A major American pragmatist
educated at Harvard, Lewis taught at the University of
California from 1911 to 1919 and at Harvard from 1920
until his retirement in 1953. Known as the father of
modern modal logic and as a proponent of the given in
epistemology, he also was an influential figure in value
theory and ethics.
Table of Contents
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1. Introduction
Lewis's philosophy as a whole reveals a systematic
unity in which logic, epistemology, value theory and
ethics all take their place as forms of rational conduct
in its broadest sense of self-directed agency. In his
first major work, Mind and the World Order (MWO),
published in 1929, Lewis put forward a position he
called 'conceptualistic pragmatism' according to which
empirical knowledge depends upon a sensuous 'given', the
constructive activity of a mind and a set of a priori
concepts which the agent brings to, and thereby
interprets, the given. These concepts are the product of
the agent's social heritage and cognitive interests, so
they are not a priori in the sense of being given
absolutely: they are pragmatically a priori. They
admit of alternatives and the choice among them rests on
pragmatic considerations pertaining to cognitive
success.
His 1932 Symbolic Logic presented his system
of strict implication and a set of successively stronger
modal logics, the S systems. He showed that there are
many alternative systems of logic, each self- evident in
its own way, a fact which undermines the traditional
rationalistic view of metaphysical first principles as
being logically undeniable. As a result, he concluded
that the choice of first principles and of deductive
systems must be grounded in extra-logical or pragmatic
considerations.
After the War his work played an important part in
giving shape to academic philosophy as a profession. His
1946 Carus Lectures, An Analysis of Knowledge and
Valuation (AKV) which represents a refinement of the
doctrines of MWO and their extension to a theory
of value, set the issues of postwar epistemology. The
thoroughness of his discussion, and the technicalities
of his writing were important models for postwar
analytic philosophy. A student of Josiah Royce, William
James and Ralph Barton Perry, a contemporary of
Reichenbach, Carnap and the logical empiricists of the
30's and 40's, and the teacher of Quine, Frankena,
Goodman, Chisholm, Firth and others, C.I. Lewis played a
pivotal role in shaping the marriage between pragmatism
and empiricism which has come to dominate much of
current analytic philosophy.
After AKV, Lewis directed the final 20 years
of his life to the foundation of ethics, giving numerous
public lectures. He died in 1964 leaving a vast
collection of unpublished manuscripts on ethical theory
which are housed at the Stanford University Library.
2. The Early Years
Lewis was born on April 12, 1883, in relative poverty
at Stoneham, Massachusetts. He enrolled in Harvard in
1902 , working part time as a tutor and a waiter, and
received his B.A. degree three years later, taking an
appointment to teach high school English in Quincy,
Massachusetts. The following year he was appointed
Instructor in English at the University of Colorado,
moved to Boulder, and that winter married his high
school sweetheart, Mabel Maxwell Graves. They stayed in
Boulder for two years and in 1908 he enrolled in the PhD
program, receiving his degree two years later in 1910,
in part because financial concerns precluded a more
leisurely pace. His thesis, The Place of Intuition in
Knowledge prefigured important themes in his later
work.
As an undergraduate, Lewis's principal influences
were James and Royce. When he returned to Harvard as a
graduate student, James had retired, and the absolute
idealism of Royce and Bradley was under attack by the
New Realism of Moore and Russell in Great Britain and of
W.P. Montague and Ralph Barton Perry at Harvard. The
debate between Royce and James over monism and pluralism
had been replaced by a debate between Royce and Perry
over realism and idealism. Lewis studied metaphysics
with Royce, and he studied Kant and epistemology with
Perry. The debate between Royce and Perry framed Lewis's
dissertation and in it he attempted to forge a
neo-Kantian middle road.
It is worth briefly discussing his dissertation
because in many way it prefigures his later views. In
his dissertation Lewis argued that the possibility of
valid, justified, knowledge requires both givenness (or
intuition) and the mind's legislative or constructive
activity. Lewis used the egocentric predicament in a
dialectical argument against both the realist and
idealist solutions to the problem of knowledge. Against
Perry's direct realism, he argued that what is known
transcends what is present to the mind in the act of
knowledge and that the real object is thus never given
in consciousness; since knowledge requires that what is
given to the mind be interpreted by our purposeful
activity the real object of knowledge is made instead of
given.
Against Royce, Lewis asserted the necessity of a
given sensuous element that is neither a product of
willing nor necessarily implicit in the cognitive aim of
ideas. The mind's activity is not constitutive of the
known object because it does not make the given.
Its purpose is rather to understand, or interpret, the
given by referring it to an object which is real
in some category or another. To be real is a matter of
classification and only future experience will confirm
or disconfirm the correctness of our classification, but
some classification of the given will necessarily be
correct. Whatever is unreal is so only relative to a
certain way of understanding it Relative to some other
purpose of understanding it will be real; the contents
of a dream, for example are unreal only relative to a
misclassification of them as a veridical perception. All
knowledge contains a given element which shapes possible
interpretation but the object known also transcends
present experience.
It is remarkable how many themes in his mature work
are already mobilized in his dissertation. Lewis's
solution to the problem of knowledge had both realist
and idealist elements in an unstable equilibrium and his
position would change several times over the next few
years. Under the influence of Royce and Hume's
skepticism, Lewis came to believe that no realist answer
to the problem of knowledge could work, and only an
idealist solution would suffice. "How could the given be
intelligible to the mind if it were independent of its
interpretive activity?" This is a question which Lewis
would not solve to his satisfaction until much later
when he read Peirce. There is no doubt, however, that
Lewis saw that a realist of Perry's sort had no answer
to it. At this point Lewis clearly had neither proof nor
account of the relation of knowledge to independent
reality. The synthesis of his dissertation had raised
deep problems which were only to be answered by the
mature system in MWO . "How can the given be
intelligible if it is independent of the mind?" "If the
mind does not shape or condition what is given to it how
could valid knowledge be possible?" It seemed clear to
Lewis that if justified knowledge were possible at all,
then realism must be wrong. But idealism, as Lewis
understood it, appealed to a necessary agreement between
human will and the absolute in knowledge which was also
unjustifiable.
