PERSON
Wilfrid Sellars
The philosopher who dismantled the Myth of the Given—the idea that knowledge rests on a bedrock of raw, uninterpreted fact—and replaced it with the provocative claim that to know anything is to stand in the space of reasons, answerable to justification, committed to inference.
Wilfrid Sellars is the philosopher artificial intelligence most needs and least knows it needs. Born in 1912 into the discipline itself—his father Roy Wood Sellars was a leading American naturalist—he spent his career at the University of Pittsburgh building what became known as the Pittsburgh School, a philosophy of mind whose two master ideas now cut directly across the central claims of the AI age. The first idea is that there is no
Myth of the Given—no bedrock of raw, theory-free data that the world delivers uninterpreted to any knower, biological or artificial. Every dataset is already saturated with the concepts, categories, and decisions of whoever built it; the dream of machine objectivity rests on a fiction Sellars demolished seventy years ago. The second idea, expressed in the most consequential sentence of his landmark 1956 lectures, is that “in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are