkeley and, for that mat-
ter, Hume saw the problem of abstract ideas as the problem
of what it is to be aware of determinable repeatables. * Thus,
an examination of Locke's Esday makes it clear that he is
thinking of a sensation of white as the sort of thing that can
become an abstract idea (occurrent) of White-a thought
of White "in the Understanding" - merely by virtue of being
separated from the context of other sensations (and images)
which accompany it on a particular occasion. In other words,
for Locke an abstract (occurrent) idea of the determinate
repeatable Whiteness is nothing more than an isolated image
of white, which, in turn, differs from a sensation of white only
(to use a modern turn of phrase) by being
"centrally
aroused."
›ocke, Berkeley, and Hume, '
• For a systematic laboratoreader should contut lollowing interpretation of

60
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
In short, for Locke, the problem of how we come to be
aware of determinate sense repeatables is no problem at all.
Merely by virtue of having sensations and images we have
this awareness. His problem of abstract ideas is the problem
of how we come to be able to think of generic properties.
And, as is clear from the Essay, he approaches the problem
in terms of what might be called an "adjunctive theory of
specification," that is, the view that (if we represent the idea
of a determinable as the idea of being A) the idea of a determi-
nate form of A can be represented as the idea of being A and B.
It is, of course, notorious that this won't account for the
relation of the idea of being red to the idea of being crimson. By
thinking of conjunction as the fundamental logical relation
involved in building up complex ideas from simple ones, and
as the principle of the difference between determinable and
determinate ideas, Locke precluded himself from giving even
a plausible account of the relation between ideas of deter-
minables and ideas of determinates. It is interesting to specu-
late what turn his thought might have taken had he admitted
disjunctive as well as conjunctive complex ideas, the idea of being
A or B alongside the idea of being A and B.
27. But my purpose here is not to develop a commentary
on the shortcomings of Locke's treatment of abstract ideas,
but to emphasize that something which is a problem for us
was not a problem for him. And it is therefore important to
note that the same is true of Berkeley. His problem was not,
as it is often construed, "How do we go from the awareness
of particulars to ideas of repeatables?" but rather "Granted that
in immediate experience we are aware of absolutely specifi
sense qualities, how do we come to be conscious of genera
pertaining to them, and in what does this consciousness
consist?" (This is not the only dimension of "abstraction" that

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
61
concerned him, but it is the one that is central to our pur-
pose.) And, contrary to the usual interpretation, the essential
difference between his account and Locke's consists in the
fact that whereas Locke was on the whole* committed to the
view that there can be an idea which is of the genus without
being of any of its species, Berkeley insists that we can have
an idea of a genus only by having an idea of the genus ar, to
borrow a useful Scotist term, 'contracted' into one of its species.
Roughly, Berkeley's contention is that if being A entails
being B, then there can be no such thing as an idea which is
of A without being of B. He infers that since being triangular
entails baving some determinately triangular sbape, there cannot
be an idea which is of triangle without being of some determi-
nately triangular shape. We can be aware of generic triangu-
larity only by having an idea which is of triangularity as
contracted' into one of the specific forms of triangularity.
Any of the latter will do; they are all "of the same sort."
" I say that Locke was "on the whole" committed to the view that there can be
an idea which is of the genus without being of any of its species, because while he
saw that it couldn't be of any one of the species to the exclusion of the others, and
saw no way of avoiding this except by making it of none of the species, he was
greatly puzzled by this, for he saw that in some sense the idea of the genus must be
of all the species. We have already noted that if he had admitted disjunction as a
principle of compounding ideas, he could have said that the idea of the genus is the
idea of the disjunction of all its species, that the idea of being triangular is the idea of
being scalene or inceled. As it was, he thought that to be of all the species it would
have to be the idea of being scalene and insceles, which is, of course, the idea of an
impossibility.
It is interesting to note that if Berkeley had faced up to the implications of the
criterion we shall find him to have adopted, this disjunctive conception of' the generic
idea is the one he would have been led to adopt. For since heing G-where 'G'
stands for a generic character-entails being Si or S2 or S3..... or So. -where
'Si' stands for a specific character falling under G- Berkeley should have taken as
the unit of ideas concerning triangles, the idea of the genus Triangle as differentiated
into the set of specific forms of triangularity. But, needless to say, if Berkeley bad
taken this step, he could not have thought of a sensation of crimson as a determinate
thought.

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
28. Now, a careful study of the Treatise makes it clear that
Hume is in the same boat as Berkeley and Locke, sharing
with them the presupposition that we have an unacquired
ability to be aware of determinate repeatables. It is often
said that whereas he begins the Treatise by characterizing
'ideas' in terms which do not distinguish between imaged and
thoughts, he corrects this deficiency in Book I, Part I, Section
vii. What these students of Hume tend to overlook is that
what Hume does in this later section is give an account not
of what it is to think of repeatabled whether determinable or
determinate, but of what it is to think of determinables, thus
of color as contrasted with particular shades of color. And
his account of the consciousness of determinables takes for
granted that we have a primordial ability to take account of
determinate repeatables. Thus, his later account is simply built
on, and in no sense a revision of, the account of ideas with
which he opens the Treatise.
How, then, does he differ from Berkeley and Locke? The
latter two had supposed that there must be such a thing as an
occurrent thought of a determinable, however much they dif-
fered in their account of such thoughts. Hume, on the other
hand, assuming that there are occurrent thoughts of determi-
nate repeatables, denies that there are occurrent thoughts of
determinables. I shall spare the reader the familiar details of
Hume's attempt to give a constructive account of our con-
sciousness of determinables, nor shall I criticize it. For my
point is that however much Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
differ on the problem of abstract ideas, they all take for
granted that the human mind has an innate ability to be
aware of certain determinate sorts —indeed, that we are aware
of them simply by virtue of baving servations and images.
29. Now, it takes but a small twist of Hume's position to
get a radically different view. For suppose that instead of

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
63
characterizing the initial elements of experience as impres-
sions of, e.g. red, Hume had characterized them as red particu-
lara (and I would be the last to deny that not only Hume,
but perhaps Berkeley and Locke as well, often treat impres-
sions or ideas of red as though they were red particulars) then
Hume's view, expanded to take into account determinates as
well as determinables, would become the view that all con-
sciousness of sorts or repeatables rests on an association of
words (e.g. "red") with classes of resembling particulars.
It clearly makes all the difference in the world how this
association is conceived. For if the formation of the associa-
tion involves not only the occurrence of resembling particu-
lars, but also the occurrence of the awareness that they are
resembling particulars, then the givenness of determinate kinds
or repeatables, say crimson, is merely being replaced by the
givenness of facts of the form t resembles y, and we are back
with an unacquired ability to be aware of repeatables, in this
case the repeatable resemblance. Even more obviously, if the
formation of the association involves not only the occurrence
of red particulars, but the awareness that they are red, then the
conceptualistic form of the myth has merely been replaced
by a realistic version, as in the classical sense-datum theory.
If, however, the association is not mediated by the aware-
ness of facts either of the form i resembles y, or of the form
it is $, then we have a view of the general type which I will
call paychological nominali, according to which all awareness
of sorte, resemblanced, facto, etc., in short, all awareness of
abstract entities —indeed, all awareness even of particulars -
is a linguistic affair. According to it, not even the awareness
of such sorts, resemblances, and facts as pertain to so-called
immediate experience is presupposed by the process of ac-
quiring the use of a language.
Two remarks are immediately relevant: (1) Although the

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
form of psychological nominalism which one gets by modi-
fying Humes view along the above lines has the essential
merit that it avoids the mistake of supposing that there are
pure episodes of being aware of sensory repeatables or sen-
sory facts, and is committed to the view that any event which
can be referred to in these terms must be, to use Ryle's
expression, a mongrel categorical-hypothetical, in particular,
a verbal episode as being the manifestation of associative connec-
tions of the word-object and word word types, it nevertheless is
impossibly crude and inadequate as an account of the sim-
plest concept. (2) Once sensations and images have been
purged of epistemic aboutness, the primary reason for sup-
posing that the fundamental associative tie between language
and the world must be between words and 'immediate expe-
riences' has disappeared, and the way is clear to recognizing
that basic word-world associations hold, for example, be-
tween "red" and red physical dejects, rather than between "red"
and a supposed class of private red particulars.
The second remark, it should be emphasized, does not
imply that private sensations or impressions may not be
essential to the formation of these associative connections.
For one can certainly admit that the tie between "red" and
red physical objects — which tie makes it possible for "red"
to mean the quality red - is caually mediated by sensations
of red without being committed to the mistaken idea that it
is "really" sensations of red, rather than red physical objects,
which are the primary denotation of the word "red."
Vil. The Logic of 'Means'
30. There is a source of the Myth of the Given to which even
philosophers who are suspicious of the whole idea of inner
episodes can fall prey. This is the fact that when we picture a

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
65
child-or a carrier of slabs-learning his first language, we,
of course, locate the language learner in a structured logical
space in which we are at home. Thus, we conceive of him
as a person (or, at least, a potential person) in a world
of physical objects, colored, producing sounds, existing in
Space and Time. But though it is we who are familiar with
this logical space, we run the danger, if we are not careful,
of picturing the language learner as having al initio some
degree of awareness - "pre-analytic," limited and fragmen-
tary though it may be —of this same logical space. We picture
his state as though it were rather like our own when placed
in a strange forest on a dark night. In other words, unless
we are careful, we can easily take for granted that the process
of teaching a child to use a language is that of teaching it to
discriminate elements within a logical space of particulars,
universals, facts, etc., of which it is already undiscriminat-
ingly aware, and to associate these discriminated elements
with verbal symbols. And this mistake is in principle the
same whether the logical space of which the child is supposed
to have this undiscriminating awareness is conceived by ult
to be that of physical objects or of private sense contents.
The real test of a theory of language lies not in its account
of what has been called (by H. H. Price) "thinking in ab-
sence," but in its account of "thinking in presence" — that is
to say, its account of those occasions on which the funda-
mental connection of language with nonlinguistic fact is ex-
hibited. And many theories which look like psychological
nominalism when one views their account of thinking in
absence, turn out to be quite "Augustinian" when the scalpel
is turned to their account of thinking in presence.
31. Now, the friendly use I have been making of the phrase
"psychological nominalism" may suggest that I am about to
equate concepts with words, and thinking, in so far as it is

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
episodic, with verbal episodes. I must now hasten to say that
I shall do nothing of the sort, or, at least, that if I do do
something of the sort, the view I shall shortly be developing
is only in a relatively Pickwickian sense an equation of
thinking with the use of language. I wish to emphasize,
therefore, that as I am using the term, the primary connota-
tion of "psychological nominalism" is the denial that there is
any awareness of logical space prior to, or independent of,
the acquisition of a language.
However, although I shall later be distinguishing between
thoughts and their verbal expression, there is a point of funda-
mental importance which is best made before more subtle
distinctions are drawn. To begin with, it is perfectly clear
that the word "red" would not be a predicate if it didn't have
the logical syntax characteristic of predicates. Nor would it
be the predicate it is, unless, in certain frames of mind, at
least, we tended to respond to red objects in standard cir-
cumstances with something having the force of "This is red."
And once we have abandoned the idea that learning to use
the word "red" involves antecedent episodes of the awareness
of redness-not to be confused, of course, with sensations of
red —there is a temptation to suppose that the word "red"
means the quality red by virtue of these two facts: briefly, the
fact that it has the syntar of a predicate, and the fact that it
is a response (in certain circumstances) to red objects.
But this account of the meaningfulness of "red," which
Price has correctly stigmatized as the "thermometer view,"
would have little plausibility if it were not reinforced by
another line of thought which takes its point of departure
from the superficial resemblance of
(In German) "rot" means red

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
67
to such relational statements as
Cowley adjoins Oxford.
For once one assimilates the form
"..." means - - -
to the form
× Ry
and thus takes it for granted that meaning is a relation
between a word and a nonverbal entity, it is tempting to
suppose that the relation in question is that of association.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that statements of the
form "'
: means - - -"
are not relational statements, and that
while it is indeed the case that the word "rot" could not mean
the quality red unless it were associated with red things, it
would be misleading to say that the semantical statement
"Rot' means red" says of "rot" that it associated with red
things. For this would suggest that the semantical statement
is, so to speak, definitional shorthand for a longer statement
about the associative connections of "rat," which is not the
case. The rubric "'
..! means - .." is a linguistic device for
conveying the information that a mentioned word, in this case
"rot," plays the same role in a certain linguistic economy, in
this case the linguistic economy of German-speaking peoples,
as does the word "red," which is not mentioned but wed - used
in a unique way; exhibited, so to speak -and which occurs
"on the right-hand side" of the semantical statement.
We see, therefore, how the two statements
"Und" means and
and
"Rot" means red

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
can tell us quite different things about "und" and "rat," for
the first conveys the information that "und" plays the purely
formal role of a certain logical connective, the second that
"rat" plays in German the role of the observation word
"red"-in spite of the fact that means has the same sense in
each statement, and without having to say that the first says
of "und" that it stands in "the meaning relation" to Conjunc-
tion, or the second that "rot" stands in "the meaning relation"
to Redness. *
These considerations make it clear that nothing whatever
can be inferred about the complexity of the role played by
the word "red" or about the exact way in which the word
"red" is related to red things, from the truth of the semantical
statement "'red' means the quality red." And no considera-
tion arising from the 'Fido'-Fido aspect of the grammar of
"means"
precludes one from claiming that the role of the
word "red" by virtue of which it can correctly be said to have
the meaning it does is a complicated one indeed, and that
one cannot understand the meaning of the word "red" -
"know what redness is" - unless one has a great deal of
knowledge which classical empiricism would have held to
have a purely contingent relationship with the possession of
fundamental empirical concepts.
VIll. Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?
32. 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 nonin-
ferentially known to be the case, but presupposes no other
• For an analysis of'the problem of abstract entities built on this interpretation
of semantical statements, see (20).

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
69
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 pre-supposing 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 knowl-
edge' 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 involved 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

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
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 observation,
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 charac-
teristically, though not necessarily or without exception, in-
volve those so-called token-reflexive expressions which, in
addition to the tenses of verbs, serve to connect the circum-
stances in which a statement is made with its sense. (At this
point it will be helpful to begin putting the line of thought I
am developing in terms of the fact-stating and observation-
reporting roles of certain sentences.) Roughly, two verbal per-
formances which are tokens of a non-token-reflexive sentence
can occur in widely different circumstances and yet make the
same statement; whereas two tokens of a token-reflexive sen-
tence can make the same statement only if they are uttered
in the same circumstances (according to a relevant criterion
of sameness). And two tokens of a sentence, whether it con-
tains a token-reflexive expression —over and above a tensed
verb-or not, can make the same report only if, made in all
candor, they express the presence-in some sense of "pres-
ence" - of the state of affairs that is being reported; if, that is,
they stand in that relation to the state of affairs, whatever the
relation may be, by virtue of which they can be said to
formulate observations of it.
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

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
71
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 credi-
bility.
Now, the credibility of some sentence types appears to be
intrinic—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 author-
ity of sentence types.
The picture we get is that of their being two ultimate modes
of credibility: (I) The intrinsic credibility of analytic sen-
tences, which accrues to tokens as being tokens of such a
type; (2) the credibility of such tokens as "express observa-
tions," a credibility which flows from tokens to types.
33. 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 "obser-

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
vation 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 ana-
lytic 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 "cor-
rectly 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 ordi-
nary 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"
has acquired a technical use in which a sentence token can
play a reporting role (a) without being an overt verbal per-
formance, 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" — in fora interna-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 as-
sume 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 action..
(3) My third comment is that if the expression "following

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
73
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"-then it is the knowledge or belief that the circum-
stances are of a certain kind, and not the mere fact that they
are of this kind, which contributes to bringing about the
action.
34. In the light of these remarks it is clear that if observa-
tion reports are construed as actions, if their correctness is
interpreted as the correctness of an action, and if the authority
of an observation report is construed as the fact that making
it is "following a rule" in the proper sense of this phrase, then
we are face to face with givenness in its most straightforward
form. For these stipulations commit one to the idea that
the authority of Konstatierungen rests on nonverbal episodes
of awareness —awareness that something is the case, eg.
that this is green — which nonverbal episodes have an intrinsic
authority (they are, so to speak 'self-authenticating) which
the verbal performances (the Konstatierungen) properly per-
formed "express." One is committed to a stratum of authori-
tative nonverbal episodes ("awareness") the authority of
which accrues to a superstructure of verbal actiond, provided
that the expressions occurring in these actions are properly
uded. These self-authenticating episodes would constitute the
tortoise on which stands the elephant on which rests the
edifice of empirical knowledge. The essence of the view is
the same whether these intrinsically authoritative episodes
are such items as the awareness that a certain sense content
is green or such items as the awareness that a certain physical
object looks to someone to be green.
35. But what is the alternative? We might begin by trying
something like the following: An overt or covert token of

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
"This is green" in the presence of a green item is a Konsta-
tierung and expresses observational knowledge if and only if
it is a manifestation of a tendency to produce overt or covert
tokens of "This is green" —given a certain set - if and only if
a green object is being looked at in standard conditions.
Clearly on this interpretation the occurrence of such tokens
of "This is green" would be "following a rule" only in the
sense that they are instances of a uniformity, a uniformity
differing from the lightning-thunder case in that it is an
acquired causal characteristic of the language user. Clearly
the above suggestion, which corresponds to the "thermome-
ter view" criticized by Professor Price, and which we have
already rejected, won't do as it stands. Let us see, however,
if it can't be revised to fit the criteria I have been using for
"expressing observational knowledge."
The first hurdle to be jumped concerns the authority which,
as I have emphasized, a sentence token must have in order
that it may be said to express knowledge. Clearly, on this
account the only thing that can remotely be supposed to
constitute such authority is the fact that one can infer the
presence of a green object from the fact that someone makes
this report. As we have already noticed, the correctness of a
report does not have to be construed as the rightness of an
action. A report can be correct as being an instance of a
general mode of behavior which, in a given linguistic com-
munity, it is reasonable to sanction and support.
The second hurdle is, however, the decisive one. For we
have seen that to be the expression of knowledge, a report
must not only have authority, this authority must in some sense
be recognized by the person whose report it is. And this is
a steep hurdle indeed. For if the authority of the report "This
is green" lies in the fact that the existence of green items

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
75
appropriately related to the perceiver can be inferred from
the occurrence of such reports, it follows that only a person
who is able to draw this inference, and therefore who has
not only the concept green, but also the concept of uttering
"This is green" - indeed, the concept of certain conditions of
perception, those which would correctly be called 'standard
conditions'-could be in a position to token "This is green"
in recognition of its authority. In other words, for a Konsta-
tierung "This is green" to "express observational knowledge,"
not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a
green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must
know that tokens of "This is green" are symptoms of the
presence of green objects in conditions which are standard
for visual perception.
36. Now it might be thought that there is something
obviously absurd in the idea that before a token uttered by,
say, Jones could be the expression of observational knowl-
edge, Jones would have to know that overt verbal episodes
of this kind are reliable indicators of the existence, suitably
related to the speaker, of green objects. I do not think that
it is. Indeed, I think that something very like it is true. The
point I wish to make now, however, is that if it is true, then
it follows, as a matter of simple logic, that one couldn't have
observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many
other things as well. And let me emphasize that the point is
not taken care of by distinguishing between knowing bow and
knowing that, and admitting that observational knowledge
requires a lot of "know how." For the point is specifically
that observational knowledge of any particular fact, e.g. that
this is green, presupposes that one knows general facts of the
form X is a relialle symptom of Y. And to admit this requires
an abandonment of the traditional empiricist idea that obser-

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
vational knowledge "stands on its own feet." Indeed, the
suggestion would be anathema to traditional empiricists for
the obvious reason that by making observational knowledge
presuppose knowledge of general facts of the form Xis a reliable
symptom of Y, it runs counter to the idea that we come to
know general facts of this form only after we have come to
know by observation a number of particular facts which
support the hypothesis that X is a symptom of Y.
And it might be thought that there is an obvious regress
in the view we are examining. Does it not tell us that obser-
vational knowledge at time t presupposes knowledge of the
form X is a reliable symptom of Y, which presupposes priar
observational knowledge, which presupposes other knowl-
edge of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y, which presup-
poses still other, and prior, observational knowledge, and so
on? This charge, however, rests on too simple, indeed a
radically mistaken, conception of what one is saying of Jones
when one says that he knows that p. It is not just that the
objection supposes that knowing is an episode; for clearly
there are episodes which we can correctly characterize as
knowings, in particular, observing. The essential point is that
in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we
are not giving an empirical description of that episode or
state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of
justifying and being able to justify what one says.
37. Thus, all that the view I am defending requires is that
no tokening by S now of "This is green" is to count as
"expressing observational knowledge" unless it is also correct
to say of S that he now knows the appropriate fact of the
form X is a reliable symptom of Y, namely that (and again I
oversimplify) utterances of "This is green"
are reliable indi-
cators of the presence of green objects in standard conditions

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
77
of perception. And while the correctness of this statement
about Jones requires that Jones could now cite prior particu-
lar facts as evidence for the idea that these utterances are
reliable indicators, it requires only that it is correct to say
that Jones now knows, thus remembers, that these particular
facts did obtain. It does not require that it be correct to say
that at the time these facts did obtain he then knew them to
obtain. And the regress disappears.
Thus, while Jones' ability to give inductive reasons today
is built on a long history of acquiring and manifesting verbal
habits in perceptual situations, and, in particular, the occur-
rence of verbal episodes, e.g. "This is green," which is su-
perficially like those which are later properly said to express
observational knowledge, it does not require that any episode
in this prior time be characterizeable as expressing knowl-
edge. (At this point, the reader should reread Section 19
above.)
38. The idea that observation "strictly and properly so-
called" is constituted by certain self-authenticating nonver-
bal episodes, the authority of which is transmitted to verbal
and quasi-verbal performances when these performances are
made "in conformity with the semantical rules of the lan-
guage," is, of course, the heart of the Myth of the Given. For
the given, in epistemological tradition, is what is taken by these
self-authenticating episodes. These 'takings' are, so to speak,
the unmoved movers of empirical knowledge, the 'knowings
in presence' which are presupposed by all other knowledge,
both the knowledge of general truths and the knowledge 'in
absence' of other particular matters of fact. Such is the
framework in which traditional empiricism makes its char-
acteristic claim that the perceptually given is the foundation
of empirical knowledge.

