myth of the given

Name adopted by Sellars for the now widely-rejected view that sense experience gives us peculiar points of certainty, suitable to serve as foundations for the whole of empirical knowledge and science. The idea that empiricism, particularly in the hands of Locke and Hume, confuses moments of physical or causal impact on the senses with the arrival of individual ‘sense data’ in the mind, was a central criticism of it levelled by the British Idealists, especially Green and Joachim. See foundationalism, protocol statements, sense-data.