 Some economists like to argue that there is some deep, fundamental reason that markets are in humanity's best interests. Personally, I'm more of a seller's market kind of a guy. I've done a fair amount of hand-wringing on thunk over arguments that challenged the foundations of my understanding of the world, raising complications for things like rationality, science, truth, induction, ethics, perception. I've lost count of how many times I've been researching a topic for an episode and had to stop to take a walk or splash cold water on my face to stave off a sense of dread when I realized the bedrock assumptions I thought were supporting my beliefs have some issues. Funnily enough, there's an assumption that's implicit to that panic, something that I've always sort of taken for granted. Let's say that I believe a thing, anything. It's going to rain tomorrow. In order for that belief to count as knowledge, it has to be true and it has to be justified, supported, grounded in something more fundamental or basic. I know it's going to rain tomorrow because the weatherman said it's going to rain tomorrow and I saw rain clouds gathering this evening. Of course, once you've supplied these reasons and support of your belief, you can repeat the process. To count them as knowledge, they also must be justified. So we give reasons to believe those reasons, and reasons to believe those reasons. But where does that process of justification end? If you ask Aristotle, it has to end somewhere. It doesn't make sense to have an infinite chain of justification. After however many steps, you need to have some starting point that's just undeniable, basic, a brute fact about the world that can't be reasonably questioned, a given. For many philosophers, called empiricists, that given the ultimate grounding rod for all knowledge is sense data, colors, sounds, smells, pain, the raw unfiltered feels we all experience from being in the world. Empiricists claim that if you chase the chain of justification for any bit of knowledge back far enough, you'll eventually get to a supporting claim like, I can taste it, which is an irrefutable and irreducible fact. Unfortunately, if you ask philosopher Wilfrid Sellers, that approach isn't just wrong, it's incoherent. Sellers says that there are two ways we can go with the sense data thing, and neither way gets us where we're going with respect to terminating our chain of justifications. One direction we might go is to claim that sense data just is, that the warmth that the sun on your face doesn't require any further explication or supporting beliefs, because it's not some abstract statement of fact or whatever, it just exists. That sort of irreducible raw experience is a great candidate for a thing that doesn't need to be justified, but it's not really clear how we could use it to prove anything. The raw sensation of warmth on your face doesn't imply anything by itself, you kind of need to interpret it, to fit it into a statement of fact. But as soon as you do that, you lose the irrefutable purity and immediacy that made it such a good starting point. Given, I feel warmth on my face. Therefore, oh really, slow down partner, how do you know that's really warmth you're feeling? How do you know you're not dreaming? Are you sure that you have a face? Are you sure that the face that feels warm is yours? It seems like grounding knowledge in sense data doesn't work either way you try to swing it. You can have the purity of raw sensation free from any quibbles of justification, or you can have a meaningful statement to build new inferences of knowledge on that requires further support. You can't have both, and it kind of seems like you need both to get where the empiricists want to be. Empiricism is usually portrayed as being locked in an Enlightenment era cartoon slap fight with rationalism, a philosophical school that claims all knowledge actually bottoms out in irrefutable logical facts like Descartes I think therefore I am. But Sellers isn't trying to convince us to be rationalists here. His argument applies to any supposed foundation for knowledge, including Descartes. Logical identity, predictive power, material objects, universals, any foundationalist method that enshrines some set of facts, principles or relations above all others as the source of everything we know. They're all victims of what Sellers calls the myth of the given, a fantasy that we can have our epistemic cake and eat it too. Sellers thinks that the confusion is due to a mix up about how we think about these structures of justification and reasoning in the first place. If I look at a ball and say that ball is red, and you ask me to justify that belief, I'm going to appeal to something more general like it appears red and my eyes generally report true information about the color of objects. Someone might take this to mean that the property is red is somehow built on top of the property appears red. That's kind of how justification works, right? But if you think about it, that's actually backwards in some ways. I have this idea of something appearing to be red, but I only have that concept available in the first place because of my experiences with red things in the world. My baby's first colors book did not start off talking about environmental context cues shaping color perception. I only say that something appears red because I have a mental framework in place that started off with an understanding of red things. Then later, red things that I discovered to be some different color once I took a closer look. In the justification game, appearing red comes before being red, supposedly. But in practical terms, red things comes first and things that appear to be red is built on top of it. For sellers, this is why foundationalist epistemologies like empiricism and rationalism always find themselves flailing around helplessly when you get to the supposed base of their hierarchy of knowledge. It might be the most fundamental level in one sense, but in another sense, it's the furthest removed from the thoughts, concepts, and experiences that actually constitute our most immediate picture of the world. That might sound like it's headed towards some sort of radical skepticism or solipsism, like sellers is going to end his argument with something like, therefore knowledge is impossible, might drop. But just because foundationalism is misguided doesn't mean all knowledge is null and void, or that reasoning can't lead us to a better, more accurate, more complete understanding. For sellers, there's no immutable starting points. Nobody actually begins thinking from irreducibly basic premises to derive more and more complex notions until they finally arrive at something profound like, I see a red ball. We always start in the middle of things with a patchwork structure of beliefs and justifications built from whatever's around, each element leaning on its neighbors. The trick is, from that precarious starting point, there's the possibility of correction, of realizing some part of the structure doesn't quite fit and replacing it with something that sits a little better. And that process follows certain rules that should be familiar. Say I see a red ball. No foundational nonsense about qualia, or I think therefore I am, or anything like that, I just see a red ball, same as normal. After some consideration, I might realize that it's actually a white ball under red lights, or that I'm colorblind, and everything I've ever thought was red might have actually been purple. There's still a logical directionality to the relationships between more fundamental concepts and less fundamental ones. I'm not going to deduce that my colorblindness means everyone else is hallucinating in a color purple. But nothing is totally safe from being swapped out if my explanations or experiences throw enough errors to think that there might be a mistake. Not even the foundations. In that sense, sellers would probably laugh at my silly hand wringing about challenges to big philosophical ideas. A foundationalist might claim that all our scientific knowledge is built on top of an assumption of induction. And if induction can't be justified, we'd have to throw out medicine and physics to just everything. But that's not how this works. We don't gain knowledge about germs or electrons with a flowchart that starts from a big bubble that reads induction is true. We justify and explain our scientific practices with concepts like induction. But those concepts are actually downstream of the real life activity and subjective experiences of scientists figuring things out. As a nerd who dedicates a fair amount of time to thinking about this sort of stuff, I find sellers' view liberating. You don't need a bulletproof ethical calculus to know that kicking puppies for fun is wrong. Any more than you need to solve physics to discover facts about biology. Even if we were to somehow construct an inarguable chain of justifications down to the foundations of our knowledge, sellers would be there offering us a choice. You can have an unquestionable fact where you can have a basis for your reasoning. You can't have both. How about you? Do you find sellers' myth of the given a neat shortcut around the swamp of foundationalism? Do you think it's right? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to follow us, subscribe, and share. And don't stop thunkin'.