 Epistemology, in Rorty’s account, is wedded to a picture of mind’s structure working on empirical content to produce in itself items – thoughts, representations – which, when things go well, correctly mirror reality. To loosen the grip of this picture on our thinking is to challenge the idea that epistemology – whether traditional Cartesian or 20th century linguistic – is the essence of philosophy. To this end, Rorty combines a reading of Quine’s attack on a version of the structure-content distinction in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1952) with a reading of Sellars’ attack on the idea of givenness in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956/1997). On Rorty’s reading, though neither Sellars nor Quine is able fully to take in the liberating influence of the other, they are really attacking the same distinction, or set of distinctions. While Quine casts doubt on the notion of structure or meaning which linguistically-turned epistemology had instated in place of mental entities, Sellars, questioning the very idea of givenness, came at the distinction from the other side: