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Sense Data and the Romantic Myth of the Given

Historically, “data” has been understood as grounding reasoning by providing its raw content, while also enabling further conclusions by offering a basis of assumed fact.What is “given”—the word “data” derives from the past participle of Latin dare, to give—can be taken for granted. This foundationalist view holds that data provide both the prima materia for reasoning and the premises from which subsequent inferences might be drawn. But recent scholarship, like the essays collected in “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, argues that “data” is never simply given: data depend on frames of reference, preselected criteria, and choices made by researchers. Data are theory-laden before they provide a foundation for subsequent analysis, affirm or challenge our beliefs, and warrant inferences. While contemporary scholarship has complicated our understanding of data and illuminated how “data are units or morsels of information that in aggregate form the bedrock ofmodern policy decisions,” it has neglected the broader philosophical framework of givenness that sustains the view of data “before the fact” (Gitelman and Jackson 1–2). Moreover, recent contextualist accounts of the term “data” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries risk sidestepping difficult and enduring philosophical questions of how empirical knowledge is possible. For example, Daniel Rosenberg treats data and the recourse to neutral information to support knowledge claims as a rhetorical strategy for countering charges of subjectivism by grounding arguments in discrete, independent unitsmarshaled within specific rhetorical contexts. Unlike its “sister terms,” facts and evidence, “the