Concept Formation in Psychology

Abstract

One central idea involved in the Myth of the Given is that, according to it, there is some kind of analytic, ostensive tie between one’s descriptive vocabulary and the extralinguistic world so that this descriptive vocabulary gets a privileged status. Especially, the meaning of an observational predicate (e.g., ‘red’) is taken to be determined by what is immediately “given” at the time of the acceptance of any observational sentence containing that predicate. This “given” could be something external (to the person), which causally brings about the person’s acceptance (or disposition to accept) the relevant observational sentence or it could be an extralinguistic sensory event (sense datum) which leads the agent to accept the observational sentence.