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Let me make it clear, however, that if I reject this frame-
work, it is not because I should deny that observings are
inner episodes, nor that strictly speaking they are nonverbal
episodes. It will be my contention, however, that the sense
in which they are nonverbal-which is also the sense in
which thought episodes are nonverbal —is one which gives
no aid or comfort to epistemological givenness. In the con-
cluding sections of this paper, I shall attempt to explicate the
logic of inner episodes, and show that we can distinguish
between observations and thoughts, on the one hand, and
their verbal expression on the other, without making the
mistakes of traditional dualism. I shall also attempt to expli-
cate the logical status of impressions or immediate experiences,
and thus bring to a successful conclusion the quest with
which my argument began.
One final remark before 1 begin this task. If I reject the
framework of traditional empiricism, it is not because I want
to say that empirical knowledge has no foundation. For to
put it this way is to suggest that it is really "empirical
knowledge so-called," and to put it in a box with rumors and
hoaxes. There is clearly some point to the picture of human
knowledge as resting on a level of propositions —observation
reports —which do not rest on other propositions in the same
way as other propositions rest on them. On the other hand,
I do wish to insist that the metaphor of "foundation" is
misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a
logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest
on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in
which the latter rest on the former.
Above all, the picture is misleading because of its static
character. One seems forced to choose between the picture
of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
79
tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of
knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?).
Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisti-
cated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a
foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which
can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.
IX. Science and Ordinary Usage
39. There are many strange and exotic specimens in the
gardens of philosophy: Epistemology, Ontology, Cosmology,
to name but a few. And clearly there is much good sense -
not only rhyme but reason -to these labels. It is not my
purpose, however, to animadvert on the botanizing of phi-
losophies and things philosophical, other than to call atten-
tion to a recent addition to the list of philosophical flora and
fauna, the Philosophy of Science. Nor shall I attempt to
locate this new specialty in a classificatory system. The point
I wish to make, however, can be introduced by calling to
mind the fact that classificatory schemes, however theoretical
their purpose, have practical consequences: nominal causes,
so to speak, have real effects. As long as there was no such
subject as 'philosophy of science,' all students of philosophy
felt obligated to keep at least one eye part of the time on both
the methodological and the substantive aspects of the scien-
tific enterprise. And if the result was often a confusion of the
task of philosophy with the task of science, and almost
equally often a projection of the framework of the latest
scientific speculations into the common-sense picture of the
world (witness the almost unquestioned assumption, today,
that the common-sense world of physical objects in Space
and Time must be analyzable into spatially and temporally, or

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
even spatiotemporally, related eventi), at least it had the merit
of ensuring that reflection on the nature and implications of
scientific discourse was an integral and vital part of philo-
sophical thinking generally. But now that philosophy of sci-
ence has nominal as well as real existence, there has arisen
the temptation to leave it to the specialists, and to confuse
the sound idea that philosophy is not science with the mis-
taken idea that philosophy is independent of science.
40. As long as discourse was viewed as a map, subdivided
into a side-by-side of sub-maps, each representing a sub-
region in a side-by-side of regions making up the total subject
matter of discourse, and as long as the task of the philosopher
was conceived to be the piecemeal one of analysis in the sense
of defunition - the task, so to speak, of "making little ones out
of big ones"— one could view with equanimity the existence
of philosophical specialists —specialists in formal and mathe-
matical logic, in perception, in moral philosophy, etc. For if
discourse were as represented above, where would be the
harm of each man fencing himself off in his own garden? In
spite, however, of the persistence of the slogan "
philosophy
is analysis," we now realize that the atomistic conception of
philosophy is a snare and a delusion. For "analysis" no longer
connotes the definition of terms, but rather the clarification
of the logical structure — in the broadest sense — of discourse,
and discourse no longer appears as one plane parallel to
another, but as a tangle of intersecting dimensions whose
relations with one another and with extra-linguistic fact con-
form to no single or simple pattern. No longer can the
philosopher interested in perception say "let him who is
interested in prescriptive discourse analyze its concepts and
leave me in peace." Most if not all philosophically interesting
concepts are caught up in more than one dimension of dis-

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
81
course, and while the atomism of early analysis has a healthy
successor in the contemporary stress on journeyman tactics,
the grand strategy of the philosophical enterprise is once
again directed toward that articulated and integrated vision
of man-in-the-universe —or, shall I say discourse-about-man-
in-all-discourse -which has traditionally been its goal.
But the moral I wish specifically to draw is that no longer
can one smugly say "Let the person who is interested in
scientific discourse analyze scientific discourse and let the
person who is interested in ordinary discourse analyze ordi-
nary discourse." Let me not be misunderstood. I am not
saying that in order to discern the logic-the polydimen-
sional logic-of ordinary discourse, it is necessary to make
use of the results or the methods of the sciences. Nor even
that, within limits, such a division of labor is not a sound
corollary of the journeyman's approach. My point is rather
that what we call the scientific enterprise is the flowering of
a dimension of discourse which already exists in what histo-
rians call the "prescientific stage," and that failure to under-
stand this type of discourse "writ large" - in science — may
lead, indeed, has often led to a failure to appreciate its role
in "ordinary usage," and, as a result, to a failure to under-
stand the full logic of even the most fundamental, the "sim-
plest" empirical terms.
41. Another point of equal importance. The procedures of
philosophical analysis as such may make no use of the meth-
ods or results of the sciences. But familiarity with the trend
of scientific thought is essential to the apprairal of the frame-
work categories of the common-sense picture of the world.
For if the line of thought embodied in the preceding para-
graphs is sound, if, that is to say, scientific discourse is but
a continuation of a dimension of discourse which has been

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present in human discourse from the very beginning, then
one would expect there to be a sense in which the scientific
picture of the world replaces the common-sense picture; a
sense in which the scientific account of "what there is" super-
seder the descriptive ontology of everyday life.
Here one must be cautious. For there is a right way and
a wrong way to make this point. Many years ago it used to
be confidently said that science has shown, for example, that
physical objects aren't really colored. Later it was pointed
out that if this is interpreted as the claim that the sentence
"Physical objects have colors" expresses an empirical propo-
sition which, though widely believed by common sense, has
been shown by science to be false, then, of course, this claim
is absurd. The idea that physical objects aren't colored can
make sense only as the (misleading) expression of one aspect
of a philosophical critique of the very framework of physical
objects located in Space and enduring through Time. In
short, "Physical objects aren't really colored" makes sense
only as a clumsy expression of the idea that there are no such
things as the colored physical objects of the common-sense
world, where this is interpreted, not as an empirical propo-
sition - like "There are no nonhuman featherless bipeds" -
within the common-sense frame, but as the expression of a
rejection (in some sense) of this very framework itself, in
favor of another built around different, if not unrelated,
categories. This rejection need not, of course, be a practical
rejection. It need not, that is, carry with it a proposal to
brain-wash existing populations and train them to speak
differently. And, of course, as long as the existing framework
is used, it will be incorrect to say - otherwise than to make a
philosophical point about the framework-that no object is
really colored, or is located in Space, or endures through

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
83
Time. But, speaking as a philoropher, 1 am quite prepared to say
that the common-sense world of physical objects in Space
and Time is unreal -that is, that there are no such things.
Or, to put it less paradoxically, that in the dimension of
describing and explaining the world, science is the measure
of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it
is not.
43. There is a widespread impression that reflection on
how we learn the language in which, in everyday life, we
describe the world, leads to the conclusion that the categories
of the common-sense picture of the world have, so to speak,
an unchallengeable authenticity. There are, of course, differ-
ent conceptions of just what this fundamental categorial
framework is. For some it is sense contents and phenomenal
relations between them; for others physical objects, persons,
and processes in Space and Time. But whatever their points
of difference, the philosophers I have in mind are united in
the conviction that what is called the "ostensive tie" between
our fundamental descriptive vocabulary and the world rules
out of court as utterly absurd any notion that there are no
such things as this framework talks about.
An integral part of this conviction is what I shall call (in
an extended sense) the positivestic conception of science, the idea
that the framework of theoretical objects (molecules, electro-
magnetic fields, etc.) and their relationships is, so to speak,
an auviliary framework. In its most explicit form, it is the
idea that theoretical objects and propositions concerning
them are "calculational devices," the value and status of
which consist in their systematizing and heuristic role with
respect to confirmable generalizations formulated in the
framework of terms which enjoy a direct ostensive link with
the world. One is tempted to put this by saying that accord-

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ing to these philosophers, the objects of ostensively linked
discourse behave as if and only as if they were bound up with
or consisted of scientific entities. But, of course, these phi-
losophers would hasten to point out (and rightly so) that
X behaves as if it consisted of Y's
makes sense only by contrast with
X behaves as it does because it does consist of Y's
whereas their contention is exactly that where the Y's are
scientifi objects, no such contrast makes sense.
The point I am making is that as long as one thinks that
there is a framework, whether of physical objects or of sense
contents, the absolute authenticity of which is guaranteed by
the fact that the learning of this framework involves an
"ostensive step," so long one will be tempted to think of the
authority of theoretical discourse as entirely derivative, that
of a calculational auxiliary, an effective heuristic device. It is
one of my prime purposes, in the following sections, to
convince the reader that this interpretation of the status of
the scientific picture of the world rests on two mistakes: (1)
a misunderstanding (which I have already exposed) of the
ostensive element in the learning and use of a language- the
Myth of the Given; (2) a reification of the metbodological
distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical discourse
into a substantive distinction between theoretical and non-
theoretical existence.
44. One way of summing up what I have been saying
above is by saying that there is a widespread impression
abroad, aided and abetted by a naive interpretation of con-
cept formation, that philosophers of science deal with a mode
of discourse which is, so to speak, a peninsular off shoot from

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85
the mainland of ordinary discourse. The study of scientific
discourse is conceived to be a worthy employment for those
who have the background and motivation to keep track of
it, but an employment which is fundamentally a hobby di-
vorced from the perplexities of the mainland. But, of course,
this summing up won't quite do. For all philosophers would
agree that no philosophy would be complete unless it re-
solved the perplexities which arise when one attempts to
think through the relationship of the framework of modern
science to ordinary discourse. My point, however, is not that
any one would reject the idea that this is a proper task for
philosophy, but that, by approaching the language in which
the plain man describes and explains empirical fact with the
presuppositions of givenned, they are led to a "resolution" of
these perplexities along the lines of what I have called the
positivistic or peninsular conception of scientific discourse -
a "resolution" which, I believe, is not only superficial, but
positively mistaken.
X. Private Episodes: The Problem
45. Let us now return, after a long absence, to the problem
of how the similarity among the experiences of seeing that an
deject over there is red, its looking to one that an object over there is
red (when in point of fact it is not red) and its looking to one
au though there were a red object over there (when in fact there is
notbing over there at all) is to be understood. Part of this
similarity, we saw, consists in the fact that they all involve
the idea —the proposition, if you please — that the object over
there is red. But over and above this there is, of course, the
aspect which many philosophers have attempted to clarify by
the notion of impresions or immediate experience.

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It was pointed out in Sections 21 ff. above that there are
prima facie two ways in which facts of the form a merely looks
red might be explained, in addition to the kind of explanation
which is based on empirical generalizations relating the color
of objects, the circumstances in which they are seen, and
the colors they look to have. These two ways are (a) the
introduction of impressions or immediate experiences as
theoretical entities; and (b) the discovery, on scrutinizing these
situations, that they contain impressions or immediate expe-
riences as components. I called attention to the paradoxical
character of the first of these alternatives, and refused, at that
time, to take it seriously. But in the meantime the second
alternative, involving as it does the Myth of the Given, has
turned out to be no more satisfactory.
For, in the first place, how are these impressions to be
described, if not by using such words as "red" and "triangu-
lar." Yet, if my argument, to date, is sound, physical objects
alone can be literally red and triangular. Thus, in the cases
I am considering, there is nothing to be red and triangular.
It would seem to follow that "impression of a red triangle"
could mean nothing more than "impression of the sort which
is common to those experiences in which we either see that
something is red and triangular, or something merely looks
red and triangular or there merely looks to be a red and
triangular object over there." And if we can never charac-
terize "impressions" intrinsically, but only by what is logically
a definite description, i.e., du the kind of entity which is common
to such situations, then we would scarcely seem to be any
better off than if we maintained that talk about "impressions"
is a notational convenience, a code, for the language in which
we speak of how things look and what there looks to be.
And this line of thought is reinforced by the consideration

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87
that once we give up the idea that we begin our sojourn in
this world with any -even a vague, fragmentary, and undis-
criminating —awareness of the logical space of particulars,
kinds, facts, and resemblances, and recognize that even such
"simple" concepts as those of colors are the fruit of a long
process of publicly reinforced responses to public objects
(including verbal performances) in public situations, we may
well be puzzled as to how, even if there are such things as
impressions or sensations, we could come to know that there
are, and to know what sort of thing they are. For we now
recognize that instead of coming to have a concept of something
because we have noticed that sort of thing, to have the ability to notice
a vart of thing is already to have the concept of that sort of thing, and
cannot account for it.
Indeed, once we think this line of reasoning through, we
are struck by the fact that if it is sound, we are faced not
only with the question "How could we come to have the idea
of an "impression' or "sensation?'" but by the question "How
could we come to have the idea of something's looking red
to us, or," to get to the crux of the matter, "of seeing that
something is red?" In short, we are brought face to face with
the general problem of understanding how there can be inner
episodes-episodes, that is, which somehow combine privacy,
in that each of us has privileged access to his own, with
intersubjectivity, in that each of us can, in principle, know
about the other's. We might try to put this more linguistically
as the problem of how there can be a sentence (e.g. "S has
a toothache") of which it is logically true that whereas anyhody
can use it to state a fact, only one person, namely S himself,
can use it to make a report. But while this is a useful
formulation, it does not do justice to the supposedly episodic
character of the items in question. And that this is the heart

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of the puzzle is shown by the fact that many philosophers
who would not deny that there are short-term hypothetical
and mongrel hypothetical-categorical facts about behavior
which others can ascribe to us on behavioral evidence, but
which only we can report, have found it to be logical nonsense
to speak of non-behavioral episode of which this is true. Thus,
it has been claimed by Ryle (17) that the very idea that there
are such episodes is a category mistake, while others have
argued that though there are such episodes, they cannot be
characterized in intersubjective discourse, learned as it is in
a context of public objects and in the 'academy' of one's
linguistic peers. It is my purpose to argue that both these
contentions are quite mistaken, and that not only are inner
episodes not category mistakes, they are quite "effable" in
intersubjective discourse. And it is my purpose to show,
positively, bow this can be the case. I am particularly con-
cerned to make this point in connection with such inner
episodes as sensations and feelings, in short, with what has —
unfortunately, I think -been called "immediate experience."
For such an account is necessary to round off this examina-
tion of the Myth of the Given. But before I can come to grips
with these topics, the way must be prepared by a discussion
of inner episodes of quite another kind, namely tboughts.
XI. Thoughts: The Classical View
46. Recent empiricism has been of two minds about the status
of thought. On the one hand, it has resonated to the idea that
insofar as there are episoder which are thoughts, they are verbal
or linguistic episodes. Clearly, however, even if candid overt
verbal behaviors by people who had learned a language were
thoughts, there are not nearly enough of them to account for

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89
all the cases in which it would be argued that a person was
thinking. Nor can we plausibly suppose that the remainder
is accounted for by those inner episodes which are often very
clumsily lumped together under the heading "verbal im-
agery."
On the other hand, they have been tempted to suppose
that the episodes which are referred to by verbs pertaining to
thinking include all forms of "intelligent behavior," verbal as
well as nonverbal, and that the "thought episodes" which are
supposed to be manifested by these behaviors are not really
episodes at all, but rather hypothetical and mongrel hypo-
thetical-categorical facts about these and still other behav-
iors. This, however, runs into the difficulty that whenever we
try to explain what we mean by calling a piece of nonbalitual
behavior intelligent, we seem to find it necessary to do so
in terms of thinking. The uncomfortable feeling will not be
downed that the dispositional account of thoughts in terms
of intelligent behavior is covertly circular.
47. Now the classical tradition claimed that there is a
family of episodes, neither overt verbal behavior nor verbal
imagery, which are thoughta, and that both overt verbal be-
havior and verbal imagery owe their meaningfulness to the
fact that they stand to these thoughts in the unique relation
of "expressing" them. These episodes are introspectable. In-
deed, it was usually believed that they could not occur with-
out being known to occur. But this can be traced to a number
of confusions, perhaps the most important of which was the
idea that thoughts belong in the same general category as
sensations, images, tickles, itches, etc. This mis-assimilation
of thoughts to sensations and feelings was equally, as we saw
in Sections 26 ff. above, a mis-assimilation of sensations and
feelings to thoughts, and a falsification of both. The assump-

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tion that if there are thought episodes, they must be imme-
diate experiences is common both to those who propounded
the classical view and to those who reject it, saying that they
"find no such experiences." If we purge the classical tradi-
tion of these confusions, it becomes the idea that to each of
us belongs a stream of episodes, not themselves immedi-
ate experiences, to which we have privileged, but by no
means either invariable or infallible, access. These episodes
can occur without being "expressed" by overt verbal behav-
ior, though verbal behavior is—in an important sense — their
natural fruition. Again, we can "hear ourselves think," but
the verbal imagery which enables us to do this is no more
the thinking itself than is the overt verbal behavior by which
it is expressed and communicated to others. It is a mistake
to suppose that we must be having verbal imagery -indeed,
any imagery -when we "know what we are thinking" -in
short, to suppose that "privileged access" must be construed
on a perceptual or quasi-perceptual model.
Now, it is my purpose to defend such a revised classical
analysis of our common-sense conception of thoughts, and
in the course of doing so I shall develop distinctions which
will later contribute to a resolution, in principle, of the puzzle
of immediate experience. But before I continue, let me hasten
to add that it will turn out that the view I am about to
expound could, with equal appropriateness, be represented
as a modified form of the view that thoughts are linguistic
episodes.
XII. Our Rylean Ancestors
48. But, the reader may well ask, in what sense can these
episodes be "inner" if they are not immediate experiences?