3. Logical Investigations
Lewis received his PhD in 1910 but there were no
jobs. This was a bitter disappointment for Lewis, who
with a wife and small child, had hoped the financial
difficulties of the past two years would be over. After
a summer at his uncle's farm the Lewises returned to
Cambridge where Lewis spent the year tutoring and
serving as an assistant in Royce's logic class. Royce
was one of America's premier logicians during the time
that Lewis was studying at Harvard and he introduced
Lewis to Volume 1 of Russell and Whitehead's
Principia Mathematica which had just been published.
In the fall of 1911, Lewis went to the University of
California at Berkeley as an instructor where, except
for a stint in the army during World War I, he was to
stay until his return to Harvard in 1920. During this
period, Lewis worked primarily on epistemology and logic
and, finding no logic texts available, was soon at work
on a text on symbolic logic. This work would appear at
the end of the war in 1918 as A Survey of Symbolic
Logic the first history of the subject in English --
and would form the basis of his better known Symbolic
Logic , written together with C. H. Langford and
published in 1932. Lewis's work on logic was dictated in
part by the need for a good text book and in part by
objections to the paradoxes of material implication in
Principia Mathematica and his desire to develop
an account of inference more reflective of human
reasoning. However, Lewis was still exercised by the
problem of knowledge from his dissertation and was
increasingly unhappy with the quasi-idealist solution he
had explored there. In fact, Lewis's study of logic
during this period was at least in part directed towards
examining important idealist assumptions about logic,
which he would come to reject.
To solve the problem of knowledge the idealist needed
logical truth to be absolute, for if the categorial form
of our constructive will could vary then we would have
no reason to take our interpretations to be true of the
world. Lewis would attack the idealist assumptions in
four related ways. First, he would argue that the
coherence of a system of propositions depends upon the
consistency of the propositions with each other and not
on their dependence upon a set of absolute or
self-evident truths. Secondly, he argued that a system
rich enough to capture the notion of a world, or system
of facts, is necessarily pluralistic in the sense that
it must contain elements which are logically independent
of each other. Thirdly, he argued that the existence of
alternative deductive systems completely undermines the
rationalistic view that metaphysical first principles
can be shown to be logically necessary through the
argument of 'reaffirmation through denial' (where in the
attempt to deny a logical principle we necessarily
presuppose its truth). Finally, he concluded that given
the existence of alternative systems of logic, the
choice of first principles and of deductive systems must
be grounded in extra-logical, pragmatic considerations.
Lewis's work in logic was also guided in part by
concerns about Russell's choice of material implication
as a paradigm of logical deduction. Lewis constructed
his own logical calculus based on relations in intention
and strict implication, which he saw as a more adequate
model of actual inference. Material implication has the
property that a false proposition implies everything and
so argued Lewis it is useless as a model of real
inference. What we want to know is what would follow
from a proposition if it were true and for Lewis this
amounts to saying that the real basis of the inference
is the strict implication where 'A strictly implies B'
means that 'The truth of A is inconsistent with the
falsity of B.' Lewis saw his account of strict
implication to have important consequences for
metaphysics and for the normative in general. He argued
that the line dividing propositions corroborated or
refuted by logic alone (necessary or logically
impossible propositions) from the class of empirical
truths or falsehood was of first importance of the
theory of knowledge. The categories of possible and
impossible, contingent and necessary, consistent and
inconsistent are all independent of material truth and
are founded on logic itself.
In 1920 Lewis was invited to return to Harvard to
take up a one year position as Lecturer in Philosophy
and was to remain for over 30 years until his retirement
in 1953. There Lewis was reintroduced to Peirce and the
last piece of his account of knowledge would fall into
place, THE PRAGMATIC a priori.
After Peirce's death Royce had arranged for the
Peirce manuscripts to be brought to Harvard, and at the
time of Lewis's appointment the department was concerned
that the manuscript remains, consisting of thousands of
pages of apparently unorganized material, be catalogued.
Lewis was given the job and although the task of
arranging and cataloguing the papers ultimately passed
to others, the two years he spent on that task gave
Lewis the final building blocks for his mature
epistemological position which he would call
conceptualistic pragmatism. Lewis would find in Peirce's
"conceptual pragmatism," with its emphasis upon the
instrumental and empirical significance of concepts
rather than upon any non-absolute character of truth, a
resonance with his logical investigations.
Lewis in effect would turn the idealist thesis that
mind determined the structure of reality on its head
without giving up the idealist view of the legislative
power of the mind. The mind interprets the given by way
of concepts: the real, ultimately, becomes a matter of
criterial commitment. The mind does not thereby
manufacture what is given to it, but meets the
independent given with interpretive structures which it
brings to the encounter. In his dissertation Lewis had
argued that the possibility of valid, justified,
knowledge requires both givenness and the mind's
legislative or constructive activity. The
epistemological view Lewis would now develop retained
this basic structure but embedded it in a richer,
psycho-biological model of inquiry and a more adequate
account of the role of a priori concepts in
knowledge. In the early 20's Lewis would publish two
seminal articles, "A Pragmatic Conception of The a
priori," and "The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge."
These two papers laid out the core of Lewis's pragmatic
theory of knowledge, which would be developed more
richly in Mind and the World Order (MWO).
In "A Pragmatic Conception of the a priori,"
Lewis rejected traditional concepts of the a priori
arguing that, "The thought which both rationalism and
empiricism have missed is that there are principles,
representing the initiative of mind, which impose upon
experience no limitations whatever, but that such
conceptions are still subject to alternation on
pragmatic grounds when the expanding boundaries of
experience reveal their felicity as intellectual
instruments." What is important about an hypothesis is
that it is a "concept" -- a purely logical meaning --
which can be brought to bear on experience. The concepts
we formulate are in part determined by our pragmatic
interests and in part by the nature of experience.
