Name adopted by Wilfrid Sellars for the now widely-rejected view that sense experience gives us peculiar points of certainty, suitable to serve as foundations for the whole of empirical knowledge and science. The idea is that empiricism, particularly in the hands of Locke and Hume, confuses moments of physical or causal impact on the senses with the arrival of individual points of certainty, so-called ‘sense data’ in the mind. This is a myth, because judgement is already involved in interpreting the flux of experience one way or another. This was a central criticism of empiricism levelled first by Kant, and also by the British Idealists, especially Green and Joachim. See foundationalism, protocol statements, sense data.