Philosophy
thinkers of his generation. His unique pragmatic vision links him to the tradition of classical American pragmatism articulated in George Herbert Mead. In this book, Sandra B. Rosenthal explores the rich veins that formed the core of Lewis’s philosophical identity. Rosenthal traces Lewis’s influences, explains the central concepts that informed his thinking, and follows the effects of Lewis’s ethics and practical thought as he worked to resolve the problems and issues that defined his view of the human experience. Rosenthal shows how Lewis’s central ideas contribute to the enrichment and expansion of pragmatism and open new paths for constructive dialogue with other traditions. This book will become a standard reference for readers who want to know more about one of American philosophy’s most distinguished minds. Sandra B. Rosenthal is Provost Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, New Orleans. American Philosophy, John J. Stuhr, editor
University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis http://iupress.indiana.edu 1-800-842-6796
INDIANA
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C. I. Lewis in F ocus
the works of Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and
Rosenthal
C. I. Lewis (1883–1964) was one of the most important
C. I. Lewis in F ocus The Pulse of Pragmatism Sandra B. Rosenthal
C. I. Lewis in Focus
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY John J. Stuhr, editor editorial board Susan Bordo Vincent Colapietro John Lachs Noëlle McAfee Cheyney Ryan Richard Shusterman
C. I. Lewis in Focus
The Pulse of Pragmatism
Sandra B. Rosenthal
Indiana University Press bloomington and indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail
[email protected] © 2007 by Sandra B. Rosenthal All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenthal, Sandra B. C. I. Lewis in focus : the pulse of pragmatism / Sandra B. Rosenthal. p. cm. — (American philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34837-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-253-34837-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Lewis, Clarence Irving, 1883–1964 2. Pragmatism. I. Title. II. Title: Clarence Irving Lewis in focus. B945.L454R66 2007 191—dc22 2006021428 1 2 3 4 5
12 11 10 09 08 07
For Lauren, Aliisa, Mark, Michelle, and Stanford Endless sources of fascination, amazement, and joy
Contents ix
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 1 Life, Work, and Importance 5 2 Rational Certitude and Pragmatic Experimentalism
25 3 Empirical Certitude and Pragmatic Fallibilism 69 4 Through Experience to Metaphysics 97 5 The Process of Valuation 129 6 Morality and Sociality: An Evolving Enterprise 148 Notes
171
Bibliography Index
181
179
Acknowledgments I would like to thank John Stuhr and Dee Mortensen for their untiring efforts and ongoing helpful suggestions on behalf of this work, from its inception to its completion. I especially wish to thank my husband, Rogene Buchholz, not just for his encouragement, but for “walking the talk,” taking on much of the tedious work associated with the writing of this book and, with in¤nite patience, getting me through an array of incredible computer problems—most of which were of my own making.
C. I. Lewis in Focus
Introduction
The pragmatic vision of C. I. Lewis brings unique doctrines and areas of focus to philosophy in general and pragmatism in particular. This work proposes to explain the central concepts and features of Lewis’s philosophy, explore the lines of thinking that led him from particular issues and problems to the development of these doctrines, and discuss their importance in resolving the problems that gave rise to them. It will also show the way these various doctrines interweave to form a comprehensive philosophic vision about humans and the world in which they live, a vision that is enlivened throughout by the pulse of pragmatism and that offers to the general corpus of the classical pragmatists the development of features that must be assumed by them but are not explicitly developed and offers to other traditions points of contact that open paths for more in-depth dialogues between them. Chapter 1 traces Lewis’s life and the in®uences that informed the direction of his thinking, indicating the way these led to his various speci¤c works and doctrines along the way. It sketches in
2
Introduction
broad strokes the importance of his thinking for both philosophy in general and classical American pragmatism in particular. The second chapter delves, in a non-technical way, into Lewis’s ground-breaking work in logic, discussing how, in the process of developing his logic of strict implication to avoid the paradoxes of traditional logic, he became interested in certain issues surrounding the existence of alternative logics in general and in what these issues revealed to him about the very status of any logic as well as about broader epistemic issues. While these abstract logical interests seem far removed from pragmatism’s move away from abstractions to a focus on the richness of concrete, everyday lived experience, Lewis’s solution to the questions raised by alternative logics led him to a distinctively pragmatic understanding of the origins of logical truths in the richness of human action within concrete experience. These logical interests also led him to his most important and original doctrine, a novel understanding of the nature and function of a priori knowledge. This focus on a priori knowledge is often held to alienate Lewis from the mainstream of classical pragmatism, yet his radical reconstruction of its nature provides the collective corpus of the tradition with an important, if not crucial, addition. Drawing from a fundamentally Kantian scheme made responsive to the insights of American pragmatism and adapted to ¤t the needs of contemporary logic, Lewis established an a priori that is coextensive with the analytic, yet that cannot be said to be empirically vacuous. It arises from experience, has possible reference to experience, is judged by its workability in the ongoing course of experience, and is inherently experimental. The following chapter explores Lewis’s pragmatic empiricism. Any empiricism, as a position that relies on sense experience as the basis of knowledge, must give some account of what is sensibly given or presented. Because of Lewis’s strong focus on the term “the given” element in experience, he is often interpreted as part of a tradition that uses that term to indicate individual, discrete units of sense data as the building blocks of experience, building blocks that are usually held to be exhausted in language. But Lewis, in keeping with his pragmatic orientation, clearly rec-
Introduction
3
ognizes the richness of what is immediately given to sense. He appreciates as well that in its richness what is sensibly given underlies and eludes the strict con¤nes of language and, as it enters our experience, already bears the imprint of the interpretations by which we get hold of it. In developing Lewis’s understanding of the given or presented ingredient in experience, the discussion delineates the various levels of interpretation by which we grasp it, the functionally different roles these levels play in experience and knowledge, and the distinctively pragmatic nature of the certitude involved. It further explores the way the certitudes of the given and the a priori interweave to give rise to empirical knowledge as probable and fallible, as well as Lewis’s way of handling related issues that bear on his understanding of knowledge. Chapter 4 examines the nature of and interrelation between the diverse understandings of reality in Lewis’s philosophy and explains the way he understands each as a reality in the making, a reality that is in an ongoing process of evolving or restructuring itself. It also discusses the signi¤cance of Lewis’s understanding of these distinctions in avoiding some of the traditional problems of philosophy as well as the paradoxes of which thoughtful common sense frequently becomes aware. In chapter 5 the focus turns to Lewis’s theory of valuation, showing how he utilizes the details of his epistemology in developing his understanding of valuations as types of empirical judgments. Like the pragmatists in general, Lewis did not accept the view that moral claims are purely subjective preferences, have no cognitive value, and hence cannot be either true or false. Unlike the pragmatists in general, however, Lewis makes a break between goods, values, or satisfactions on the one hand, and obligation, imperatives, or rules on the other. While judgments pertaining to what is good are empirical claims of sense experience and are necessary for dealing with issues concerning what is right to do, or what ought to be done, the claims of sense experience alone cannot determine what ought to be pursued or what is right to do. This chapter examines his theory of valuation, leaving his understanding of imperatives for the following chapter.
4
Introduction
Chapter 6 explores the way Lewis, throughout his moral and social philosophy, brings the full range of his pragmatic vision to bear in understanding the nature of rules, directives, or imperatives and their ongoing interplay with judgments of sense concerning goods. His ethics, with its focus on imperatives of rightness, provides the grounding for both prudence as the right ordering of one’s life and justice as the social parallel to the imperative of prudence. This leads to his social philosophy and an examination of the natural sociality of humans, the meaning of liberty, the signi¤cance of the institutionalization of social criticism, and the way in which society restructures its own social imperatives in an ongoing process of social evolution. Like his understanding of a priori knowledge in general, Lewis’s pragmatic reconstruction of imperatives ultimately does not contradict the general framework of classical American pragmatism but rather rounds it out by developing certain assumptions only vaguely acknowledged in the collected corpus of its works. Lewis’s moral and social philosophy, like his philosophy in general, is deeply embedded within and attuned to the pulse of pragmatism, and his philosophic contributions are part and parcel of the pragmatic tradition.
1 Life, Work, and Importance
Clarence Irving Lewis was one of the most important thinkers of his generation, and with his pragmatic vision he brought unique doctrines and areas of focus to philosophy in general and pragmatism in particular. Yet he does not receive the attention given the other pragmatists and which he richly deserves. Lewis is part and parcel of the tradition of classical American pragmatism, that movement incorporating, along with his works, the works of the other great American pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Pragmatism began as a method of understanding meaning in terms of possibilities of experience. Meanings are embodied in our creative ways of acting in the world, our purposive activity, and the truths of our beliefs are subject to veri¤cation in the ongoing course of experience. Do they lead to the expected consequences; do they work? Experience is experimental, and all of our beliefs are fallible. Meanings, and hence the determination of truths within their structures, are never ¤nal, but are subject to revision. There is a fundamental openness to whatever results experience brings.
6
C. I. Lewis in Focus
We are not spectators in the universe, mirroring it in our subjective experience or directly grasping its ¤xed structures. Rather, we are creatively engaged within it. Experience is understood as a rich transactional unity of the active organism immersed in a natural universe. Experience is an ongoing transactional affair that is inclusive of subject and object as features distinguished within an unanalyzed whole. What is involved is not a coming together of separate parts—mind and matter, mental and physical, subjective experience and objective reality, self and other, and so forth. Rather, these are distinctions within a uni¤ed whole that is partially constitutive of the very parts distinguished. Experiencing subject and experienced object constitute a primal relational unity. Nor does experience come chopped into bits, but rather it is continuous, inde¤nitely rich, and full of relationships. The empiricism of pragmatism is a radical empiricism in that traditional empiricism was not empirical enough; it ignored far too much of what we experience. The universe for the pragmatist is a restless, pluralistic, open universe that offers no assurances, no guarantees, and no closure. Diversity, change, and precariousness are part and parcel of it. Emphasizing the importance of community, the social, and the value-laden dimension of experience, pragmatism embodies a unique relevance for the affairs of life and concern with human conduct. American pragmatism by and large rejects the categories and language central to the philosophic tradition in favor of new visions that undercut the traditional dichotomies and dilemmas that were entrenched in the tradition. It does not attempt to provide new answers to enduring problems. Rather it undercuts these problems by denying the assumptions that gave rise to them, in this way transforming the very nature of the debates. Several factors relevant to Lewis and his work have led to a lack of appreciation of his unique contributions to this pragmatic vision. One such factor is his basic temperament and writing style. Lewis was born April 12, 1883, in Stoneham, Massachusetts. His parents, Irving Lewis and Hannah Dearth Lewis, both came from New Hampshire families, and as he characterizes him-
Life, Work, and Importance
7
self, “both by inheritance and in temperament, I am, I think, an up-country New England Yankee.”1 He was a very private person who was not concerned with popularity, and he was convinced that there were great things to be achieved with hard work and self-reliance. This in®uenced his basic approach to philosophic issues as well as his style of presentation. He was uncompromisingly honest and rigorous in his philosophical pursuits, and his writings and lectures were geared to small groups of similarly rigorous scholars. Lewis was a “philosopher’s philosopher,” an academic specialist who thrived on technical problems presented in professional journals or graduate lectures and whose primary interest was in addressing other philosophers. And while, like James and Dewey, he was interested in the problems and issues of everyday life, as evidenced by the richness of his writings in moral, social, and political philosophy, he engaged these problems by translating them into highly abstract problems of philosophy. Another factor that contributed to his neglect as an important ¤gure in the tradition of classical American pragmatism is partially the result of his long association with Harvard University. Lewis grew up in the Boston area, and for most of his career he was af¤liated with Harvard, ¤rst as a student and then as a teacher. The diverse in®uences of the great philosophers with whom he came in contact in this setting led him to formulate unique syntheses of opposing views that required carefully thought through understandings of their relative strengths and weaknesses. His reconstructed version of traditional concepts, which his novel syntheses required and which is itself partially the result of his long association with Harvard, developed into some of his most important pragmatic doctrines but also led to some of the major barriers to understanding his uniquely pragmatic vision, with a resultant lack of attention to or appreciation of his philosophy. In his continual use of terms drawn from the philosophic tradition, Lewis radically transformed their meanings in keeping with his novel vision, but these terms are too often interpreted in traditional ways by both specialized scholars and more general readers alike. This is most pronounced in the constant thread of the Kantian schematic that runs throughout his thought and domi-
8
C. I. Lewis in Focus
nates his own philosophic vocabulary. His use of Kantian themes and vocabulary is the source of a perceived tension, even an irreconcilable con®ict, between Lewis and a thoroughgoing pragmatism. Kant’s emphasis on a priori forms of thought, schemas, and categorical imperatives does not seem to ¤t with the pragmatic agenda. But, it is precisely Lewis’s pragmatic appropriation of Kantian themes, a thoroughly pragmatic appropriation, that not only hides, but also houses, the power of his position to uniquely enrich the fabric of American pragmatism. Moreover, Lewis’s Kantian leanings and the Kantian vocabulary that dominate his writings are combined with a style and vocabulary not alien to positivist thinking. Indeed, there is a sense in which the positivists can trace their own philosophical lineage back to the problems found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This combination was the source of standard interpretations placing Lewis’s position within the framework of either the Vienna Circle type of positivism and constructionalism or the British ordinary language analysis of the post-Wittgensteinian variety. Yet his pragmatic appropriation of Kant involves him in an ongoing debate with the positivist tradition and the rejection of key positivist doctrines. In this way, he occupies a unique position in advancing the pragmatic agenda from within the conversation of the Anglo-American philosophical world from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Today, his pragmatic Kantianism has the potential to open up in a unique way fruitful paths of dialogue between pragmatism and later analytic philosophy. Lewis’s philosophical leanings began to develop before he started college. He said, “At about the age of thirteen, I had found myself beset with puzzles which, as far as I could discern, came out of the blue and had no antecedents.”2 He found himself questioning orthodox religion, and when he was ¤fteen he met a “little old lady” who opened him up to discussion when she said that “she also was a heretic.” During this period he read Marshall’s A Short History of Greek Philosophy and the Zeller books on Greek philosophy, as well as Herbert Spencer’s First Principles. His lasting interest in Greek philosophy is evidenced in the sprinkling
Life, Work, and Importance
9
of references to various Greek thinkers found throughout his writings. Because he had to provide his own ¤nancial support when he began Harvard in 1902, Lewis took course loads that would allow him to graduate in three years. His time there after his freshman elementary courses was about equally divided between English, economics, and philosophy. Josiah Royce and William James, among others, were his philosophy professors. As regards two other important ¤gures in his development, Ralph Barton Perry had not yet arrived at Harvard, and Lewis did not meet George Santayana until he was in graduate school. In his third year he took a well-known course in metaphysics, which was divided equally between James’s pragmatic position with its pluralistic, “restless” un¤nished universe and Royce’s objective or absolute idealism with its rational order and in¤nite Absolute. While Lewis found merit in both points of view, by the end of the course Royce was his ideal of a philosopher mainly because of his “deep and untiring” cogency. Even then he thought James and Royce had more in common, most noteworthy the voluntaristic aspect, than either recognized, and he felt grati¤ed when Royce eventually referred to his position as “absolute pragmatism.” And, indeed, Royce’s af¤nities with pragmatism were hidden both by the absolutism to which he took his doctrines and by the opposing, argumentative stances Royce and James continually took toward each other’s position both in and out of the classroom. Looking back on that experience years later, Lewis commented that he “should be glad to think that the ‘conceptual pragmatism’ of Mind and the World Order had its roots in that same ground” and that the general tenor of his philosophic thinking “may have taken shape under the in®uence of that course.”3 He received an A.B. with honorable mention in philosophy and English, and the next year took a job teaching English at a Massachusetts high school, an experience that he characterized as miserable. The following year, however, he took an appointment as an instructor in English at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He found the mountain setting very congenial, and he related
10
C. I. Lewis in Focus
to the students who, like himself, had to work to put themselves through college. Expecting reappointment at the end of the academic year, he married his long-time sweetheart, Mabel Maxwell Graves, on New Year’s Day, 1907. In the fall of 1908, however, he returned to Harvard for graduate studies. By this time James had retired and Ralph Barton Perry had joined the department. Lewis remained interested in Greek philosophy, taking Santayana’s course on Plato. He enrolled in Perry’s course on Kant,4 and as Lewis characterizes the impact of this latter course, “The evidence of Kant in my thinking ever since is unmistakable, however little I may achieve the excellences which aroused my youthful admiration.”5 He also took a seminar from Perry on epistemology, which brought many current issues to the fore. Lewis later characterized the philosophic climate during that period as a contest among three dominate schools of thought: absolute idealism, pragmatism, and the new realism, or neorealism, of which Perry was a leading exponent. But while Lewis was in®uenced by James’s pragmatism, his graduate years were more dominated by the debate between neo-realism and idealism. He repeated metaphysics with Royce and attended Perry’s epistemology seminar. These rekindled trains of thought in Lewis that had begun in the James-Royce course, and they began to take sharper contours. During this period objective idealism, which had dominated both American and British philosophy, was challenged from the directions of both pragmatism, with Dewey as the leading exponent, and neo-realism, of which Perry was one of the leading American proponents. Lewis considered that all three movements could be said to take off from “the Jamesian dictum that ‘The real is what it is known as,’” but each taking it in differing directions. He held that Royce took it in the direction of the Absolute, claiming the real is to be identi¤ed not with what it is known as by the ¤nite, fallible knower but by the Absolute knower, while Dewey took it to the “mundane level” of the human organism and its limited practical goals. Neo-realism in turn insists on the some-
Life, Work, and Importance
11
thing more, a reality of independent objects to which knowing is directed.6 The train of thought he developed in the examination of these three directions anticipates the tenor of his thinking throughout his career. While the arguments did not convince him, he did not want to set them aside without a clear understanding of their respective points and without satisfactory answers to them. Moreover, he thought that within the parameters in which the controversy took place, one could have it both ways if the necessary distinctions were made. In developing the way of having various traditional points of view “both ways” throughout his long philosophical career, Lewis developed his own novel way of “having it” that forged a pathway beyond traditional alternatives. His speci¤c thinking in having it both ways at this point is illustrated by his analysis of the issues of validity and truth that these divergent paths raised and the direction of his resolution of the con®icting views. He found problems with James’s pragmatism concerning what he considered the con®ation of truth and validity, while he thought Dewey tended to avoid the issue, making no clear-cut distinction between them,7 and his eventual exposure to the writings of Peirce led him to feel vindicated in his refusal to accept James and Dewey on these points. He thought Royce’s position was better on this issue, as it emphasized that while beliefs change, the criteria by which they are judged are permanent. Making a clear distinction between the validity of empirical beliefs as a relation of them to their given premises and truth as a concept that has metaphysical implications, he held that there is no contrariety between pragmatism’s focus on beliefs judged by their workability and idealism’s insistence on the ideal of absolute truth. But he agreed with Perry’s insistence that there was no warrant for objective idealism’s reifying this cognitive ideal as absolute mind. Thus, for Lewis, “absolute truth and the validity of such knowledge of the real as is achievable by humans, are two different things,”8 and absolute truth is an ideal, not a metaphysical reality. Though the distinction between validity and truth takes a different twist in Lewis’s
12
C. I. Lewis in Focus
developed philosophy, this distinction, emphasized in his resolution of the above debate on the issues of truth, is crucial throughout his writings and lies at the heart of his work in logic and the resultant pragmatic a priori, his single most important contribution to the pragmatic tradition. Re®ecting the strong in®uence Kant had on his thinking throughout his career, he held that “the idealists had reverted to a metaphysical non sequitur against which they should have taken warning from Kant: they had mistaken a valid regulative ideal for a constitutive metaphysical principle.”9 The world as a wholly rational system is a regulative ideal of reason, the ideal of the unity of knowledge, but is not constitutive of reality. We use regulative ideals to guide us, but should not attempt to do the impossible of proving the reality of what they assert. When Lewis claimed that after taking Perry’s seminar he “left idealistic metaphysics permanently behind,” what he left behind was what he considered the illicit rei¤cation of ideals as metaphysical absolutes; but he did not leave behind some key elements of Royce’s “absolute pragmatism” shorn of Royce’s absolutes. Indeed, he accepted, in modi¤ed form, much of what idealism, shorn of its absolutes, had to offer. The later Royce made use of Kantian regulative principles as “leading ideas” crucial in the advance of science. Unlike Kantian ¤xed principles, leading ideas can change over time. And, while suggested by experience, alternative ones are possible. Though in a sense they are demanded by experience, we use them because they are helpful; they work. Their justi¤cation, then, is really a pragmatic one. And indeed, even Kant’s regulative rules or ideals in guiding our action are ultimately justi¤ed by their function. This “pragmatic justi¤cation” of regulative principles or leading ideas became crucial in Lewis’s development of his own pragmatic a priori, though in other ways they at times took a decidedly unRoycean turn in his various interests. Although he did not agree that real objects depended on experience or the knowing relation, he agreed with Royce that any de¤nition of the real object must include the active constructions of the mind, which embodied voluntaristic aspects of willing or purpose, and that we analyze given knowledge in terms of pos-
Life, Work, and Importance
13
sible experience. Thus he also rejected new realism’s view of real objects as completely independent of the knowing relation.10 But though the real object was not immediately given, there was a given, brute element in knowledge. In a distinctively Kantian fashion, Lewis held that without our activity the given has no signi¤cance, while without the given our activity has no grounding. Lewis’s own position incorporates throughout the element of the sensuous, “brutely there” given, and the element of interpretation. In 1910 Lewis received his Ph.D., having submitted a doctoral dissertation that attempted to bring together the realism and voluntarism of the epistemologies of Perry and Royce respectively. The way his years at Harvard contoured his unique pragmatic vision is evinced in own account, which is well worth quoting in length: Of my teachers at Harvard, Royce impressed me most. His ponderous cogency kept my steady attention, even though I never followed to his metaphysical conclusions. James, I thought, had a swift way of being right, but how he reached his conclusions was his own secret. Royce was, in fact, my paradigm of a philosopher, and I was prone to minimize the difference from him of such convictions as I had. It was Royce himself, ¤nally, with my doctor’s thesis before him, who pointed out the extent of these differences. He concluded by saying, with his usual dry humour, “I thought you were principally in®uenced by Perry, but I ¤nd he thinks you are principally in®uenced by me. Between us, we agreed that perhaps this is original.11
And, indeed, while his distinctively pragmatic vision re®ects the strong in®uence of Royce’s idealism and Perry’s realism, it in fact negates or undercuts the very dichotomy between idealism and realism as well as the dichotomies between many other traditional alternatives. After getting his Ph.D. Lewis assisted at Harvard for a year as no jobs were available, but the following year he got a position at Berkeley. At Berkeley he turned to the study of logic, and his focus remained there through the publication of his Survey of Symbolic Logic in 1918. He had taken a course from Royce on symbolic
14
C. I. Lewis in Focus
logic, which ¤rst stimulated an interest in it, and not too long after assisted in the course. He was very much in®uenced by the importance Royce gave to logic, holding, like Royce, that it embodied the principles of reasoning and that a study of the logical systems led to their grasp. Unlike Royce, however, he did not think that logic held the absolute truth, allowing us to understand the Absolute mind in which thought and objects would be identical, in this way understanding reality. Also, during this period Lewis had the opportunity to read Principia Mathematica, by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, and recognized its importance for developments in the ¤eld of logic, though he rejected its understanding of the relation of logical implication. This interest in logic was reinforced by the lasting in®uence of Kant on his thinking; for Kant the laws of logic were ultimately legislative for human thought. But what ultimately brought him to the study of logic was his epistemological interests and the insights the study of logic had to offer in that area, particularly work done in logic and mathematics concerning in¤nity and continuity, which had negative implications for parts of Kant’s position. Lewis wanted to give a course in symbolic logic at Berkeley, but there were no adequate texts available. While he felt that no commercial out¤t would publish a logic textbook, the need for a text in symbolic logic, combined with the fact that Berkley was preparing to launch a series of publications for its semicentennial celebration, led him to undertake the project of writing A Survey of Symbolic Logic. At the time, logic was decidedly out of favor. Looking back on the situation, Lewis described it as one in which mathematicians dismissed logic as philosophy, and philosophers dismissed it as a mathematical game concerned with obvious results. But after reading the ¤rst volume of Principia Mathematica he felt that there would be a growing serious interest in logic. The synthesis Lewis had developed in his dissertation leaned toward the realist side. Though the activity of the mind was crucial for knowledge, its constructive function was limited almost to organization or selection. During the next ensuing years, however, he began to swing toward various idealisms stemming from
Life, Work, and Importance
15
Royce’s in®uence. Interrelated with this was the growing recognition of the need to counter the force of Hume’s skepticism, which argued that a reality independent of the structuring activity of the mind is not only unknowable but meaningless. The force of Hume’s skepticism had led Kant to hold on to the validity of knowledge only by agreeing that things-in-themselves are unknowable, that metaphysical knowledge is impossible, thus setting limits to the realm of knowledge, limiting it to what can be structured by the mind. This concern and respect for Hume’s skeptical arguments followed Lewis throughout his career. His ongoing unique pragmatic synthesis incorporating dimensions of realism, idealism, and Kantian insights, as well as his ongoing criticisms of these positions, was directed by the need to establish the validity of knowledge against the skepticism of Hume. During the time Lewis was at Berkeley idealism came under increasing attack and other positions began to assert their respective voices, although idealism remained strong. In this period the movement of critical realism, so named by Roy Wood Sellers, took shape. According to critical realism knowledge involves the knower, the datum, and the object; objects existing independently in the external world cause our percepts to arise. This position was supposed to handle the problems of error and illusion, which posed dif¤culties for neorealism. Soon after Lewis began his nine-year stay at Berkeley Santayana, an early critical realist, taught summer school there and delivered a paper that caught Lewis’s interest. A year later Lewis delivered a paper in response to Santayana’s attack on idealism, defending the idealist position that reality must be intelligible and that reason imposed conditions upon real objects. He also defended idealism against naturalism, which he thought limited knowledge of reality to scienti¤c knowledge gained through the reduction of reality to the value-free contents of mathematical thinking and causal analysis. He contended that it would not work for naturalism to take the pragmatic path of understanding knowledge of reality in terms of workable or useful hypotheses, for this introduces the concept of value; “useful” is always useful relative to some end or purpose one thinks valuable. The understanding of
16
C. I. Lewis in Focus
knowledge as involving valuational dimensions became a key directive in the development of Lewis’s own position, which he thought of as a “humanism.” In 1920 Lewis returned to Harvard as a visiting lecturer, and a year later he was appointed assistant professor. Although reluctant to leave the west, he felt that “for one who grew up under Royce and James and Perry, no other position in philosophy could have quite the same meaning as one at Harvard.”12 His return to Harvard went well, and four years later he was promoted to tenured associate professor. He soon turned from logic to epistemology, and in 1929 published Mind and the World, which lays out the fundamental tenets of his conceptual pragmatism and which gave him an international reputation. This work is strongly and consciously Kantian in its focus on “categories,” though as always with Lewis, the Kantian schematic undergoes a radical transformation. The following year he was promoted to full professor. When Lewis returned to Harvard he was assigned a room in the Harvard Library that contained the manuscripts of Charles Peirce, with the expectation seeming to be that Lewis would become interested in them and might organize and catalogue them. While he identi¤ed and organized possible pieces of continuous writing, he never went further, but he did spend two years “practically living with” the material, read many of the manuscripts, and was in®uenced by Peirce’s pragmatic views. He was particularly in®uenced by Peirce’s claim that the meaning of a concept consisted in its calling for certain types of behavior in certain types of circumstances, leading to certain types of consequences, a debt that Lewis acknowledges in several places in Mind and the World Order.13 The further pervasive, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle, in®uence of Peirce on Lewis’s thinking can be seen in his claim that he thought reading the Peirce manuscripts was like receiving “a thousand suggestions, on a hundred topics, which eventually round out to a total impression.”14 While acknowledging his debt to James and Dewey as well, he calls special attention to his indebtedness to Peirce.15 Reading the Peirce manuscripts also rekindled trains of thought begun during his exposure to James. He thought that Peirce’s
Life, Work, and Importance
17
fundamental concepts were better developed than those of James, and they resonated more with Lewis’s own way of thinking. Finally he realized, to his own surprise, that his own conceptions, as far as they could be classi¤ed, were pragmatic, “somewhere between James and the absolute pragmatism of Royce; a little to one side of Dewey’s naturalism and what he speaks of as ‘logic.’”16 Thus, when Mind and the World Order was published in 1929, he called the general position “conceptual pragmatism.” The book developed from his work in logic and mathematics and from epistemological issues that had interested him in his dissertation and followed him throughout his career. Years later, in re®ecting on this work, he said he had later come to realize that his further writings needed to rectify his failure in that book to make a clear separation of the more metaphysical questions from the more epistemological ones. He also expressed the regret that he had not better conveyed his thoughts concerning “the given” in experience or the ultimate data of knowledge found in experience, an issue that he tried to better clarify in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation through the introduction of “expressive language.” He worried, however, that this may have not made matters more clear but may have in fact “muddied the waters,” as scholars who referred to this later discussion seemed not to grasp the relevant points that led to the new distinction, and they generally tended to confuse levels of language. He concluded that “after thirty years of debating the questions of the given element in experience, I come to think that an accurate and well-expressed phenomenology of the perceptual is the most dif¤cult—the most nearly impossible—enterprise to which epistemology is committed.” 17 But he emphasized again, as he had throughout his career, that one cannot avoid the issues by beginning with the level of language. At no time did he accept the linguistic level as the ground level for knowledge. He further expressed his discontent with certain aspects of Mind and the World Order because it had too much of the air of proving when it should have been more just calling attention to. He had come to the conclusion that fundamental matters are, by their
