Editing Knowledge by acquaintance (section)

===Sellars===
[[Wilfrid Sellars]], in ''Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'' (1956), rejects acquaintance theory, arguing that acquaintance is not necessary to provide a solid foundation for knowledge and thinking, as acquaintance theorists claim. In his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, he dissects the internalists' case for acquaintance. He calls the proposal that we have direct acquaintance with sensory data "The Myth of the Given". Sellars argues, "there is no reason to suppose that having the sensation of a red triangle is a cognitive or epistemic fact." He reasons that if sensations, impressions, desires, images, or feelings are to be considered as veridical experiences, then it must be likewise possible for them to be unveridical. He believes that if "immediate experience" like sensations, is susceptible to being misperceived, thus resulting in erroneous inferences for epistemic agent (as is very common in everyday life) then it doesn't make sense to think of acquaintance as a necessity for knowledge.

Sellars bypasses the usual objections to acquaintance theory, which largely focus on absence of explanation for how acquaintance is connected to the knowledge that is said to result from it. Instead, Sellars emphasizes the need to dispel the myth by closely examining the “form of the givenness”, dissecting the proposed operations of acquaintance in terms of “such facts as that physical object X looks red to person S at time t, or that there looks to person S at time t to be a red physical object over there.” (Sellars)

Sellars asserts that acquaintance theory has not been sufficiently evaluated, and that in order for the theory to be validated, the range of sense impressions it claims can be "given" to the epistemic agent must be fully accounted for by an "exhaustive list", and each type of impression must be meticulously scrutinized as a prospect for such givenness. He also argues that it is necessary to presuppose that the epistemic agent possesses empirical knowledge of particular truths in order to make assumptions about the epistemic state of cognitive states that are independent of inference. However, Sellars reasons, because presupposition is inferential, empirical knowledge, regardless of being non-inferentially acquired, is nevertheless epistemically dependent if based on the presupposition that the epistemic agent possesses other pertinent empirical knowledge. Therefore, he concludes that cognitions that are organized propositionally do not qualify as “the given”. Sellars does determine that there are beliefs that are non-inferential but that are intermixed with other beliefs that are connected in chains of inferences.
(These arguments are later pursued by DeVries.)