Davidson & Sellars: authoritative self-knowledge without introspection

Sellars’ and Davidson’s conceptions of self-knowledge have a common ground in their rejection of the given. Both offer arguments against the idea that raw sensations can justify corresponding introspective judgments and thus challenge core observational models. Although it is widely acknowledged that both philosophers reject the aforementioned conception of introspection, their shared perspectives on self-knowledge, resulting from this critique, are seldom explored. In fact, there is a noticeable disparity between Davidson’s impact on contemporary debates concerning self-knowledge, particularly within the rationalist tradition, and Sellars’ relatively limited recognition in this discussion. This chapter aims to address these gaps. The chapter begins by explaining Sellars’ and Davidson’s criticisms of the given and how they constitute arguments against observational models of self-knowledge. It then proceeds to reconstruct their alternative conceptions of self-knowledge. We argue that the primary difference between the two authors concerns their conceptions of self-knowledge as an epistemic achievement. Whereas Davidson's view is typically understood as a non-epistemic explanation, Sellars seems to offer resources for a genuinely epistemic understanding of self-knowledge, free from any commitments to the given, if developed within an externalist framework.