philosophy help - arguing against chisholm and the "directly evident"?

Question

I need help arguing against chisholm and what he claims to be "diretly evident" statements which follow the formula

What justifies me in couting it as evident that a is F is simply the fact that a is F

I need help with situations in which statements immediate to oneself such as thinking and believing are not directly evident when true

Thanks

Answer 1

Isn't this the whole point of the Gettier paper?

Answer 2

I think perhaps the most influential challenge to Chisholm's notion of direct evidence would be Wilfrid Sellars' famous discussion of "The Myth of the Given" in his article called "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." I'm not sure if I am up to the task of explaining this is quick, simple terms, tho I sure as heck wish I could. I will take a stab at it, just to see what happens.

One way to think of this is to consider what it is that we sense, when we directly sense something. Do we sense PARTICULAR things, or do we sense FACTS?

1) If we sense particulars, then sensing is not knowing, because knowing is a relation to facts. If sensing is not a form of knowing, then sensing does not help us justify anything (since justification is dependent on knowledge of facts). Thus the notion of direct evidence as a basis of justification would not work. Or to put it another way, whatever it is that we supposedly perceive directly cannot possibly have anything to do with any sort of justification of anything.

2) If, on the other hand, we sense facts, rather than particulars, then we must contend with the intrinsically relational nature of facts. Facts are abstract, and they only have meaning in relation to other facts. Fact only makes sense in a "web of meaning" in which the meaning of any given fact derives from its position in the overall web of meaning. So when we think we are "directly perceiving," say, the color blue, the meaning of the blueness (in dealing with justification and facts) depends on its place in the overall web of meaning. We can't just pick the sensation blue out of the web and say anything meaningful about it in isolation. What "blue" IS is its position in the overall web of meaningful relationships of concepts. (Like you can't have a notion of "tall" without also having some notion of its relationship to "short".)

So no matter which of these options we choose, we cannot apply the notion of "truth" to anything that we perceive when we think that we are perceiving something "in-itself" apart from all other concepts. If we want to talk in terms of truth, meaning, or justification, we simply cannot escape the WEB of meaningful concepts that makes up our knowledge of the world. We never simply KNOW something in isolation of the web of meaning; we must LEARN the meaning, which is to say, we must learn no things fit together or relate to each other in the web of meaning. We can't understand any part without somehow LEARNING about its nature AS A PART in the context of some larger whole. I keep emphasizing "learning" because the very nature of learning X implies that we might not know X. It is always possible that we have not yet learned X, or that we are mistaken about X. If we can KNOW anything about our sensation of blue, then must have LEARNED to experience blue AS BLUE and thus we could be wrong, and thus the notion of our sensation of blue being "directly evident" becomes problematic.

Sorry if none of this makes much sense, but it is the best I can do.