Fundamental scientific laws are a priori because
they order experience so that it can be investigated.
The same is true of our more fundamental categorial
notions. The given contains both the real and illusion,
dream and fantasy. Our categorial concepts allow us to
sort experience so that it can be interrogated. Thus the
fact that we must fix our meanings before we can apply
them productively in experience, is entirely compatible
with their historical alteration or even abandonment.
In "The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge", Lewis
extended his pragmatism about the a priori to the
theory of knowledge. Here, following Peirce and Royce,
he identifies three elements in knowledge which are
separable only by analysis: the element of experience
which is given to an agent, the structure of concepts
with which the agent interprets what is given, and the
agent's act of interpreting what is given by means of
those concepts. The distinctively pragmatic character of
this theory lies both in the fact that knowledge is
activity or interpretation and that the concepts with
which the mind interrogates experience reflect fallible
and revisable commitments to future experiential
consequences. Knowledge is an interpretation of the
experiential significance for an agent with certain
interests of what is given in experience; a significance
testable by its consequences for action.
A priori truth is independent of experience
because it is purely analytic of our concepts and can
dictate nothing to the given. The formal sciences depend
on nothing which is empirically given, depending purely
on logical analysis for their content. So a priori
truth is not assertive of fact but is instead
definitive. There is logical order arising from our
definitions in all knowledge. Ordinarily we do not
separate out this logical order, but it is always
possible to do so, and it is this element which minds
must have in common if they are to understand each
other. As Lewis puts it, "At the end of an hour which
feels very long to you and short to me, we can meet by
agreement, because our common understanding of that hour
is not a feeling of tedium or vivacity, but means sixty
minutes, one round of the clock...". In short, shared
concepts do not depend upon the identity of sense
feeling, but in their objective significance for action.
The concept, the purely logical pattern of meaning,
is an abstraction from the richness of actual
experience. It represents what the mind brings to
experience in the act of interpretation. The other
element, that which the mind finds , or what is
independent of thought, is the given. The given is also
an abstraction, but it cannot be expressed in language
because language implies concepts and because the given
is that aspect of experience which concepts do not
convey. Knowledge is the significance which experience
has for possible action and the further experience to
which such action would lead.
4. Mind and the World Order
Lewis first major book, Mind and the World Order
(MWO) develops these results in three principal
theses: first, a priori truth is definitive and
offers criteria by means of which experience can be
discriminated; second, the application of concepts to
any particular experience is hypothetical and the choice
of conceptual system meets pragmatic needs; and third,
the susceptibility of experience to conceptual
interpretation requires no particular metaphysical
assumption about the conformity of experience to the
mind or its categories. These principles allow Lewis to
present the traditional problem of knowledge as resting
on a mistake. There is no contradiction between the
relativity of knowledge to the knowing mind and the
independence of its object. The assumption that there
is, is the product of Cartesian representationalism, the
'copy theory' of thought, in which knowledge of an
object is taken to be qualitative coincidence between
the idea in the mind and the external real object. For
Lewis knowledge does not copy anything but concerns the
relation between this experience and other possible
experiences of which this experience is a sign.
Knowledge is expressible not because we share the same
data of sense but because we share concepts and
categorial commitments.
All knowledge is conceptual; the given, having no
conceptual structure of its own, is not even a possible
object of knowledge. Foundationalism of the classical
empiricist sort is thus directly precluded. Lewis's task
for MWO is in effect a pragmatic solution to
Hume's problem of induction: an account of the order we
bring to experience which renders knowledge possible but
makes no appeal to anything lying outside of experience.
Prefiguring contemporary externalist accounts of
representation, Lewis argues that both representative
realism and phenomenalism are incoherent. Knowledge as
correct interpretation is independent of whether the
phenomenal character of experience is a "likeness" of
the real object known, because the phenomenal character
of experience only receives its function as a sign from
its conceptual interpretation, that is, from its
significance for future experience and action. The
question of the validity of knowledge claims is thus for
Lewis fundamentally the question of the normative
significance of our empirical assessments for action.
Lewis argued that our spontaneous interpretation of
experience by way of concepts that have objective
significance for future experience constitutes a kind of
diagnosis of appearance . If we could not
recognize a sensuous content in our classification of it
with qualitatively similar ones which have acquired
predictive significance in the past, interpretation
would be impossible. Despite the fact that such
recognition is spontaneous and unconsidered it has the
logical character of a generalization. To recognize an
object -- "this is a round penny" -- is to make a
fallible empirical claim, but to recognize the
appearance is to classify it with other qualitatively
similar appearances. The basis of the empirical judgment
lies in the fact that past instances of such
classification have been successful. Our empirical
knowledge claims are dependent for their justification
upon this body of conceptual interpretations in two
ways. First, the world, in the form of future events
implicitly predicted (or not) by our empirical
judgments, will confirm or disconfirm those judgments:
all empirical knowledge is thus merely probable. But
secondly, the classification of immediate apprehensions
by way of concepts justifying particular empirical
judgments is itself generalization even when those
concepts have come to function as a criterion of sense
meaning. Concepts become criteria of classification
because they allow us to make empirically valid
judgments, and because they fit usefully in the larger
structure of our concepts.
This structure, looked at apart from experience is an
a priori system of concepts. The application of
one of its constituent concepts to any particular is a
matter of probability but the question of applying the
system in general is a matter of the choice of an
abstract system and can only be determined by pragmatic
considerations. The implications of a concept within a
system become criteria of its applicability in that
system. If later experience does not accord with the
logical implications of our application of a concept to
a particular, we will withdraw the application of the
concept. Persistent failure of individual concepts to
apply fruitfully to experience will lead us to readjust
the system as a whole. Our conceptual interpretations
form a hierarchy in which some are more fundamental than
others; abandoning them will have more radical
consequences than abandoning others. Lewis's account of
inquiry offers both a non-metaphysical account of
induction and an early version of the so called
'theory-ladenness of observation terms'. There is no
need for synthetic a priori or metaphysical
truths to bridge the gap between abstract concepts in
the mind and the reality presented in experience. Lewis
offers a kind of 'Kantian deduction of the categories'
providing a pragmatic vindication of induction but
without Kant's assumption that experience is limited by
the modes of intuition and fixed forms of thought.
