Brandom1/14/19“The Lever of Archimedes” (1981 First Carus Lecture) Passages1. My ultimate aim will be to formulate, more clearly than I have hitherto been able to do,the complex interplay in empirical knowledge of the two dimensions which epistemologists have sought to capture by the concepts of the given on the one hand, and of coherence on the other. [230]2. Firth was concerned to explore the contrast between those epistemological theories which stress the “given” and those which stress “coherence.” He begins by pointing out that in the context of epistemology a “coherence theory” is either a theory of truth, or of concepts, or of justification, or some blend of these. [230]3. When a child has an experience of the kind which it is useful to baptize by saying that “O looks red toJunior,” what is really going on is that O is causing Junior to sense redly. Junior is directly aware of this sensing redly. Therefore, he is aware of it as a sensing redly. This line of thought involves the principle If a person is directly aware of an item which has categorial status C, then the person is aware of it as having categorial status C. This principle is, perhaps, the most basic form of what I have castigated as “The Myth of the Given.” [236] [BB: What is needed would only seem to be that there were some values of C for which this is true. But to suppose there are any such Cs is to subscribe to the MoG.]4. Thus, if Junior was originally exposed to translucent objects only, we could conceive of him as passing through a stage in which he responded to the portions of color stuff of which he was aware, e.g., cubes of pink, with some such concept as that of a cube of pink which hascertain causal properties among which is that of being responsible for his experience of seeing it. Of course, when Junior’s experience subsequently broadens, and he encounters opaque objects, he is in a position to distinguish between the object he sees and what he sees of the object. At any one time one sees of an opaque object its facing surface, but not its inside or its other sides. [238-9]5. Given these resources, the alternative to the Firthian account might be fleshed out as follows:1. Junior has an ur-concept of volumes and expanses of red stuff. 2. Junior has an ur-concept of seeing a volume of red stuff. 3. Junior has an ur-concept of a physical object as an individuated volume of color stuff which is endowed with certain causal properties. 4. Junior has an ur-concept of seeing a volume or expanse of red stuff not only as a volume or expanse of red, but as a constituent of a physical object. 5. Junior has an ur-concept of what it is to see of a physical object a volume or expanse of red which is one of its constituents. If the constituent is the surface of an opaque object, e.g., an apple, it is the very redness of the apple. 6. Junior has an ur-concept of what it is to see the very redness of an object. [239]tmp8408pagm 1 1/14/2019Brandom6. Now the basic phenomenological fact from which I shall take my point of departure is that when an object looks red to S, and S is, so to speak, “taken in”—I make this stipulation only to put irrelevancies aside—S has an experience which is intrinsically like that of seeing the object to be red. 70. The experience is intrinsically like that of seeing an object to be red in the sense that if certain additional conditions were realized the experience would in fact be one in which S sees an object to be red. Among these conditions are (a) that the object be in fact red; (b) that the object be appropriately responsible for the experience. Let me call such an experience ostensibly seeing an object to be red. [241]7. Now my strategy, in essence, is going to be that of equating (1) O (at t) looks red to S with (2) S (at t) ostensibly sees O to be red. In other words I will be putting the concept looks red on the level—not of is red—but rather of is seen to be red, or, to put it in a different way, I shall be equating (1) with (3) S (at t) seems to see O to be red, where ‘seems to see’ functions as the ordinary language counterpart of the technical ‘ostensibly sees’. [241]8. It is a familiar fact that (4) S (at t) sees that O is red entails neither ‘S sees O’ (one can see that a plane is going overhead without seeing the plane), nor ‘O looks red to S’ (knowing that the illumination is abnormal one can see that O is white, although it looks red). [241]9. But in the absence of a theory with factual content…, the concept of a “particular” is the empty or “formal” concept of an ultimate subject of predication, and is of a piece with Kant’sunschematized category of substance. 81. The categories to which the entities which form the subject matter of a theory belong are generic features of the concepts of the theory. Categories in general are classifications of conceptual roles. And while the thinnest categories are subject matter independent, categorieswhich are not bloodless are functions of the factual content of theories. 82. To put it bluntly, the fruits of painstaking theory construction in the psychology and neuro-physiology of sense perception cannot be anticipated by screwing up one’s mental eye (the eye of the child within us) and “seeing” the very manner-of-sensing-ness of a volume of red. [244]10. On my account, however, there is no such determinate category prior to the concept of red as a physical stuff, as a matter for individuated physical things. We, as phenomenologists, can bracket the concept of an expanse of red in that radical way which involves an abstraction from all those implications involved in its being the concept of something physical. But by soabstracting we do not acquire a concept of red which belongs to a more basic determinate category—we simply abstract from such determinate categorial status it has, and construe it tmp8408pagm 2 1/14/2019Brandommerely as a particular having some determinate categorial status or other. Our phenomenological abstraction no more reveals a new determinate category than the concept of some color or other generates the concept of a new shade of red. [244]11. Thus it might be thought that what is given in perception is, for example, that one has a red experience, i.e., an experience of the kind which is captured by the child’s ur-concept of red. If so, then the “experience,” although conceptualized by the child would not be in and of