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The Nature of the ‘Given’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Paul Arthur Schilpp
Paul Arthur Schilpp*
Affiliation:
Los Angeles, California
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Abstract

It is by no means impossible that the discussion of epistemological problems, at the present stage of our understanding of the issues involved, may be futile. But so long as anyone desires to “know” anything at all, just so long it will be impossible for thoughtful men to leave the questions of epistemology alone. So, futile or not, this paper is concerned with an analysis of one of the most fundamental of epistemological problems, namely that of the ‘given.’ It is true, the ‘given’ has recently received an unusual amount of attention from philosophers. What with two of the American Philosophical Association's presidential addresses last year having much to say on the subject, and what with the logical positivists making the ‘given’ the cap-stone of their radical empiricism? All of which, it will be claimed, proves the contention that any attack upon the problems of epistemology, from the standpoint of our present knowledge and understanding of the total situation involved, is condemned to hopeless futility. Why, then, add one more hopelessly futile attempt to those of all the rest? If, despite such initial misgivings, I shall proceed to my own analysis of the ‘given,’ I shall do so, first of all, in recognition of the indisputable fact that everyone of us, even though we should be blind, deaf and dumb, do, as a matter fact, find ourselves confronted with something ‘given’; and, secondly, because it appears to me that, as philosophers, it is still our task seriously to concern ourselves with unsolved problems, even though they may not yet be capable of being so stated that a unanimously acceptable solution for them may be—at present—possible. Even the logical positivists, who, of course, are most critical of what philosophy is or ought to be, insist that “the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.” Since the ‘given’ is a concept (thought) most widely used not only by so-called ‘pseudo-philosophers’ but even by the logical positivists themselves, it certainly cannot be denied that the clarification of the concept of the ‘given’ is decidedly a philosophical task. More than that: it is a necessary philosophical task just so long as there is such wide difference of opinion concerning the ‘given’ among philosophers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , April 1935 , pp. 128 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1935

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Footnotes

1

Read in substance before the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, Berkeley, California, December 27, 1934.

References

2 The object of philosophy as stated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

3 I am, for the sake of brevity in the present discussion, using the word “facts” in the ordinary sense of every day language, though of course fully aware of the problematic character of facts themselves. But a treatment of the nature and character of “facts” (their flexibility and chosen and interpreted nature) deserves a separate paper, which cannot here be interjected. The interested reader may, however, be referred to the volume on “Facts” of the University of California Publications in Philosophy (vol. 14, 1931), in which varied and able discussions of this problem may be found.

4 This must not be taken to mean that I assume it possible to approach such analysis with a wholly “blank mind.” No conscious adult mind can approach anything in such fashion, as I have tried to show elsewhere (cf. my essay “Is ‘Standpointless Philosophy’ Possible?,” The Philosophical Review, vol. XLIV, No. 3 (May 1935)). But it is one thing to admit the necessary presence of the background of one's own life and experience, and a quite different thing to insist upon approaching everything with an already completely determined (speculative) metaphysics.

5 Cf. C. I. Lewis, “Experience and Meaning,” The Philosophical Review, vol. XLIII, No. 2, (March 1934), pp. 125–146, and Donald C. Williams, “The A Priori Argument for Subjectivism,” Monist, July 1933, especially footnote 34 on page 193.

6 It should be unnecessary to prove at length that anything ‘given’ in experience is just such a one event in ordinary experience, though what is ‘given’ may be ever so complex. The one-event character of anything ‘given’ has nothing to do with the simplicity or complexity of what is ‘given.‘ This involves another problem which cannot be discussed here.

7 Absolutely necessary, that is to say, from the point of view of a common sense interpretation of the facts of every day experience.

8 And it is fundamentally such ‘given-ness’ through the senses that the logical positivists have been using as their no-further-definable or -describable finality.