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91
and in what sense can they be "linguistic" if they are neither
overt linguistic performances, nor verbal imagery "in foro
interno"? I am going to answer these and the other questions
I have been raising by making a myth of my own, or, to give
it an air of up-to-date respectability, by writing a piece of
science fiction - anthropological science fiction. Imagine a
stage in pre-history in which humans are limited to what I
shall call a Rylean language, a language of which the funda-
mental descriptive vocabulary speaks of public properties
of public objects located in Space and enduring through
Time. Let me hasten to add that it is also Rylean in that
although its basic resources are limited (how limited I shall
be discussing in a moment), its total expressive power is very
great. For it makes subtle use not only of the elementary
logical operations of conjunction, disjunction, negation, and
quantification, but especially of the subjunctive conditional.
Furthermore, 1 shall suppose it to be characterized by the
presence of the looser logical relations typical of ordinary
discourse which are referred to by philosophers under the
headings "vagueness" and "open texture."
I am beginning my myth in medias red with humans who
have already mastered a Rylean language, because the philo-
sophical situation it is designed to clarify is one in which we
are not puzzled by how people acquire a language for refer-
ring to public properties of public objects, but are very
puzzled indeed about how we learn to speak of inner epi-
sodes and immediate experiences.
There are, I suppose, still some philosophers who are
inclined to think that by allowing these mythical ancestors
of ours the use ad libitum of subjunctive conditionals, we
have, in effect, enabled them to say anything that we can say
when we speak of thoughts, experienced (seeing, hearing, etc.),

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and immediate experiences. I doubt that there are many. In any
case, the story I am telling is designed to show exactly how
the idea that an intersubjective language must be Rylean rests
on too simple a picture of the relation of intersubjective
discourse to public objects.
49. The questions I am, in effect, raising are "What re-
sources would have to be added to the Rylean language of
these talking animals in order that they might come to rec-
ognize each other and themselves as animals that think, ol-
serve, and have feelings and sendations, as we use these terms?"
and "How could the addition of these resources be construed
as reasonable?" In the first place, the language would have
to be enriched with the fundamental resources of semantical
discourse - that is to say, the resources necessary for making
such characteristically semantical statements as "Rot' means
red," and "Der Mond ist rund' is true if and only if the moon
is round." It is sometimes said, e.g., by Carnap (6), that these
resources can be constructed out of the vocabulary of formal
logic, and that they would therefore already be contained, in
principle, in our Rylean language. I have criticized this idea
in another place (20) and shall not discuss it here. In any
event, a decision on this point is not essential to the argu-
ment.
Let it be granted, then, that these mythical ancestors of
ours are able to characterize each other's verbal behavior in
semantical terms; that, in other words, they not only can talk
about each other's predictions as causes and effects, and as
indicators (with greater or less reliability) of other verbal and
nonverbal states of affairs, but can also say of these verbal
productions that they mean thus and so, that they say that
such and such, that they are true, false, etc. And let me
emphasize, as was pointed out in Section 31 above, that to

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
93
make a semantical statement about a verbal event is not a
shorthand way of talking about its causes and effects, al-
though there is a sense of "imply" in which semantical state-
ments about verbal productions do imply information about
the causes and effects of these productions. Thus, when I say
"Es regnet' means it is raining," my statement "implies" that
the causes and effects of utterances of "Es regnet" beyond
the Rhine parallel the causes and effects of utterances of
"It is raining" by myself and other members of the English-
speaking community. And if it didn't imply this, it couldn't
perform its role. But this is not to say that semantical state-
ments are definitional shorthand for statements about the
causes and effects of verbal performances.
50. With the resources of semantical discourse, the lan-
guage of our fictional ancestors has acquired a dimension
which gives considerably more plausibility to the claim that
they are in a position to talk about thought just as we are.
For characteristic of thoughts is their intentionality, reference,
or aboutned, and it is clear that semantical talk about the
meaning or reference of verbal expressions has the same
structure as mentalistic discourse concerning what thoughts
are about. It is therefore all the more tempting to suppose
that the intentionality of thoughts can be traced to the appli-
cation of semantical categories to overt verbal performances,
and to suggest a modified Rylean account according to which
talk about so-called "thoughts" is shorthand for hypothetical
and mongrel categorical-hypothetical statements about overt
verbal and nonverbal behavior, and that talk about the inten-
tionality of these "episodes" is correspondingly reducible to
semantical talk about the verbal components.
What is the alternative? Classically it has been the idea
that not only are there overt verbal episodes which can be

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characterized in semantical terms, but, over and above these,
there are certain inner episodes which are properly charac-
terized by the traditional vocabulary of intentionality. And, of
course, the classical scheme includes the idea that semantical
discourse about overt verbal performances is to be analyzed
in terms of talk about the intentionality of the mental epi-
sodes which are "expressed" by these overt performances.
My immediate problem is to see if I can reconcile the classical
idea of thoughts as inner episodes which are neither overt
behavior nor verbal imagery and which are properly referred
to in terms of the vocabulary of intentionality, with the idea
that the categories of intentionality are, at bottom, semantical
categories pertaining to overt verbal performances.*
XIlI. Theories and Models
51. But what might these episodes be? And, in terms of our
science fiction, how might our ancestors have come to rec-
ognize their existence? The answer to these questions is
surprisingly straightforward, once the logical space of our
discussion is enlarged to include a distinction, central to the
philosophy of science, between the language of theory and the
language of observation. Although this distinction is a familiar
one, I shall take a few paragraphs to highlight those aspects
of the distinction which are of greatest relevance to our
problem.
Informally, to construct a theory is, in its most devel-
oped or sophisticated form, to postulate a domain of entities
which behave in certain ways set down by the fundamental
• An earlier attempt along these lines is to be found in (18) and (19).

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
95
principles of the theory, and to correlate-perhaps,
in a
certain sense to identify-complexes of these theoretical en-
tities with certain non-theoretical objects or situations; that
is to say, with objects or situations which are either matters
of observable fact or, in principle at least, describable in
observational terms. This "correlation" or "identification" of
theoretical with observational states of affairs is a tentative
one "until further notice," and amounts, so to speak, to
erecting temporary bridges which permit the passage from
sentences in observational discourse to sentences in the the-
ory, and vice versa. Thus, for example, in the kinetic theory
of gases, empirical statements of the form "Gas g at such and
such a place and time has such and such a volume, pressure,
and temperature" are correlated with theoretical statements
specifying certain statistical measures of populations of mole-
cules. These temporary bridges are so set up that inductively
established laws pertaining to gases, formulated in the lan-
guage of observable fact, are correlated with derived propo-
sitions or theorems in the language of the theory, and that
no proposition in the theory is correlated with a falsified
empirical generalization. Thus, a good theory (at least of the
type we are considering) "explains" established empirical
laws by deriving theoretical counterparts of these laws from
a small set of postulates relating to unobserved entities.
These remarks, of course, barely scratch the surface of the
problem of the status of theories in scientific discourse. And
no sooner have I made them, than I must hasten to qualify
them -almost beyond recognition. For while this by now
classical account of the nature of theories (one of the earlier
formulations of which is due to Norman Campbell (5), and
which is to be found more recently in the writings of Carnap

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
(8), Reichenbach (15, 16), Hempel (10), and Braithwaite
(3)) does throw light on the logical status of theories, it
emphasizes certain features at the expense of others. By
speaking of the construction of a theory as the elaboration
of a postulate system which is tentatively correlated with
observational discourse, it gives a highly artificial and unre-
alistic picture of what scientists have actually done in the
process of constructing theories. I don't wish to deny that
logically sophisticated scientists today might and perhaps, on
occasion, do proceed in true logistical style. I do, however,
wish to emphasize two points:
(1) The first is that the fundamental assumptions of a
theory are usually developed not by constructing uninter-
preted calculi which might correlate in the desired manner
with observational discourse, but rather by attempting to find
a model, i.e. to describe a domain of familiar objects behaving
in familiar ways such that we can see how the phenomena
to be explained would arise if they consisted of this sort of
thing. The essential thing about a model is that it is accom-
panied, so to speak, by a commentary which qualifies or
limite —but not precisely nor in all respects -the analogy
between the familiar objects and the entities which are being
introduced by the theory. It is the descriptions of the funda-
mental ways in which the objects in the model domain, thus
qualified, behave, which, transferred to the theoretical enti-
ties, correspond to the postulates of the logistical picture of
theory construction.
(2) But even more important for our purposes is the fact
that the logistical picture of theory construction obscures the
most important thing of all, namely that the process of de-
vising "theoretical" explanations of observable phenomena
did not spring full-blown from the head of modern science.

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97
In particular, it obscures the fact that not all common-sense
inductive inferences are of the form
All observed A's have been B, therefore (probably)
all A's are B.
or its statistical counterparts, and leads one mistakenly to
suppose that so-called "hypothetic-deductive" explanation is
limited to the sophisticated stages of science. The truth of the
matter, as I shall shortly be illustrating, is that science is
continuous with common sense, and the ways in which the
scientist seeks to explain empirical phenomena are refine-
ments of the ways in which plain men, however crudely and
schematically, have attempted to understand their environ-
ment and their fellow men since the dawn of intelligence. It
is this point which I wish to stress at the present time, for I
am going to argue that the distinction between theoretical
and observational discourse is involved in the logic of con-
cepts pertaining to inner episodes. I say "involved in" for it
would be paradoxical and, indeed, incorrect, to say that these
concepts are theoretical concepts.
52. Now I think it fair to say that some light has already
been thrown on the expression "inner episodes"; for while it
would indeed be a category mistake to suppose that the
inflammability of a piece of wood is, so to speak, a hidden
burning which becomes overt or manifest when the wood is
placed on the fire, not all the unobservable episodes we
suppose to go on in the world are the offspring of category
mistakes. Clearly it is by no means an illegitimate use of
"in" — though it is a use which has its own logical grammar -
to say, for example, that "in" the air around us there are
innumerable molecules which, in spite of the observable
stodginess of the air, are participating in a veritable turmoil

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
of episodes. Clearly, the sense in which these episodes are
"in" the air is to be explicated in terms of the sense in which
the air "is" a population of molecules, and this, in turn, in
terms of the logic of the relation between theoretical and
observational discourse.
I shall have more to say on this topic in a moment. In the
meantime, let us return to our mythical ancestors. It will not
surprise my readers to learn that the second stage in the
enrichment of their Rylean language is the addition of theo-
retical discourse. Thus we may suppose these language-using
animals to elaborate, without methodological sophistication,
crude, sketchy, and vague theories to explain why things
which are similar in their observable properties differ in their
causal properties, and things which are similar in their causal
properties differ in their observable properties.
XIV. Methodological versus Philosophical Behaviorism
53. But we are approaching the time for the central episode
in our myth. I want you to suppose that in this Neo-Rylean
culture there now appears a genius — let us call him Jones-
who is an unsung fore-runner of the movement in psychol-
ogy, once revolutionary, now commonplace, known as Be-
haviorism. Let me emphasize that what I have in mind is
Behaviorism as a methodological thesis, which I shall be
concerned to formulate. For the central and guiding theme
in the historical complex known by this term has been a
certain conception, or family of conceptions, of how to go
about building a science of psychology.
Philosophers have sometimes supposed that Behaviorists
are, as such, committed to the idea that our ordinary men-
talistic concepts are analyzable in terms of overt behavior. But

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99
although behaviorism has often been characterized by a cer-
tain metaphysical bias, it is not a thesis about the analys of
evisting psychological concepts, but one which concerns the
construction of new concepts. As a methodological thesis, it
involves no commitment whatever concerning the logical
analysis of common-sense mentalistic discourse, nor does it
involve a denial that each of us has a privileged access to our
state of mind, nor that these states of mind can properly be
described in terms of such common-sense concepts as believ-
ing, wondering, doubting, intending, wishing, inferring, etc.
If we permit ourselves to speak of this privileged access to
our states of mind as "introspection," avoiding the implication
that there is a "means" whereby we "see" what is going on
"inside," as we see external circumstances by the eye, then
we can say that Behaviorism, as I shall use the term, does
not deny that there is such a thing as introspection, nor that
it is, on some topics, at least, quite reliable. The essential
point about 'introspection' from the standpoint of Behavior-
ism is that we introspect in terma of common sense mentalisti
concepti. And while the Behaviorist admits, as anyone must,
that much knowledge is embodied in common-sense mental-
istic discourse, and that still more can be gained in the future
by formulating and testing hypotheses in terms of them, and
while he admits that it is perfectly legitimate to call such a
psychology "scientific," he proposes, for his own part, to
make no more than a heuristic use of mentalistic discourse,
and to construct his concepts "from scratch" in the course of
developing his own scientific account of the observable be-
havior of human organisms.
54. But while it is quite clear that scientific Behaviorism
is not the thesis that common-sense psychological concepts
are analyzable into concepts pertaining to overt behavior —a

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
thesis which has been maintained by some philosophers and
which may be called'
'analytical' or 'philosophical' Behavior-
ism — it is often thought that Behaviorism is committed to the
idea that the concepts of a behavioristic psychology must be
so analyzable, or, to put things right side up, that properly
introduced behavioristic concepts must be built by explicit
definition -in the broadest sense —from a basic vocabulary
pertaining to overt behavior. The Behaviorist would thus be
saying "Whether or not the mentalistic concepts of everyday
life are definable in terms of overt behavior, I shall ensure
that this is true of the concepts that I shall employ." And it
must be confessed that many behavioristically oriented psy-
chologists have believed themselves committed to this austere
program of concept formation.
Now I think it reasonable to say that, thus conceived, the
behavioristic program would be unduly restrictive. Certainly,
nothing in the nature of sound scientific procedure requires
this self-denial. Physics, the methodological sophistication
of which has so impressed —indeed, overly impressed - the
other sciences, does not lay down a corresponding restriction
on its concepts, nor has chemistry been built in terms of
concepts explicitly definable in terms of the observable prop-
erties and behavior of chemical substances. The point I am
making should now be clear. The behavioristic requirement
that all concepts should be introduced in terms of a basic
vocabulary pertaining to overt behavior is compatible with
the idea that some behavioristic concepts are to be intro-
duced as theoretical concepts.
55. It is essential to note that the theoretical terms of a
behavioristic psychology are not only not defined in terms of
overt behavior, they are also not defined in terms of nerves,
synapses, neural impulses, etc., etc. A behavioristic theory of

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101
behavior is not, as such, a physiological explanation of be-
havior. The ability of a framework of theoretical concepts
and propositions successfully to explain behavioral phenom-
ena is logically independent of the identification of these
theoretical concepts with concepts of neurophysiology. What
i true-and this is a logical point-is that each special
science dealing with some aspect of the human organism
operates within the frame of a certain regulative ideal, the
ideal of a coherent system in which the achievements of each
have an intelligible place. Thus, it is part of the Behaviorist's
business to keep an eye on the total picture of the human
organism which is beginning to emerge. And if the tendency
to premature identification is held in check, there may be
considerable heuristic value in speculative attempts at inte-
gration; though, until recently, at least, neurophysiological
speculations in behavior theory have not been particularly
fruitful. And while it is, I suppose, noncontroversial that
when the total scientific picture of man and his behavior is
in, it will involve some identification of concepts in behavior
theory with concepts pertaining to the functioning of ana-
tomical structures, it should not be assumed that behavior
theory is committed al initio to a physiological identification
of all its concepts, — that its concepts are, so to speak, physi-
ological from the start.
We have, in effect, been distinguishing between two di-
mensions of the logic (or 'methodologic') of theoretical terms:
(a) their role in explaining the selected phenomena of which
the theory is the theory; (b) their role as candidates for
integration in what we have called the "total picture." These
roles are equally part of the logic, and hence the "meaning."
of theoretical terms. Thus, at any one time the terms in a
theory will carry with them as part of their logical force that

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
which it is reasonable to envisage - whether schematically or
determinately —as the manner of their integration. However,
for the purposes of my argument, it will be useful to refer to
these two roles as though it were a matter of a distinction
between what I shall call pure theoretical concept, and hypothe-
ses concerning the relation of these concepts to concepts in
other specialties. What we can say is that the less a scientist
is in a position to conjecture about the way in which a certain
theory can be expected to integrate with other specialities,
the more the concepts of his theory approximate to the
status of pure theoretical concepts. To illustrate: We can
imagine that Chemistry developed a sophisticated and suc-
cessful theory to explain chemical phenomena before either
electrical or magnetic phenomena were noticed; and that
chemists developed as pure theoretical concepts, certain con-
cepts which it later became reasonable to identify with con-
cepts belonging to the framework of electromagnetic theory.
XV. The Logic of Private Episodes: Thoughts
56. With these all too sketchy remarks on Methodological
Behaviorism under our belts, let us return once again to our
fictional ancestors. We are now in a position to characterize
the original Rylean language in which they described them-
selves and their fellows as not only a behavioristic language,
but a behavioristic language which is restricted to the non-
tbeoretical vocabulary of a behavioristic psychology. Suppose,
now, that in the attempt to account for the fact that his
fellow men behave intelligently not only when their conduct
is threaded on a string of overt verbal episodes-that is
to say, as we would put it, when they "think out loud" - but
also when no detectable verbal output is present, Jones

EMPIRICISM AND THE PILOSOPHY OF MIND
103
develops a theory according to which overt utterances are but
the culmination of a process which begins with certain inner
episodes. And let ud suppose that his model for these episodes which
initiate the events which culminate in overt verbal behavior
is that of overt verbal bebavior itself. In other words, wing the
language of the model, the theory is to the effect that overt verbal
behavior is the culmination of a procede which begins with "inner
specib."
It is essential to bear in mind that what Jones means by
"inner speech" is not to be confused with verbal imagery. As
a matter of fact, Jones, like his fellows, does not as yet even
have the concept of an image.
It is easy to see the general lines a Jonesean theory will
take. According to it the true cause of intelligent nonhabitual
behavior is "inner speech." Thus, even when a hungry person
overtly says "Here is an edible object" and proceeds to eat
it, the true —theoretical —cause of his eating, given his hun-
ger, is not the overt utterance, but the "inner utterance of
this sentence."
57. The first thing to note about the Jonesean theory is
that, as built on the model of speech episodes, it carries over
to these inner episodes the applicability of semantical categories.
Thus, just as Jones has, like his fellows, been speaking of
overt utterances as meaning this or that, or being about this
or that, so he now speaks of these inner episodes as meaning
this or that, or being about this or that.
The second point to remember is that although Jones'
theory involves a model, it is not identical with it. Like all
theories formulated in terms of a model, it also includes a
commentary on the model; a commentary which places more
or less sharply drawn restrictions on the analogy between
the theoretical entities and the entities of the model. Thus,

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
while his theory talks of "inner speech," the commentary
hastens to add that, of course, the episodes in question are
not the wagging of a hidden tongue, nor are any sounds
produced by this "inner speech."
58. The general drift of my story should now be clear. I
shall therefore proceed to make the essential points quite
briefly:
(1) What we must suppose Jones to have developed is the
germ of a theory which permits many different develop-
ments. We must not pin it down to any of the more sophis-
ticated forms it takes in the hands of classical philosophers.
Thus, the theory need not be given a Socratic or Cartesian
form, according to which this "inner speech" is a function of
a separate substance; though primitive peoples may have had
good reason to suppose that humans consist of two separate
things.
(2) Let us suppose Jones to have called these discursive
entities thoughts. We can admit at once that the framework
of thoughts he has introduced is a framework of "unob-
served," "nonempirical" "inner" episodes. For we can point
out immediately that in these respects they are no worse off
than the particles and episodes of physical theory. For these
episodes are "in" language-using animals as molecular im-
pacts are "in" gases, not as "ghosts"
are in "machines." They
are "nonempirical" in the simple sense that they are theoreti-
cal —not definable in observational terms. Nor does the fact
that they are, a introduced, unobserved entities imply that
Jones could not have good reason for supposing them to
exist. Their "
'purity" is not a metaphysical purity, but, so to
speak, a metbodological purity. As we have seen, the fact that
they are not introduced as physiological entities does not
preclude the possibility that at a later methodological stage,

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
105
they may, so to speak, "turn out" to be such. Thus, there are
many who would say that it is already reasonable to suppose
that these tboughts are to be "identified" with complex events
in the cerebral cortex functioning along the lines of a calcu-
lating machine. Jones, of course, has no such idea.
(3) Although the theory postulates that overt discourse is
the culmination of a process which begins with "inner dis-
course," this should not be taken to mean that overt discourse
stands to "inner discourse" de voluntary movements stand to
intentions and motives. True, overt linguistic events can be
produced as means to ends. But serious errors creep into the
interpretation of both language and thought if one interprets
the idea that overt linguistic episodes epress thoughts, on the
model of the use of an instrument. Thus, it should be noted
that Jones' theory, as I have sketched it, is perfectly com-
patible with the idea that the ability to have thoughts is
acquired in the process of acquiring overt speech and that
only after overt speech is well established, can "inner speech"
occur without its overt culmination.
(4) Although the occurrence of overt speech episodes
which are characterizable in semantical terms is explained
by the theory in terms of thought which are aldo characterized
in semantical terms, this does not mean that the idea that
overt speech "has meaning" is being analyzed in terms of the
intentionality of thoughts. It must not be forgotten that the
semantical characterization of overt verbal epiunded is the primary use
of semantical terma, and that overt linguistic evente ad semantically
characterized are the model for the inner epiunded introduced by the
theary,
(5) One final point before we come to the dénouement of
the first episode in the saga of Jones. It cannot be empha-
sized too much that although these theoretical discursive

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
episodes or thoughts are introduced as inner episodes — which
is merely to repeat that they are introduced as tbeoretical
episodes - they are not introduced as immediate experienced. Let
me remind the reader that Jones, like his Neo-Rylean con-
temporaries, does not as yet have this concept. And even
when he, and they, acquire it, by a process which will be the
second episode in my myth, it will only be the philosophers
among them who will suppose that the inner episodes intro-
duced for one theoretical purpose -thoughts -must be a
subset of immediate experiences, inner episodes introduced
for another theoretical purpose.
59. Here, then, is the dénouement. I have suggested a num-
ber of times that although it would be most misleading to say
that concepts pertaining to thinking are theoretical concepts,
yet their status might be illuminated by means of the contrast
between theoretical and non-theoretical discourse. We are
now in a position to see exactly why this is so. For once our
fictitious ancestor, Jones, has developed the theory that overt
verbal behavior is the expression of thoughts, and taught
his compatriots to make use of the theory in interpreting
each other's behavior, it is but a short step to the use of
this language in self-description. Thus, when Tom, watching
Dick, has behavioral evidence which warrants the use of the
sentence (in the language of the theory) "Dick is thinking
'p'" (or "Dick is thinking that p"), Dick, using the same
behavioral evidence, can say, in the language of the theory,
"I am thinking 'p'" (or "I am thinking that p"). And it now
turns out — need it have? - that Dick can be trained to give
reasonably reliable self-descriptions, using the language of
the theory, without having to observe his overt behavior.
Jones brings this about, roughly, by applauding utterances
by Dick of "I am thinking that p" when the behavioral
evidence strongly supports the theoretical statement "Dick is