Without a system of conceptual interpretation, no
experience is possible, but which system of
interpretation we use is a matter of choice and what we
experience is given to us by reality. The importance of
the given in this story is its independence . Our
conceptual system can at best specify a system of
possible worlds; within it the actual is not to be
deduced but acknowledged. In short, Lewis's theory of
knowledge in MWO is a pragmatic theory of inquiry
which combines rationalist and naturalistic elements to
make knowledge of the real both fallible and progressive
without recourse to transcendental guarantees.
5. The Conversation with
Positivism
MWO was published in 1929 during a time of
tragedy for Lewis and his family. MWO was very
well received and Lewis's career was now secure; he was
elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
May of 1929 and made a full professor at Harvard in
1930. But his daughter died that year after two years of
a mysterious ailment and a few years later Lewis
suffered a heart attack due to overwork. Despite life's
trials, the period between MWO and AKV was
a period of intellectual expansion for Lewis. Lewis
began to explore the consequences of his views for value
theory and ethics. At the same time his logical
interests shifted. While technical issues continued to
occupy his attention for the next few years, largely in
the form of replies to responses to his work in
Symbolic Logic , his thinking shifted decisively
away from technicalities and towards the experiential
structure of meaning and its relation to value and
knowledge. There were several reasons for this.
The period was a time of decisive change in
philosophy in America generally. The influx of British
and German philosophy into the United States during the
thirties and the increasing professionalization of the
universities, posed deep and ambiguous problems for
American philosophers with a naturalistic or pragmatic
orientation, and for Lewis in particular. Logical
empiricism, with its emphasis on scientific models of
knowledge and on the logical analysis of meaning claims
was emerging as the most pervasive tendency in American
philosophy in the thirties and forties, and Lewis was
strongly identified with that movement. But Lewis was
never completely comfortable in this company. For Lewis,
experience was always at the center of the cognitive
enterprise. The rapid abandonment of experiential
analysis in favor of physicalism by the major
positivists and their rejection of value as lacking
cognitive significance both struck him as particularly
unfortunate. Indeed his own deepening conversation with
the pragmatic tradition led him in the opposite
direction. It is only within experience that anything
could have significance for anything, and Lewis came to
see that rather than lacking cognitive significance,
value is one way of representing the significance which
knowledge has for future conduct. Attempting to work out
these convictions led him to reflect on the differences
between pragmatism and positivism, and to begin to
investigate the cognitive structure of value
experiences.
The pragmatist, Lewis holds, is committed to the
Peircean pragmatic test of significance. But, as he
notes in his 1930 essay, "Pragmatism and Current
Thought," this dictum can be taken in either of two
directions. On the one hand, its emphasis on experience
could be developed in a psychologistic direction and
promote a form of subjectivism. On the other, the fact
that the Peircean test limits meaning to that which
makes a verifiable difference in experience takes it in
the direction which he developed in MWO, to a
view of concepts as abstractions in which "the immediate
is precisely that element which must be left out." But
this claim must be correctly understood. An operational
account of concepts empties them only of what is
ineffable in experience. "If your hours are felt as
twice as long as mine, your pounds twice as heavy, that
makes no difference, which can be tested, in our
assignment of physical properties to things." A concept
is thus merely a relational pattern. But it does not
follow from this that the world as it is experienced is
thrown out the window. "In one sense that of connotation
a concept strictly comprises nothing but an abstract
configuration of relations. In another sense its
denotation or empirical application this meaning is
vested in a process which characteristically begins with
something given and ends with something done in the
operation which translates a presented datum into an
instrument of prediction and control." Knowledge is a
matter of two moments, beginning and ending in
experience although it does not end in the same
experience in which it begins. Knowledge of something
requires that the experience which is anticipated or
envisaged as verifying it is actually met with. Thus,
the appeal to an operational definition or test of
verifiability as the empirical meaning of a statement
is, for the pragmatist, the requirement that the speaker
know how to apply or refuse to apply the statement in
question and to trace its consequences in the case of
presented or imagined situations.
In his 1933 presidential address to the American
Philosophical Association, "Experience and Meaning",
Lewis dealt with the question of verifiable significance
in a very general way emphasizing both the points of
agreement and difference between pragmatism and logical
positivism. Lewis framed the discussion of meaning in
terms of the distinction between immediacy and
transcendence, sketching arguments against both
phenomenalism and representational realism. What
remains, the third way, is a view of meaning common to
absolute idealism, logical positivism and pragmatism.
Meaning is a relation of verifiability or signification
between present and possible future experience.
In "Logical Positivism and Pragmatism", Lewis
compared his pragmatic conception of empirical meaning
with the verificationism of logical positivism in a
sharply critical way. Both movements, he argued, are
forms of empiricism and hold conceptions of empirical
meaning as verifiable ultimately by reference to
empirical eventualities. The pragmatic conception of
meaning looks superficially very much like the logical-
positivist theory of verification despite its different
formulation and its focus on action. But, argues Lewis,
there is a deep difference. Whereas the pragmatic
account rests meaning ultimately upon conceivable
experience, the positivist account logicizes the
relation. Lewis's complaint is that this results in a
conception of meaning which omits precisely what a
pragmatist would count as the empirical meaning.