18
C. I. Lewis in Focus
very nature of being fundamental, beyond the reach of anything that could appropriately be called proof. This re®ects what in fact pervades his mode of accepting some very fundamental tenets of his philosophy, a pragmatic justi¤cation in that without such acceptance thought and knowledge become impossible. In 1924 Whitehead came to Harvard. Whitehead’s writings in®uenced Lewis’s thinking in his study of philosophy of science, especially the Whiteheadean doctrines that everything we know is via sensory experience; that observational knowledge takes place though a duration, denying point-like instants of time and point-like particles; that duration is not a time container but a slab of nature; and that perception is an awareness of events or happenings. Whitehead’s in®uence on Lewis’s own thinking is perhaps most notable in the latter’s metaphysical speculations, which, though sparse, are crucial for rounding out his pragmatic vision. Lewis’s metaphysical claims, like Whitehead’s, view reality in terms of process or change rather than in terms of unchanging entities of any sort—although Lewis’s understanding of a universe in process differs in fundamental ways from Whitehead’s. Meanwhile, Royce continued to have a powerful in®uence on Lewis’s thinking. In a closing note to a paper published around 1930, Lewis observes that he used “knowledge” in the essay to refer to “truths of description” and excluded “truths of appreciation,” which incorporate the esthetic quality of the given. He concludes, “There is, then, a line of division between such interests and cognition of the type of science. And it is suggested that the foundation of these, not being found in knowledge alone, may rest upon some postulate.”18 As with most of what shows the in®uence of Royce in his philosophy, he reworks this in a way that alters the direction it takes in Royce’s idealism. And it points the direction for much of what will occupy Lewis in upcoming years. During this period, the ¤eld of logic was growing rapidly, and Lewis was concerned that the logic of Principia, which was gaining hold and with which he disagreed, would have destructive implications for the direction of epistemology in general. From the time he ¤rst read Principia Mathematica he thought that the implication relation, “material implication,” which served as the
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basis for the entire development, could not adequately serve as a paradigm for logical deduction, and that its restrictions were the result of a series of historical accidents rather than the result of thoughtful consideration of the issue by anyone. In chapter 6 and appendix 2 of Symbolic Logic, co-authored with Cooper Harold Langford and published a few years after Mind and the World Order, he presented what he regarded as the ¤nal development of his “strict implication.” However, each of the two authors wrote his respective individual chapters, and some of Langford’s views expressed in his parts of the book diverge from Lewis’s own views. After the publication of these two works Lewis turned to the study of ethics. From very early in his teaching career he considered ethics the most important branch of philosophy, and he taught a course in social ethics as often as possible. His own thoughts on ethics had gradually begun to take root, and he now wanted to develop them. However, he found that he kept getting pushed back to epistemological issues for several reasons. Most importantly, his work in ethics continually led him to epistemological issues, which ¤rst had to be resolved. He realized that he needed a well-formulated epistemology that could ground valid valuations as a species of empirical knowledge, an epistemological grounding of valuation not contained in anything he had previously published. Also at this time, critical discussions of Mind and the World Order were being published in numerous journals, and Lewis was concerned with countering the various objections presented. He realized that Mind and the World Order made no clear separation of the more epistemological issues from metaphysical considerations, and he needed to sharpen his focus on purely epistemological clari¤cations. Furthermore, the conceptualism of “conceptual pragmatism” and the conceptualism implicitly incorporated in his theory of strict implication were becoming consolidated in his thinking and reformulated as a distinct topic, thus bringing about a closer convergence between his logical and epistemological interests. Additionally, other philosophers were presenting points of view that were similar to Lewis’s own views, yet diverged from them in crucial ways, and he needed to work through these
20
C. I. Lewis in Focus
various positions. The combination of providing a grounding for valuation as a form of empirical knowledge, clarifying his position as presented in Mind and the World Order while countering objections to it, and working through emerging divergent views all combined to focus his attention on the systematic development of the epistemological issues themselves. One of the developments that in®uenced the direction of Lewis’s focus was the formation of the Vienna Circle, which began in 1923 and which developed into the general movement known as logical positivism. This position limited the cognitive meaning of propositions to the method of their veri¤cation, rejected metaphysics, and equated knowledge with scienti¤c knowledge, the ultimate goal being the establishment of a uni¤ed language of science, with philosophy equivalent to the logic of science. Lewis was exposed to the members of this movement on and off and became familiar with their writings, citing them in his own work. Some aspects of it were appealing to Lewis, for example the construction of knowledge on the basis of experience, but here again, with quali¤cations that distanced him from logical positivism. In his presidential address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in December 1933, he noted that approaching the issues from the direction of Peirce, James, and Dewey divided him from the logical positivists. Among other things that Lewis could not dismiss as the logical positivists had done were the importance and meaningfulness of metaphysical claims, the pragmatic insistence on the importance of unactualized possibilities of experience, which cannot be reduced to actual verifying instances, and the inclusion of value theory and normative science within the realm of empirical meaningfulness.19 Also about this time the debate over the analytic-synthetic distinction came to the forefront of the philosophic scene with the publications of Willard V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Quine’s work attacked the irreducible difference between the conceptual and the empirical or existential, a difference that was a fundamental tenet of Lewis’s position. Quine’s attack, however, misses the mark of Lewis’s unique pragmatic appropriation of the
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issue, and Lewis’s stance in fact opens up possibilities for important dialogue between pragmatism and positions such as Quine’s. In the late 1930s and into the ’40s much of Lewis’s work was directed toward countering the claims of positivism. He recognized that positivism had changed the framework of philosophical questioning from “How do you know?” to “What do you mean?”20 This demanded that Lewis develop his thoughts clearly and precisely, and he delved even more rigorously into the problems of veri¤cation, apprehension of the given, valuational issues, and the importance of the analytic-synthetic distinction. These various in®uences directed both the plan and the content of An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, which is considered his major work and which was the focus of his interest until 1945. Book 1 of Analysis and Valuation is called “Meaning and Analytic Truth,” and in it Lewis presents a detailed theory of meaning that in turn shores up his analytic-synthetic distinction as the basis of his pragmatic a priori and lays the groundwork for his position on valuation as a type of empirical knowledge. As such, it was a challenge both to positivism in general and to Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. In re®ecting on the book years later, Lewis thought that he overdid the separation between Book 1, which contained the logical considerations and the related analytic knowledge that were needed for support of more epistemological claims, and Book 2, which housed the systematic development of empirical knowledge. As a result, he considered the connection between Books 1 and 2 to be inadequate.21 He emphasized, however, that the whole work converged toward Book 3, which established valuation as a species of knowledge. In this work, Lewis described his ethical position as “naturalism,” which was a complete turnaround from his early attack on naturalism. Lewis had not changed his fundamental rejection of the scienti¤c reductionism that limited philosophy and knowledge in general to the con¤nes of the logic of science and the ¤ndings of scienti¤c inquiry, but rather had come to understand naturalism as a humanism that was itself an attack on sci-
22
C. I. Lewis in Focus
enti¤c reductionism and the kind of naturalism it incorporated. He claimed to hold a “naturalistic or humanistic” conception of values, thus clearly indicating that the naturalism he now embraced was not to be set over against humanism but rather was to be understood as part and parcel of it. And indeed, pragmatism in general incorporates this non-reductionistic, value-rich naturalism. His goal was, ultimately, to show precisely how and why “empiricism in epistemology and naturalism in ethics” do not imply “relativism and cynicism.”22 This issue was vital, for it concerned the ongoing debate between cognitivism and noncognitivism in ethics. Lewis’s ethical writings re®ect the in®uence of both Kant and Peirce. For Lewis, ethics is not to be taken narrowly, for ethics is concerned with the critique of human action and hence with the normative basis of all knowledge, for knowledge and action are inseparably linked. In re®ecting on his philosophy much later in his career, he succinctly summarized the way in which what he calls ethical considerations must be taken in a broad sense. It concerns not merely “ethics and other types of value assessment, but the whole area of the normative, including logical determinations of consistency and cogency,” any claim for truth in logic itself, and the justi¤cation of beliefs in general. To deal with the issues, he stresses that there must be a sharp line between “what are strictly valuations from judgment of right and wrong in general.”23 He framed his discussion in terms of “laws” and imperatives, and the “categorical imperative” occupies the center stage of his moral theory. This frame, consciously and explicitly Kantian and crucial for Lewis’s ethical pursuits, is usually held to distance him from the other pragmatists, who do not make such an irreducible distinction between the good and the right. Lewis, however, is not here running counter to the general pragmatic view but bringing into sharp focus something implicitly but fundamentally operative in their pragmatic claims. Pertinent to these issues, as well as others, is his The Ground and Nature of the Right and the third section of Our Social Inheritance. In 1953 Lewis retired at age seventy. His stature in philosophy is attested to by the fact that Paul Schilpp, editor of the Library
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23
of Living Philosophers, devoted a volume to his work. This was a big honor, which put him in the ranks of such ¤gures as Albert Einstein, Russell, Whitehead, Santayana, and Dewey, among others. After completing An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation and throughout his retirement years Lewis turned to ethics, publishing some articles and three series of lectures. The Ground and Nature of the Right,24 consisting of the Woodbridge Lectures presented at Columbia in 1954, was published the following year; Our Social Inheritance, the Mahlon Powell Lectures presented at Indiana University in 1956, was again published the following year;25 “The Foundation of Ethics,” delivered at Wesleyan University in 1959, was published posthumously in 1969.26 At the time of his death on February 3, 1964, Lewis was working on a major undertaking in ethics, which he never completed. While Lewis’s work in ethics was postponed till late in his career, ethics, in the broad sense in which he takes it, is the foundation of his entire position. His focus on abstract logical concerns, the essential role of the a priori in knowledge, the sharp break between the analytic and the synthetic, and the irreducible difference between the right and the good have often been held to distance him from the other pragmatists. However, his philosophy, like that of the other pragmatists, is fundamentally a normative philosophy, and his logical concerns and sharp distinctions are ultimately crucial for the foundations of the general pragmatic vision. While this chapter has been concerned with the historical development of Lewis’s philosophic career, his philosophic position is not one that changed in radical ways over time. Rather, throughout his highly successful career, Lewis’s philosophic endeavors were directed toward developing, clarifying, re¤ning, expanding, and deepening ideas that had their roots, explicitly or implicitly, in the unique synthesis of diverse positions that he submitted as his doctoral dissertation. And, while An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation is considered his major work, many aspects of his philosophy that are fundamental to and crucial for his unique pragmatic vision are housed solely in brief articles scattered throughout his career. What emerged through this lifelong endeavor is a
24
C. I. Lewis in Focus
distinctively pragmatic vision of the universe in which we live, the manner in which we come to understand it, and the direction of our activities within it in morally and socially constructive ways. The remainder of this book will focus on the various facets of Lewis’s worldview, not in terms of their historical development, but from the perspective of their systematic signi¤cance and interrelatedness and the contributions they make toward the further development not only of the pragmatic movement in American philosophy but of philosophy in general.
2 Rational Certitude and Pragmatic Experimentalism Lewis holds that there are three ingredients in knowledge: the sensibly given and the concept—each of which is independent of the other—and the interpretation of the former by the latter. A distinguishing aspect of pragmatism is that it puts interpretation and its practical consequences “in ¤rst place.” Knowledge for Lewis involves a triadic relation of the given or sensibly presented, freely created a priori conceptual schemes, and the interpretation that brings the two together. This chapter will take a look at the nature and signi¤cance of the purely conceptual element in knowledge. Empiricism has been given such a broad range of meanings throughout the history of philosophy as to have virtually no de¤ning characteristics that cover all supposedly empirical philosophies. However, the distinction between the a priori, analytic, non-factual statement on the one hand and the a posteriori, synthetic, factual statement on the other has been taken to offer the most inclusive characteristic of empiricism. Yet there has been much controversy within the empiricist camp itself over the adequacy of this distinction. Cases have been made for the existence
26
C. I. Lewis in Focus
of the synthetic a priori by several philosophers who, whether or not they call themselves empiricists, ¤t into the empiricist category on other grounds. This so-called principle of empiricism has also been questioned from another direction in controversies concerning the denial of the long-held absolute distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. In the midst of this controversy, Lewis’s concept of the a priori occupies a unique position in the ongoing debate concerning the nature of a priori knowledge and the very possibility of an analytic-synthetic distinction. Drawing from a fundamentally Kantian scheme made responsive to the insights of American pragmatism and adapted to ¤t the needs of contemporary logic, Lewis has established an a priori that is coextensive with the analytic, yet that cannot be said to be empirically vacuous. It both arises from experience and has possible reference to experience. The uniqueness of Lewis’s position concerning the nature and function of the a priori both houses and hides its far-ranging signi¤cance. Logical Investigation and Its Dual Directions Lewis’s work in logic, combined with a healthy respect for Kantian epistemology and an appreciation of certain basic tenets of American pragmatism, produced the context of thought from which the pragmatic a priori, the vital core of Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism, took shape. Lewis’s spending many years in the study of logic was motivated in large part by his strong objections to the conception of implication developed in the extensional logic of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. This implication relation, called material implication, deviates strikingly from the ordinary sense of implication. According to material implication, a false proposition implies any proposition, while a true proposition is implied by any proposition. The problem, Lewis held, lay in the fact that the logic of propositions formulated in Principia is an extensional one, while ordinary deductive inference depends upon the meanings of the propositions used, and hence is rooted in an intensional logic.
