given in epistemology, the ‘brute fact’ element to be found or postulated as a component of perceptual experience. Some theorists who endorse the existence of a given element in experience think that we can find this element by careful introspection of what we experience (Moore, H. H. Price). Such theorists generally distinguish between those components of ordinary perceptual awareness that constitute what we believe or know about the objects we perceive and those components that we strictly perceive. For example, if we analyze introspectively what we are aware of when we see an apple we find that what we believe of the apple is that it is a three-dimensional object with a soft, white interior; what we see of it, strictly speaking, is just a red-shaped expanse of one of its facing sides. This latter is what is ‘given’ in the intended sense.
Other theorists treat the given as postulated rather than introspectively found. For example, some theorists treat cognition as an activity imposing form on some material given in conscious experience. On this view, often attributed to Kant, the given and the conceptual are interdefined and logically inseparable. Sometimes this interdependence is seen as rendering a description of the given as impossible; in this case the given is said to be ineffable (C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 1929).
On some theories of knowledge (foundationalism) the first variant of the given – that which is ‘found’ rather than ‘postulated’ – provides the empirical foundations of what we might know or justifiably believe. Thus, if I believe on good evidence that there is a red apple in front of me, the evidence is the non-cognitive part of my perceptual awareness of the red appleshaped expanse. Epistemologies postulating the first kind of givenness thus require a single entity-type to explain the sensorial nature of perception and to provide immediate epistemic foundations for empirical knowledge. This requirement is now widely regarded as impossible to satisfy; hence Wilfred Sellars describes the discredited view as the myth of the given.
See also PERCEPTION ; PHENOMENALISM ; SELLARS , WILFRI. T.V.