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
107
thinking that p"; and by frowning on utterances of "I am
thinking that p." when the evidence does not support this
theoretical statement. Our ancestors begin to speak of the
privileged access each of us has to his own thoughts. What
began as a language with a purely theoretical ude bad gained a
reporting role.
As I see it, this story helps us understand that concepts
pertaining to such inner episodes as thoughts are primarily
and essentially intersubjective, as intersubjective as the con-
cept of a positron, and that the reporting role of these con-
cepts - the fact that each of us has a privileged access to his
thoughts -constitutes a dimension of the use of these con-
cepts which is built on and presupposed this intersubjective
status. My myth has shown that the fact that language is
essentially an intersubjective achievement, and is learned in
intersubjective contexts —a fact rightly stressed in modern
psychologies of language, thus by B. F. Skinner (21), and by
certain philosophers, e.g. Carnap (7), Wittgenstein (22) - is
compatible with the "privacy" of "inner episodes." It also
makes clear that this privacy is not an "absolute privacy."
For if it recognizes that these concepts have a reporting use
in which one is not drawing inferences from behavioral
evidence, it nevertheless insists that the fact that overt be-
havior is evidence for these episodes is built into the very logic
of these concepti, just as the fact that the observable behavior
of gases is evidence for molecular episodes is built into the
very logic of molecule talk.
XVI. The Logic of Private Episodes: Impressions
60. We are now ready for the problem of the status of
concepts pertaining to immediate experience. The first step
is to remind ourselves that among the inner episodes which

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belong to the framework of thoughts will be perceptions, that
is to say, seeing that the table is brown, bearing that the piano is
out of tune, etc. Until Jones introduced this framework, the
only concepts our fictitious ancestors had of perceptual epi-
soder were those of overt verbal reports, made, for example,
in the context of looking at an object in standard conditions.
Seeing that something is the cade is an inner episode in the
Jonesean theory which has as its model reporting on looking
that something is the case. It will be remembered from an earlier
section that just as when I say that Dick reported that the table
is green, I commit myself to the truth of what he reported,
so to say of Dick that he daw that the table is green is, in
part, to ascribe to Dick the idea 'this table is green' and to
endorse this idea. The reader might refer back to Sections
16 ff. for an elaboration of this point.
With the enrichment of the originally Rylean framework
to include inner perceptual episodes, I have established con-
tact with my original formulation of the problem of inner
experience (Sections 22 ff.). For I can readily reconstruct in
this framework my earlier account of the language of appearing,
both qualitative and existential. Let us turn, therefore to the
final chapter of our historical novel. By now our ancestors
speak a quite un-Rylean language. But it still contains no
reference to such things as impressions, sensations, or feel-
ings- in short, to the items which philosophers lump to-
gether under the heading "immediate experiences.'
" It will be
remembered that we had reached a point at which, as far as
we could see, the phrase "impression of a red triangle" could
only mean something like "that state of a perceiver —over
and above the idea that there is a red and triangular physical
object over there -which is common to those situations in
which

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
109
(a) he sees that the object over there is red and triangu-
lar;
(b) the object over there looks to him to be red and tri-
angular;
(c) there looks to him to be a red and triangular physi-
cal object over there."
Our problem was that, on the one hand, it seemed absurd to
say that impressions, for example, are theoretical entities,
while, on the other, the interpretation of impressions as
theoretical entities seemed to provide the only hope of ac-
counting for the positive content and explanatory power that
the idea that there are such entities appears to have, and of
enabling us to understand how we could have arrived at this
idea. The account I have just been giving of thought suggests
how this apparent dilemma can be resolved.
For we continue the myth by supposing that Jones devel-
ops, in crude and sketchy form, of course, a theory of sense
perception. Jones' theory does not have to be either well-
articulated or precise in order to be the first effective step in
the development of a mode of discourse which today, in the
case of some sense-modalities at least, is extraordinarily sub-
tle and complex. We need, therefore, attribute to this mythi-
cal theory only those minimal features which enable it to
throw light on the logic of our ordinary language about
immediate experiences. From this standpoint it is sufficient
to suppose that the hero of my myth postulates a class of
inner-theoretical —episodes which he calls, say, impressions,
and which are the end results of the impingement of physical
objects and processes on various parts of the body, and, in
particular, to follow up the specific form in which I have
posed our problem, the eye.

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
61. A number of points can be made right away:
(1) The entities introduced by the theory are states of the
perceiving subject, not a clade of particulars. It cannot be em-
phasized too strongly that the particulars of the common-
sense world are such things as books, pages, turnips, dogs,
persons, noises, flashes, etc., and the Space and Time-
Kant's Undinge-in which they come to be. What is likely to
make us suppose that impresdion are introduced as particu-
lars is that, as in the case of thoughts, this ur-theory is
formulated in terms of a model. This time the model is the
idea of a domain of "inner replicas" which, when brought
about in standard conditions, share the perceptible charac-
teristics of their physical source. It is important to see that
the model is the occurrence "in" perceivers of replicas, not of
perceivings of replicas. Thus, the model for an impression of a
red triangle is a red and triangular replica, not a seeing of a red
and triangular replica. The latter alternative would have the
merit of recognizing that impressions are not particulars. But,
by misunderstanding the role of models in the formulation
of a theory, it mistakenly assumes that if the entities of the
model are particulars, the theoretical entities which are in-
troduced by means of the model must themselves be particu-
lars-thus overlooking the role of the commentary. And by
taking the model to be seeing a red and triangular replica, it
smuggles into the language of impressions the logic of the
language of thoughts. For seeing is a engritive episode which
involves the framework of thoughts, and to take it as the
model is to give aid and comfort to the assimilation of im-
pressions to thoughts, and thoughts to impressions which, as
I have already pointed out, is responsible for many of the
confusions of the classical account of both thoughts and
impressions.
(2) The fact that impressiond are theoretical entities en-

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
ables us to understand how they can be intrinsically charac-
terized - that is to say, characterized by something more than
a definite description, such as "entity of the kind which has as its
standard cause looking at a red and triangular physical object
in such and such circumstances" or "entity of the kind which
is common to the situations in which there looks to be a red
and triangular physical object." For although the predicates
of a theory owe their meaningfulness to the fact that they are
logically related to predicates which apply to the observable
phenomena which the theory explains, the predicates of a
theory are not shorthand for definite descriptions of proper-
ties in terms of these observation predicates. When the ki-
netic theory of gases speaks of molecules as having mad, the
term "mass" is not the abbreviation of a definite description
of the form "the property which ..." Thus, "impression of a
red triangle" does not simply mean "impression such as is
caused by red and triangular physical objects in standard
conditions," though it is true-Logically true -of impressions
of red triangles that they are of that sort which is caused by
red and triangular objects in standard conditions.
(3) If the theory of impressions were developed in true
logistical style, we could say that the intrinsic properties of
impressions are "implicitly defined" by the postulates of the
theory, as we can say that the intrinsic properties of sub-
atomic particles are "implicitly defined" by the fundamental
principles of subatomic theory. For this would be just an-
other way of saying that one knows the meaning of a theo-
retical term when one knows (a) how it is related to other
theoretical terms, and (b) how the theoretical system as a
whole is tied to the observation language. But, as I have
pointed out, our ur-behaviorist does not formulate his theory
in textbook style. He formulates it in terms of a model.
Now the model entities are entities which do have intrinsic

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
properties. They are, for example, red and triangular wafers.
It might therefore seem that the theory specifies the intrinsic
characteristics of impressions to be the familiar perceptible
qualities of physical objects and processes. If this were so, of
course, the theory would be ultimately incoherent, for it
would attribute to impressions — which are clearly not physi-
cal objects-characteristics which, if our argument to date
is sound, only physical objects can have. Fortunately, this
line of thought overlooks what we have called the commen-
tary on the model, which qualifies, restricts and interprets
the analogy between the familiar entities of the model and
the theoretical entities which are being introduced. Thus, it
would be a mistake to suppose that since the model for the
impression of a red triangle is a red and triangular wafer, the
impression itself is a red and triangular wafer. What can be
said is that the impression of a red triangle is analogous, to
an extent which is by no means neatly and tidily specified,
to a red and triangular wafer. The essential feature of the
analogy is that visual impressions stand to one another in a
system of ways of resembling and differing which is struc-
turally similar to the ways in which the colors and shapes of
visible objects resemble and differ.
(4) It might be concluded from this last point that the
concept of the impression of a red triangle is a "
purely
formal" concept, the concept of a "logical form" which can
acquire a "content" only by means of "ostensive definition."
One can see why a philosopher might want to say this, and
why he might conclude that in so far as concepts pertaining
to immediate experiences are intersubjective, they are "purely
structural," the "content" of immediate experience being in-
communicable. Yet this line of thought is but another expres-
sion of the Myth of the Given. For the theoretical concept

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
113
of the impression of a red triangle would be no more and no
less "without content" than any theoretical concept. And
while, like these, it must belong to a framework which is
logically connected with the language of observable fact, the
logical relation between a theoretical language and the lan-
guage of observable fact has nothing to do with the episte-
mological fiction of an "ostensive definition."
(5) The impressions of Jones' theory are, as was pointed
out above, states of the perceiver, rather than particulars. If
we remind ourselves that these states are not introduced as
physiological states (see Section 55), a number of interesting
questions arise which tie in with the reflections on the status
of the scientific picture of the world (Sections 39-44 above)
but which, unfortunately, there is space only to adumbrate.
Thus, some philosophers have thought it obvious that we can
expect that in the development of science it will become
reasonable to identify all the concepts of behavior theory
with definable terms in neurophysiological theory, and these,
in turn, with definable terms in theoretical physics. It is
important to realize that the second step of this prediction,
at least, is either a truum or a mistake. It is a truism if it
involves a tacit redefinition of "physical theory" to mean
"theory adequate to account for the observable behavior of
any object (including animals and persons which has physi-
cal properties." While if "physical theory" is taken in its
ordinary sense of "theory adequate to explain the observable
behavior of physical objects," it is, I believe, mistaken.
To ask how impremion fit together with electromagnetic fielde,
for example, is to ask a mistaken question. It is to mix the
framework of molar behavior theory with the framework of
the micro-theory of physical objects. The proper question is,
rather, "What would correspond in a micro-theory of sentient

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
organisms to molar concepts pertaining to impressions?" And
it is, I believe, in answer to this question that one would come
upon the particulars which sense-datum theorists profess to
find (by analysis) in the common-sense universe of discourse
(cf. Section 23). Furthermore, I believe that in characterizing
these particulars, the micro-behaviorist would be led to say
something like the following: "It is such particulars which
(from the standpoint of the theory) are being responded to
by the organism when it looks to a person as though there
were a red and triangular physical object over there." It
would, of course, be incorrect to say that, in the ordinary
sense, such a particular is red or triangular. What could be
said, * however, is that whereas in the common-sense picture
physical objects are red and triangular but the impression
"of" a red triangle is neither red nor triangular, in the frame-
work of this micro-theory, the theoretical counterparts of
sentient organisms are Space-Time worms characterized by
two kinds of variables: (a) variables which also characterize
the theoretical counterparts of merely material objects; (b)
variables peculiar to sentient things; and that these latter
variables are the counterparts in this new framework of the
perceptible qualities of the physical objects of the common-
sense framework. It is statements such as these which would
be the cash value of the idea that ".
'physical objects aren't
really colored; colors exist only in the perceiver,"
and that
"to see that the facing surface of a physical object is red
and triangular is to mistake a red and triangular sense content
for a physical object with a red and triangular facing side."
* For a discussion of some logical points pertaining to this framework, the reader
should consult the essay, "The Concept of Emergence." by Paul E. Meehl and
Wilfrid Sellars, Minnesota Studies in the Philosopby of Science, vol. I (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 239-252.

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
115
Both these ideas clearly treat what is really a speculative
philosophical critique (see Section 41) of the common-sense
framework of physical objects and the perception of physical
objects in the light of an envisaged ideal scientific framework,
as though it were a matter of distinctions which can be drawn
within the common-sense framework itself.
62. This brings me to the final chapter of my story. Let us
suppose that as his final service to mankind before he van-
ishes without a trace, Jones teaches his theory of perception
to his fellows. As before in the case of thoughta, they begin
by using the language of impressions to draw theoretical
conclusions from appropriate premises. (Notice that the evi-
dence for theoretical statements in the language of impres-
sions will include such introspectible inner episodes as its
looking to one at though there were a red and triangular physical
object over there, as well as overt behavior.) Finally he succeeds
in training them to make a reporting use of this language. He
trains them, that is, to say "I have the impression of a red
triangle" when, and only when, according to the theory, they
are indeed having the impression of a red triangle.
Once again the myth helps us to understand that concepts
pertaining to certain inner episodes-in this case impred-
sonu-can be primarily and essentially intersubjective, without
being resolvable into overt behavioral symptoms, and that
the reporting role of these concepts, their role in introspec-
tion, the fact that each of us has a privileged access to his
impressions, constitutes a dimension of these concepts which
is built on and prepposed their role in intersubjective dis-
course. It also makes clear why the "privacy" of these epi-
sodes is not the "absolute privacy" of the traditional puzzles.
For, as in the case of thoughts, the fact that overt behavior
is evidence for these episodes is built into the very logic of

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
these concepts as the fact that the observable behavior of
gases is evidence for molecular episodes is built into the very
logic of molecule talk.
Notice that what our "ancestors" have acquired under the
guidance of Jones is not "just another language" — a "nota-
tional convenience" or "code" - which merely enables them
to say what they can already say in the language of qualita-
tive and existential looking. They have acquired another
language, indeed, but it is one which, though it rests on a
framework of discourse about public objects in Space and
Time, has an autonomous logical structure, and contains an
explanation of, not just a code for, such facts as that there looks
to me to be a red and triangular physical object wer there. And notice
that while our "ancestors" came to notice impressions, and
the language of impressions embodies a "discovery" that
there are such things, the language of impressions was no
more tailored to fit antecedent noticings of these entities than
the language of molecules was tailored to fit antecedent
noticings of molecules.
And the spirit of Jones is not yet dead. For it is the
particulars of the micro-theory discussed in Section 61(5)
which are the solid core of the sense contents and sense fields
of the sense-datum theorist. Envisaging the general lines
of that framework, even sketching some of its regions, he
has taught himself to play with it (in his study) as a report
language. Unfortunately, he mislocates the truth of these
conceptions, and, with a modesty forgivable in any but a phi-
losopher, confuses his own creative enrichment of the frame-
work of empirical knowledge, with an analysis of knowledge
as it was. He construes as data the particulars and arrays
of particulars which he has come to be able to observe,

EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
117
and believes them to be antecedent objects of knowledge
which have somehow been in the framework from the begin-
ning. It is in the very act of taking that he speaks of the given.
63. I have used a myth to kill a myth-the Myth of the
Given. But is my myth really a myth? Or does the reader
not recognize Jones as Man himself in the middle of his
journey from the grunts and groans of the cave to the subtle
and polydimensional discourse of the drawing room, the
laboratory, and the study, the language of Henry and William
James, of Einstein and of the philosophers who, in their
efforts to break out of discourse to an arché beyond discourse,
have provided the most curious dimension of all.
References
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pp. 298-312.
3. Braithwaite, R. B. Scientific Explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Pr., 1953.
4. Broad, C. D. Scientific Thought. London: Kegan Paul, 1923.
5. Campbell, Norman. Plyrics: The Elements. Cambridge: Cambridge
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6. Carnap, Rudolf. Introduction to Semantica. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
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M. Brodbeck (eds.), Readinge in the Philovapby of Science, pp. 309-18.
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of pp. 59-69 of his Foundations of Logic and Mathematica. Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1939.
9. Chisholm, Roderick. "The Theory of Appearing," in Max Black

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EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
(ed.), Philosophical Analydis, pp. 102-18. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Pr.,
1950.
10. Hempel, C. G. Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical Science.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1952.
I1. Linnell, John. "Berkeley's Critique of Abstract Ideas." A Ph.D. the-
sis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Minne-
sota, June 1954.
12. Paul, G. A. 'Is there a Problem about Sense Data?" in Supplemen-
tary Volume XV of the Aristotelian Society Proceedling.. Also in A. C
V. Flew (ed.), Lagic and Language. New York: Philosophical Lib
1951.
13. Price, H. H. Perception. London: Methuen, 1932.
14. Price, H. H. Thinking and Experience. London: Hutchinson's Univ.
Lib., 1953.
15. Reichenbach, H. Philosopbie der Raum-Zeit-Lebre. Berlin: de Gruyter,
16. Reichenbach, H. Experienie and Prediction. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Pr., 1938.
17. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson's Univ. Lib.,
1949
18. Sellars, Wilfrid. "Mind, Meaning and Behavior," Philosophical Studied,
3:83-94 (1952).
19. Sellars, Wilfrid. "A Semantical Solution of the Mind-Body Prob-
lem," Methodor, 5:45-84 (1953).
20. Sellars, Wilfrid. "Empiricism and Abstract Entities," in Paul A.
Schlipp (ed.), The Philampby of Rudolf Carnap. Evanston (IIl.): Li-
brary of Living Philosophers (forthcoming). (Available in mimeo-
graph form from the author.)
21. Skinner, B. F. "The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms,"
Prychological Review, 52:270-77 (1945). Reprinted in H. Feigl and M.
Brodbeck (eds.), Readings in the Philosoply of Science, pp. 585-94.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953.
22. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. London: Macmil-
lan, 1953.

ROBERT BRANDOM
STuDY GuIDE
THE NOTES THAT FOLLOW were developed over
the years to help my graduate and advanced under-
graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh to
see their way through the textual trees to the Sellars-
ian forest. They are meant to provide only a first take
on the material, to indicate the most general outlines
of the structure of the essay and of the thought behind
it. To that end, many philosophically interesting issues
and discussions have been brushed past. In particu-
lar, I have sedulously avoided discussing genuinely
esoteric issues — such as the philosophical significance
some have professed to find in the distinction between
'red' paragraphs and 'green' paragraphs. The formu-
lations and characterizations that are provided are
not intended to be definitive or authoritative. They
aim to provide a place to start reading this rich and
difficult text.
The idea for such a document, and the notes to the
concluding sections, had their origins in a handout
Richard Rorty circulated for similar purposes when I
was a graduate student at Princeton in the 1970s. I

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am grateful to my colleague John McDowell, and to our
former student Danielle Macbeth, for many suggestions and
improvements. It should be noted, though, that where their
comments evidenced substantive disagreements about what
Sellars is (and ought to be) saying -concerning in particular
the intricacies of 'looks' talk in relation to reports of the
presence of secondary qualities, and the various theses and
commitments involved in scientific realism - I have stuck to
my own readings. The errors that remain, both those of
omission and of commission, should be charged to my ac-
count alone.
Note: Section numbers of "Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind" are indicated in square brackets: [36]. On the rare
occasions where sections of this guide must be referenced, I
use double brackets: [[36]].
Part | [I]-[7]
An Ambiguity in Sense-Datum Theories
Section I: Sellars announces that his project is to attack "the
whole framework of givenness." By this he does not mean to
be undercutting the distinction between judgments we arrive
at noninferentially, paradigmatically through perception, and
those that are arrived at as the conclusions of inferences.
Indeed, one of the positive tasks of the essay is precisely to
tell us how to understand noninferential reports without
insensibly sliding into the constellation of philosophical com-
mitments that Sellars calls "the Myth of the Given." Sense-
datum theories, his immediate target, are important only as
prominent and influential instances of the appeal to given-
ness. We will have to learn to recognize such appeals in many
less obvious guises.

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In these opening sections, the Myth of the Given shows
up in the guise of the idea that some kind of non-epistemic
facts about knowers could entail epistemic facts about
them.! Epistemic facts about knowers are in the first instance
facts about what someone knowd (though we will come to see
that facts about what one merely believed are equally
'epistemic' facts in Sellars's sense). One of Descartes's signal
innovations was to define the mind in epistemic terms: for a
state to be a mental state is for being in that state to entail
knowing that one is in that state (transparency, ruling out
ignorance) and for beliering that one is in that state to entail
being in that state (incorrigibility, ruling out error). The mind
is the realm of what is known immediately, not just in the
sense of noninferentially, but in the stronger sense that its
goings-on are given to us in a way that banishes the possibility
both of ignorance and of error. (Descartes's thought was
that if anything is known to us mediately, that is, by means
of representations of it, then something-some kind of rep-
resentations — must be known to us immediately, on pain of
an infinite regress.) Sellars will try to show us that the
Cartesian way of talking about the mind is the result of
confusion about the distinction between epistemic and non-
epistemic items, and the roles they can play in various sorts
of explanation.
In its most familiar form, the Myth of the Given blurs
the distinction between sentience and sapience. This is the
distinction between being aware in the sense of being merely
awake (which we share with nondiscursive animals-those
I. The discussion of foundationalism in [32] shows that one can still be commit-
ted to the Myth of the Given even if'one's foundations are conceived as epistemic
facts-if the capacity to know those facts is thought of as independent of inferential
capacities and hence the acquisition of ordinary empirical concepts.