Rational Certitude and Pragmatic Experimentalism
27
This is not merely some abstract logical issue, for it has momentous consequences for knowledge in general. Material implication does not allow for the signi¤cance of contrary-to-fact conditionals, for the signi¤cance of claims concerning what would happen if one were to perform a certain action even if that action has not been or ever will be preformed. For example, the claim that if I were to jump out the window and ®ap my arms in a certain precise fashion I would ®y “like a bird” and the claim that if I were to do so I would not ®y are equally true. Since I did not jump out the window and try to ®y like a bird (nor will I ever try to do so), the antecedent “if” clause is false, and thus the entire statement is true, no matter what the consequent clause. But if the two contradictory claims can both be true, the claim has no signi¤cance. Material implication cannot allow for the meaningfulness of unactualized possibilities and potentialities, but only for actual facts, and thus it renders senseless the ordinary meaning of causal connections or real connections. Furthermore, it undermines the entire concept of veri¤cation, particularly in science, in which an observational occurrence is held to verify a hypothesis, for if a true proposition is implied by any proposition, then the observational truth technically veri¤es any hypothesis whatsoever; if the consequent is true, the statement is true regardless of the truth of the antecedent. In short, material implication wreaks havoc with our ordinary claims and inferences. Lewis sees the prevalence of material implication in logic in spite of its paradoxes as resulting from the fact that Boole’s development of the calculus of propositions followed the model of class inclusion, in which the null-class is included in every class and every class is included in the universal class. This led to the position that every proposition whose truth-value is false implies every other, and every proposition whose truth-value is true is implied by every other. The source of the dif¤culty for Lewis, as well as the dual directions in which it led him, is clearly indicated in his observation that Two sorts of problems were before me. First and most obviously: is there an exact logic, comparable to this extensional calculus, which will
28
C. I. Lewis in Focus
exhibit the analogous relations in intension? And is the intensional analogue of material implication the relation upon which deductive inference is usually founded? Second, there were larger and vaguer questions: Could there be different exact logics? If I should ¤nd my calculus of intension, it and material implication would be incompatible, on some points, when applied to inference. In that case, in what sense would there be a question of validity or truth to be determined between them? And what criteria could determine the validity of logic, since logic itself provides the criteria of validity used elsewhere, and the application of these to logic itself would be petitio principii?1
The ¤rst set of problems arose from the paradoxes of the extensional logic of Principia. Their solution led Lewis to the development of the system of strict implication in symbolic logic and carried him beyond logic into the ¤eld of epistemology and the development of a detailed theory of meaning and analyticity. The second set of problems, arising out of the entertainment of the possibility of an alternative to the logic of material implication, led to his interest in the existence, within the ¤eld of symbolic logic, of alternative logics such as many-valued logics and socalled queer logics. It also carried him beyond logic to the development of a theory of knowledge asserting the free creation of and pragmatic selection among various possible conceptual schemes as tools for interpreting experience. These two strands of Lewis’s thought, both arising from his logical studies and always completely interwoven, lie at the heart of, and pervade, his philosophical position. An understanding of the nature of these two strands, then, is important for an understanding of Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism. The following discussion will trace these two strands, ¤rst in his continuing logical investigations and then in their manifestation in his epistemic framework. For Lewis, all propositions of logic are truths of intension or relations of meanings. The logic of material implication claims to be based on relations of extension and the corresponding denotational truth values. However, real denotational truth has reference to the empirical, while no part of pure logic is concerned with the question of empirical truth. Pure logic, in being abstract,
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is concerned with formal truth or validity, not with empirical truth. No purely logical truth, then, can be based on extensional relations. All such logical truths must be intensional truths. Lewis holds that any abstract system of logic has intensional meaning in that its terms are systematically related in accordance with general conceptual schemes. Logical rules have meaning in terms of the operations they prescribe. This meaning that the symbols of logic have is part of a system whose total structure is analytic. “Inference is analytic of systems, not of propositions in isolation.” 2 It is because of what the rules mean, because of what we do with logical symbols in accordance with rules, that the resulting propositions of a logical syllogism are tautologies. The tautology is an equivalence of intra-systematic meaning that the rules have built up. The logical meaning of truth values, then, just like logical meaning, is pure or intra-systematic intension and is not dependent upon a locus within experience. Within pure logic, whether based on the material implication of Principia or the implication relation of Lewis’s own system, or any other desirable system, the meaning of the terms, which is intensional and circular, determines the extension, a pure logical extension that is itself part of the pure intensional meaning in abstract logic. This general view of the nature of logical truth lends support, according to Lewis, to his own theory of strict implication, which does not focus its attention on the extensional or denotational values of truth or falsity but on the intensional modalities of possible and impossible, contingent and necessary, consistent and inconsistent. These intensional categories forming the basis of the validity of ordinary inference are what Lewis’s own system of strict implication purports to analyze. Strict implication captures the meaning of ordinary inference or deducibility, with meaningful implications holding whether the antecedent is true or false, and allows for meaningful assertions involving potentialities and possibilities. However, like any logic, it is itself circular. Lewis is thus led to his second task, that of understanding the nature of those criteria suf¤cient for deciding which, among various possible logical systems, contain the principles that state the truth about valid inference.
30
C. I. Lewis in Focus
Two points become clear to him. First, internal consistency is not suf¤cient to determine a truth that is independent of initial logical assumptions, but rather such truth requires an extra-logical element. Second, every process of reasoning within a logical system itself contains an extra-logical element, for any particular conclusion presented as the conclusion is selected from an inde¤nite number of valid inferences that can be drawn. The guiding factor in both cases is purpose or interest. Thus Lewis is led to the position that the inferences chosen within a logical system, as well as the original choice of a logical system, answer to criteria best called pragmatic. We choose that which works best in answering our interests and needs. The problem of alternative logics is similar to the problem of alternative geometries. The question in the latter is which geometry applies to real space, and the question in the former is which applies to ordinary inference. Lewis concludes that “the behavior of symbolic systems is nothing more or less than the behavior of the human mind, using its characteristic instrument: there is nothing in them which we have not put in ourselves, but they teach us inexorably what our commitments mean.”3 A priori judgments, judgments whose truth is in some sense given by mind and which are necessarily true or certain, are traditionally held to be judgments that can be determined to be true or false without any reference to experience. Lewis’s position is that the analytic and the a priori are identical. He thus rules out a priori synthetic judgments or judgments that are made solely by mind and that are necessary truths independent of sense experience, but that are formed by mind’s synthesis of independently diverse concepts. A priori truth is independent of experience because it is purely analytic of our conceptual meanings. The division between the a priori and the a posteriori, then, coincides with the division between the conceptual and the empirical, between the contributions of mind and what is given in experience, between the analytic and the synthetic. Lewis is thus drawn into an epistemological investigation of the nature of a priori truth that encompasses both the analyticity of meanings and the pragmatic determination of the contributions
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mind chooses to make. Indeed, Lewis recognized from the start of his logical investigations the epistemological direction to which he would be drawn and accordingly set his plans “to argue from exactly determined facts of the behavior of symbolic systems to conclusions of more general problems.”4 The logical development of intensional relationships of meanings and the pragmatic determination of their usefulness together give rise to Lewis’s doctrine of the pragmatic a priori. To understand the role of a priori knowledge in the way we come to know the world, then, it is important to ¤rst understand Lewis’s theory of meaning and the kind of analyticity it roots.
Meaning and Analyticity Modes of Meaning Lewis de¤nes a “term” as an expression that is able to name or to apply to some kind of thing, and introduces the notion that a proposition may be thought of as a kind of term. He distinguishes four modes or dimensions of meaning that can be applied: comprehension, signi¤cation, connotation or intension, and denotation.5 Broadly considered, comprehension, signi¤cation, and connotation are all intensional modes of meaning, while denotation is an extensional mode, for the ¤rst three all have to do with meaning as something determined by what one has in mind when entertaining a meaning. A proposition, for Lewis, is a term capable of signifying a state of affairs; the element of assertion in a statement is extraneous to the proposition asserted. The proposition is the content of the assertion, a content that, while signifying the same state of affairs, can also be questioned, denied, or merely supposed. Giving the name “proposition” to the clause or participial phrase such as “Jane baking bread now” rather than to the corresponding statement “Jane is baking bread now” provides a basis for the important distinction between intension and extension. The state of affairs referred to is the signi¤cation of the proposition, not its denotation. The signi¤cation of a proposition is the
32
C. I. Lewis in Focus
state of affairs in the actual world that makes the statement asserting the proposition true or false. Every statement asserts a proposition and attributes a state of affairs to the actual world. A state of affairs is con¤ned to what must be the case for the predicable term, which is the proposition, to be applicable to reality. A state of affairs is the signi¤cation of some proposition, not its denotation. It is not a chunk or space-time slab of reality in all the details of its concreteness, but rather includes all that the assertion of the state of affairs as actual implies, and only what is thus implied. The difference is that between what Peirce calls an “occurrence,” which is “a slice of the universe” in its “in¤nite detail,” and a fact, which is so much of this as is implied by “the power of thought.”6 The comprehension of a proposition is the classi¤cation of all possible or consistently thinkable worlds that are compatible with it. The comprehension of a proposition, the assertion of which is true, includes the actual world. If the statement is false, the actual world is excluded from the comprehension of the proposition. The correlation between intension and comprehension is such that the more that is incorporated into the intension, the less is included in the comprehension. Analytically or necessarily true propositions have universal comprehension and no intension; they apply to any consistently thinkable world. Analytically false or self-contradictory propositions have universal intension and no comprehension; they apply to no consistently thinkable world. While analytic proposition have zero intension, apply to anything thinkable, and imply nothing, require nothing, mean nothing as to the facts of existence—thus leading to their frequent characterization as “empty”—the applicability of analytic propositions to experience is crucial for Lewis. Thus the question arises as to how propositions that “mean nothing” can be applied to experience. Lewis ¤nds the answer in the distinction between the analytic and the holophrastic meaning of analytic statements. Through this distinction he is able to apply analytic statements to matters of fact, while maintaining an independence from matters of fact necessary for their a priori assertion. The “analytic meaning” of
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an expression is constituted by its component parts and their syntax, while the “holophrastic meaning” is the meaning of a whole expression as a unit. To exhibit analytic meaning, any statement can be analyzed into a series of elementary expressions, “each of which has no symbolized constituent, the intension of which is a constituent of the intension of the expression in question itself.”7 Lewis here means that they are neither elements of meaning that are not separately expressed (such as “rational” and “animal” as elements in the meaning of “man”), nor elements of expressions that have no separate meaning (such as letters of the alphabet). This type of analysis reveals that the constituents in an expression retain their own meanings while combining to produce the meaning of the whole statement. The meaning of the whole expression—the holophrastic intention—is not the same as the meaning of the constituents taken separately. The constituent expressions refer to empirical facts, thus rendering the complete statement empirically signi¤cant, while the constituents in syntactical order say that their intensions are so related as to result in an intension equal to zero. Through use of this distinction, Lewis accounts both for the application of analytic statements to experience and for the validity of formal deductive systems in logic. Lewis points out that not only analytic statements having zero intension but also contradictory statements having zero comprehension are meaningful in a way in which nonsense locutions are not. Thus, in speaking of the term “round square,” Lewis observes that the term is distinguished from nonsense-locution by de¤nitely implying the properties of roundness and squareness. It is only by reason of this intensional meaning that it has that one determines its inapplicability to anything consistently thinkable. Self-contradictory statements having zero comprehension tell us something very important about this world, for it is a piece of valuable information to be told that something is impossible, that no corresponding factual statements can ever be true. However, since analytically true propositions hold true for any possible or consistently thinkable world, they cannot distinguish the actual world from possible worlds or put any limitations upon
34
C. I. Lewis in Focus
the actual world. Analytically true propositions have implications, of course, but they imply only other analytic propositions that, in having universal comprehension, also apply to any possible world. As Lewis stresses, the analytic is “independent of any particular states of affairs or of what the world that exists is like in its details.”8 Synthetic propositions, on the other hand, have an intension and comprehension that lie between zero and universal. They can be true or false of some possible worlds, but not of all possible worlds. They imply some things but not all things. The implication or deductive signi¤cance of a proposition coincides with the intension of the proposition in the sense that whatever is deducible from the proposition is contained in the intension of it. The important extensional or denotational property of any proposition is simply its truth-value. Through his theory of meaning Lewis offers intensional criteria for separating and identifying the analytic and the synthetic, as well as the analytically true and the analytically false. Real De¤nitions and Sense Meanings All real de¤nitions specify intensional modes of meaning. What Lewis here means by a real de¤nition is neither symbolic convention nor dictionary de¤nition, but rather an explicative statement that relates a meaning to a meaning. For Lewis, there are two types of meanings related in such real de¤nitions—linguistic meaning and sense meaning. Linguistic meaning is the pattern formed by the relation of a term or proposition to other terms or propositions. Sense meaning is the criterion in mind that determines the application of the term or proposition; it is the criterion by which what is meant is to be recognized. Analytic truths, for Lewis, state relations between sense meanings and not merely between linguistic meanings. Lewis sets out to undercut the conventionalist position that analytic truth expresses nothing beyond what is or can be determined by the language system that embodies it. Such a position makes the analyticity of a statement relative to the conventions of linguistic usage. To assert that the a priori is coextensive with the analytic, but
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dependent on linguistic conventions, fails to justify the epistemic function of the a priori. It explains the analytic by robbing it of its relevance to sense experience. A priori judgments cannot be merely verbal. Lewis holds that there are conventional elements in the choice of symbols, in the assignment of the symbols to the meanings, and in the choice of the meanings to be considered. But the interrelation of the meanings is neither linguistic nor arbitrary. The analyticity of the linguistic meaning is determined by the ¤xed intensional relationships of sense meanings. To separate linguistic meaning from the sense meaning it conveys is to engage in a process of abstraction, for these two aspects of intensional meaning are supplementary rather than alternative and are separable in analysis rather than factually separated. Such abstraction serves a useful function for purposes of analysis, for it is helpful to consider meaning both in its linguistic and in its sense aspects. However, Lewis considers it disastrous for epistemological theory when one makes the distinction absolute and posits linguistic meaning as the focal point for epistemological investigations. Such a procedure, by omitting the intensional relations of sense meanings, leads to the conventionalism that Lewis ¤rmly rejects. Meaning cannot be fully captured by the relationship of words. The inability of linguistic meaning to adequately capture or express sense meanings produces the result that an examination of linguistic entities can give us no exact conception of meanings and their relationships and hence of the necessity in terms of which we understand analyticity. But though language is not the basis of analyticity for Lewis, he is not denying that language is indispensable to articulate thought. The interrelation of words provides a type of map for locating what is intended in terms of sense experience. The “usefulness of our linguistic patterns consists eventually in their guidance of our identi¤cations of the sense-recognizable so as to conform these to our intensions and render them consistent.”9 Language serves the positive function of providing precision for our sense meanings, but only by abstracting from a meaning too concrete to be captured by words. Language, by its selective and
