Repository | Book | Chapter

Sellars suggests that a characterization of knowledge that underlies the Myth of the Given, in his sense, can be avoided by "placing" knowledge in the space of reasons. The idea that there can be states of awareness the having of which does not presuppose knowledge, learning, or the possession of concepts which at the same time are able to provide justification is not coherent.¹ The image of the space of reasons is introduced by Sellars partly as a way to maintain that knowledge can be adequately understood only in a normative context. The context incorporates the sense in which placing episodes or states within it, involves the knower being justified or being able to justify what they say. It is distinctive and contrasts with other ways in which we make things intelligible, including perhaps other states or episodes. According to McDowell, we sometimes make phenomena intelligible by placing them in a network of intrinsically non-rational relations; the kind of relations that unify phenomena as conforming to laws of nature, for instance. The space of reasons, by contrast, is a domain which involves justificatory relations, and is one of the ways in which we make things (ourselves, for instance) intelligible as being sensitive to, asking for, and providing, reasons.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230292437_6

Full citation: