Chisholm Quote on Appearances: The Given in Perception

Quote

"The things that appear to us, whether they appear truly or falsely, are things that are given."

— Roderick Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (1957)

Context

This passage appears in Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (1957), the book in which Roderick Chisholm set out his theory of perception and defended a form of epistemological foundationalism. Chisholm was writing in the wake of the sense-data tradition associated with Bertrand Russell and C.D. Broad, but also against the rising tide of ordinary-language philosophy and the Sellarsian critique of the "myth of the given."

The central problem Chisholm addressed is how perceptual experience can justify belief. If all justification were inferential, we would face an infinite regress: every belief justified by another belief, which itself needs justification, and so on without end. Foundationalists hold that the regress stops at certain basic beliefs — or, in Chisholm's formulation, at certain "given" appearances that are not inferred from anything else but are directly presented in consciousness.

Chisholm's theory of "appearing" was an attempt to steer between two unsatisfactory alternatives: naive realism, which says we directly perceive physical objects, and the sense-datum theory, which posits inner mental objects as the immediate objects of awareness. Chisholm proposed that the fundamental perceptual relation is one of appearing: things appear to us in certain ways, and these appearances — whether veridical or not — constitute the data from which knowledge begins.

Meaning

Chisholm's claim has a precise epistemological force. When something appears to you — a coin that looks elliptical from an angle, a stick that looks bent in water — there is a fact of the matter about how it appears, and that fact is independent of whether the appearance is accurate. The elliptical-seeming and the bent-seeming are themselves genuinely "given": they are presented to consciousness directly, not inferred from anything else.

The phrase "whether they appear truly or falsely" is crucial. Chisholm is not claiming that every appearance reveals the world as it is. A hallucination is false, a perceptual illusion is misleading. But even a false appearance is something — it has a phenomenological reality that cannot be wished away. The given is not the physical object as it is, but the appearance as it is experienced, and this appearance can serve as a non-inferential starting point for knowledge.

This makes the given foundational in a specific sense. It is not justified by further beliefs; it is self-presenting. From the fact that something appears thus-and-so, a perceiver can form a justified belief about the appearance itself ("there seems to be a red patch"), and from that basic belief, further beliefs about the external world can be inferentially built. The given thus arrests the regress of justification by providing a level of awareness that is epistemically basic.

Philosophical Significance

Chisholm's defense of the given became a defining episode in twentieth-century epistemology:

The foundationalism vs. coherentism debate: Chisholm stood as the leading foundationalist of his generation, insisting that some beliefs are directly justified by experience rather than by their coherence with other beliefs. His opponent Wilfrid Sellars, in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956), argued that the very idea of a non-conceptual given is a myth — that all awareness is a linguistic, conceptual affair. The Chisholm-Sellars exchange set the terms for the foundationalism-coherentism debate that dominated epistemology for decades.

The theory of appearing: Chisholm's "adverbial" theory of appearing offered an alternative to both sense-datum theory and naive realism. Rather than positing sense-data as objects, or claiming we perceive physical objects directly, Chisholm analyzed perception in terms of ways of being appeared-to. This approach influenced later "disjunctivist" and "representationalist" theories of perception, which continue to grapple with the same tensions Chisholm identified.

Epistemic justification: Chisholm developed a detailed theory of justification in which beliefs are "evident," "reasonable," or "beyond reasonable doubt" depending on their relation to self-presenting states. This framework, refined across Theory of Knowledge (1966) and later editions, provided one of the most systematic internalist accounts of justification, contrasting with the externalist reliabilism later proposed by Alvin Goldman.

The fate of the given: Although the Sellarsian critique largely carried the day in analytic philosophy, the question of whether experience has a non-conceptual component that can justify belief has never disappeared. Contemporary debates about perceptual content, phenomenal consciousness, and the epistemology of perception continue to circle back to the issue Chisholm framed: is there something given in experience, prior to judgment, on which knowledge can rest?

Sources

1. Chisholm, Roderick M. Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Cornell University Press, 1957). Context in: https://iep.utm.edu/chisholm/
2. "Roderick Chisholm," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://iep.utm.edu/chisholm/
3. "Roderick Chisholm," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chisholm/
4. "The Myth of the Given," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on Sellars). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
5. Chisholm, Roderick M. Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1977).