36
C. I. Lewis in Focus
abstractive nature, makes precise that which “spills over” its verbal containers. Here one can see the supplementary roles of linguistic meaning and sense meaning. Linguistic meaning does allow for more precision, but it is not self-suf¤cient. It can only symbolize sense meaning, not capture it. It makes our concrete meanings not only communicable but also more precise, yet only at the price of abstracting from the concreteness. Linguistic meaning helps us to sharpen our meanings as criteria in mind and to note previously unnoted defects, yet sense meaning as a criterion in mind gives the concreteness of meaning to which the linguistic usage must conform in its role of providing communication and precision. Thus linguistic meaning and sense meaning, as two intensional modes of meaning, perform two complementary functions. And, ultimately, sense meaning is the basic, fundamental meaning that supplies the criteria of analyticity. If the search for these criteria is transferred to the linguistic level, then it will indeed be unsuccessful. At no time does Lewis take the “linguistic turn” in his philosophy. Pragmatic Kantianism Sense meaning, as the criterion in mind determining the applicability of a term or expression, requires imagery. But sense meanings cannot be merely imagery. Lewis is well aware of the often repeated nominalist objection to abstract general ideas. He holds that we do have general sense meanings, however, and ¤nds the solution to the problem in the answer given by Kant. A sense meaning is a rule or prescribed routine and an imagined result of it that will determine the applicability of the word. “We cannot imagine triangle in general, but we can easily imagine following the periphery of a ¤gure with the eye or a ¤nger and discovering it to be a closed ¤gure with three angles.” In this way Lewis proposes to solve the epistemological problem of the nature of the necessity of analytic truth and of how we know such necessity. We perform an experiment in imagination. We know that “[a]ll squares are rectangles because in envisaging the test which a thing must satisfy if ‘square’ is to apply to it, we observe that the test it must satisfy if ‘rectangle’ is to apply is already included.”10
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Both his theory of meaning and his notion of the test pattern or schema reveal that his theory of analyticity is basically one of inclusion or containment. Though he does set up de¤nite criteria for determining synonymy in terms of intensional meaning, the fundamental concept of his notion of analyticity is not synonymy but rather containment. This emphasis on rule rather than imagery helps clarify Lewis’s position that logical systems, also, are analytically true not by reference to the linguistic aspect of intensional meaning, but rather by reference to sense meaning. Logical rules and postulates are helpful in dealing with analytic truth because of the intensional relation of the sense meanings that the rules express. Logical rules have sense meaning in terms of the operations they prescribe, and it is because of this meaning in terms of prescribed routines that there is a logical system rather than an aggregation of symbols. Indeed, he holds that without meaning the marks cannot rightly be called even symbols. The difference, then, between the analytic propositions of abstract logical systems and the analytic statements whose constituent meanings refer to concrete empirical facts is a difference in degree, not in kind. Abstract logical systems do, for Lewis, have sensory reference, even if the sensory vehicles be only conventional notation. Furthermore, the intensional relationships in abstract logical systems are rooted in sense meanings that can be neither reduced to the sensory vehicles nor assimilated to linguistic meaning. These sense meanings, as the criteria in mind, determine the applicability of the concepts of logic to the data of experience, and as prescribed routines determine the containment of one meaning within another. Lewis’s theory of knowledge displays both a sympathy toward and a criticism of Kant’s epistemology. This critical appreciation of the insights of Kant is nowhere more in evidence in Lewis’s philosophy than in his rejection of Kant’s synthetic a priori, a rejection based directly on Lewis’s own use of the Kantian concept of schematism. Using his concept of sense meaning as a schema of application of a concept to experience, Lewis administers to Kant’s theory of the synthetic a priori a neat, simple, yet forceful
38
C. I. Lewis in Focus
blow. For Kant, the schematism imposes conditions not derivable from the conceptual de¤nition, and thus a judgment relating the schematism to the concept is synthetic a priori. Lewis argues that this view of synthetic a priori judgments is plausible only if one overlooks an equivocation in Kant’s argument, for the object referred to by the pure concept is a different object than the object to which the schematism is applicable. The pure concept, expressible by a de¤nition and not limited to objects of possible experience, extends at least problematically to noumenal objects, or things-in-themselves that need not be accessible to experience. The object, the essential criteria of which are given in the schematism, is a phenomenal object experienced in space and time. If we do not equivocate, but rather speak of the same phenomenal object in the subject and the predicate, then the judgment is analytic. The concept of the phenomenal object entails all the spatial and temporal conditions essential to that object’s being identi¤able in experience. The schema for the empirical application of the term must be part of the conceptual meaning of the phenomenal object. Lewis offers a more brief, yet more general, argument against the possibility of any synthetic a priori judgments. “Any character in the absence of which we should refuse to apply a term is of the essence. It is included in the signi¤cation of the term; and, any de¤nition which does not entail such an essential character represents a faulty analysis of the meaning in question.”11 Such faulty analyses are readily understandable, for the intrinsic intensional connections among terms are rooted in sense meanings, and our verbal expression of these meanings may well omit too much of the concrete ground of the connection. Thus, through failure of analysis, the appearance of synthetic a priori judgments can arise. But, if the analysis of a meaning is adequate, the schema is included in the statement of the real de¤nition. And that which is part of the de¤nition of a term is analytically contained within it. By turning to the frequently used example “Nothing that is red all over can be green all over,” we can see the way in which Lewis meets the attack of those who hold to the existence of synthetic a priori judgments. It is true that one must go behind the words to the qualities red and green in order to understand the propo-
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39
sition at all. And it is further true that the meaning of red does not include the meaning of green. Yet, an “experiment in imagination” is suf¤cient to reveal that the absence of green is essential for our willingness to apply the expression “red all over.” The sense meaning of “red all over,” as the criterion in mind or the conceptual pattern, implicitly contains the exclusion of “green,” for if green were present, we should refuse to apply the expression “red all over.” Nor would Lewis deny that the experience of red or the experience of green is necessary in order to understand the meaning of the terms. However, once the meaning of “red” and “green” is grasped, as well as the meaning of “nothing” and of “all over,” then experience is no longer required. Once the sense meanings of the individual terms are grasped, the truth of the relationship is known by an experiment in imagination, for its truth is simply truth to the original meanings embodied in the basic concepts. This truth is legislative for all future experience. We know that nothing that is red all over can be green because we will refuse to apply the expression “red all over” when green is present. And though the element of esthesis in imagined or actual sensory complexes is personal and possibly idiosyncratic, the sense meaning has, as its intersubjective factor, the rule-like procedures for relating the sensory complexes. It is in this way that common meanings get beyond such individual differences of sense content. Indeed, even a colorblind person is able to function correctly with color meanings, for the common content is the relational patterns or rule-like procedures. Lewis, then, has not merely stipulated out of existence the synthetic a priori by an arbitrary de¤nition of terms. Rather, he has attempted to give an epistemic justi¤cation of the thesis of the analyticity of all a priori truth. But his understanding of sense meaning has a further important complexity, and this complexity leads directly to the biological basis of meaning and the functioning of sense meaning as dispositional. Meaning as Dispositional Lewis’s focus on the behavioral basis of meaning does not reduce human behavior to the contents of science, nor does it lie in opposition to a view of human awareness in terms of a ¤eld of
40
C. I. Lewis in Focus
meanings, but rather, when properly understood, it reveals the purposive activity out of which awareness of meanings emerges. As Lewis stresses, “The fact that purposive behavior is a physical happening, argues nothing as to the adequacy of exclusively physical categories for description of it, since that feature which is in point is one which it does not share with physical doings in general.” 12 Human behavior is meaningful behavior, and it is in behavior that meaning is rooted. There is an inseparable relationship between the human biological organism bound to a natural environment and the perceiver who enters into the structuring of a world. From the context of organic activity and behavioral environment there emerge irreducible meanings that allow a world of things to come to conscious awareness. Such meanings are irreducible to the contents of science, to physical causal conditions, or to psychological acts and processes, yet they emerge from the biological, when the biological is properly understood, for the content of human perception is inseparable from the structure of human behavior within its natural setting. Purposive biological activity is the “lived through” biological activity of the human organism and, as such, is capable of phenomenological description. The phenomenological signi¤cance of habit, dispositions, or tendencies is that they are immediately experienced and pervade the very tone and structure of immediately grasped content. Although Lewis usually speaks of sense meaning as a precise, explicit schema, yet sense meaning is, for Lewis, intensional or conceptual meaning, and this he frequently identi¤es as a disposition or habit. He clari¤es this dual aspect of sense meaning when he observes that “[a] sense meaning when precise and explicit is a schema.”13 Furthermore, though he speaks of sense meanings as being in mind, “the important character connoted by ‘in mind’ here is ‘entertained in advance of instances of application which are pertinent’ . . . One may consider such criteria of application, as meanings entertained in advance, in terms of incipient behavior or behavior attitudes if one choose.”14 The sense meaning, as the disposition or habit, is the source of the generation of explicit schemata, each of which makes precise for conscious awareness some aspect of the concrete sense meaning.
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For Lewis, then, the series of possible schemata for any intended item is “¤xed” prior to the imposition of a linguistic scheme, not by any eternal ontological order, but rather by the concrete, biologically based, disposition or habit as the rule of generation of explicit schemata. Meanings thus emerge from organism environment interactions as precise schematic structures uni¤ed by habit as a rule of organization and as a rule of generation of speci¤c schemata. To be conscious of a meaning, to inspect a meaning, is to be conscious of or to inspect speci¤c schemata. We are never able directly to examine a disposition, but rather we examine particular schemata generated by it. Dispositions cannot be said to generate explicit schemata in the sense of providing a copy—even a partial one. The generation cannot be understood as analogous to the Platonic model of an original generating a copy, for if the relation of the disposition to that which it generates is that of an original to a particularized copy, then there is transferred to the conceptual level precisely the denotative approach to analyticity that Lewis emphatically rejects. We are placed once again in the impossible predicament of having to infer intensional necessity from denoted individual instances—in this case, individual copies. A schema is not a particular copy of a general rule. It is not a copy; nor is anything in the schema particular. Lewis emphatically rejects as epistemologically untenable the nominalist conception that individuals are the ¤rst knowables and that individuals are primitively determinable by ostensive reference. It is only by reference to intensional meaning as criterion in mind by which one applies or refuses to apply a term that denotation is possible, for we must ¤rst have criteria for determining what experiences are relevant. Lewis’s position can perhaps best be clari¤ed by taking the term “image” as “aspect.” For example, one may say, quite correctly, that a landscape presents a majestic image or aspect. In this sense, then, the production of an image is the production of an aspect. And while the speci¤c empirical content of experience is best understood as one particular among many, the image of the schema as criterion of recognition is best understood as the one that applies to the many. The importance of the content of the image of
42
C. I. Lewis in Focus
the schema lies in the way in which it comes into being. Such an image represents as aspect of the dispositional ordering by which it is regulated. The disposition or ground of meaning cannot, it is true, be inspected “an sich,” but it is inspectable in any aspect. Explicit aspects can be continually generated for inspection, though the rule of generation will never be exhausted by the schemata and hence will never be completely inspected. A disposition as an implicit criterion is concrete, and any attempt to make it clear and explicit requires an abstraction from this concreteness. Any explicit criterion generated by the concrete ground of meaning gains clarity and explicitness at the expense of total concreteness. In keeping with this, Lewis holds that a meaning is determinate beyond what any number of observed occasions can assure with theoretical certainty. What follows from this position is that though a meaning is never fully inspected, it is inspectable in any aspect. And what follows from this is that some propositions may be necessary that we do not recognize to be so; it does not mean that those we do recognize to be necessary cannot be. If an analytic statement is true, it is necessarily true, though it need not be exhaustive. Lewis is not here claiming that we can know with theoretical certitude that an asserted relation of sense meanings is correct. Rather, if the asserted relation is correct, then what is asserted is a necessary truth. The necessity involved in the analytic is there in sense meanings, and if we do correctly state a relation of sense meanings, then we are stating a necessary truth, necessary because we are asserting the implication of that which has been ¤xed in behavior—though we have no theoretical certainty that we have correctly stated the relationship. Theoretical certitude thus has a fallibilistic dimension. Though Lewis’s discussion of analyticity and sense meaning can sound quite abstract, then, the discussion ultimately gets down to the very behavioral roots of meaning and analyticity. Lewis summarizes the entire process in behavioral terms when he states that how the meaning implicit in behavior should become explicit and what would be recognized as essential when the attitude ¤nally becomes self-conscious “is already implicit in the attitude
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43
itself. . . . The classifying attitude or mode of behavior which the mind brings to the given experience and which represents its meaning, dictates the explicit concept and implicitly possesses it already.”15 Through the functioning of sense meaning as dispositional, Lewis can offer a solution to the problem of containment, showing the way in which one can discover that some quality or character not explicit in a de¤nition is nevertheless essential to the meaning in question. Similarly, this functioning of sense meaning makes meaningful the way in which a meaning of which one is not conscious may be implicit in that meaning of which one is conscious. Lewis uses an abstract model of a mathematical rule generating a number series to illustrate the concrete functioning of the relation of habit or purposive activity16 to the generation of schemata or sense meanings as aspects of objects or objective qualities. Just as a mathematical rule may generate an unlimited series of numbers, so a disposition as a rule of organization contains within itself an unlimited number of possibilities for the generation of particular acts of response in relation to particular types of sensory content. And, just as with the number series one may elicit any particular number or any particular cut, but cannot exhaust via enumeration all possibilities, so one can elicit any particular set of sensory-action relations desired, but cannot exhaust via enumeration all possibilities. Furthermore, in none of these cases is the inability to exhaust via enumeration all possibilities a contingent fact, but rather it is intrinsic to the nature of the generating rule. Moreover, as Lewis states, such an absence of boundedness gives rise to our “sense of the experientially possible but not experientially now actual.”17 Embodied in the actuality of our meaning structures as habits of response, then, is a sense of a reality that transcends actual occasions of experience. A second and closely related feature of the model for understanding habit is that the rule for the generation of a series enters into the structure of that which is generated. The structure of that which is generated re®ects the character of the rule that generates. In understanding the relational structure of that which is generated, we understand to that extent the rule that generates
44
C. I. Lewis in Focus
it. The structure of behavior as anticipatory, then, both requires and makes possible the creatively regulative features of meaning as habit. Such anticipatory behavior also requires the meaningfulness of possible but unactualized schemata or plans of action or, in other terms, the meaningfulness of contrary-to-fact conditionals, of meaningful consequences of possible ways of acting that are not actualized. Lewis’s epistemology cannot operate within the structure of material implication and its paradoxes. The Importance of Temporality The above illustration houses two temporal features: the presence within experience of inexhaustible possibilities and the creatively regulative features of habit as anticipatory. To be a purposive, interpretive agent is to be temporal. Anticipation is ingredient in the fundamental nature of all understanding, and even the most primordial grasp is not a presuppositionless apprehending of something that reveals itself in its pristine purity, for the meaning of things is legislated by our purposive activity, our creative regulatory habit of response. Our regulative activities, as prescriptive for the structural relationships within experience, are at once rules for the construction of the conditions within which things of various types can emerge within experience. They consist of the dynamically organized relational generalities that set the conditions of recognition for what will count as the emergence within experience of instances of particular types of things. Such orderings are resolutions to action embodied in the “living meaning” of the creative, regulative features of human behavior. The temporal stretch of human experience as creative, regulative, and anticipatory reaches out to the future to let it emerge within the contours of the possibilities contained in the temporally rooted structure of meaning. For Lewis, knowing emerges at a pre-re®ective level. There is a deepening and extending of interpretive activity that requires a rede¤nition of understanding so that it now encompasses the whole mode of existing of the human. Understanding and imagination are transformed and uni¤ed in the biologically based, concrete functioning of the creativity of habits or dispositions. He
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abandons theories according to which we experience brute sense data or qualities instead of ontologically thick things that are encountered ¤rst through purposive activity. This view of purposive behavioral activity requires an understanding of time that rejects the traditional concept of the “now point.” The minimal experience always involves a durational ®ow, for it is ¤lled with the rudimentary pulsations of the temporal structure of habit as anticipatory. Such a durational ®ow is essential for Lewis’s understanding of experience as experimental, for it involves an anticipation of a next experience to come, something for which we are waiting, an expectation set in motion by the temporal stretch of human activity. The temporally grounded structure of meaning as habit, then, is the source of the functionally organized concrete structural unity of perceived things as more than a collection of atomic appearances, and is the source of our sense of a reality whose possibilities of being experienced transcend all actual experience. Pragmatic Experimentalism and the Creation of a Common World Thus far, the examination of Lewis’s notion of the a priori has centered on the ¤rst type of question arising from his logical interests—that is, the nature of the a priori as it relates to an intensional theory of meaning, a theory in which analyticity is grounded in a ¤xed, intensional relationship of meanings. There is a second aspect to be examined, however, and that is the experimental or functional element that runs through his concept of the a priori, a view that gained prominence in Lewis’s thought through his awareness of the pragmatic element that guides both the choice of logical systems and the direction of logical thought within any system. This aspect of Lewis’s conception of a priori interpretive structures is best expressed in his assertion that the difference between a priori interpretive structures and empirical generalizations is one “determined by pragmatic considerations of the particular interests our knowledge is to serve.”18 Lewis holds that the entire process of creating the common
46
C. I. Lewis in Focus
world that is our social achievement is based on a cumulative process involving a pragmatic interplay between categories and concepts on the one hand and experience on the other. We are creatures fundamentally alike, having certain very fundamental tendencies to action, growing out of a basic similarity of needs and physical structure. Such a cumulative process between the logical and the genetic is in operation with the very emergence of mind, for “The earliest cognitions of a mind like ours are continuous with those modes of animal behavior which foreshadow explicit knowledge.”19 Lewis shows not only that our choice of an a priori conceptual scheme is conditioned by experience in that it is based on pragmatic considerations, but also that the logic which the conceptual schemes apply and by which they are interrelated is itself based on pragmatic considerations and hence is, in the last analysis, conditioned by experience. Yet Lewis holds that “some logic is true and some logical principles necessary.”20 The status of logic as true cannot be determined by its being self-af¤rming or selfcritical. As Lewis realized through his work in logic, “bad” logic or “false” logic or “pseudo-logic” may also be tautological and selfconsistent. When Lewis notes that “some logic is true,”21 he is thinking not of formal truth but rather of “extra logical” truth; he is speaking of the pragmatic selection of that logical system which will prove the most useful. He also holds, however, that “some logical principles are necessary,” yet “the stamp of Mind’s creation . . . is not inevitability but exactly its opposite, the absence of compulsion and the presence of at least conceivable alternatives.” 22 Some principles of formal logical systems are “necessary,” only in the sense that if we are to express the structure of valid ordinary inference, then certain formal principles are required to accomplish this work. The problem can be pushed back to an even more fundamental level. Logic, for Lewis, represents the principles of consistent thinking. Analytic statements represent implications of our accepted de¤nitions in accordance with consistent thinking. And, if the law of non-contradiction is the ultimate ground of the validity of logical principles themselves, then what is its own ground
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of validity? Logic as the cannon of deductive inference, plus the logical laws such as that of excluded middle, and the very necessity of consistency itself lie, ultimately, in pragmatic considerations. Lewis’s pragmatism runs quite deep. Humans, for Lewis, are essentially acting beings. Meanings that mind entertains, the logic that explicates such meanings, and mind itself emerge from behavioral responses to the environment in which we ¤nd ourselves. Our ways of behaving toward the world around us that are made explicit in our accepted logic are those ways of behaving that have lasted because they work. The ¤nal ground of the validity of the principle of consistency as well as the validity of ordinary inference is ¤rmly rooted in a pragmatic, evolutionary-based direction toward survival. The principle of consistency, and that ordinary inference which explicates our meanings in accordance with the principle of consistency, are rooted in a “pragmatic imperative.”23 The basis of the imperative lies in the fact that if it is rejected, then thought and action themselves become stulti¤ed. The basis of this “pragmatic imperative” to be consistent is held by Lewis to be a “datum of human nature.” However, this does not reduce to the “merely psychological,” for, as noted by Lewis, we do act and think inconsistently. Psychologically, it may even be easier and more natural to think inconsistently. Pragmatically, it is imperative that we overcome this tendency. “A decision without intent to adhere to it would not be a genuine decision. But one who should adopt the decision ‘Disregard consistency, ‘ would be deciding to disregard his decision as soon as made. And, adherence to that decision would require that it be promptly disregarded.”24 The principle of consistency, then, is a pragmatic imperative that must be adhered to if thought and action themselves are not to be stulti¤ed. Thus, those principal tools by which meanings are logically related are themselves rooted neither in metaphysical structure, nor in existential structure, nor in necessary structures of mind, nor in psychological facts, but rather in behavioral responses. Their origin is pragmatic or functional. Lewis frequently makes use of the term “category,” but categories differ not at all from concepts in general except in their
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degree of comprehensiveness and their more fundamental character. Thus, one might speak of the concept of chair, but the category of physical object. Our common categories are built up in the light of a basic similarity of primitive experience. In light of common categories we build our common concepts; and, in the light of common concepts, similar experience will occur, for “Most . . . identi¤cations of meaning will, of course, be based on the previous identi¤cation of other and related meanings.”25 The a priori at all levels rests upon the ability of the mind to formulate concepts by real de¤nition and to reject from classi¤cation and interpretation under these concepts any datum that does not conform to the criteria that their de¤nitions have established. Thus, we know with certitude that “A mouse which disappears where no hole is, is no real mouse; a landscape which recedes as we approach is but illusion.”26 On each level of this cumulative process, intensional, a priori concepts must precede the possibility of any denotation or empirical truth revealed through experience. Yet pragmatic considerations of adequately dealing with what is given in experience will determine the development of new a priori concepts on a higher level in the cumulative process. And what is an a priori criterion of reality in a particular time frame and context may be just an empirical law in different circumstances. It is here that the denotation of analytic propositions becomes important. Though we may choose to mean anything we desire, and though the truth of a relation of meanings cannot be affected by any empirical fact, yet pragmatic considerations compel us to intend meanings that have empirical exempli¤cations. If the empirical classi¤cation that is implicit in our a priori or analytic proposition has no exempli¤cation in experience, then this proposition does not reveal a material truth, and hence is usually not pragmatically justi¤ed. Our conceptual schemes do not limit or determine the given, but they determine our attention to the given, as well as the attitude we take toward that to which we do attend. That is a priori, holds Lewis, which we choose to “maintain in the face of all experience, come what will.”27 The meanings em-
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bodied in our conceptual schemes are built up in the light of past experience. They are drawn from the empirical situation, although the relation between the meanings is statable apart from any particular instance of fact. The origin of our a priori conceptual structures, then is empirical, pragmatic, functional. A well-worn example, which will serve the present purpose, is the assertion that “all swans are white.” This statement may be accepted as an empirical generalization, susceptible to veri¤cation or refutation by future experience. Or it may be taken as an analytic or a priori proposition not susceptible to refutation at all. The difference between the two lies in the attitude that one takes with respect to the principle. The objective properties essential to the applicability of a term are those that we have chosen to insert in our criterion. They are “essential” because and in the sense that we have decided to use them, henceforth, as part of our criterion. Thus, if we are determined to maintain the above principle, come what may, then the signi¤cation of the character of whiteness is referred to by the criterion in mind by which we apply or refuse to apply the term “swan.” If the principle is allowed to be overturned by experience, then the character of whiteness is not essential to the application of the term. In this latter case, the term does not signify whiteness, but rather whiteness has been factually associated with the application of the term, though it need not be. In the case of the empirical generalization the relation between the subject term and the predicate term is extrinsic; the connection is revealed or not according to experience. In the case of the analytic proposition, the relationship between the subject term and the predicate term is intrinsic, and a correct explication of the meanings involved, which reveals this intrinsic relationship, is “eternally true.” Meanings, then, can be called “Platonic ideas”28 in the sense that “the implications of them are eternal and the empirical truth about anything given, expressed in terms of them, is likewise through all time unalterable.”29 These “eternally true” logical relationships of meanings can be neither cemented in metaphysics nor reduced to what the majority do, as a matter of psychological fact, draw out of the original meanings. Lewis
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C. I. Lewis in Focus
objects to new realism in part because it hypostatizes conceptual realities, while he objects to nominalism in part because it reduces meaning to psychology. Thus, in accepting an a priori truth that all swans are white, we can know with certitude that, if we ¤nd a swan, then it will be white. Though for pragmatic reasons we must create or ¤xate meanings with workable applications in the ongoing course of experience, a meaning itself is a deductive system applying to a hypothetical state of affairs, the implications of which we can know about since we create it. The a priori then, has a hypothetical or if-then certitude that is purely conceptual, an intensional if-then relationship as opposed to an empirical one. The distinction between the analytic and synthetic often goes unnoticed because “[t]he a priori proposition and the empirical generalization are usually indistinguishable by their form. Both are universal in intent, and are normally expressed by an ‘all’ proposition or by one in which the ‘all’ though unexpressed is obviously understood.”30 The difference between these two is that between the intensional and extensional “all.” The ¤rst expresses in the predicate something logically contained in the subject; the subject concept implies the predicate concept. The second states a factual connection of two classes of objects that are not related intensionally. Here it must be noted that though the term “swan” is applied in both cases, the meanings attached to the term differ. Though the denotation of the term in each case may in fact be the same—for example, when only white swans exist though other colors will be allowed if they occur—the signi¤cation and hence also the comprehension and the intension of the term “swan” in the two cases are different. This, then, is a case of two logically distinct meanings. Though the same term is used, meanings evolve only in a genetic sense. Logically, separate and distinct meanings become attached to the same term. Thus, though Lewis does speak of “the same” proposition serving now in one capacity, now in the other, what is involved is not the same proposition but rather two different propositions having the same sentential expression. What is determined by our attitudes of response is not the function of one proposition, but
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rather the choice between two propositions, the choice as to whether the character of whiteness is to be included in or excluded from the signi¤cation of the term “swan.” Lewis further stresses that often we cannot distinguish in advance what are the analytic equivalences, for our meanings implicit in action have not yet been made explicit. For example, in applying the term “swan,” we may be completely unaware as to whether this character of whiteness is included in the signi¤cation of the term or not. Since a meaning may be implicitly present in behavior without the explicit recognition of what this behavior implies, the inclusion of the character of whiteness may remain completely undetermined until an instance of a black bird resembling a swan in all other characteristics should arise. The inclusion or rejection of the character of whiteness as a signi¤cation of swan will be implicit in our acceptance or rejection of the black bird as a swan. This inclusion or rejection implicit in our behavior will be based upon pragmatic considerations learned in the light of past experience. And, as our past experience has revealed that color is a very cumbersome mode of classi¤cation for ordering experience within the larger classi¤cation of “bird,” it is to be expected that our attitude will reveal that whiteness is not included in our implicit criterion in mind. As Lewis notes, “We may doubt whether any meaning would ever become conscious if it were not for the practical dif¤culties which arise when meanings are not thus explicit—the dif¤culties of hesitant or inconsistent behavior in border-line cases.”31 The presence or absence of an intrinsic relationship will be found in attitudes of response as manifested in particular acts of response, not necessarily in any conscious awareness of what a meaning includes or excludes. Belief in a priori synthetic propositions arises because we are not aware of an implicitly accepted intrinsic relationship between meanings and thus assert as synthetic a relationship that is, in fact, analytic. Lewis at times goes even farther than the functionalist himself, holding that we often cannot tell whether an abandoned principle is to be classi¤ed as a priori and eternally true but now useless or as a false empirical generalization, for “It would indeed be inap-
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propriate to characterize as a priori a law which we are prepared to alter in the light of further experience even though in an isolated case we should discard as non-veridical any experience which failed to conform.”32 Lewis’s position is perhaps best summarized in his statement that classi¤cations and their criteria “are determined pragmatically, not metaphysically . . . and there can be nothing in the nature of an object which determines the fundamentum divisionis by reference to which it shall be classi¤ed. Nevertheless, the mode of classi¤cation being given, what determines whether any particular thing belongs to a speci¤ed class or not, is the real nature of it; the properties it has and those which it lacks.”33 In short, analytic truth is truth about the relations between the meanings we set up, while the meanings are about empirical facts. What is determined by pragmatic considerations and by behavioral attitudes is whether or not a speci¤c objective character is to be included in the signi¤cation of a term. But, once that character is included, the relationship of the signi¤cation of the character to the criterion of application of the term is eternally true and analytic, though it may prove to be pragmatically useless in organizing and interpreting empirical facts. In speaking of scienti¤c knowledge, Lewis asserts that there comes a stage when it is dif¤cult to say whether concepts are devised and laws discovered to ¤t phenomenal facts or whether the conceptual system itself rules and the facts are reconceived in conformity to it. He uses the example of the Copernican Revolution. Celestial motions can be described by the Ptolemaic system, in which the earth is taken as motionless and the sun and other stars are understood as moving. This system was replaced by the Copernican system of moving earth and ¤xed stars. Yet, he continues, we now hold that all motion is relative. The issue as to what moves and what does not in the heavens cannot be settled by experience or facts. All the observational data of one system can be theoretically made to ¤t the other. The choice depends on the issue as to which system “describes the facts simply and conveniently.” In the same way, he holds that the choice between Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity is about
