Most of your text (Willem Devries and Timm Triplett, Knowledge, Mind, and the Given) is about Wilfird Sellars’s paper “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” I will be assigning only the paper itself, which you will find in an appendix at the end, but you may find the body of the book helpful as a commentary. The paper is divided into sections whose numbers run through the whole paper (however, the numbers 9 and 16 are repeated, and there is no section 42), and I will often refer to specific sections.

Our discussion of part I will focus on two specific passages.

• the dilemma for sense-datum theorists stated in §3

• the “inconsistent triad” presented in §6

There are a number of connections between these passages and things we’ve read earlier in the course. The closest ties are to Russell’s discussion of intuitive judgments of sensation and memory in chs. 11 and 13 of the Problems of Philosophy. It is possible to understand what Sellars says as a direct critique of those ideas. You’ve encountered the term “given” in connection with such ideas in Blumberg and Feigl’s “Logical Positivism” (especially in §II, pp. 285f). And Wittgenstein’s discussion of ideas of a private langauge and of a report of private experience are also relevant. Although Sellars was less a follower of Wittgenstein than were many other philosophers active in the 1950s, he often draws on ideas in Wittgenstein and makes use of them in his own way.

Part II develops Sellars’s analysis of the Myth of the Given further but also begins to lay the groundwork for Sellars’ own alternative account of perceptual knowledge. The key material for us in §§8-9 is the distinction between codes and theories found in §8 and the second §9 (section numbers are repeated at a couple points in the book).

This distinction is introduced as a way of describing another form of the Myth of the Given, but it has a broader significance. It is related to criticisms of the logical positivists’ understanding of scientific theories that were becoming well known at the time Sellars wrote this paper, and Sellars’ philosophy of mind will employ an alternative view of scientific theories. The relevant views of the positivists appear in Blumberg and Feigl’s mention of the views of Reichenbach and Bridgman concerning the empirical content of theories in §III, p. 289, and the discussion of meaning and verification in §IV, p. 293. (The triple bar in the second §9 is a somewhat old-fashioned symbolic notation for “if and only if”; the dots surrounding it can serve as punctuation to indicate relative scope, as in the notation of the Tractatus, though they are not needed for that here.)