Specifying which observation sentences are consequences
of a given sentence helps us know the empirical meaning
of a sentences only if the observation sentences
themselves have an already understood empirical meaning
in terms of the specific qualities of experience to
which the observations predicates of the statement
apply. Thus for Lewis the logical positivist fails to
distinguish between linguistic meaning, which concerns
logical relations with other terms, and empirical
meaning, which concerns the relation expressions have to
what may be given in experience, and as a result, leaves
out precisely the thing which actually confirms a
statement, namely the content of experience.
The emphasis on the experience of the knower points
to a yet larger contrast between positivism and
pragmatism regarding the difference between judgments of
value and judgments of fact. Lewis was entirely opposed
to the positivist conception of value statements as
devoid of cognitive content, as merely expressive. For
the pragmatist all judgments are, implicitly, judgments
of value. Lewis would develop both the conception of
sense meaning and the thesis that valuation is a form of
empirical cognition in AKV .
6. Analysis of Knowledge and
Valuation
In 1946 The Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation
(AKV) was published, and Lewis was awarded the Edgar
Pierce Professorship at Harvard, the chair which had
been held by Perry and would be held by Quine after
Lewis. AKV was the most widely discussed book of
its day.
The pragmatic psycho-biological model of inquiry
which Lewis adopted from Peirce and James is even more
visibly a part of AKV than it was in MWO.
Knowledge, action and evaluation are essentially
connected animal adaptive responses. Cognition, as a
vital function, is a response to the significance which
items in an organism's experiential environment have for
that organism. Any psychological attitude which carries
cognitive significance as a response will exhibit some
value character of utility or disutility which can
ground the correctness or incorrectness of that response
as knowledge. Cognitively guided behavior is a kind of
adaptive response, and the correctness of behavior
guiding experience, to the extent that it carries
cognitive significance, depends simply on whether the
expectations lodged in it come about as the result of
action. Meaning, in this sense is anticipation of
further experience associated with present content and
the truth of it concerns the verifiability of expected
consequences of action. It is because of this that
sense-apprehension is basic and underlies other forms of
empirical cognition. Perceptual cognition involves a
sign-function connecting present experience and possible
future eventualities grounded in some mode of action
which, pervading the experience in its immediacy, gives
it its cognitive content.
The signifying character of the expectancies lodged
in immediate experience is enormously expanded by the
web of concepts we inherit as language users. Lewis did
not, however, identify meaning with linguistic signs.
Linguistic signs are secondary to something more basic
in our experience which we share with animals generally
and which occurs when something within our experience
stands for something else as a sign. When the cat comes
running because she hears you opening a can and takes it
as a sign of dinner, she is responding to the meaning of
her experience. While this meaning is independent of
whether or not you are opening a can of cat food her
expectation will be confirmed if the can contains cat
food and disconfirmed if it doesn't.
Meaning in this sense of empirical significance could
only be available to a creature who can act in
anticipation of events to be realized or avoided.
Accordingly, the possible is epistemologically prior to
the actual. Only an agent, for whom experience could
have anticipatory significance, could have a concept of
objective reality as that which is possible to verify or
change. In addition to meaning as empirical significance
Lewis distinguished the kind of meaning involved in the
apprehension of our concepts. A definition represents a
mode of classification, and although alternative modes
of classification can be more or less useful,
classification cannot be determined by that which is to
be classified. Knowledge of meanings in this sense is
analytic.
In AKV, Lewis distinguishes between four modes
of meaning: (1) the denotation or extension of a term is
the class of actual things to which the terms applies;
(2) the comprehension of a term is the class of all
possible things to which the term would correctly apply;
(3) the signification of a term is the character of
things the presence or absence of which determines the
comprehension of the term; (4) the intension of a term
is the conjunction of all the other terms which must be
correctly applicable to anything to which the term
correctly applies. A proposition is a term capable of
signifying a state of affairs; it comprehends any
possible world which would contain the state of affairs
it signifies. The intension of a proposition includes
whatever the proposition entails and thus comprises
whatever must be true of any possible world for that
proposition to be true of it.
Intentional and denotational modes of meaning are two
aspects of cognitive apprehension in general, the
denotational being that aspect of apprehension which,
given our classifications, is dependent upon how
experience turns out, and the intentional being that
aspect of apprehension which reflects the
classifications or definitions we have made and is thus
independent of experience. Our choice of classification
is essentially pragmatic, however, so what may count as
an empirical matter in one context may count
legislatively in another, generalizations may be
corrected by future experience and our definitions
replaced on the grounds of inadequacy. The analytic
element in knowledge is indispensable because unless our
intensions are fixed our terms have no denotation, but
nothing determines how we shall fix our intensions save
the superior utility of one set of terms over others.
While intensional meaning is primary for him, Lewis
distinguishes between two different ways in which we can
think of it. First, linguistic meaning is intension as
constituted by the pattern of definitions of our terms.
Secondly, sense meaning is intension as the criterion in
terms of sense by which the application of terms to
experience is determined. Sense meaning is more
fundamental. Learning involves the extension of
generalizations to unobserved cases and correlatively
recognizing in new experiences the correct applicability
of our terms. The sense meaning of a term is our
criterion for applying the term correctly. In a thought
experiment anticipating Searle's "Chinese Room," Lewis
imagines a person who somehow learns Arabic using only
an Arabic dictionary thus learning all the linguistic
patterns in the language. This person would grasp the
linguistic meanings of all the terms in Arabic but might
nonetheless not know the meaning of any of the terms in
the sense of knowing their application to the world. The
language would remain a meaningless and arbitrary system
of syntactic relationships. Linguistic meaning is
nonetheless central in communication because what can be
shared is conceptual structure. Understanding between
two minds depends not on postulated identity of imagery
or sensation but on shared definitions and concepts.
The validation of empirical knowledge has two
dimensions, its verification and its justification.
Verification is predictive and formulates our
expectations for verification or falsification.