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more than facts, which can be interpreted to ¤t either one, but rather in the last analysis the fundamental issues are pragmatic ones such as “intellectual simplicity, economy, and comprehensiveness of principle.”34 These kinds of radical shifts in conceptual sets are captured in Kuhn’s examination of the structure of scienti¤c revolutions. Lewis’s philosophy in fact provides a philosophical grounding for such shifts that avoids both the objectivism to which Kuhn was objecting and the charges of relativism that were frequently hurled at Kuhn’s position. Indeed, Kuhn himself recognized the dilemma of rejecting long-held foundationalist interpretations of scienti¤c method while having no adequate philosophical alternative to replace them.35 Lewis draws from scienti¤c examples because in science categories and concepts change more quickly and obviously than in everyday experience, in which they more often evolve slowly over time. This is well illustrated in his use of Einstein’s position as an example of the fundamental role of the a priori as de¤nitive in structuring experience. As he elaborates in his example, if lightning strikes the railroad track at two places, which we will call points A and B, how do we know whether these events are simultaneous? It is suggested that the connecting line AB should be measured and an observer with two mirrors properly inclined be situated midway along the line. If the person observes two ®ashes at the same time, then they are simultaneous. This de¤nition of simultaneity would be right, however, only if it were known that the light travels the length A–M with the same velocity as along the length B–M. But an examination of this supposition would be possible only if we already had the means of measuring time. That the speed of light is constant is in fact not a supposition or hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation made to arrive at a de¤nition of simultaneity, and thus “we arrive at a de¤nition of ‘time’ in physics.”36 As this example illustrates, we cannot ask questions to be answered by discoverable laws unless we ¤rst have de¤nitive criteria in place by a priori stipulation. “The fundamental laws of any science—or
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those treated as fundamental—are a priori because they formulate just such de¤nitive concepts or categorical tests by which alone investigation becomes possible.”37 Lewis’s conceptual certitude has been seen to be intricately interwoven with pragmatic experimentalism and certain dimensions of conceptual fallibilism. Our explications of meanings, though yielding necessary truths if correctly made, are always subject to error, thus providing only fallible knowledge about necessary truths. The very claim that a relationship between meanings is in fact analytic or synthetic is itself always fallible; we may easily, through failure of analysis, take as synthetic a relation that is in fact analytic. And when experience turns out unexpectedly, requiring a change in our set of beliefs, there is no certainty as to whether experience has overturned an empirical generalization only, or has given rise, on pragmatic grounds, to a new meaning. We can never be certain if, and when, a highly con¤rmed empirical generalization about an object becomes incorporated into the very meaning of the object, related necessarily to the dispositional rule that now has the power to generate it. The cumulative effects of experience can lead to new empirical generalizations about the same meaningful contents of experience, or they can lead to the perception of different contents by the replacement of the meanings in terms of which contents of a particular type can emerge within experience. Further, we do not, at any level of experience, test beliefs in isolation, but rather as parts of a whole set of claims. Something similar to auxiliary hypotheses in science is operative in our common sense awareness of the world around us. No part of a relevant corpus of knowledge is immune from change in the face of repeated discon¤rming instances, and any part of a belief structure can be held in the face of discon¤rming evidence by changing other parts of the structure. Experience reveals that an improvement is necessary, but clearly not which improvement is needed. Whether we change empirical generalizations in the face of discon¤rming evidence or restructure a set of meanings that do not adequately capture experience is not itself dictated by the evidence but is rather a pragmatic decision operative within the
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context of that encompassing intentional unity of humans and nature. And, indeed, experience usually proceeds without any awareness as to whether or not we have modi¤ed an empirical generalization by counter instances or have replaced a meaning to avoid having to throw out too much of experience as not real contents of a particular type, for such pragmatic decisions are implicit in modes of response. At this point it may be asked whether, after such a long excursion, the only conclusion to be reached is that, after all, the supposed distinction between analytic meaning containments and empirical generalizations is nebulous at best, totally useless at worst. The answer here is a decided “no.” This sharp theoretical difference, which is always operative within the structure of knowledge, though always elusive for our recognition because of its fallibilistic, holistic contextualistic features, is inextricably woven into the complex fabric of the uniquely pragmatic understanding of a noetic creativity that is rooted in purposive biological activity and constitutive of the nature of experience as experimental. Lewis is concerned to rectify the kinds of issues raised by James’s characterizations of truth in terms of “truer” and “falser,” “new truth” and “old truth,” and “becoming true.” He ¤nds that “the paradoxes and many of the dif¤culties of the pragmatic position center on the notion that truth can change.”38 Any principles that were ever true must remain true within the context of the old concepts. In each of the two sets of systems illustrated above, “the one would be better truth, the other worse, from the point of view of workability.”39 Rejected systems are not empirically true, but they remain consistent logical systems, and any empirical claims that were true relative to that framework remain true relative to that framework. Past pragmatists, holds Lewis, are vulnerable to a charge of capriciousness, in which “they seem to put all truth at once at the mercy of experience and within the power of human decision.”40 Our conceptual schemes prescribe the character of reality, and any conceptual scheme has an eternal truth that experience cannot touch, though experience may indicate that it should be re-
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placed by one that is more useful. Furthermore, the truth of any empirical generalization is determined by the relationship of a conceptual scheme to given experience. Empirical truth does not literally change, nor are conceptual contexts of interpretation proven false. Rather, when the pragmatic factor in experience is properly located, it is seen that contexts within which any empirical truth can be determined are replaced. Apart from some context of interpretive structures that prescribe types of realities, the search for empirical truth is literally senseless, for all empirical truth is truth relative to a context. The sense in which truth is “made by the mind” and is “relative to human interest and purpose” is the sense in which we chose the interpretive structures by which we prescribe the outlines of realities of particular types and in so doing set the context for the discovery of empirical truth. However, the analytic or a priori truth contained in the interrelationships of the interpretive structures is subject neither to the contingencies of experience nor to the whims of convention; rather, it is eternally true. Such truth is not material truth but formal truth or validity. Lewis holds that this complex fabric prevents his pragmatism, and by extension any pragmatism within which it is operative, “from lapsing into a cheerful form of skepticism.”41 And this complex fabric does in fact illusively pervade the collective corpus of the writings of the classical pragmatists, as the following section suggests. The Pragmatic A Priori: Overview and Signi¤cance We have seen that two distinct strands run through Lewis’s conception of the a priori, the “absolutist” and the “functional,” each of which answers questions emerging from his logical studies. When Lewis’s concept of the a priori is approached in terms of its genesis, the emphasis is on functionalism. When it is approached in terms of its analytic nature, the emphasis is on absolutism. Both of these strands unite to form the strength of his pragmatic a priori. The claims implicit in such conceptual interrelationships cannot be reduced to the contents of experience or to empirical general-
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izations about relationships within experience, for they are legislative for what types of objects or facts can conceivably emerge within experience to provide the basis for empirical generalizations about facts and objects. Further, they are legislative for the very possibility of the emergence of anything within experience. And, though they are a priori legislative for future experience and contain analytic, intensionally grounded relationships, yet their justi¤cation is ultimately pragmatic or functional; if the contours of realities of various types that they delimit do not adequately work in capturing the indeterminate richness of experience, then they will be replaced by logically distinct and new meanings. This a priori element in experience, which regulates in advance the possibility of the emergence within experience of facts and objects, is rooted in the concreteness of rudimentary purposive human behavior, and it arises from, is made possible by, and is replaceable or alterable within, the ¤nite temporal structure of such behavior. Further, while it emerges through a behaviorally operative creative synthesis, it then contains within its structure the conditions for its applicability in the ongoing course of experience. This containment houses within its very structure a reference to the sensible, and thus the features of its relational structure can be apprehended within sensible experience. These various characteristics of the a priori in an important sense undercut some of the contemporary debates about the nature of analytic truths as articulated in explicit claims. More signi¤cantly, they change as well the very nature of the analytic-synthetic debate. Perhaps the uniqueness of this point of view to some extent accounts for the general perception that this focus on an a priori element in knowledge and abstract logical systems distances Lewis from the other pragmatists, as well as for a general failure to recognize the signi¤cance of the contribution Lewis’s pragmatic a priori can offer to the pragmatic tradition. Yet the detailed development of a pragmatic a priori and an analytic-synthetic distinction as formulated by Lewis helps ¤ll in or round out the pragmatic position in a much needed way by serving to highlight what is operative, in brief, underdeveloped, and underutilized
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statements, the signi¤cance of which is generally ignored, in the writings of the other classical pragmatists. Moreover, it offers a unique opportunity for the American philosophical tradition to engage in fruitful dialogue with both the continental and analytic traditions concerning one of the important issues in philosophy. These directions are sketched in what follows. Lewis’s focus on the details of abstract logical systems and a priori certitude seems at ¤rst glance to be far removed from the interests of Dewey. Dewey’s interest in logic can be broadly characterized as an interest in the logic of experience and in the naturalistic, functional origins of logic. However, as has been seen, though Lewis begins with problems within abstract logic, in tracing the pragmatic element in logic to its very roots he “descends” to the point from which Dewey begins his own logical “ascent” to the understanding of abstract symbolic systems. It is precisely the experiential roots of the foundations of logic that Lewis is attempting to articulate and explicate by beginning with abstract logical systems and the problems they engender, and from there working down to the conditions of their possibility in the interactions of anticipatory human activity within a thick natural universe that reveals itself within the contours of such activity. And Dewey, like Lewis, holds that inquiry, in its emergence in the context of basic human responses to situations, may generate problems in its own development, and thus logic becomes autonomous in solving the problems necessary for its own advancements.42 For Dewey, as for Lewis, logic permits a great freedom in laying down postulates, a freedom subject only to the condition that they be rigorously fruitful of implied consequences.43 Though Dewey’s brief comments concerning analyticity and the a priori are taken to be merely functional and given little signi¤cance, he makes distinctions that, though brief and underdeveloped, clearly point toward that which Lewis lays out in his position. In a way similar to Lewis’s, Dewey makes a distinction between the intensional “all” of meaning relationships, which implies a necessary relation, and the extensional “all” of empirical claims, which implies a high degree of probability at best.44 Dewey also makes a sharp and parallel distinction between if-
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then claims, which he agrees are systematically ambiguous in their meaning, sometimes referring to the existential and sometimes to the ideational.45 He holds that existential propositions refer directly to actual conditions as determined by experimental observation, while ideational or conceptual propositions consist of interrelated meanings that are non-existential in content in direct reference, but are applicable to existence through the operations they represent as possibilities.46 Thus, if-then claims refer sometimes to existential or empirical circumstances, and sometimes to logical relations among meanings. Moreover, for Dewey material meanings or sense meanings as schematic rules of operation and observation underlie and make possible our empirical knowledge. As he indicates the key role of an a priori regulative feature that is distinctively analytic, “All propositions of existential import involve delimiting analytic operations of observation. . . . The operations of observation executed are controlled by conceptions which de¤ne the conditions to be satis¤ed . . . in descriptive determination of kinds.”47 The rule-like or regulative aspect of the a priori, as well as its emergence within the ongoing course of experience, is encapsulated in Dewey’s claim that “a postulate as a rule of action is thus neither arbitrary nor externally a priori. It is not the former because it issues from the relation of means to the end to be reached. It is not the latter, because it is not imposed upon inquiry from without, but is acknowledgment of that to which the undertaking of inquiry commits us.”48 Nonetheless, such a postulate or rule of action “is empirically and temporally a priori in the same sense in which the law of contracts is a rule regulating in advance the making of certain kinds of business engagements. While it is derived from what is involved in inquiries that have been successful in the past, it imposes a condition to be satis¤ed in future inquiries.’”49 Such an a priori element within experience, which Dewey ¤nds exempli¤ed in the postulational aspect of logic as the theory of inquiry, is not rooted in this abstract level, but again re®ects the pragmatic insight that the level of re®ective inquiry can provide a clear model for understanding the structures of lived experience. As Dewey carefully observes, insofar as thought does
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exercise this a priori regulative aspect, “it is because thought is itself still a vital function.”50 Thus for Dewey as for Lewis, the a priori element in knowledge that regulates in advance the possibility of the emergence within experience of certain kinds of facts or objects is rooted in human behavior as partially constitutive of the environment in which it operates. Further, for Dewey as for Lewis the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori corresponds with the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, and both distinctions are rooted in the absoluteness of the containment of action-oriented schematic possibilities within the structure of meaning. What Lewis offers is a full epistemic account and justi¤cation of the nature, function, and critical role of this pragmatic a priori dimension within knowledge which they hold in common but of which Dewey’s writings give only hints. Peirce’s own brief, fragmented thoughts related to these issues point toward a position that not only welcomes but calls out for the developed insights Lewis’s pragmatic a priori has to offer. As Peirce puzzled over the problem of containment: “Consider a state of mind which is a conception. It is a conception by virtue of having a meaning, a logical comprehension; and if it is applicable to any object, it is because that object has the characters contained in the comprehension of this conception. Now the logical comprehension of a thought is usually said to consist of the thoughts contained in it but thoughts are events.”51 How, he asks, can this concept of containment be made reasonable “when thoughts are always distinct events?” He ¤nds the answer to the puzzle in the distinction between the concrete disposition or habit as the rule of organization or “living ultimate logical interpretant” and the awareness of the logical interpretants or schematic aspects of that which is organized by the rule. As he expresses the point, the living meaning “virtually contains”52 these aspects, and thus the resultant structure or logical interpretant or “general idea” “is the mark of the habit.”53 The “particular kind of judgment”54 that Peirce holds is formed from this relationship is an analytic claim that expresses a deductive relation of containment between generative rule and schematic product, for, “the conclusion is com-
