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.
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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