Justification looks to the rational credibility of those
expectations prior to their verification. In the
acquisition of knowledge these dimensions support each
other. The warrant which our present beliefs have is
shaped by the history of past verifications of similar
beliefs. Reflection on the warranted expectancies in our
present beliefs leads us to formulate new
generalizations and normative principles we can subject
to tests. The common stock of concepts in our language
embeds such principles and empirical generalizations in
the intensions of terms. As a result our use of terms
decisively shapes what is warranted and verifiable for
us.
Lewis distinguishes between three classes of
empirical statements. First, there are what he calls
expressive statements which attempt to express what is
presently given in experience. An ordinary perceptual
judgment, say seeing my cat by the fridge, outstrips
what is presently evident. This added content is carried
by the intensions of the concepts in the judgment
insofar as they convey the expectancies found in the
experience. These expectancies, although partly a
function of past learning and knowledge of the intension
of terms, are simply given in the experience, they are
the part we do not invent and cannot change but merely
find. Lewis suggests that we can use language
expressively to capture this presentational content by
stripping our meaning of its ordinary implication of
objective content. Secondly, there are statements which
formulate predictions. The judgment that if I do action
A the outcome will include E, where E indicates an
aspect of experience expressively characterized, is one
which can be completely verified by putting it to the
test. Upon acting the content E will either be given or
it will not. Lewis calls empirical judgments of this
sort terminating judgments. Finally, there are judgments
which assert the actuality of some state of affairs.
Although they can be rendered increasingly probable by
tests, no set of eventualities envisioned can exhaust
their significance. Lewis calls these judgments
non-terminating because there are indefinitely many
further tests which could, theoretically speaking,
falsify the prediction and any actual verification can
be no more than partial.
The ground of empirical judgments is past experience
of like cases. At bottom those experiences have a
warrant-producing character for a particular response
because of the directly apprehended qualitative
character of the signal combined with the expectations
due to similar experiences in the past. In short, an
empirical judgment is justified by its relation to past
experiences of like cases. The warrant producing
character of those experiences for a particular judgment
depends upon the recognition of the presentation as
classifiable with other qualitatively similar
appearances as significant of future experience, and the
character of the passages of experience attending past
instances of the judgment. Epistemic warrant at its
bottom level is the animal's recognition of future
objectivity lodged in present experience; present
experience is a sign of experience to come. A
multi-storied interpretive structure of concepts is
built upon this adaptive responsiveness. Concepts become
criteria of classification because they allow us to make
empirically valid judgments, and because they fit
usefully in the larger structure of our concepts. The
structure, viewed apart from experience, is an a
priori system of concepts, but looked at in terms of
experience it is a network of sense meanings. The
concept of probability plays a more prominent role in
AKV than it does in MWO, but it is not a role
of a different kind.
Perceptual knowledge has two aspects: the givenness
of the experience and the objective interpretation
which, in light of past experience, we put on it. But
these are both abstractions and only distinguishable by
analysis. What is given in experience as spontaneously
arising expectancies is already conceptually structured,
to recognize the given is to classify it with
qualitatively similar cases and that recognition,
although spontaneous, has the logical character as a
generalization. The system of concepts within which our
judgments are formulated and the pyramidal structure of
empirical beliefs which intend a set of possible worlds
of which ours is but one, by themselves suggest a
coherence theory of justification. But here, as in
MWO, Lewis resists this idealist alternative. Lewis
takes the given to be essential for a series of
interrelated reasons. Mere coherence of a system of
statements does not even give meaning; the student of
Arabic mentioned earlier does not know what any of the
terms mean and cannot even use a statement to express a
judgment. The given thus plays the role of fixing what
beliefs mean because it lodges the actual world among
the various possible worlds which are compatible with my
knowledge: whichever world I am in it is this one. A
merely hypothetical system of congruent and consistent
statements could be fabricated out of whole cloth, as a
novelist does, but however richly developed, the
congruence and coherence of the system would be no
evidence of fact at all. Independently given facts are
indispensable and they are the actually given
expectancies whose objective intent we then can evaluate
for their mutual congruence and coherence.
Lewis's emphasis on the given has been taken by many
contemporary philosophers to be an instance of classical
foundationalism. As we saw in the discussion of MWO
Lewis considered the very idea of sense data to be
incoherent. There is, however, a debate about whether
his views changed between that book and AKV.
Christopher Gowans (in "Two Concepts of the Given in
C.I. Lewis, Realism and Foundationalism") has argued
that Lewis had two different conceptions of the given
but failed to recognize the difference between them. On
this view, while Lewis was an anti-foundationalist in
MWO he embraced foundationalism in AKV and
his later thinking. Determining Lewis's position is, of
course, a matter of interpretation. I think that a
non-foundationalist position is dictated by the larger
structure of his thought. He was certainly not a
foundationalist in the British empiricist sense of the
word.
7. Valuation and Rightness
Lewis rejected the "scandal" of emotivism and
noncognitivism and directed much of his late thinking to
two tasks: demonstrating that valuation is a species of
empirical knowledge and establishing that there are
valid nonrepudiable imperatives or principles of
rightness. Lewis's acceptance of the psycho-biological
model of inquiry and it's emphasis on the evolutionary
and biological ground of cognition in animal adaptive
response, committed him to the ineliminability of value
in knowledge. Inquiry directed towards epistemic goals
is, he argued, no less a species of conduct than
practical and moral inquiry. Conduct of any sort will be
directed towards ends appropriate to it and in light of
which both its success can be measured and its aim be
critiqued as reasonable or unreasonable. Lewis argued
that evaluations are a form of empirical knowledge no
different fundamentally from other forms of empirical
knowledge regarding the determination of their truth or
falsity, or of their validity or justification.
Much of Lewis's discussion takes the form of an
analysis of the concepts surrounding rational agency.
Purposeful activity intrinsically involves rational
cognitive appraisal. Action is behavior which is
deliberate in the sense of being subject to critique and
alterable upon reflection. It is behavior for the sake
of realizing something to which a positive value is
ascribed. He characterizes an action as sensible
just in case the result or its intent, is ascribed
comparative value. The purpose of an act, by which he
means that part of the intent of an act for the sake of
which it is adopted, can also be said to be sensible
because what is purposed is something to which
comparative value is ascribed. An act is successful
in the circumstance that it is adopted for a
sensible purpose which is realized in the result.
