Language and rules : a normative approach to the myth of the given

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to show that the specifically epistemological and semantic failures of the Myth of the Given are a result of mistaken normative assumptions. The self-authenticating awareness of particulars and the self meaning-giving semantic rules are different disguises wore over a skeleton of a normative self-moving mover. The first episode I narrated was but a pure form of the third. Whatever his solution may be, we owe to Wilfrid Sellars the philosophical miracle –opposite to the theological– of turning three problems into one.