Reading Notes: March 27th, 2023

“The basic commitment of empiricism is that all conceptual content derives from experience. The idealism of the empiricists, however, does not follow directly from this principle alone. Among the theses that combined with the empiricists principle to yield idealism are: (1) the myth of the given; (2) the belief that what is given is one’s current mental state; (3) the belief in the atomic, hierarchical, constructivist structure of the mental or conceptual realm; (4) the belief in the fundamental unity of the sensory and the conceptual; and (5) the belief that conceptual content is derived from sensory content by abstraction. How these principles combined to yield forms of idealism in both eighteenth- and twentieth-century empiricism is, in general, clear: The empiricist takes sensory experience not only to be knowledge, but to be the very paradigm of knowledge and the source—via abstraction—of all concepts and meaning. If sensory experience is not only what we know first and best, but also is the only and ultimate source of all conceptual content, from which all our ideas must be derived or constructed, then our concepts and our knowledge are limited to the sensory and constructions therefrom. The sensory is mental, our concepts are mental; thus, there is no way to reach beyond the mental, so the mental must be ontologically and explanatorily prior to any other form of being. This basic reasoning can be found just as much in the twentieth-century phenomenalists as in Berkeley and Hume.” (deVries, Getting Beyond Idealisms, 212-213) 

“The myth of the given is a multi-dimensional thesis, in that it has both methodological and substantive sides. The myth of the given is the doctrine that the cognitive states of any cognitive subject include some that are both (1) epistemically basic (independent of the epistemic status of any other cognitive state), and (2) warrant the subject’s non-basic cognitive states. Such basic cognitive states are traditionally taken to be the beginning points of all knowledge and inquiry, as well as “the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims-particular and general-about the world”….In pre-Kantian thought, it was commonplace to assume that what is given is our own mental state: we know our minds first and best. Methodologically, the belief that one's own mental states are what is given encourages a deliberate naivete about the process of understanding our own minds. We need only direct our thoughts to consciousness itself and we will, perhaps with some practice or training, gain insight into its very nature. The idea that consciousness is somehow immediate and transparent to itself discourages us from recognizing both that theory is called for in order to understand consciousness and the mind, and that the appropriate philosophical theory is distinctively meta. One of the important developments in twentieth-century philosophy, one that Sellars helped solidify, is the realization that philosophical questions about the intrinsic characteristics of the mental fundamentally concern the logic of those dimensions of our conceptual framework that describe, explain, and express our mental or conscious lives….Methodologically, Sellars replaces the enterprise of analyzing the mind or mental states with that of analyzing our concepts of mind and mental states. The difference is not trivial. It is the difference between a philosophy of mind that knows itself to be philosophy and a philosophy of mind that still confuses itself with psychology.” (deVries, Getting Beyond Idealisms, 215-216) 

“Turning to the substantive side, there are at least two distinguishable beliefs associated with the myth that mental states are given. One is the thesis that if x is a mental state, then we are directly conscious of it. This is a very strong claim; it is often weakened to the thesis that if x is a mental state, then we can be directly conscious of it. The mental is always available for our direct awareness or inspection. I'll call this the immediacy of the mental. (IM) X is mental ⟹ x is available to direct consciousness. Conversely, it has also been held that what is available for our direct awareness is the mental. We can call this claim the mentality of the immediate: (MI) X is available to direct consciousness ⟹ x is mental….If something is available to consciousness, it is still an open question how it appears in consciousness, as what it is available to consciousness. In the baldest form of the givenness of the mental, consciousness of a mental state is necessarily of that mental state in propria persona, that is, as the mental state it is. We can therefore distinguish a stronger form of the immediacy of the mental (IMS) X is mental ⟹ x is available to direct consciousness as the mental state it is.” (deVries, Getting Beyond Idealisms, 216-217)