A little give and take: problems in the empiricism of Sellars and his followers

the starting point of this paper is sellars's rejection of foundationalist empiricism as found in his discussion of the myth of the given. sellars attacks the myth from two main angles, corresponding to the two elements of empiricism: the idea that our beliefs are justified by the world, and the idea that our concepts are derived from experience. in correctly attacking the second, sellars is also, incorrectly, led to attack the first. thus, sellars rejects the commonsensical idea that at least some of our ideas can be justified by appeal to the empirical world. my purpose is to examine why sellars is led to this point, and how the same assumptions that lead him there also operate in his followers, such as brandom, rorty and mcdowell. i then show how a rejection of these assumptions gives us a way around this problem that does not fall back into foundationalism.