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that do not grasp concepts), on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, being aware in a sense that involves knowledge
either by being a kind of knowledge, or as potentially serv-
ing to justify judgments that so qualify. The "idea that a
sensation of a red triangle is the very paradigm of empiri-
cal knowledge" [7] is a paradigm of the sort of conflation in
question. The Myth of the Given is the idea that there can
be a kind of awareneds that has two properties. First, it is
or entails having a certain sort of knowledge-perhaps not of
other things, but at least that one is in that state, or a state
of that kind -knowledge that the one whose state it is pos-
sesses simply in virtue of being in that state. Second, it
entails that the capacity to have that sort of awareness, to be
in that sort of state, does not presuppose the acquisition of
any concepti-that one can be aware in that sense indepen-
dently of and antecedently to grasping or mastering the use
of any concepts (paradigmatically through language learn-
ing).? The conclusion of Sellars's critical argument is that
these two features are incompatible: only what is proposi-
tionally contentful, and so conceptually articulated, can
serve as (or, for that matter, stand in need of) a justifica-
tion, and so ground or constitute knowledge. Davidson ex-
presses a version of this thought with the slogan, "Nothing
can count as a reason for holding a belief except another
belief." Sellars's thought is better captured by changing this
to "Nothing can count as a reason for endorsing a believable
except another believable," where believables are the con-
2. As McDowell puts the point: "The idea of the Given is the idea that the space
of reasons, the space of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than the
conceptual sphere" (Mind and World [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994], p. 7); that is, that what is Given can serve as a justification, without its being
given requiring the exercise of conceptual capacities.

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123
tents of possible beliefs, that is, what is propositionally con-
tentful.3
Sellars understands propositional contentfulness, what is
epistemic in the sense of being a candidate for knowledge,
in terms of role in what he calls "the game of giving and
asking for reasons." "In characterizing an episode or state as
that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of
that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of
reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says"
[36]. To treat something as even a candidate for knowledge
is at once to talk about its potential role in inference, as
premise and conclusion. Because a crucial distinguishing
feature of epistemic facts for Sellars is that their expression
requires the use of normative vocabulary, to treat something
as a candidate for knowledge is also to raise the issue of
its normative status. The Myth of the Given eventually ap-
pears as "of a piece with the naturalistic fallacy in ethics" -
the attempt to derive ought from id.4 This is because talk
of knowledge is inevitably talk of what (conceptually ar-
ticulated propositional contents) someone is committed to,
and whether he is in various senses entitled to those commit-
ments.
Section 2: Here Sellars distinguishes between the act or epi-
sode of sensing, on the one hand, and the content of that
3. The emendation allows that propositionally contentful items that are not
believings might serve as epistemic justifiers-for instance, that facts could play this
4. "The idea that epistemic facts can be analyzed without remainder-even in
principle'-into non-epistemic facts ... is ... a radical mistake—a mistake of a
piece with the so-called 'naturalistic fallacy' in ethics" [5]. This theme arises very
early in Sellars's writing. See, for instance, "A Semantical Solution to the Mind-
Body Problem, " reprinted in J. Sicha, ed., Pure Pragmatics and Pawible Worlds: The
Early Easays of Wilfrid Sellars (Reseda, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing, 1980).

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act, what is sensed, which is called a sense content, on the
other. When one hallucinates a pink elephant, doing so is
sensing, and the sense-content is what makes it an of-a-pink-
elephant hallucination, rather than, for instance, an of-a-
green-Norway-rat hallucination. In ordinary perception, the
contents sensed must be carefully distinguished from the
external objects sensed (which are entirely absent in the case
of hallucinations).
Section 3: Now consider the suitability of sensings of sense
contents as foundations of knowledge and justification on the
Cartesian model.
The general idea of a foundation for knowledge can be
sketched as follows. Our beliefs constitute knowledge only
insofar as they are not only true, but jitified- lucky guesses
don't qualify. One claim or belief can justify another to which
it is inferentially related. If one is justified in a commitment to
the claim that p, and q may be inferred from p. then one may
for that reason be justified in a commitment to the claim that
%. To say this is to offer a mechanism whereby justification
can be inherited. But, the thought is, not all commitments
that are justified can have inherited that status inferentially
from others. There must be some other mechanism for ac-
quiring positive justification status, to give the inheritance
mechanism something to pass along. If pi inherits its status
from pz, and pa inherits it from p3, and so on, then either
at some point a claim is repeated (some p, is identical
with a pm for m < n), in which case the "justification'
is circular,
or
there never is a repetition, in which case an infinite re-
gress arises, in which each po has the anomalous

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125
status of an unjustified 'justifier,' which is not itself
justified until an infinite number of other claims have
been justified.5
The conclusion is that there must be some way of being
justified without having to he justified. We ought to distin-
guish two senses of 'justification,' one indicating a status
(being justified), and the other making reference to a process
(justifying) that can result in possession of the status.6 Then
the conclusion is that there must be some other way of
acquiring positive justificatory status besides justifying it in
the sense of offering a justification. Besides inferential inheri-
tance, there must also be some noninferential acquisition
mechanism for this epistemic status.
So far, so good. Descartes concluded from this line of
thought that there is a kind of claim or belief, call it a basi
belief, that forms the foundation of all other beliefs in the
sense that these beliefs are the font from which the justifica-
tory status of all the rest flows inferentially. This does not
follow, but Sellars will not contest it? Descartes believed
5. This argument is obviously oversimplified in many ways. Of course justifica-
tions need not be single statements —but a corresponding dilemma occurs if sets of
premises are allowed. The argument also ignores the fact that there is a regress on
inferences in many ways analogous to this regress on premises, and that the two
sorts of regress can interact in complex and significant ways.
6. This is an instance of what Sellars calls "the notorious "ing'led' ambiguity"
[24]. (See also [[35]].)
7. See [32]. As it stands, the argument turns on an invalid quantifier inversion.
What immediately follows from the foundationalist regress argument is at most that
forench chain of justifications there i a belief that ir justified (has positive justificatory
status) without having to he justified (by appeal to another belief). It does not follow
that there i' a kind of belief such that for each chain of justification its terminus is a
belief of that kind. A belief that stands in need of' justification in one context might
serve as an unjustified justifier in another. Compare: For each minute there is a woman
somewhere having a baby at that time. This is true. It does not follow that there in
a woman such that foreach minute, she is having a baby at that time. If it did follow,
then we could solve the problem of overpopulation by finding that woman and
making her stop!

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further that unless those beliefs were certain (the ultimate
positive justificatory status), none of those inferentially based
upon them could even be probable (as C. I. Lewis put it in
Murd and the World Order). Descartes gave philosophy a deci-
sive epistemic turn which was, at least until Kant, confused
with a subjective turn. The latter is a consequence only of
Descartes's peculiar and optional way of working out the
former. For he defined the mind by its epistemic status, as
what is best known to itself by falling within the reach of the
subject's incorrigibility and local omniscience. This epistemic
definition is what motivates the assimilation of events whose
contents are structured like sentences, such as thinking that
Vienna is a city in Austria, and events whose contents are
structured like pictures, such as imagining or seeming to see
a red triangle inside a green circle.
To return to the idea of using sensings of sense contents
as a foundation of knowledge, then, a process is pictured
something like this:
Physical Objects
Sensings of Sense Contents
2
Noninferential Beliefs
3
Inferential Beliefs

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127
In the standard perceptual case, it is becale there is a red
object with an octagonal facing surface in front of me that I
find myself with a sensing of a red and octagonal sense
content. It is because I have such a sense content that I acquire
the noninferential belief that there is a red and octagonal
object in front of me. And it is hecaue I have this belief,
together, perhaps, with other beliefs, that I am justified in
the further inferential belief that there is a stop sign in front
of me.
The point to focus on is the nature of the 'because's. The
first (arrow 1) can be understood as a causal notion, per-
haps the sort studied by students of the neurophysiology of
perception. As such, it relates particulars describable in a
nonnormative vocabulary. This is a matter-of-factual, non-
epistemic relation. The final 'because' (arrow 3), on the other
hand, indicates the sort of relation Sellars calls 'epistemic.' It
is an inferential notion, relating sententially structured beliefs
(or believables) which are repeatable abstracta—a matter of
reasons rather than causes. This justificatory relation is not
a natural one, but a normative one; it is not the empirical
scientist, but the logician or epistemologist who has the final
say about it.
The question is, what sort of relation is the middle one
(arrow 2)? Does it belong in a box with the first, causal
relation, or in a box with the third, inferential relation? How
are the sensings of sense contents to be conceived as related
to (potentially foundational) noninferential beliefs? Here is
where the distinction between the epistemic and the non-
epistemic, between particulars specified in the language of
causes and believables specified in the language of reasons,
comes into play.
Suppose that one understands the sensing of a sense con-

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tent to be the existence of a nonepistemic relation between
one particular, the sense content, and another, the person
doing the sensing. (This is the position Sellars himself even-
tually endorses.) If so, then it is hard to see how the sensing
of a sense content could entail or justify a claim, for in-
stance, a noninferential belief. For only things with sentential
structure can be premises of inference, not nonepistemically
specified particulars. For this reason sensings, understood in
terms of nonepistemic relations between sense contents and
perceivers, are not well suited to serve as the ultimate ground
to which inferentially inherited justification traces back.
Since the occurrence of such a sensing does not entail com-
mitment to any claim, it would be possible to have one
without coming to believe anything, and certainly without
coming to know anything (for this latter requires positive
justificatory status). So it seems the foundationalist who
wants to appeal to sensings as foundational must take the
sensing of a sense content to be an epistemic fact about the
sensing agent. But if so, what becomes of the particular?
Sectione 4 and 5: The sense-datum theorist can treat sensings
as epistemic noninferential beliefs, from which inferences
may be made and justification status inherited, so that
sensings can perform their foundational function. To retain
a role for the mental particulars that are sensed (sense data,
sense contents conceived as a kind of sensed object), that
theorist must be willing to say the following: "The primitive
notion is believing that sense content i has property F To
sense the sense content . is to believe that it has some (no
matter what) characteristic F. The sense content, which is
a particular, is the intentional object of the epistemic sens-
ing." The important thing to notice about this analysis is
that epistemic notions are presupposed, not accounted for in

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terms of a supposedly antecedently understood nonepistemic
notion of sensing a sense content (thought of as a relation
between a subject and a sense content, both of them particu-
lars). In fact Sellars believes that no such reduction of the
epistemic to the nonepistemic is possible, even in principle-
though his arguments will not depend on this claim.
Section 6: At this point a further consideration is introduced:
the ability to stand in the passive causal relations to the
physical world envisaged by the fans of givenness is not
something that must be acquired through experience or train-
ing. Organisms of the right sort get it just by being awake.
But the capacity to have beliefs of the form 't is F' involves
classifying unrepeatables or particulars under repeatables or
universals. It is natural to think that the capacity to classify
is acquired, since one must learn by experience and training
what the boundaries of the classes are. This line of thought
results in the inconsistent triad of claims that the sense-datum
theorist is committed to, and would like to be entitled to
A. 'S senses red sense content .r, ' entails 'S noninferen-
tially believes (knows) that . is red.'
B. The ability to sense sense contents is unacquired.
C. The capacity to have classificatory beliefs of the form
it is F' is acquired.
If A is given up, the sensing of sense contents becomes a
nonepistemic event, which can at best be a logically neces-
sary condition of knowledge or noninferential beliefs, not a
logically sufficient condition of it. To take this way out would
be to discard the line pursued in [4] and [5]. If B is given
up, the sense-datum theorist must either claim that we need
practice to feel pain, hunger, itches, and so on when we are
infants, or claim that feeling these things is not sensing. But

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then what is sensing? If C is given up, a story must be told
about what universal concepts are innate (unacquired, in-
born, wired-in) and which are not. This would require much
more than even latter-day innatists such as Chomsky have
claimed, since substantive concepts like red and tall, not
merely grammatical forms, would have to be innate. A is the
Myth of the Given, in one of its forms, and Sellars will give
it up. He'll then owe (and provide) us a new account of both
thoughts and sensations, and of the origins (both in the order
of causation and in the order of justification) of knowledge.
Section 7: Sellars's diagnosis, which is not yet a treatment for
the conceptual illness of givenness, is that it results from
confusing two trains of thought, the first derived from an
attempt to give a scientific account of perception and the
acquisition of empirical information, and the second from an
attempt to give a foundational epistemological account on the
Cartesian model canvassed above in the discussion of [3]:
I. The idea that there are certain inner episodes -e.g.,
sensations of red or of C# which can occur to human
beings (and brutes) without any prior process of
learning or concept formation; and without which it
would in some sense be impossible to see, for exam-
ple, that the facing surface of a physical object is red
and triangular, or hear that a certain physical sound
is C#.
2. The idea that there are certain inner episodes which
are the noninferential knowings that certain items
are, for example, red or C#; and that these episodes
are the necessary conditions of empirical knowledge
as providing evidence for all other empirical proposi-
tions.

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The first class consists of particulars, picked out by their
causal role. The second consists of claimings structured like
sentences, picked out by their inferential or justificatory
role. Sellars will offer an account (starting in [45]) of the
genus, inner episode, to which these two species belong. He
will call the first kind 'sense impressions,' and the second
kind 'thoughts,' and will describe the roles they play. Finally,
he will explain how they are related in human knowledge. (I
have talked about belief so far, where Sellars talks about
knowledge, in order to emphasize that the question of the
justification of or warrant for noninferential beliefs has yet to
be discussed.)
The result of running together these two lines of thought
is "the idea that a sensation of a red triangle is the very
paradigm of empirical knowledge." That idea is subject to
precisely those related 'perplexities' that Sellars has pointed
out:
• Should we think of the sensation in question as a kind
of particular (structured like a triangle), or as a kind of
belief (structured like a sentence)?
• Is the capacity to have empirical knowledge like this
acquired by experience, or prior to experience?
• Is it prior to the rest of our knowledge in the order of
causation, or in the order of justification and evidence?
Part || [8]-[9]
Another Language?
Section 8: This and the next two sections (both marked in
the original as Section 9!) are in one way an aside. The
main thread is picked up again in [10]. The excursus is
used to introduce some important ideas that will be dis-

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cussed further along. The topic here is one possible form
a sense-datum theory might take to avoid the nonepistemi-
cally-specifiable-particular vs. only-epistemically-specifiable-
sententially-structured-premise dilemma Sellars is construct-
ing for it. One might give up entirely on the nonepistemic
side of things and embrace the foundational noninferen-
tial belief side. Thus Ayer sees sensing-of-sense-data talk
as equivalent to and derivative from talk about how things
look or seem to a subject. The suggestion comes in three
parts:
a) There is a class of noninterential beliefs that form a
justificatory basis for the rest of our empirical beliefs.
[Note that this would be sufficient to respond to the
regress argument sketched above in [[3]], though, as
suggested there, it is not a necessary condition for a
response.]
b) Three nested descriptions of a phenomenon. First, a
platitude: I may be mistaken that there is a red trian-
gle in front of me. It is not possible for me to be mis-
taken about there seeming to be one. Next, a reifying
move: an application of the Cartesian principle that
although appearance must be distinguished from real-
ity since subjects can be in error about the latter, on
pain of an infinite regress it cannot be that one might
be mistaken about the former also. Finally, a founda-
tional claim: the class mentioned in (a) consists of be-
liefs that would be expressed by sentences used to
make perceptual reports, prefixed by a special opera-
tor "It looks to me now that ...,
" 'It seems to me
now that...,
" or "It now appears to me just as
though...

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c) Sentences of the form "S is having (or is aware of) a
sense datum that is F" (say, red and triangular) are
by definition equivalent to sentences of the form "It
seems to S that he senses something F." On this un-
derstanding, there are no particulars that are sense
data - the apparently referential singular terms that
give the contrary impression must be understood con-
textually, like the 'it' in 'it is raining.'
Section 9: Here Sellars offers an observation about this ap-
proach and then formulates a dilemma for it. The observation
regards merely generic lookings. Something can look polygo-
nal without there being any determinate number of sides that
it looks to have. But nothing can le polygonal without there
being a determinate number of sides that it has. (This con-
trast will be explored in [17].) So the inferences one is
permitted to make in sense-datum talk as introduced by the
equivalence asserted by (c) are not the same as those licensed
by the sense-datum theorist's talk of sense data as particulars
(for which the above 'inference to further determination'
goes through). Thus the code is misleading.
Section 9 lis: The dilemma presents a more serious objection.
If sense-datum talk is just a code, it is redundant (insofar as
it is not misleading). So what good is it? It can't explain
anything about seemings or appearance. To do that it would
have to be a theory of appearings, explaining them by relation
to a certain kind of particular, namely, sense data. (Sellars
begins to explain how he thinks about theoretical explanation
in [21] and [22]. We then hear a lot more about this topic
in the second half of the essay, beginning at [391-[44]) But
this would reintroduce the strand of thought (1) above (in

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[7] and [[7]]), which the code theory is formulated precisely
to avoid. The lesson is that that strand of thought is not
altogether mistaken. The account Sellars will offer provides
a theory of appearings, and will embrace and reconcile (1)
and (2), properly understood. So (c) is not a way to avoid
the problem. It allows us to look, however, at the assumptions
(a) and (b) to which it was conjoined. Sellars's conclusion is
that this line of thought is committed already at step (b) to
the possibility of inferring from claims exclusively about how
things seem to claims about how things actually are. But if,
as (a) and (b) assert, all empirical evidence ultimately derives
from how things seem, it is clear that such an inference
cannot be warranted empirically, by inductive correlation of
appearances and realities. The alternative seems to be to
find a definitional reduction according to which "ordinary
discourse about physical objects and perceivers could (in
principle) be constructed from sentences of the form 'There
looks to be a physical object with a red and triangular facing
surface over there."" Since commitment to (a) and (b) is
much more widespread than commitment to (c), it is impor-
tant to see what is wrong with the view the former express-
why the reduction they presuppose is impossible. To that end
Sellars turns to the logic of 'looks' or 'seems' talk.
Part I|| [1O]-[Z0]
The Logic of "Looks'
Section 10: To get out of the trilemma of [6], it is necessary
to "examine these two ideas [(1) and (2) in [7] and [[7]]]
and determine how that which survives criticism in each
is properly to be combined with the other." To begin with,
consider the genus inner episode to which each subject

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135
has privileged access, which is common to sensations and
thoughts.
a) Logical positivists have denied that there could be
such episodes, because their existence is not intersub-
jectively verifiable or falsifiable. This is the source of
the traditional problem of other minds, and of the in-
verted spectrum. To avoid entertaining such un-
verifiable hypotheses, one can reject idea (1).
b) Wittgenstein and some of his followers have attacked
(2), the idea that inner episodes can be premises for
inferentially based knowledge, because as private
they escape the net of public discourse and language
learning (the beetle in the box, and the private lan-
guage argument).
Sellars disagrees with both of these. We'll return to the first
later under the heading "behaviorism' ([54]-[55]). What one
should reject in order to avoid the problem of other minds
and the possibility of inverted spectra is the Myth of the
Given, not the notion of inner episodes. Sellars will argue (in
[45]-[47]) that (b) is both too strong and too weak. It is too
strong in that inner episodes need not escape the net of public
discourse. The second half of EPM has the task of showing
us how to think of inner episodes — as theoretical entities that
became observable. It is too weak in that this repudiation of
inner episodes is not (as we see in the following sections)
sufficient to avoid Sellars's foe, the Myth of the Given.
Section 11: The problem is that noninferential beliefs of the
form "X looks F to S" can be held to be given in the bad
sense even if, for inverted spectrum and beetle-in-a-box rea-
sons, one refuses to talk about intrinsic properties of these

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lookings. That is, even if one does not assume (as one ought
not, see [21]) that if anything looks F to S, something is F
(the "sense-datum inference"), one can still fall prey to the
Myth. In order to attack this more insidious form of the
Myth, then, Sellars considers the notion of 'looks' talk inde-
pendent of any relation it might be taken to have to inner
episodes as particulars.
Section 12: The question is, Does looka-red come before it-red
conceptually (and so in the order of explanation)? That is,
could the latter be defined in terms of the former in such a
way that one could learn how to use the defining concept
(looking-F) first, and only afterwards, by means of the defini-
tion, learn how to use the defined concept (i-F)? Descartes
and his tradition claimed that looke-F talk, with which it is
possible to form a class of statements about which subjects
are incorrigible, is a foundation of knowledge, and so must
be prior in this sense to it-F talk, with which it is possible to
express only corrigible, inferred beliefs. This view is the
essence of Descartes's foundationalism.
Descartes was struck by the fact that the appearance/re-
ality distinction seems not to apply to appearances. While I
may be mistaken about whether something is red (or whether
the tower, in the distance, is square), I cannot in the same
way be mistaken about whether it looks red to me now.
While I may legitimately be challenged by a doubter- "Per-
haps the item is not really red; perhaps it only seem red"-
8. I might be mistaken about whether red is what it looks, that is, whether the
property expressed by the word 'red' is the one it looks to have. But that, the
thought goes, is another matter. I cannot be mistaken that it looks that way, like
that, where this latter phrase is understood as having a noncomparative use. It
looke-red, i.e., it has a distinctive phenomenal property, which we may inconveniently
only happen to be able to pick out by its association with a word for a real-world
property.