The verification of success will depend upon the
purpose for which the act is done. The success of an
action aimed at an enjoyable experience can be
decisively verified if that experience is attained, but
typically the purpose of an act will be to bring about a
state of affairs whose value-consequences extend into
the future and will thus be affected by other states of
affairs, and so the success of the act may never be
fully verified. In addition, an act may fail of its
purpose in two ways: the expected result may fail to
follow or it may be realized but fail to have the value
ascribed to it.
Just as there are two aspects to the validation of
empirical belief, verification and justification, Lewis
distinguishes the success (or verification) of an action
from its practical justification, which is the character
belonging to a belief just in case its intent is an
expectation which is a warranted empirical belief. Given
these distinctions, Lewis argues that unless values were
truth-apt in the sense of being genuine empirical
cognitions capable of confirmation or disconfirmation,
no intention or purpose could be serious and hence no
action could be justified or attain success. The
enterprise of human life can only prosper, he says, if
there are value judgments which are true. Those who deny
it fall into a kind of practical contradiction similar
to that of Epimenides the Cretan who said that all
Cretans are liars. Making a judgment, framing an
argument, and deciding to take an action, are all
activities which involve bringing to bear cognitive
criteria of classification, inference and cogency on the
matter at hand. Thinking is an activity which
presupposes selective and intelligent choice concerning
the path of thought. Repudiation of the rational
imperativeness of so selectively choosing is thus
nothing less than a repudiation of the cognitive aim of
thinking. All the different forms of imperatives, the
epistemic and logical imperatives, the technical,
prudential and moral imperatives, are of a piece: they
are principles of right intellectual conduct, in short,
principles of intelligent practice. The notions of
correctness, conduct, objectivity and reality are all
forged within the system of communal practices which
give these concepts ground. Our conceptual framework is
not merely a set of common concepts but also a set of
communal norms regulating our conduct. We can reject
these norms only by repudiating our conceptual
framework, but there is no other ground of rational
choice which could provide a warrant for an act of
repudiation, so that the act of repudiating norms
tacitly presupposes the warrant which norms provide. The
skeptic's own claims constitute a reductio ad
absurdum against his position.
As we saw, Lewis distinguished between three classes
of empirical statement, expressive, terminating and
non-terminating statements. Since valuation is a species
of empirical knowledge Lewis distinguishes between three
kinds of value-predications. First, there are expressive
statements of found value quality as directly
experienced. Such predications require no verification
as they make no claim which could be subjected to test.
Secondly, there are terminating evaluations which
predict the success of an action aimed at some value
experience as result. These can be put to test by so
acting and thus are directly verifiable. Finally there
are non-terminating evaluations which ascribe an
objective value property to an object or state of
affairs. Like any other judgment of objective empirical
fact such claims are always fallible though some may
attain practical certainty.
Since the aim of sensible action is the realization
of some positive value in experience, only what is
immediately valuable can be valuable for its own sake or
intrinsically valuable. Extrinsic values divide
into values which are instrumental for some thing
else and values found to be inherent in objects,
situations or states of affairs. Value, Lewis argues, is
not a kind of quality but a dimension-like orientational
mode pervading all experience. To live and to act is
necessarily to be subject to imperatives, to recognize
the validity of norms. The good which we seek in action
is not this or that presently given value experience but
a life which is good on the whole. That is something
which cannot be immediately disclosed in present
experience but can only be comprehended by some
imaginative or synthetic envisagement of its on-
the-whole quality. We are subject to imperatives because
future possibilities are present in our experience only
as signs of the significance which that experience has
for the future if we decide to act one way rather than
another. Since we are free to act or not we must move
ourselves in accordance with the directive import of our
experience to realize future goods. Life is not an
aggregate of separate moments but a synthetic whole in
which no single experience momentarily given says the
last word about itself: each moment has its own fixed
and unalterable character but the significance of that
character for the whole, like the significance of a note
within a piece of music, depends upon the character of
other experiences to which it stands in relation. The
value assessment of experiential wholes can never be
directly certain nor decisively verified in any
experience because what is to be assessed is a whole of
experiences as it is experienced, and there is no moment
in which this experiential whole is present. The value
of experiential wholes thus essentially involves memory
and narrative interpretation.
8. The Late Ethics
A discussion of Lewis's philosophy would not be
complete without a discussion of his late work in
ethics. Lewis's ethics, toward which the whole of his
mature philosophical work aimed, is a richly developed
foundation for a common sense reflective morality,
broadly within the American pragmatic naturalistic
tradition. No one can cogently repudiate the ethical
task and it is not the special mission of any
discipline. At the center of Lewis's theory of practical
reason is the rational imperative. While a naturalist
with respect to values, he held practical thinking in
all its forms to rest for its cogency on categorically
valid principles of right. Ethics, epistemology and
logic are all inquiries into species of right conduct.
They are kinds of thinking, subject to our deliberate
self-government and thus to normative critique, and as a
consequence they are all forms of practical reason.
Under the influence of Kant, he held that imperatives
are rational constraints put on our thinking by our
nature as rational beings. He offered several arguments
including a pragmatic 'Kantian deduction' of the
principles of practice, arguing that without universally
valid principles of practice, our experience of
ourselves as agents would be impossible. He also offered
a reductio ad absurdum against the skeptic. The
denial of moral imperatives is pragmatically incoherent
because it in effect attempts to mount a valid argument
to the conclusion that there is no such thing as
validity in argument; the skeptic's attempt to deny the
universal validity of such imperatives involves him in
what Lewis called a pragmatic contradiction and leads by
a reductio ad absurdum to the confirmation of
their validity. By implicitly asking us to weigh and
consider his reasons, the skeptic appeals to reasons and
argument as things which should constrain us in our
beliefs and decisions, whether we like it or not and
thus acknowledges their force in his practice.
