1. Here I am following James Cornman’s article ’Materialism and Some Myths about Some Givens’, The Monist 56 (1972), 216–226. For a helpful survey of various theories of the given see J. J. Ross, The Appeal to the Given ( Allen and Unwin, London, 1970 ).
2. See Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966), pp. 27–28, and idem, Theory of Knowledge, 2d ed. ( Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1977 ), pp. 21–22.
3. A. J. Ayer suggests the following options in ’Basic Propositions’, in idem, Philosophical Essays (Macmillan, London, 1954), pp. 105–124. Cf. Alan H. Goldman, ’Appearing Statements and Epistemological Foundations’, Metaphilosophy
10 (1979), 229–230. The first of the following options is defended by Pollock in Knowledge and Justification ( Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974 ), pp. 73–75.
4. See William Alston, ’Varieties of Privileged Access’, American Philosophical Quarterly
8 (1971), 231. Cf. Bruce Aune, Knowledge, Mind, and Nature (Random House, New York, 1967), Chapter 2, and idem, ’Chisholm on Empirical Knowledge’, in E. Sosa (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy of R. M. Chisholm (Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1979), pp. 240–241. A. J. Ayer espouses something like the irrefutability thesis in ’Privacy’, in idem, The Concept of a Person (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1963 ), p. 73.
5. See Sellars, ’Epistemic Principles’, in H.-N. Castañeda (ed.), Action, Knowledge, and Reality, p. 339. Cf. Lehrer, Knowledge ( Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974 ), pp. 107 - 110.