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there is no room for the further doubt, "Perhaps the item
does not even seem red; perhaps it only deems to seem red."
If it seems to seem red, then it really does seem red. The
looko, seemo, or appears operators collapse if we try to iterate
them. A contrast between appearance and reality is marked
by the distinction between looke-F and F for ordinary (reality-
indicating) predicates 'F. But no corresponding contrast is
marked by the distinction between looked-to-look-F and looks-F.
Appearances are reified by Descartes as things that really
are just however they appear. He inferred that we do not
know them mediately, by means of representings that intro-
duce the possibility of mid-representing (a distinction be-
tween how they really are and how they merely appear, i.e.,
are represented as being). Rather, we know them immedi-
ately-simply by having them. Thus appearings-thought
of as a realm of entities reported on by noninferentially elic-
ited claims about how things look (for the visual case), or
more generally seem, or appear - show up as having the ideal
qualifications for epistemologically secure foundations of
knowledge: we cannot make mistakes about them. Just bav-
ing an appearance ("being appeared-to F-ly," in one of the
variations Sellars discusses) counts as knowing something: not
that something is F, to be sure, but at least that something
looke, deena-, or appears-F. The possibility accordingly arises
of reconstructing our knowledge by starting out only with
knowledge of this sort-knowledge of how things look, seem,
or appear —and building up in some way to our knowledge
(if any) of how things really are (outside the realm of ap-
pearance).
This project requires that concepts of the form looks-F be
intelligible in principle in advance of grasping the corre-
sponding concepts F (or i-F). Sellars is a linguistic pragma-
tist about the conceptual order; that is, for him, grasp of a

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concept just is mastery of the use of a word.? So he system-
atically pursues the methodology of translating questions of
conceptual priority into questions about the relative auton-
omy of various language games. He will argue that in this
case, Descartes got things backwards. 'Looks' talk does not
form an autonomous stratum of the language-it is not a
language-game one could play though one played no other.
One must already be able to use "is-F' talk in order to master
'looks-F' talk, which turns out to be parasitic on it. In this
precise practical sense, i-F is conceptually (Sellars often says
'logically') prior to looke-F.
Section 13: The definition being considered for exploitation
in a Cartesian order of explanation (and so, ultimately, of
justification) is
• lit red = de. t would look red under standard conditions.
Sellars will show how to acknowledge that this claim is
definitionally true without countenancing the conceptual pri-
ority of'looks' talk, and hence without giving aid and comfort
to givenness and the sort of foundationalism it supports.
Section 14: Sentences can have reporting (noninferential) uses
as well as (merely) fact stating (inferential) uses.!° For reli-
able reporters, one may infer from the fact that one is dis-
9. For it to be a concept one grasps thereby, the word must have an inferential
role; it must be usable in formulating premises and conclusions of inferences
assessable as correct or incorrect. Thus acquiring the differential responsive dispo-
sitions required to use the word 'ouch' does not qualify as grasping a concept. See
[[1] below
10. Sellars's terminology is strained here. There is no reason to deny that
noninferential reports are in the fact-stating line of work, and so, when true, state
facts. The preferred usage is to see the distinction between claims that are nonin-
ferentially elicited and those that arise as the conclusions of inferences as a distinc-
tion within fact-stating discourse.

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139
posed to say that . is F and that the conditions are as far as
one knows standard and that when under those conditions
one is so disposed it is usually the case that a is F, to the
conclusion that t' is in fact F. (The reporter's having to believe
all of this, and so to understand it, is crucial to Sellars's later
argument). Understanding the possibility of systematic error
in the responsive dispositions of reporters introduces a new
dimension in the relation between practices of reporting and
those of inferring. Here Sellars introduces the illustrative
parable of young John in the tie shop.
Section 15: Where collateral beliefs indicate that systematic
error is likely, the subject learns not to make the report it is
F, to which his previously inculcated responsive dispositions
incline him, but to make a new kind of claim: it looke (or
seems) F.' Of course it is tempting to take this as a new kind
of report, indeed, a report of a special kind of particular, a
sense datum. This report, then, is naturally thought of as
reporting a minimal, noninferentially ascertainable, founda-
tionally basic fact, about which each subject is incorrigible.
There are two points here which might be distinguished.
First, it is a mistake in any case to treat what is reported as
foundationally basic facts, for the concepts needed to formu-
late them turn out to depend on other concepts, which are
not formed using any analogue of a 'looks'-operator. (See
[32].) Second, it is a mistake to treat these as reports at
all -since they evince a disposition to call something F, but
may not happily be thought of as saying that one has such a
disposition. Sellars wavers on the second point, but he is firm
on the first.
Section (1) 16: Sellarss alternative analysis depends on distin-
guishing two different dimensions of the use of a noninfer-

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ential report. First, each report is the manifestation of some
reliable differential responsive disposition. That is, it is the result
of one's being trained to behave in a certain way when in
certain environmental situations (like a pigeon trained to
peck at the red square when the red light comes on). What
is the difference between a parrot trained to utter "That's
red!" when and only when confronted by the visible presence
of something red, and a genuine noninferential reporter of
the same circumstance? Having the differential responsive
dispositions is not enough to have the concept, else a chunk
of iron that rusts in wet environments and not in dry ones
would have to be counted as having the concepts of wet and
dry environments. What more, besides the parrot's sentience,
is required for the sapience that consists in responding differ-
entially by applying a concept? Sellars's answer, invoking the
second dimension of reporting, is that the response must be
taking up a position in the space of reasons - making a move
in the game of giving and asking for reasons. The genuine
noninferential reporter of red things has, and the parrot has
not, mastered the inferential role played by reports of that
type -where inferential role is a matter of what conclusions
one is entitled to draw from such a statement when it is
overheard, what would count as a reason for it, and what is
incompatible with it and so a reason against it. This is a
matter of the inferentially articulated content of the asser-
tional commitment undertaken by the reporter in virtue of
the performance that is the reporting: what the reporter is
responsible for. Sellars's term for this second dimension is
endorsement, a matter of what one is linguistically committed to
(the inferential consequences of ones claims) or responsible
for (how it could be justified) in virtue of one's assertional
performance. This notion of responsibility, or of what conclu-

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141
sions one has given others the right to draw, or has obliged
oneself to draw, and what other commitments would count
as entitling one to the commitment one has undertaken is the
normative element in linguistic conduct, whose irreducibility
to descriptive aspects (such as responsive dispositions) lies
at the base of the epistemic/nonepistemic distinction, and is
the source of Sellars's remark about the naturalistic fallacy
at the end of [5].
On Sellars's understanding, the ability to use t looks
green' correctly appeals to the same responsive dispositions
acquired in learning to use it is green' correctly. But these
two sorts of remarks elicited in accordance with those dis-
positions support quite different inferences. In particular, the
parable of the tie shop shows that in saying that something
merely look green, one can be understood to be doing two
things: expressing one's noninferential differential responsive
disposition to call it green (to commit oneself to the claim
that it is green, with all of its inferential consequences and
justificatory obligations), and at the same time explicitly
withholding one's endorsement of that claim. For collateral
beliefs concerning the possibility of systematic error under
the prevailing circumstances of observation have undermined
the reporter's confidence in his reliability-that is, in the
correctness of the inference from "X is disposed noninferen-
tially to report the presence of something green (seen by
electric lighting)," to "There is (probably) something green
there."
This analysis of what one is doing in using 'looks' explains
the incorrigibility of 'looks' talk. One can be wrong about
whether something i green because the claim one endorses,
the commitment one undertakes, may turn out to be incor-
rect. For instance, its inferential consequences may be incom-

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patible with other facts one is or comes to be in a position
to know independently. But in saying that something looks
green, one is not endorsing a claim, but withholding endorse-
ment from one. Such a reporter is merely evincing a dispo-
sition to do something that for other reasons (e.g., suspicion
that the circumstances of observation lead to systematic er-
ror) he is unwilling to do-namely, endorse a claim. Such a
reporter cannot be wrong, because he has held back from
making a commitment. This is why the looks, seema, and
appears operators do not iterate. Their function is to express
the withholding of endorsement from the sentence that ap-
pears within the scope of the operator. There is no sensible
contrast between 'looks-to-look F' and 'looks-F' of the sort
there is between 'looks-F'
and '(is-)F' because the first 'looks'
has already withheld endorsement from the only content in
the vicinity to which one might be committed (to something's
being F). There is no further withholding work for the
second 'looks' to do. There is nothing left to take back. Since
asserting 'X looks F' is not undertaking a propositionally
contentful commitment-but only expressing an override-
able disposition to do so-there is no issue as to whether or
not that commitment (which one?) is correct.
Sellars accordingly explains the incorrigibility of appear-
ance-claims, which had so impressed Descartes. He does so
in terms of the practices of using words, which are what
grasp of the relevant appearance concepts must amount to,
according to his methodological linguistic pragmatism. But
once we have seen the source and nature of this incorrigibil-
ity - in down-to-earth, practical, resolutely nonmetaphysical
terms —we see also why it is precisely unsuited to use as an
epistemological foundation for the rest of our (risky, corrigi-
ble) empirical knowledge. For, first, the incorrigibility of

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claims about how things merely look simply reflects their
emptiness: the fact that they are not really claims at all.
And second, the same story shows us that looks' talk is not
an autonomous language game-one that could be played
though one played no other. It is entirely parasitic on the
practice of making risky empirical reports of how things
actually are. Thus Descartes seized on a genuine phenome-
non -the incorrigibility of claims about appearances, reflect-
ing the non-iterability of operators like looke, seema, and
appear -but misunderstood its nature, and so mistakenly
thought it available to play an epistemologically foundational
role for which it is in no way suited.
This analysis of "the logic of 'looks' talk," along with the
consequent diagnosis of the errors of a foundationalism based
on the incorrigibility of our epistemic access to appearances,
is the constructive core of Sellars's critique of Cartesianism.
It does not purport to be a knock-down argument; for it can
only be as persuasive as its account of how 'looks' talk works,
and alternatives are always possible.' What it is meant to do
I1. "There are many interesting and subtle questions about the dialectics of
'looks'-talk, into which I do not have space to enter" [17]. Sellars focuses on one
sort of use that 'looks' has: first-person, noninferential uses. But as he points out in
this section, 'looks' also has third-person, (merely) fact-stating uses, as when S' says:
"X looks I to S." The account generalizes to these cases straightforwardly. In
making this claim, S' is doing two things: attributing to S a disposition noninferen-
tially to report that X is F, and herself withholding endorsement from the claim that
X is F. The words used to make this report do not settle whether S' would attribute
to S the endorsement, or the withholding of endorsement, from the claim that X is
F (that is, whether S' takes it that the disposition being she attributes to S issues
in an endorsement, or is overridden and withheld by S). More expressively powerful
and discriminating regimented uses that do mark such distinctions are easily con-
trived. (This same idea will account for the nontrivial iterated or embedded uses of'
'looks' or 'seems' made possible by shifts of perspective: "It seems to S' that X looks
F to S, and so on.)
Further uses of 'looks' that are more challenging to the Sellarsian account have
been pointed out by Joe Camp. These are cases where we use looks F without a

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is to remove the temptation to go the Cartesian foundation-
alist route, by explaining, without explaining away, the exact
nature of that temptation.
Section 17: (This line of thought is completed in [22]). We
begin to look for some confirmation of the two-pronged
account of 'looks' talk as expressing a differential responsive
disposition to make a specified noninferential report, while
withholding endorsement of that claim. The confirmation
takes the form of explanations of otherwise puzzling features
of appearance-talk. Consider the three sentences:
(i) The apple over there is red.
(ii) The apple over there looks red.
(iii) It looks as though there were a red apple over there.
Utterances of these sentences can express the same respon-
sive disposition to report the presence of a red apple, but
they endorse (take responsibility for the inferential conse-
quences of) different parts of that claim. (i) endorses both
the existence of the apple and its quality of redness. (ii)
endorses only the existence of the apple. The 'looks' locution
explicitly cancels the qualitative commitment or endorse-
ment. (iii) explicitly cancels both the existential and the
corresponding practice of' using the unmodified '(is) F:' Thus after the optometrist
puts pupil-dilating drops in my eyes, I may say, "Things look blurry." 'Blurry' does
not express a way things could be. It is essentially an expression pertaining to images
or representations. Taking this sort of use of 'looks' as central and paradigmatic
could encourage the reintroduction of the idea that noninferential uses of looks'
are genuine reports, reports of intrinsic features of appearances as such. Sellarsians
ing possibilities, derivative from the central uses, and to be explained in terms of'
them. Sellars himself never discusses this issue.
In a note to the 1963 edition, Sellars suggests that one might distinguish between
looks P and looks to be f, in a way that corresponds to Chisholms distinction
between noncomparative and comparative 'appears' statements.

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qualitative endorsements. Thus, if someone claims that there
is in fact no apple over there, he is asserting something
incompatible with (i) and (ii), but not with (iii). If he denies
that there is anything red over there, he asserts something in-
compatible with (i), but not with (ii) or (iii). Sellars's account
of the practice of using 'looks,' in terms of the withholding
of endorsement when one suspects systematic error in one's
responsive dispositions, can account for the difference in
scope of endorsement that (i)-(iii) exhibit. But how could
that difference be accounted for on a sense-datum approach?
In this section Sellars points out another virtue of his
account, as opposed to sense-datum theories, namely, the
possibility of reporting a merely generic (more accurately,
merely determinable) look. (Recall that Sellars introduced
this phenomenon already in [9].) Thus it is possible for an
apple to look red, without its looking any specific shade of
red (crimson, scarlet, etc.). It is possible for a plane figure
to look many-sided without there being some particular num-
ber of sides (say 119) which it looks to have. But if 'looks'
statements are to be understood as reports of the presence
before the eye of the mind of a particular which is F, how
can this possibility be understood? Particulars are completely
determinate. A horse has a particular number of hairs,
though as Sellars points out, it can look to have merely 'a lot'
of them. It is a particular shade of brown (or several shades),
even though it may look only darkly colored. So how are
such generic, merely determinable, looks possible? Sellars's
account is in terms of scope of endorsement. One says that
the plane figure looks 'many-sided' instead of ' 119-sided' just
in case one is willing only to endorse (be held responsible
for justifying) the more general claim. This is a matter of how
far one is willing to trust one's responsive dispositions, a

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matter of the epistemic credence one feels they deserve or
are able to sustain. Particulars, even if they are sense con-
tents, cannot be colored without being some determinate
color and shade. How then can the sense-datum theorist -
who wants to say that when something looks F to S, some-
thing in S it F-account for the fact that something can look
colored without looking to be any particular color, or look
red without looking to be any particular shade of red? So
Sellars's account of 'looks' talk in terms of endorsement can
account for two aspects of that kind of discourse that no
theory that invokes a given can explain: the scope distinc-
tions between qualitative and existential lookings, and the
possibility of merely generic or determinable lookings.
Section 18: On this account, then, one must first acquire the
practice of reporting red objects (getting both the appropri-
ate responsive dispositions and an understanding of what one
is endorsing by making such a claim), and only then can one
learn to make reports expressing those same dispositions, but
which are more guarded in their endorsement. As the argu-
ment of the previous section has shown, the mastery of
different endorsements required can be quite sophisticated.
One may, for instance, discriminate existential and qualita-
tive lookings, and various grades of determinability. Thus to
know when something looks red, one must understand what
it is to be red, and a good deal besides.! We can see at this
point that the sentence we worried about in [13] is true
12. In a footnote added to the 1963 reprinting of' the essay, Sellars points out
that his story is compatible with distinguishing a rudimentary concept corresponding
to the use of 'green,' which one can have without having mastered the use of looks
green, and a richer concept (corresponding more closely to ours) which is achieved
only once one has also mastered 'looks' talk. This observation opens the door to
distinguishing (as McDowell does) concepts corresponding to secondary qualities as
those mastery of which requires mastery of the associated looks' vocabulary-as,
arguably, green does, while massive, and perhaps square, do not.

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because it is a definition, not of is-red, but of standard condi-
tions. For standard conditions are just those in which one's
responsive dispositions can be trusted, and ought to be fully
endorsed. Given such a definition, one can investigate em-
pirically what those conditions are.
Section 19 and 20: These sections return to the question of the
acquisition of various capacities involved in mastering an
observation concept, the question that set up the trilemma of
[6]. We now know that these capacities involve both regular
responsive dispositions and a capacity to manipulate en-
dorsements inferentially, a nonepistemic and an epistemic
skill respectively. The specifically inferential articulation re-
quired for endorsements to qualify as conceptually contentful
introduces at least a limited bolium into Sellars's picture: one
could not have one concept unless one had many others to
which it is inferentially related: "The essential point is that
even to have the more rudimentary concept [of green, say]
presupposes having a battery of other concepts." This entails
rejecting the idea that "fundamental concepts pertaining to
observable fact have that logical independence of one an-
other which is characteristic of the empiricist tradition."
These sections do not present Sellars's argument in a per-
spicuous, or even linear, fashion, and the argument is re-
peated in more satisfactory form at [33]-[37], where we will
discuss it.
Part IV [Z1]-[23]
Explaining Looks
Sections 21 and 22: [17] discussed the issue of the scope of
endorsement, which is treated in the third paragraph of [21].
Sellars reformulates that account in terms of the events that

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are lookings and seeings, where earlier we discussed the
reports causally occasioned by those events. The first two
paragraphs of [22] and the third paragraph of [21] then
present a preliminary account of a distinction between two
ways in which some phenomenon can be explained:
(i) By deducing it from some empirical generalization
formulated entirely in terms of observables (things
that can be noninferentially reported). Explaining a
change in pressure of a gas sample by appealing to
the law PV = kT, together with suitable back-
ground conditions, is an example.
(il) By postulating unobservable entities, and subsuming
the phenomenon under laws involving those theoreti-
cal entities. Explaining the change in pressure of a
gas by appealing to the kinetic theory of gases and
its postulated molecules and their interactions is an
example.
Once again, this discussion is really out of place here, serving
merely as a dark foreshadowing of a line of argument that
will be pursued in more detail later (beginning at [39]-[44]).
Sellars does here raise the important question that remains
even after we have understood existential, qualitative, and
unqualified 'looks' statements in terms of scope of endorse-
ment (as in [17]), namely, what is it that is common to the
three cases? The answer, we will see, is "sense impressions
of red." But that is an answer we will not be able to under-
stand until the very end of the essay ([62]).
Section 23: This section discusses the question of what things
can literally be red. Sellars's claim is that only physical
objects can, and that it is a mistake to think that even facing
surfaces can, except in a derivative sense. The discussion as it

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stands is unsatisfactory, since criteria of primacy of sense and
literalness of attribution are not forthcoming. Once again, a
later discussion is being prefigured, in this case concerning
the 'of-red'ness of sensations in [60]-[61].
Parts V and VI (Sections [24]-[29]) offer a discussion of
the British Empiricists' treatment of impressions. They fill in
some of the historical background of Sellars's discussion, but
are not central or essential to the development of his argu-
ment.
Part V [24]-[25]
Impressions and Ideas: A Logical Point
Sections 24 and 25: A discussion of the intentionality of 'sen-
sation of ..! Sellars's view is that Descartes mistakenly
assimilated sensations and thoughts because of the way in
which each is 'of' or 'about or directed at something. There
need be no red triangle for me to have a sensation 'of' one,
and there need be no golden mountain for me to have a
thought 'of' one. But this is a superficial similarity, for the
kind of aboutness is in fact quite different in the two cases.
An equally important motivation for the assimilation, which
Sellars does not mention here, is the incorrigibility and trans-
parency, the epistemic privilege accorded to reports of sensa-
tions and of thoughts. Here Sellars points out "the notorious
'ing'l'ed' ambiguity" as it applies to the concept of experience.
Part VI [26]-[29]
Impressions and Ideas: A Historical Point
Section 26: The inverted spectrum problem cannot be stated
without recourse to some version of the Myth of the Given.
*
*

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Section 27: A central epistemological problem of the empiri-
cists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume is taken to be the question
how, given that we can be aware of completely determinate
sense repeatables, we can come to be aware also of determin-
able sense repeatables. Determinate/determinable is like spe-
cies/genus, except that there is no separately specifiable dif-
ferentiating factor. Colors are the prime example: scarlet is a
more determinate shade of the determinable color red, as red
is a determination of the determinable colored.
Section 28: The British Empiricists "... all take for granted
that the human mind has an innate ability to be aware of
certain determinate sorts — indeed, that we are aware of them
simply by virtue of having sensations and images." That is,
they did not ask a corresponding question about how, given
that we can be aware of particular unrepeatable token sense
contents, we can come to be aware also of their repeatable
types, even maximally determinate ones.
Section 29: Against this Sellars will argue for what he calls
'psychological nominalism' (not the best imaginable name),
according to which all awareness of repeatables (whether
determinate or determinable) is a linguistic affair, and hence
may not be presupposed in one's account of the acquisition
and functioning of language. Sellars is proposing a linguistic,
social theory of awareness. He has in mind more by this term
than simply being awake (not being asleep): he is after
awareness in the sense of sapience, not of sentience. It is clas-
sificatory awareness, awareness of something as something.
But not all acts of classification are acts of awareness. As
pointed out above in [[16]], anything with stable dispositions
to respond differentially to stimuli can be thought of as

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classifying the stimuli according to the repeatable responses
those stimuli elicit. A parrot trained to respond differentially
to red things in its environment does not display the sort of
awareness that Sellars is explaining. Such awareness, spe-
cifically conceptual awareness, requires something beyond be-
ing awake and classifying by differential response.
Part VII [OJ-BI]
The Logic of 'Means'
Section 30: Anyone whose account of the prelinguistic aware-
ness that makes language acquisition possible assigns it an
inferential structure (Sellars says 'logical,' but that is just
1950s talk for 'conceptual,' which for Sellars can be parsed
as 'inferential") and is committed to the Myth of the Given.
Such conceptual awareness involves not only classification,
but making the classifications significant in inferences. It is
at this point that statements of fact are made, particulars
referred to and classified under universals. On the sort of
account Sellars opposes to the Myth, conceptual content is
inferentially articulated. But inference is a process arising
only within the "game of giving and asking for reasons,"
which essentially involves beliefs. This is a normative realm,
of commitment and entitlement to claims, of endorsement
and justification. It is what Sellars has been calling the
'epistemic.' The Myth is to think that anything could intrin-
sically, naturally, or necessarily possess a particular signifi-
cance for this realm, independent of the acquisition or
deployment of concepts by the one for whom it has that
significance. Acts of awareness as traditionally conceived, as
entailing the existence of something sufficiently belief-like to
serve as the ultimate inferential ground of empirical knowl-

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edge (never mind as themselves constituting knowledge),
would have to have just such a property.
Section 3l: So learning a meaning ought not to be understood
as associating something one is already aware of with a
verbal symbol. But isn't this the natural way to understand
statements like "'Rot' (in German) means red"? How else
can Sellars understand this sentence except as expressing an
association between ones awareness of the determinable re-
peatable quality and the word 'rot"? His answer is that
meaning claims like this really assert that the mentioned
expression ('rot') plays the same conceptual functional role
as the used expression ('red"'). 'These considerations make it
clear that nothing whatever can be inferred ... about the
exact way in which the word red' is related to red things,
from the truth of the semantical statement "red" means the
quality red.'"
Part VIII [32]-[38]
Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?
Section 32: Another incorrect, foundationalist account is de-
scribed here. Sellars disagrees with only one bit of this
story, though it turns out to be an important bit. Foundation-
alism is the claim that there is a structure of particular beliefs
such that
(1) Each one is noninferentially arrived at.
(2) The beliefs in (1) presuppose no other belief, either
particular or general.
(3) These noninferentially acquired beliefs constitute the
ultimate court of appeal for all factual claims.