Imperatives are not arbitrary commands or
recommendations to the self; they are directly and
cognitively present in the agent's experience.
Rational imperatives must underlie all forms of
rational self-regulation, of which ethics proper is only
one department. Arguing, concluding, believing are also
forms of self-governed conduct and it is to these forms
that his argument first turns. Experience itself is for
Lewis dynamically shaped by our classifications and
judgments; as a temporal process its present moments are
pervaded by implicit judgments, expectations and
valuations, grounded in past expectations and
confirmations. Permeated with value and active
assessment, experience is a weave of givenness and
conduct, of doing and suffering. Value qualities are
verifiably found in experience; objective valuations are
both fallible and corrigible. They are judgments which
reflect the justified expectation of good (or
unfavorable) consequences on the assumption of actions
envisaged. Accordingly, the evaluative ought the
rational imperative is at the heart of human experience.
At the beginning his 1954 Woodbridge Lectures, as The
Ground and Nature of the Right , he argues "To say
that a thing is right is simply to characterize it as
representing the desiderated commitment of choice in any
situation calling for deliberate decision. What is right
is thus the question of all questions; and the
distinction of right and wrong extends to every topic or
reflection and to all that human self-determination of
act or attitude may affect."
Despite the critical priority of the right it is in
the service of the good; and Lewis's account of both
reflects a single commitment to the pragmatic structure
of inquiry. Ethics grows out of the fact that human
beings are active creatures who enter into the process
of reality in order to change it. We are also social
creatures whose experience and needs are taken up
thematically in the categories and organized practices
which make up our social inheritance. For Lewis both
what is judged justifiably to be good and what ways of
achieving it are validly imperative are fallibly
grounded in human experience; skepticism about either
the right or the good is ultimately a failure to
acknowledge that fact. Since we are endowed with the
capacity to do by choosing we are obligated to exercise
it. We must decide even if we choose to do
nothing, and the world will be different depending on
how we decide
To say that human beings are self-conscious and
self-governing creatures means, for Lewis, that they
perceive their environment in terms of predictively
hypothetical imperatives between which they are able to
choose. Beliefs and imperatives are thus only modally
distinct; they contain the same information. What Lewis
calls the "Law of Objectivity" is governing oneself by
the advice of cognition, in contravention if necessary
to our impulses and inclination. Directives of doing,
determined by the good or bad results of conforming to
them, fall into various modes, principally the
technical, the prudential and the moral and the logical.
The imperative force of technical rules presumes as
antecedently determined some class of ends; they justify
actions only on the assumption of the justification of
those ends. The rules of technique are thus hypothetical
imperatives. By contrast, the rules of the critique of
consistence and cogency, of prudence and of the moral
are non-repudiable; they are categorical.
In his final years Lewis worked on a book on the
foundations of ethics. It is clear from his manuscripts
and letters that the ethics book occupied Lewis's
attention in the early forties and for the rest of his
life. While it is difficult to understand why Lewis was
unable to work the material into a form which satisfied
him, I think that it had come to have an importance in
his mind, a finality, which combined with his declining
health, prevented a final satisfactory version being
written for he continued to work on his ethics book
writing almost daily until his death in February of
1964.
9. Major Works by Lewis
Lewis, C.I., 1929. Mind and The World Order: an
Outline of a Theory of Knowledge . Charles
Scribner's Sons, New York, 1929, reprinted in paperback
by Dover Publications, Inc. New York, 1956.
Lewis, C.I., 1932a. Symbolic Logic (with C.H.
Langford). New York: The Appleton-Century Company, 1932
pp. xii +506, reprinted in paperback by New York: Dover
Publications, 1951.
Lewis,C. I., 1946. An Analysis of Knowledge and
Valuation , (The Paul Carus Lectures, Series 8,
1946) Open Court, La Salle, 1946.
Lewis, C.I., 1955a. The Ground and Nature of the
Right , The Woodbridge Lectures, V, delivered at
Columbia University in November 1954, New York, Columbia
University Press, 1955.
Lewis, C.I., 1957a. Our Social Inheritance ,
Mahlon Powell Lectures at University of Indiana, 1956,
Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1957.
Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis ,
ed. John D. Goheen and John L. Mothershead, Jr.,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1970. (Includes
most of Lewis's most important articles.)
Values and Imperatives, Studies in Ethics ,
ed. John Lange, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
California, 1969. (Includes a number of Lewis's late,
unpublished talks on ethics)
10. Secondary Sources
Dayton, Eric. AC I Lewis And The Given@,
Transactions of the Charles S . Peirce Society ,
31(2), Spr 1995, pp. 254-284.
Flower, Elizabeth and Murphey, Murray G. A History
of Philosophy in America , New York, G.P. Putnam's
Sons, 1977, Chapter 15. pp.892-958.
Gowans, Christopher W. ATwo Concepts Of The Given In
C I Lewis: Realism And Foundationalism@. The Journal
of the History of Philosophy , 27(4), 1989, pp.
573-590.
Haack, Susan. "C I Lewis" In American Philosophy
, Singer, Marcus G (Ed), Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1986, pp. 215-238.
Hill, Thomas English. Contemporary Theories of
Knowledge , The Ronald Press Co., New York, 1961,
chapter 12, pp. 362-387.
Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy,
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977, chapter 28, pp.
533-562.
Reck, Andrew J. The New American Philosophers ,
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1968, pp.
3-43.
Rosenthal, Sandra B. The Pragmatic a priori: Study In
The Epistemology Of C I Lewis . St Louis, Green, 1976.
Schilpp, Paul Arthur (Ed). The Philosophy Of C I
Lewis . La Salle Il Open Court, 1968.
Thayer, H S. Meaning And Action: A Critical History
Of Pragmatism. Indianapolis Bobbs-merrill, 1968, chapter
4, pp.205-231.
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