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Sellars accepts (1) and (3), but denies (2). His project at this
point is to show how a bit of knowledge (beliet) can, and
indeed how all of it does, presuppose other knowledge (be-
lief), even though it is not inferred from that other knowledge
or belief. This possibility was not seriously examined by the
classical epistemological tradition. It is a certain hierarchical
picture of understanding (at this level a necessary condition of
believing) that Sellars rejects. He does not object to a hier-
archical picture of justification, once that has been suitably
disentangled from bad foundationalism concerning the na-
ture and acquisition of belief.
For Sellars, there is no such thing as a noninferential
belief, if by that one means a belief one could have without
grasping its inferential connection to at least some other
beliefs. For to understand a sentence, to grasp a propositional
content (a necessary condition of having a belief) is to place
it in the space of reasons, to assign it an inferential role in
the game of giving and asking for reasons, as entailing some
other contents and being incompatible with others. A nonin-
ferential report or belief can properly be called 'noninferen-
tial' only in the sense that the reporter's commitment to an
essentially inferentially articulated content is elicited nonin-
ferentially on this occasion - that is, that it is elicited as a
response to some nonlinguistic, nonepistemic environing cir-
cumstance, rather than as a response to another belief or
assertion. Noninferential beliefs do not form an autonomous
discursive stratum: there could be no language game consist-
ing entirely of noninferential reports. (Notice that this is a
stronger claim than that made above in connection with
'looks'-talk. For this claim concerns any kind of noninferen-
tial report, whether what they report is inner or outer, ap-
pearances or empirical realities.) For any sentence to have

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noninferential uses, some sentences must have inferential
ones. For the conceptual content expressed by a sentence
(what is believed) essentially involves its potential as a prem-
ise and as a conclusion of inferences. Unless one can employ
noninferentially acquired beliefs as the premises of inferences
leading to further beliefs, their acquisition does not qualify
as acquiring belief: (something propositionally contentful) at
all. On this inferentialist picture of conceptual content, one
cannot have one concept without having many inferentially
interrelated ones. This does not mean that there could not
be a language consisting only of expressions for observables,
however. For the concepts of observables are concepts that
have noninferential, reporting, uses. The requirement is only
that the concepts that can be used to make noninferential
reports must also be available to be applied inferentially, as
the conclusions of inferences whose premises are the nonin-
ferential applications of other concepts.
Sellars begins by asking about the nature of the autbority
(a patently normative notion) of noninferential beliefs, that
is, their capacity to justify other claims. A distinction is
needed first between sentence types and sentence tokens: the
type is repeatable and can be instantiated on different occa-
sions, whereas the token is unrepeatable. It is the utterance
or inscription of the sentence on a particular occasion. So if
the distinction is applied to letters instead of sentences, the
sequence 'aeaaeea' contains two letter types and seven letter
tokens, four of one type and three of the other. Now it can
be seen that it is sentence tokens whose justification is at
issue. For though there are some sentences that are justified,
if they are justified at all, whenever they are tokened, such
as '2 + 2 = 4,' and 'Red is a color,' there are others that can
be justified (and true) on one occasion and not justified or
true on another. Then only the tokens and not the types can

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be said to be justified. These are sentences like 'That car is
red, ' or 'I'm hungry now,' which contain words whose refer-
ence is determined by the actual circumstances in which the
sentence is tokened. These are called "token reflexive" ex-
pressions. Many, though not all, of the noninferential beliefs
putatively described in (1)-(3) above are token reflexive.
Authority or credibility (positive justification status) is either
extrinsic, coming from something else, in this case by infer-
ential inheritance, or intrinsic. Intrinsic credibility may be
associated with types, as in meaning-analytic statements such
as 'All bachelors are unmarried males,' or with tokens, as
in 'This is red' (or, given Sellars's account of 'looks,' "This
looks red).
Section 33: Sellars now considers a line of thought according
to which intrinsically credible types and intrinsically credible
tokens, analytic claims 3 and observation reports, are similar
in that they are both types such that their being correctly
tokened, that is, tokened according to the rules for the use of
all the component expressions, is a sufficient, not just a
necessary, condition of their being true and justified (hence
not just believed but known). Sellars can swallow all of this
13. In "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" Quine objects to the notion of meaning-
analytic claims (claims true in virtue solely of the meanings of their words) on the
broadly pragmatist grounds that there is no practically discernible status corre-
sponding to this supposed category. Claims taken to be analytic, such as "All
bachelors are unmarried males."
are not immune from revision, known a priori, or
otherwise distinguished from statements of very general fact, such as "There have
been black dogs." Sellars accepts analyticity, which he associates with the practical
status of counterfactual robustness. This line of thought ties our concepts to what
we take to be laws of nature. (See Sellars's "Concepts as Involving Laws, and
Inconceivable without Them," in Pure Pragmaties and Powsible Worles, and "Counter-
factuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities, " in Minnesota Studies in the Philoso-
play of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell, vol. 2,
pp. 225-308 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958].) So conceived,
analytic claims are neither immune from revision nor known a priori.

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except the bit about rules. The idea that he will reject is that
analytic statements are true by virtue of discursive definition
(definition of a linguistic expression in terms of other linguis-
tic expressions), while observation reports are true by virtue
of ostensive definitions. Ostensive definitions are the only
sort we can give of terms like 'red.' They consist of defining
the expression by exhibiting samples of the things it applies
to (pointing to red objects). The usual foundationalist infinite
regress argument can be applied to show that not all expres-
sions of the language can be discursively defined on pain of
circularity or infinite regress (in either case no definition
is achieved). So there must be ostensive definitions in the
language. These definitions, just like the discursive ones,
codify the rules of appropriate usage of the expressions they
define. Just as following those rules is sufficient for the truth
of analytic statements, so following the 'rules' of ostensive
definition is to be sufficient for the truth of observation
reports. (Such a rule might look like the definition in [13].)
At this point Sellars disagrees. One can imagine following
the rules for the use of 'this, 'is,' and 'green'
only if one has
some idea of prelinguistic awareness of green-the Myth.
For Sellars it is incoherent to talk of ostensive definitions
setting up rules for using 'green,' for there is no language
available in which
such rules could be stated. Ostensive
definitions establish practices; they are regular, but not rule
governed.'4
Section 34: The notion that the authority of noninferential
reports rests on episodes of nonverbal, hence nonconceptual,
14. This distinction, and the need for some sense in which a practice (paradig-
natıcally, a lil
maticallyan linge isaid practice can be govered larsorm evich thomph is practi
"Some Reflections on Language Games," reprinted in Science, Perception, and Reality
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1963).

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awareness, which verbal performances express, is a version
of the Myth. From Sellars's point of view, such episodes are
the tortoise underneath the elephant.
Section 35: Here Sellars presents his alternative view. It begins
with the observation that "... a token of "This is green' in
the presence of a green item ... expresses observational
knowledge [only if] it is a manifestation of a tendency to
produce tokens of 'This is green' -given a certain 'set' (con-
text of collateral commitments and circumstances) if and
only if a green object is being looked at in standard condi-
tions. ..." That is, it must be the expression of a reliable
differential responsive disposition. But photocells and par-
rots could satisfy this condition, which shows that so far only
the responsive dispositions part of the observation report has
been specified. It remains to add conditions to capture the
epistemic side, the dimension of endorsement, of undertaking
inferentially articulated commitments, of producing a per-
formance with a distinctive kind of authority.
To have the authority of knowledge, the report must not
only he reliable; it must be taken to be reliable. In fact Sellars
claims that it must be known by the reporter to be reliable
(and in this he perhaps goes too far): "... the perceiver must
know that tokens of "This is green' are symptoms of the
presence of green objects in conditions which are standard
for visual perception." 'Justification' has the "ing/ed' ambigu-
ity (cf. [24]): justifying, a practical activity, or being justified,
a normative status. Sellars claims that one cannot have the
status except when it is possible to redeem that claim to
authority and epistemic privilege by engaging in the activity
of justifying it. This claim of the priority of practice over
status is a specific variety of pragmatism, to which Sellars
adheres. The difference between a noninferential reporter

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and a photocell, or a parrot trained to utter 'It's getting
warmer' as the temperature rises, does not lie in the reliability
or range of their responsive dispositions. It lies in the capac-
ity of the reporter to redeem the commitment undertaken,
the authority claimed by the reporting, by justifying the claim
(if challenged) by giving reasons for it. The by now familiar
basic point is that in order to count as making a claim
(expressing a belief) at all, the reporter must be "in the space
of giving and asking for reasons," in addition to having the
right responsive dispositions. The further claim being for-
warded here is that for a noninferential report to express
knowledge (or the belief it expresses to constitute knowl
edge), the reporter must be able to justify it, by exhibiting
reasons for it. This is to say that the reporter must be able
to exhibit it as the conclusion of an inference, even though
that is not how the commitment originally came about.
The inference in question is what might be called a "reli-
ability inference." One justifies a noninferentially elicited
report that something is red by noting that one was disposed
noninferentially to apply the concept red to it, and pointing
out that one is a reliable reporter of red things in these
circumstances. To say that one is reliable is just to say that
the inference from one's being disposed to call something red
to its actually being red is a good one. Thus the reliability of
one's differential responsive dispositions, together with the
reports being an exercise of those dispositions, justifies -of-
fers good reasons for-the report. In insisting that in order
properly to be credited with knowledge a reporter must be
able to offer an inferential justification of the belief in ques-
tion, Sellars is endorsing an epistemological internalism that
puts him at odds with more recent reliabilist externalists in
epistemology. Their claim is that the real function of the

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traditional justification condition on knowledge is to rule
out accidentally true beliefs. If so, then the rationale for en-
gaging in assessments of whether various beliefs qualify as
knowledge is perfectly well-served by insisting only that
candidate beliefs result from reliable belief-forming mecha-
nisms -that is, mechanisms that are likely to lead to truths,
whether or not the reporter knows that they are. Forming
beliefs that one can justify then appears as one reliable
mechanism among others.
Of course, from Sellars's point of view it would be a
mistake to conclude from this line of thought that one could
trade inferential justification for reliable belief-formation in
a wholesale fashion. For that it is belief that one is forming,
that what one is doing is applying concepts, is a matter of their
specifically inferential articulation - their role in the game of
giving and asking for reasons, justifying and demanding
justifications. Against that background of inferential practice,
however, it is not obvious why Sellars should resist the
reliabilist's suggestion. Why isn't it enough that the attributor
of knowledge know that the reporter is reliable, that the
attributor of knowledge endorse the inference from the re-
porter's responsive disposition noninferentially to apply the
concept red to the thing's (probably) being red? Why should
the reporter herself have to be able to offer the inferen-
tial justification for her noninferential report? (This is the
thought behind the qualification offered parenthetically early
in the second paragraph above.)
Section 36: The moral is that on the true view "one could not
have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew
many other things as well." This is not to say that observation
reports are somehow results of inferences after all, but only

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that, though noninferential, they must be justifiable to be
justified. The false view thinks it is supposed to give a causal
description of how knowledge is possessed, but "
... in char-
acterizing an episode or state as that of knowing we are not
giving an empirical description of that episode or state: we
are placing it in the logical space of reasons, or justifying and
being able to justify what one says." Thus everything irrele-
vant to justification, either to knowing what would be a
justification or to being entitled to produce one, is a noncog-
nitive causal antecedent, perhaps a necessary condition of
empirical knowledge, but not one that is constitutive of it.
Nor is the general point specific to the normative, epistemic
status of knowledge-though Sellars does not point this out.
He could as well have said that in characterizing an episode
or state as one of believing, or applying concepta, or grasping
propositional contents we are not giving an empirical descrip-
tion of that episode or state but placing it in the logical space
of reasons, or justifying and being able to justify what one
says. For only what is inferentially articulated is conceptually
contentful (and hence qualifies as a believable or claimable)
at all. As we saw in the previous section, however, Sellars
does want to insist further that one cannot know noninferen-
tially that something is green unless one also knows that one
is a reliable reporter of green things under the prevailing
circumstances.
Section 37: This view -the one Sellars endorses -seems to
involve an infinite regress. For how could we have acquired
knowledge that tokens of "This is green'
are reliable symp-
toms ... unless we had had knowledge of such facts as "This
is green, ' and "This is a token of' this is green'" beforehand? 15
15. Notice that this is a problem Sellars need not have faced, had he endorsed
the modified externalism offered to him in [[35]] above.

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Sellars's answer is that we can acquire knowledge of facts of
these three types simultaneously, but that we can know facts
that bear on events that occurred before we acquired any of
this knowledge. Thus: "... it requires only that it is correct
to say that Jones now knows, thus remembers, that these
particular facts did obtain. It does not require that it be
correct to say that at the time these facts did obtain he then
knew them to obtain. And the regress disappears." Thus
children at the age of six can know that at four they saw - in
the sense of reliably responded to-a fire, although at the
age of four all they could do was say 'fire' parrot-fashion,
without knowing there was a fire. 16 The important difference
is not one of responsive disposition but one of capacity to
endorse. The six-year-old has moved into the space of giving
and asking for reasons; he can commit himself to a claim and
be treated as authoritative; he is responsible for the claim he
undertakes. For this he must at least be able to tell what he
is thereby committing himself to and what evidence would
entitle him to it, that is, he must understand his claim. But
even that is not sufficient. For this new normative status is
socially conferred. No nonepistemic description of the can-
didate reporter suffices for the conferral of this status, unless
and only insofar as the community conferring that status,
treating the individual as responsible, reliable, and so on,
takes it to be sufficient. Compare achieving one's majority
and being able for the first time to undertake contractual
obligations. This status consists in the community's recogni-
tion of it. Some minors are more reliable at carrying out the
commitments they undertake than many over the age of
twenty-one, but this fact does not make their signature mean
16. Commenting on this point for the 1963 edition, Sellars said that his thought
was that one could have direct (in the sense of noninferential) knowledge of a past
fact which one could not conceptualize at the time that it occurred.

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that they have entered into a contract. This is how "the light
dawns slowly over the whole": at some point one masters
the moves, inferential and noninferential, sufficiently that
one's noises come to be taken by ones community as having
the significance of making claims, undertaking commitments,
giving reasons.
Section 38: The only sense in which there is no foundation for
empirical knowledge is the sense in which the observation
reports, which in a certain sense are its foundation, them-
selves rest (not inferentially, but in the order of understanding
and sometimes of justification) on other sorts of knowledge.
Observation reports, whether of inner episodes or outer
happenings, do not constitute an autonomous stratum of the
language —a game one could master though one had as yet
not mastered the inferential use of any expressions. That is,
Sellars rejects only claim (2) of the three foundationalist
theses considered in [32]. But there is no need for a founda-
tion in this sense: "Empirical knowledge is rational, not
because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting
enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not
all at once."
Part IX [39]-[44]
Science and Ordinary Usage
Sections 39-44: Here Sellars sketches his Scientific Realism.
He includes this discussion because if science is viewed in
the opposite, positivist fashion, the notion of inner episodes
as theoretical entities, which he is about to introduce, is
incoherent. Thus [41] claims that "science is the measure of
all things. ..." This is a view about the authority of claims

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couched in scientific vocabulary relative to the authority of
claims couched in other vocabularies. [43] briefly indicates
the positivist view. According to the positivist scheme, there
is an observation language in which data are formulated and
the results of experiments expressed. All we directly know
about are the objects of observation (observation reports are
the Konstatierungen of [33]). According to this account, a
theoretical language is introduced in order to systematize our
observations and facilitate prediction and control. But the
objects the theory postulates are virtual, mere calculational
devices or instruments for the expression and systematization
of observations. Theories are instruments, and their asser-
tions should not be taken as entailing the existence of the
objects they postulate. Sellars points out that only someone
who thought that the observations themselves were given,
not the product of the learning of concepts with which to
report, would be tempted by this picture. Once it is dis-
carded, another way of thinking about the distinction be-
tween theoretical and observable objects and concepts comes
into view.
According to Sellarss view, the distinction between purely
theoretical objects and observable objects is methodological,
rather than ontological. That is, theoretical and observable
objects are not different kinds of things. They differ only in
how we come to know about them. Theoretical objects
are ones of which we can only have inferential knowledge,
whereas observable objects can also be known noninferen-
tially; theoretical concepts are ones we can be entitled to ap-
ply only as the conclusions of inferences, whereas concepts
of observables also have noninferential uses. But the line
between things to which we have only inferential cognitive
access and things to which we also have noninferential cog-

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nitive access can shift with time, for instance, as new instru-
ments are developed. Thus when first postulated to explain
perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, Pluto was a purely
theoretical object; the only claims we could make about it
were the conclusions of inferences. But the development of
more powerful telescopes eventually made it accessible to
observation, and so a subject of noninferential reports. Pluto
did not undergo an ontological change; all that changed was
its relation to us. (Notice that this realism about theoretical
entities does not entail scientific realism in the sense that
privileges science over other sorts of cognitive activity, al-
though Sellars usually discusses the two sorts of claims to-
gether.)
It might be objected to this view that when the issue of
the ontological status of theoretical entities is raised, they are
not considered merely as objects in principle like any others
save that they happen at the moment to be beyond our
powers of observation. They are thought of as undervable in
a much stronger sense: permanently and in principle inac-
cessible to observation. But Sellars denies that anything is
unobservable in this sense. To be observable is just to be
noninferentially reportable. Noninferential reportability re-
quires only that there are circumstances in which reporters
can apply the concepts in question (the dimension of infer-
entially articulated endorsement) by exercising reliable dif-
ferential dispositions to respond to the objects in question
(the causal dimension), and know that they are doing so. In
this sense, physicists with the right training can noninferen-
tially report the presence of mu mesons in bubble chambers.
In this sense of 'observation,' nothing real is in principle
beyond the reach of observation. (Indeed, in Sellars's sense,
one who mastered reliable differential responsive dispositions

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noninferentially to apply normative vocabulary would be
directly observing normative facts. It is in this sense that we
might be said to be able to bear, not just the noises someone
else makes, but their words, and indeed, what they are saying -
their meaningd.)
Once one sees that observation is not based on some
primitive sort of preconceptual awareness (the tortoise be-
neath the elephant), the fact that some observation reports
are riskier than others and that when challenged we some-
times retreat to safer ones from which the originals can be
inferred will not tempt one to think that the original reports
were in fact the products of inference from those basic or
minimal observations. The physicist, if challenged to back
up his report of a mu meson, may indeed justify his claim
by citing the distinctively hooked vapor trail in the bubble
chamber. This is something else observable, from which the
presence of the mu meson can, in the right circumstances,
be inferred. But to say that is not to say that the original
report was the product of an inference after all. It was the
exercise of a reliable differential responsive disposition keyed
to a whole chain of reliably covarying events, which includes
mu mesons, hooked vapor trails, and retinal images. What
makes it a report of mu mesons, and not of hooked vapor
trails or retinal images, is the inferential role of the concept
the physicist noninferentially applies. (It is a consequence of
something's being a mu meson, for instance, that it is much
smaller than a finger, which does not follow from something's
being a hooked vapor trail.) If mu meson is the concept the
physicist applies noninferentially, then if he is sufficiently
reliable, when correct, that is what he deed. His retreat, when
a question is raised, to a report of a hooked vapor trail, whose
presence provides good inferential reason for the original,

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noninterentially elicited claim, is a retreat to a report that is
safer in the sense that he is a more reliable reporter of hooked
vapor trails than of mu mesons, and that it takes less training
to be able reliably to report vapor trails of a certain shape,
so that is a skill shared more widely. But the fact that an
inferential justification can be offered, and that the demand
for one may be in order, no more undermines the status of
the original report as noninferential (as genuinely an obser-
vation) than does the corresponding fact that I may under
various circumstances be obliged to back up my report of
something as red by invoking my reliability as a reporter of
red things in these circumstances -from which, together
with my disposition to call it red, the claim originally en-
dorsed noninferentially may be inferred
Part X [45]
Private Episodes: The Problem
Section 45: Sellars starts by setting the problem that will
occupy him for the rest of the essay: "the problem of how
the similarity among the experiences of seeing that an object
over there is red, its looking to one that an object over there i red
(when in point of fact it is not red), and its looking to one a
though there were a red object over there (when in fact there is
nothing over there at all). Part of this similarity, we saw,
consists in the fact that they all involve the ... proposition
... that the object over there is red. But over and above this
there is, of course, the aspect which many philosophers have
attempted to clarify by the notion of impressions or immediate
eixperience." Sellars's response to this problem will not be fully
in place until [62].
Next Sellars summarizes [32]-[38] (the meat of his epis-

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temological discussion): we now recognize that instead of
coming to have a concept of something because we have
noticed that sort of thing, to have the ability to notice re-
quires already having the concept, and cannot account for it.
For to notice something-to be aware of it in the sense rele-
vant to assessments of sapience, rather than of mere sen-
tience - is to respond to it by applying a concept, making a
noninferential judgment about it. So until one has the con-
cept 'green,' one cannot notice or be aware of green things,
though one can respond differentially to them - obviously, in
ways other than by applying the concept green. The title of
this essay is "Empiricium and the Philosophy of Mind," but
Sellars never comes right out and tells us what his attitude
toward empiricism is. One might think he endorses it, misled
by remarks such as he offers in [6] in discussing the incon-
sistent triad of commitments characteristic of classical sense-
datum theories. For there he dismisses the option of reject-
ing the third element of the trilemma by doing no more
than observing that to abandon it would "do violence to the
predominantly nominalistic proclivities of the empiricist
tradition" (proclivities that he discusses in more detail in
[24]-[28]). But to interpret this remark as an endorsement
by Sellars of the nominalistic proclivities of empiricism that
he invokes here would be to mistake the role the re-
mark plays in his argument. It is often hard to tell when
Sellars is speaking in his own voice, and this is one of the
occasions on which he is not. It is the classical sense-datum
theorists who are committed to this tenet of empiricism, not
Sellars —although, as will emerge just below, he does as a
matter of fact share with empiricists the belief that "the
capacity to have classicatory beliefs of the form :
l' is F' is
acquired."

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Indeed, we can see at this point that one of the major tasks
of the whole essay is to dismantle empiricism. For traditional
empiricism depends on episodes of nonverbal, nonconceptual
awareness, which serve both as the raw material for a proc-
ess of abstraction by which concepts can be formed and
grasped, and as our warrant for the ground-level (noninfer-
ential) applications of those concepts. (Compare [34].) This
whole picture depends essentially on the Myth of the Given.
Sellars's own view is one he is elsewhere happy to call
'rationalist':! conscious experience presupposes that the ex-
periencer already has concepts, and so cannot account for
their acquisition. In this claim, Sellars aligns himself with
the Leibniz of the New Essay, writing against his Lockean
target. Sellars's task in the rest of the essay is to show how
the philosophy of mind can understand inner episodes once
one has rejected hoth Cartesianism and empiricism, having
recognized that both depend upon the Myth of the Given.
The classical pre-Kantian rationalists, having won their
way through to the realization that awareness in the sense
that distinguishes us from prerational animals presupposes
the possession of concepts, took it that that claim committed
them to seeing concepts as innate-perhaps not all concepts,
but at least the most basic or general ones. Sellars shows that
that is not so. For he shows how to put together
a) reliable differential responsive dispositions, causally
keyed to things; and
b) inferential uses of concepts, which actually apply to
those things,
each of which can be acquired separately, to get the capacity
for conscious conceptual awareness of things. He shows us
17. For instance, in his important essay "Inference and Meaning," reprinted in
Pure Pragmatics and Possile Worlds.

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how to build out of those ingredients noninferentially elicited
reports in which the concepts are applied to the things that
causally elicit the reports. In this way he can explain how
concepts such as red and green can be acquired, by a route
that does not presuppose preconceptual awareness of red and
green things (though it does require the preconceptual ca-
pacity to discriminate them, and so to learn reliably to re-
spond differentially to them). That allows him to agree with
the empiricists (without indulging in their 'nominalist pro-
clivities'- see [24]-[29]) that "the capacity to have classifica-
tory beliefs of the form it is F is acquired," as he puts the
point in [6]. In the rest of the essay, he is going to tell a
corresponding story about the concepts thought and sense
impression, ending with our capacity to be directly (in the
sense of noninferentially) aware of them.
His question at this point is, If this rationalistic 'psycho-
logical nominalism'18 is right (and Sellars insists that it is),
how could we come to have the idea of an inner episode?
Descartes thought it a satisfactory answer to this question
that we get the idea just by having inner episodes. But this
must now be rejected as a sufficient condition of our noticing
(being aware of, believing that we have) them, for that is just
the Myth. The empiricists thought we could get the concept
of thoughts and impressions by abstraction from the thoughts
and impressions we were already in any case aware of. That
too is a version of the Myth. "In short, we are brought face
to face with the general problem of understanding how there
can be inner episodes-episodes that is, which somehow
combine privacy in that each of us has privileged access to
his own, with intersubjectivity, in that each of us can, in
principle, know about the other's." In other words, how
18. Here 'nominalism' has a sense quite distinct from that invoked in the previous
paragraph, picking up on its use in [6]. See [29].

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could we ever have come to know that reports of the form
'I'm seeing something that looks red,' or 'I am thinking that
Vienna is in Austria,' were reliable signs of certain inner
facts, given that we can make no empirical correlation by
induction as we can with 'This is red'? The Jones myth is
the answer to this question -indeed, the only answer avail-
able once we have given up both the self-authenticating
nonverbal episode notion of Descartes and the empiricists,
and the anti-inner-episode strain in Ryle and Wittgenstein
(as promised in [10]).
Sellars will "use a myth to kill a myth" [63]. He will tell
a story about how a community that turns out always already
to have had thoughts and sense impressions might work its
way up to having the concepts thought and sense impression,
and then come to be able to apply them noninferentially
and so for the first time to notice and be aware of those
thoughts and sense impressions. This is explicitly put for-
ward as a myth. Sellars is not claiming that things actually
happened this way, that we really had Rylean ancestors, or
owe our concepts to a primitive genius (never mind one
called 'Jones'). Sellars's pragmatism dictates that issues of
conceptual priority be translated into questions of the relative
autonomy of different strata of language — that is, into ques-
tions concerning what language games can be played inde-
pendently of and antecedently to which others. Telling an as-
if historical, developmental story is a way of exhibiting those
relations of conceptual dependency and presupposition.
Part XI [46]-[47]
Thoughts: The Classical View
Section 46: The previous section explained (contra Ryle) that
there really are impressions to be accounted for. This section

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just says the same thing about thoughts. There isn't much in
the way of argument here: Sellars points out that it is hard
to explain these things away, and we may agree that a theory
that can keep them is, other things being equal, superior to
one that must deny them.
Section 47: This bit is directly addressed to Ryle, and dismisses
his claims that
a) 'privileged access' must mean invariable access-
which Sellars rejects because often someone else can
tell what I must have been thinking, even when I am
not aware of having thought it; and
b) introspectible thoughts are just rotto voce verbal im-
agery: words running through one's head, 'perceived"
as if the words were either heard or seen. (This
point is discussed further in [56].)
We have to free ourselves from these preconceptions if we
are to understand Sellars's positive story about thoughts and
sense impressions.
Part XII [48]-[50]
Our Rylean Ancestors
Section 48: Sellars introduces the notion of 'our Rylean ances-
tors,' who have and can talk about dispositional traits that
are relatively long term, the sort of thing for which Ryle's
account works well: beliets, desires, hopes, fears, plans,
moods, character traits, etc. Ryle got these more or less right
(wed still have to put holist qualifications on his atomistic
approach), but he injudiciously thought that his success at
giving dispositional-behavioral accounts of this sort of mental
phenomenon meant that anything that could not be ex-

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plained this way must be metaphysical and illegitimate. Sel-
lars, via Jones, will show that this is not so. Sellars insists
(on the basis of the distinction between dispositions and
episodes) that having subjunctive conditionals of the Rylean
sort does not yet give the Ryleans the ability to talk about
thoughts and experiences. Sellars is going to show what
additional conceptual resources they need to develop the
concept of thoughts, and then on that basis, the concept of
sense impressions.
Section 49: The problem is, what would have to be added to
the Rylean language so that those who speak it "might come
to recognize each other and themselves as animals that think,
observe, and have feelings and sensations as we use the
terms." (The last clause is meant to eliminate the merely
dispositionally analyzable bits of mentalistic discourse-
items, paradigmatically such propositional attitudes as beliefs
and desires, that are psychological, but do not qualify as
mental episodes.) The first requirement is semantic discourse
(see [30]). Semantic discourse falls on the side of the
epistemic. It is not "definitional shorthand for statements
about the causes and effects of verbal performances," al-
though it may have such statements as contingent conse-
quences. Semantic discourse is a kind of normative discourse,
discussing how expressions aught to be used, or are properly
or correctly used. This is one of Sellarss most fundamental
ideas, appearing in nearly all of his earliest essays. ([5l] and
[52] will tell us about the second requirement.)
Section 50: "My immediate problem is to see if I can reconcile
the classical idea of thoughts as inner episodes which are
neither overt behavior nor verbal imagery and which are

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properly referred to in terms of the vocabulary of intention-
ality, with the idea that the categories of intentionality are,
at bottom, semantical categories pertaining to overt verbal
performances." This latter idea is that thought must be un-
derstood by analogy to talk, in the sense that the concepts
we put in play to talk about the meanings or contents of our
thoughts are understood in terms of their role in their original
or 'home' language game of talking about what we day, rather
than about what we think. (Compare Dummett's commitment
to understanding judging as the interiorization of an act of
asserting, rather than understanding asserting as the exteri-
orization of an act of judging.)"'
Part XIII [5I]-[52]
Theories and Models
Section 5l: Here Sellars returns to the discussion of theoretical
language (discussed under the heading "Scientific Realism"
in Part IX). Theoretical discourse is just a sophistication of
a dimension of ordinary empirical language. One way it can
arise is by model and commentary. Sellars is telling us this
because "the distinction between theoretical and observa-
tional discourse is involved in the logic of concepts pertaining
to inner episodes."
Section 52: So "the second stage in the enrichment of their
Rylean language is the addition of theoretical discourse."
This matters because Sellars claims that "the distinction be-
tween theoretical and observational discourse is involved in
the logic of concepts pertaining to inner episodes."
19. Michael Dummett, Freges Philosopby of Logic (New York: Harper and Row,
1973), p. 362.

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Part XIV [53]-[55]
Methodological versus Philosophical Behaviorism
Section 53: Jones is a forerunner of methodological be-
haviorism (which is clarified below, and which Sellars en-
dorses).
Section 54: Behaviorists need not present their accounts as
analyses of the concepts we already employ; nor need they
introduce their theoretical notions by means of explicit defi-
nitions. The former would be analytic or logical behaviorism,
the latter a kind of instrumentalism. Both are mistakes. In-
stead, the behavioristic requirement that all concepts should
be introduced in terms of a basic vocabulary pertaining
to overt behavior is compatible with the idea that some be-
havioristic concepts are to be introduced as theoretical con-
cepts, relative to a behavioral observational vocabulary. This
view becomes available once one sees (as we did in [39]-
[44]) that the distinction between theoretical and observable
objects is methodological, not ontological, i.e., that it has to
do with our access to those objects, either purely inferential
or also noninferential, and says nothing about the kind of
object involved. To say that they are theoretical concepts in
this sense is to say that (at this stage in the development of
the language game) they can only be applied as the conclu-
sions of inferences. Thus they are not equivalent to any
descriptions of behavior (which could be applied observa-
tionally). This idea is one of Sellars's cardinal innovations.
Section 55: Behaviorism in this methodological sense is com-
patible with physicalism, since the theoretical concepts it
employs might turn out to refer to neurophysiologically de-

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scribable items (just as 'Pluto,' introduced as a name for
whatever is perturbing the orbit of Neptune, might have
turned out to apply to an astronomical ball of cheese). But
it is also compatible with denying such physicalism. Behav-
iorism and physicalism are two different and independent
sorts of commitment.
Part XV [56]-[59]
The Logic of Private Episodes: Thoughts
Section 56: Jones's model for thinking is inner speech. His
commentary ensures that this is not conceived of as verbal
imagery. What is objectionable about the verbal imagery
proposal (introduced in [47]) is that it consists in the use of
a quasi-perceptual model: hearing the wagging of an inner
tongue.
Section 57: The model carries the applicability of semanti-
cal categories over from overt utterances to thoughts; so
thoughts can be 'about' things.
Section 58:
(1) This Jonesian theory is compatible with dualism as
well as with materialism.
(2) Inner episodes are to be unobservable the way mole-
cules or the cause of the crack in the dam are, not
the way ghosts are. That is, we happen (at this
stage in the story) not to be able to report them non-
inferentially, though there is nothing that rules out
such observation in principle. Thus they might turn
out to be identical to physiological events. Neverthe-

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less, at this point only the third-person use is avail-
able, even for characterizing our own episodes.
(3) One can't think until one has learned to speak —one
can't assert anything 'mentally' (think to oneself
that ...) until one has caught on to the social prac-
tice of public assertion. Thus talk is prior to thought
in the order of explanation. Once one has learned si-
multaneously to talk and think, however, thought
often precedes talk in the order of causation.
(4) So the notion of language having a meaning, being
'about' things, is not to be explained in terms of
thoughts having meanings (for instance, in the
Cartesian or Lockean fashion). The project must ex-
plain the meaning of thoughts in terms of the mean-
ing of talk, which must be explained some other
way (e.g., in terms of social practices). 20
(5) Jones does not think of these episodes as immediate
experiences, that is, things to which thinkers have
privileged access, since he doesn't have this concept
yet. His episodes are 'inner' only in the mundane
sense of 'under the skin.'
Section 59: But it turns out that when Jones teaches his theory
to other people, they "can be trained to give reasonably
reliable self-descriptions, using the language of the theory,
without having to observe [their own] overt behavior." That
is, one can develop a conditioned reflex in someone (perhaps
depending on some ultimately discoverable neurophysiologi-
cal event related to his thought) to report noninferentially
what heretofore could only be inferred. "What began as a
20. "Intentionality and the Mental" (a symposium by correspondence with
Roderick Chisholm), Minnesota Studies in the Philauphy of Science, pp. 507-539.

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language with a purely theoretical use has gained a reporting
role.
" It might not have turned out this way. But insofar as
Jones's theory is a good one (a question in principle inde-
pendent of the eventual identifiability of these episodes with
ones characterizable in neurophysiological terms), his fellows
were already reliably differentially responding to these epi-
sodes. So one would expect that they would be able to learn
to expand their differential responses to include reports. This
story explains why: recognizing "that these concepts have a
reporting use in which one is not drawing inferences from
behavioral evidence, [the account] nevertheless insists that
the fact that overt behavior is evidence for these episodes is
built into the very logic of these concepts, just as the fact
that the observable behavior of gases is evidence for molecu-
lar episodes is built into the very logic of molecule talk."
Part XVI [60]-[63]
The Logic of Private Episodes: Impressions
Section 60: Jones now does for sense impressions what he
previously did for thoughts. This category presupposes the
category of thoughts. We start from a sub-class of thoughts
called 'perceptions.' Seeing that something is the case is an
inner episode in the Jonesian theory, which has as its model
reporting on looking that something is the case. But these
perceptions are not yet sense impressions. We still have a
kind of claim, something in the epistemic order, not a kind of
particular, something in the causal order. To get sense impres-
sions we need the notion of a 'state of the perceiver' common
to those occasions when the perceiver is right and those
occasions when he's wrong about there being something red
and triangular. This will be the 'intrinsic characterization' of

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impressions that Sellars talks about in the third paragraph
of [45], and in [22]. Here is an outline of the theory of
perception on the causal side that was appealed to in [7].
Section 6l: Whereas thoughts were modeled on sentences,
impressions are modeled on pictures or, more generally, rep-
licas, which
are particulars. The essential feature of the
model is that visual impressions stand to one another in a
system of ways of resembling and differing that is structur-
ally similar to the ways in which the colors and shapes of
visible objects resemble and differ. That is, there are states
of the perceiver which, though neither red nor triangular,
have features (call them 'of-red' and 'of-triangular') that are
isomorphic to the kinds of features visible physical objects
have. This is a sort of functionalism about sense impressions.
The occurrence of these replicas is to be understood as a
nonepistemic relation of particulars (which neurophysiology
or dualistic mind science might further specify for us). "Thus
the model for an impression of a red triangle is a red and
triangular replica, not a seeing of a red and triangular replica,"
which would be an epistemic affair. Their overall explanatory
role can be summarized thus: It is sense impressions "which
(from the standpoint of the theory) are being responded to
by the organism when it looks to the person as though there
were a red and triangular physical object over there."
Section 62: This section just does for sense impressions what
[59] did for thoughts. It points out that people can be trained
to develop conditioned reflexes for reporting these theoreti-
cal entities called 'impressions.' (Perhaps some neurophysi-
ological mechanism will be discovered eventually that ex-
plains the acquisition of such responsive dispositions.) At this

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point, since Jones's students can make noninferential reports
of their sense impressions as well as of their thoughts, they
are directly (in the sense of noninferentially -the only sense
available once the Myth of the Given has been rejected)
aware of both sorts of inner episode. In the case of sense
impressions, this is awareness of the impressions "of the sort
which is common to those experiences in which we either
see that something is red and triangular, or something merely
looks red and triangular, or there merely looks to be a red
and triangular object over there" [45]. Such noninferential
reports of sense impressions, reports of the form "I am now
sensing a sense impression of a red triangle," are quite dif-
ferent from those made using 'looks,' which were considered
in the first half of the essay. A noninferential report using
'looks' takes a 'that' clause as its content-specification, and
indicates the inferential potential that is being forwarded as
a candidate for endorsement. A noninferential report of a
sense impression takes a description of a particular of a sort
modeled on replicas as its content-specification, and indicates
the causal antecedent common to reports of how things are
and of how things look. (Recall the diagnosis of [7].) Run-
ning the two together would re-enact the Myth of the Given.
These two essentially derivative and parasitic strata of lan-
guage, both centering on noninferential uses, express differ-
ent aspects of perceptual experience. The conceptual aware-
ness of sense impressions that Sellars has now made available
in an unmysterious and unthreatening way is the "something
more" that (according to the opening sentences of [16]) our
perception involves, besides endorsement of propositional
contents "wrung [noninferentially] from the perceiver by the
object perceived." They are what was promised in the first
paragraph of [45]. The sense impressions of which we are

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aware (once both the concept of sense impressions and the
corresponding noninferential reporting practices are fully in
place) explain the fact that "when I say 'X looks green to me
now'
... my experience is, so to speak, intrinsically, « an
experience indistinguishable from a veridical one of seeing that
i is green [16]." For both sorts of speech act arise as the
result of exercising reliable differential dispositions to re-
spond to the presence of sense impressions-as they did
already before Jones gave us the concepts without which we
could not be aware of them. All that needed to be added to
those responsive dispositions was the new concept sende im-
pression, with the kind of inferential articulation appropriate
to its model of replicas of, e.g., visible surfaces.
Sellars has now completed his task. We now have recipes
telling us how to diagnose and treat the Myth of the Given
in all its multifarious manifestations, whether what is given
shows up in the guise of particulars whose occurrence entails
knowing or believing something (e.g., sense-datum theories),
or in the form of noninferentially acquired propositionally
contentful beliefs (e.g., what is expressed by 'looks' talk).
Epistemologically foundationalist appeals to the given of the
Cartesian sort have been shown to fail because noninferential
uses of concepts (no matter whether their subject matter is
construed as 'inner' or 'outer') turn out to presuppose infer-
ential uses of concepts. Empiricist appeals to the preconcep-
tual given to explain concept acquisition (whether by ab-
straction or otherwise) fail because "we now recognize that
instead of coming to have a concept of something because
we have noticed that sort of thing, to have the ability to
notice a sort of thing is already to have the concept of that
sort of thing, and cannot account for it" [45]. Nonetheless,
Sellars has shown us how we can make sense of the idea that

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we have direct awareness of mental episodes (the applica-
tions of inferentially articulated concepts of thoughts and sense
impressions elicited noninferentially by thoughts and sense
impressions), including the limited but very real privileged
access each of us has to such inner episodes, without com-
mitting ourselves to the Myth of the Given.