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pelled to be true by the conditions of the construction.”55 Indeed, Peirce indicates that the mathematical model of containment via diagrammatic or schematic reasoning represents “the modes in which concepts are, or should be, represented as compounded in de¤nitions.” 56 This discovery requires for Peirce, as for Lewis, “a real effective force behind consciousness,” or, in other terms, a living habit.57 Moreover, hints of much of the temporal dynamics operative in the genesis of the pragmatic a priori can be found in Peirce’s very brief comments concerning his observation that a self-contradictory proposition is not meaningless; it means too much.58 It “means” something in the predicate, not allowed by the subject as the dispositional rule of generation. However, through a change of meaning, though not necessarily of words, “what is inconceivable today may become conceivable tomorrow.”59 Yet Peirce, like Lewis, speaks of meanings as analogous to Platonic ideas. Concepts are analogous to Platonic forms for both, not in the sense of being metaphysical essences, but in the sense of being ¤xed, eternal, unchanging (though replaceable) and, indeed, “toward the side of math.” The ambiguities of James’s understanding of the a priori as found in The Principles of Psychology falls into focus within the context of the above discussion. James holds that there is a coerciveness among necessary and eternal relations that the mind ¤nds between certain of its ideal conceptions, and that these relations among ideal conceptions form a determinate system independent of the order of frequency in which experience may have associated the conception’s originals in time and space.60 As far as some of nature’s realities ¤t this network, “we can make a priori propositions concerning natural fact.”61 Yet he also indicates that our regulative principles are themselves conditioned by the experiences that they serve to organize.62 Again, at times he holds that there is a sharp distinction between the way in which we justify the a priori truths of logic and mathematics on the one hand and the a posteriori truths of physics on the other.63 Yet there are places where James comes close to holding that physical theories and theories of mathematics are alike not on1y in being “sponta-
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neous variations,” but a1so in being “rational propositions.”64 What seems implicit here is not an ambiguous vacillation, but a development toward a view that physical truths contain an a priori element, though for physical truths, such an a priori element both arises within the matrix of experience and must be found workable within the context of experience. Indeed, James’s refusal to relate issues of the a priori to the analytic is instructive of his understanding of the a priori. He holds that the analyticsynthetic distinction is an unhappy legacy from Kant that loses all philosophical interest the moment one ceases to ascribe to any a priori truths the “legislative character for all possible experience” that Kant believed in.65 “We ourselves have denied such legislative character, and contended that it was for experience itself to prove whether its data can or cannot be assimilated to those ideal terms between which a priori relations obtain. The analyticsynthetic debate is thus for us devoid of all signi¤cance.”66 Thus, James thinks that the experimental context of a priori truths, the temporal origin of a priori relationships, and the testing of their usefulness in terms of their workability in experience makes the issue of the analytic-synthetic distinction useless, since there is no claim for any a priori truth legislative of all experience in Kant’s sense. What we can know, holds James, is only that if these things are anywhere to be found, then eternal verities will obtain of them.67 This if-then, however, is the if-then of containment, which Lewis calls the hypothetical certitude of a priori claims about experience. I can know in advance of any experience, as “eternal verities,” that if the subject term applies then certain features must obtain, for they are analytically contained in the meaning of the subject term. It is not surprising that Lewis’s careful and detailed development of a pragmatic a priori can serve to illuminate implicit and underdeveloped ideas germinating in the collective corpus of the writings of the classical American pragmatists, for any position that holds, as pragmatism does, that our world does not come to us “ready made” but rather that mind enters into its structuring, can be expected to hold that we bring structures of some sort to experience. And if the structures we bring to experience are not
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to be a veil that cuts us off from what is ultimately real, but rather, as pragmatism holds, allow us to engage an independent reality in fruitful ways, then these structures can be expected to be formed, evaluated, and replaced when necessary within the temporal ®ow of the creative, anticipatory dynamics of experience as experimental, in the interplay of mind’s free creativity and reality’s persistent constraints. These characteristics of Lewis’s pragmatic a priori unite to form important points of departure for dialogue with some continental philosophy. Heidegger and others rightly claim that if the a priori is relevant to sense experience, and in fact underlies all perceptual awareness, then it must incorporate “material meanings.” It is precisely this point that Heidegger is stressing in his objection to attempts to identify the a priori with the analytic, arguing that “allegedly verbal propositions cannot be completely severed from the beings they intend. . . . All signi¤cations, including those that are apparently mere verbal meanings, arise from reference to things. Every terminology presupposes some knowledge of things.”68 A priori structures are synthetic for Heidegger in that the necessary relationships are dependent upon the material meanings of the terms. But, it is precisely this necessary reference to the sensory dimension, incorporated within the a priori in the form of sense meanings, that provides the force of Lewis’s claim that the a priori is analytic. This relatedness to experience leads to the objection that structures so rich in empirical meaning can arise neither through induction, nor de¤nition, nor linguistic stipulation, and hence require a synthetic aspect. For Lewis, however, the synthesizing activity is not involved in the nature or structure of the a priori, but in its functional genesis in experience. This genesis of meaning structures corresponds to none of the above alternatives. Rather, genetically, meanings arise through the cumulative effect of past experience and the creative ¤xation, within the ongoing course of experience, of dispositionally organized relationships among experiences. And habit, as creatively structuring, always brings a “more than” to the organization of past experience. The creative process intended corresponds most closely to the creative
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process that Peirce calls abduction, though what are here ¤xed by such creative activities or abductive processes are not empirical hypotheses asserting the applicability of meanings to experience, but rather the very structure of the meanings themselves. And at any point in the process, a meaning or dispositional rule contains, analytically, all that it has creatively ¤xated, or conversely, all that it now has the power or potential to generate, and it is a priori regulative for future experience. This containment houses within its very structure a reference to the sensible, and thus the features of its relational structure can be apprehended within sensible experience. That the a priori is dependent upon the material meaning of the terms does not itself answer the issue as to whether the relationship of the meanings is analytic or synthetic. But there is the common agreement that the a priori element in experience, which regulates in advance the possibility of the emergence within experience of facts and objects, is rooted in the concreteness of rudimentary purposive or intentional human behavior; that it arises from, is made possible by, and is replaceable or alterable within, the ¤nite temporal structure of such behavior; that it has a crucial epistemic/existential function in underlying all experience and in fact makes experience possible; and that this crucial function requires the a priori relatedness of material meanings. This agreement offers a new and common point of departure for discussing the question of the nature of a priori knowledge as analytic or synthetic and opens a further pathway for dialogue between the pragmatic and continental traditions. It also would seem to clear this pathway of the stumbling block of Heidegger’s characterization of the “arbitrariness” of pragmatism.69 At the same time that Lewis’s position opens a pathway for dialogue with phenomenology concerning the existence of a synthetic a priori, it opens avenues of rapport and discussion with the in®uential position of Quine and others following him who attack the claim of an irreducible difference between the conceptual and the empirical or existential. In his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” Quine argues against the possibility of the analytic-synthetic distinction and also against
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the claim that a statement, taken in isolation from the statements surrounding it, can admit of con¤rmation or discon¤rmation at all.70 These two “dogmas” were, for Quine, opposite sides of the same coin. Quine objected to analyticity partially because he considered it impossible to make any sense of the concept of synonymy or the linguistic meaning of an expression in which it was supposedly based. His rejection also came in part from his position that while analytic claims are considered to be infallibly known and not subject to revision, no sentence is absolutely immune from revision, and thus no sentence is purely analytic or a priori. There are no unrevisable statements and no infallible knowers. This latter objection is tied into his articulation of a view, which came to be known as “con¤rmation holism,” that our beliefs are holistic, forming a corporate body or web, and sentences are more or less revisable depending upon how central or peripheral their positions are within the web. Quine extended this “con¤rmation holism” to include all of math and logic. So-called analytic and other sentences purporting to be “known a priori” are, like the laws of logic and mathematics, comparatively central, and so are given up, if ever, only under the extreme force of peripheral beliefs within the web. It now becomes possible to revise logic or mathematics to further a theoretical web that includes empirical claims along with mathematics and logic. This revisability does not allow for a justi¤cation that excludes experience, for scienti¤c theories, along with the mathematics and logic they include, are con¤rmed only as a holistic web or corporate body. What we call a priori knowledge is revisable within the context of sense experience, and sense experience is pervaded by what we call a priori knowledge. There is a constant intermingling. We revise a web of beliefs in keeping with what changes can most “agreeably” be incorporated. For Quine, then, the major features that make the a priori–a posteriori or analytic-synthetic distinction untenable are the holistic nature of belief systems, the revisability of any belief statement within a holistic web, the fallibilism of all knowledge, and the inability to make any sense of the concept of synonymy or the
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linguistic meaning of an expression in which it is supposedly based. Lewis agrees with Quine in accepting the holistic nature of our beliefs, fallibilism, and the revisability of any part of a belief structure. For Lewis we do not test beliefs in isolation, but as parts of a whole set of claims. No part of a corpus of knowledge is immune from change, and any part of a belief structure can be held by changing other parts of the structure. What is a priori can be changed, in the sense of being replaced, in the face of the cumulative effects of experience, and experience is thoroughly pervaded by a priori knowledge. Moreover, experience usually proceeds without any awareness as to whether we are changing empirical generalization by counter instances or replacing a meaning to avoid having to throw out too much of experience as not real contents of a particular type. And whether we change empirical generalizations in the face of discon¤rming evidence or restructure an a priori net that does not adequately capture experience is not itself dictated by the evidence but is rather a pragmatic decision based on workability. Experience reveals that an improvement is necessary, but clearly not which improvement is needed. There is an inherent fallibilism running throughout the web of beliefs. Further, explications of meanings, though yielding necessary truths if correctly made, are always subject to error, thus providing only fallible knowledge about necessary truths. And the very claim that a relationship between meanings is in fact analytic or synthetic is itself always fallible. We can never be certain if, and when, a highly con¤rmed empirical generalization about an object becomes incorporated into the very meaning of the object, related necessarily to the dispositional rule that now has the power to generate it and that thus now contains it. In his understanding of dispositional rule, Lewis’s focus on analyticity is not on synonymy but rather containment. Finally, Lewis agrees with Quine that the analytic-synthetic distinction falls to the ground in the context of linguistic philosophy. At this point, however, Lewis and Quine part company. For
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Quine this indicates the collapse of the distinction and a “turn to the pragmatic” in the sense that he views linguistic behavior as providing something like synonymy without the rei¤cation of meaning. Words or expressions to which we react similarly, which are employed in the same way, must have similar status. For Lewis, on the other hand, it points to the need to recognize the importance of experience as underlying and over®owing the con¤nes of language. It points as well to the crucial role of sense meanings as schematic criteria in providing the vehicle for incorporating a sensory element within the very structure of the analytic a priori as the basis for the containment understanding of analyticity and as the link for the inseparable intermingling of the a priori and experience. Lewis, in denying the traditional rei¤cations of meaning, also turns to behavior, but behavior as the temporal ®ow of the meaningful, purposive activity of concrete organisms immersed in the natural world and as incorporating the analytic-synthetic distinction within its ongoing dynamics. While the sharp theoretical difference between the analytic and the synthetic or the a priori and the a posteriori is always operative within the structure of knowledge, it is always elusive for our recognition because of its fallibilistic, holistic, contextualistic features. But, Lewis holds, it constitutes the pervasive pattern of ongoing experimental inquiry in which a noetic creativity is rooted in purposive biological activity and constitutive of the nature of experience as experimental, thereby avoiding what Lewis calls a capriciousness that seems to put all truth at once at the mercy of experience and within the power of human decision. The common acceptance by Lewis and Quine of the numerous features indicated above does not solve the issue as to whether there is an experiential over®ow that underlies the linguistic level and opens us onto the universe, or whether sense meaning is incorporated into the very structure of the conceptual, providing the link between, and intermingling of, the conceptual and the empirical. However, these many points of agreement clear the path for turning to the heart of what is at issue and what kind of
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dialogue is important in attempting to come to grips with the question of the nature of a priori knowledge and the viability of an a priori–a posteriori or analytic-synthetic distinction. Here the dialogue with analytic philosophy comes, in a sense, full circle back to the dialogue with phenomenology. Much philosophical interest lies in knowing not merely about the concepts we use, which may or may not correspond to properties, relations, or objects in the world, but about the real characteristics in the world. For example, philosophers have wanted to claim not merely that our concepts of red and green exclude the possibility of our thinking something is both colors all over at once, but that this possibility is ruled out for the actual colors, red and green, themselves. They want a basis for thinking that analytic claims provide some insight into external reality. This ¤t between concepts and actual worldly properties cannot be ensured by a linguistic semantics alone. Nor is a synthetic a priori needed to explain it. Lewis’s understanding of a priori knowledge, with its schematic exclusion of the possibility of both “red all over” and “green all over” at the same time, as well as his distinction between the experiential origin and logical, legislative structure of the a priori, explains the ¤t while yet denying the existence of a synthetic a priori. In a deeply fundamental way, Lewis’s pragmatic reconstruction of the a priori undercuts, and can change the nature of, the debates about analyticity and the analytic-synthetic distinction, casting “opposing alternatives” in a new, fruitful, and complementary light. But as Lewis stresses, sense meanings are important not only as they relate to analytic truth but even more obviously as they relate to the synthetic truths of empirical knowledge. Sense meaning provides the crucial connection between the creations of mind and the sensibly presented. The following chapter will turn to empirical knowledge and its interweaving of pragmatic experimentalism and fallibilism with a dimension of a distinctively pragmatic empirical certitude.
3 Empirical Certitude and Pragmatic Fallibilism Analytic or a priori propositions are true of all possible worlds, and their assertions are known true by an understanding of the sense meaning that they express. Empirical or synthetic propositions, however, assert something that is not necessary, and their assertions can be known true only by turning to experience. Empirical knowledge arises by the application of a priori concepts to what is given in experience. The Given and Pragmatic Certitude While Lewis places strong emphasis on the abstract, conceptual element that enters into knowledge, he is a pragmatic empiricist. And any empiricism, as a position that relies on sense experience as the basis of knowledge, must give some account of what is sensibly given or presented. Because Lewis uses the term “the given” to express this element in experience, he is often interpreted as a part of a tradition in which “the given” indicates individual, discrete units of sense data as the building blocks of experience, building blocks that are exhausted in language.
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But Lewis, in keeping with his pragmatic orientation, clearly recognizes the richness of what is immediately given to sense. He appreciates as well that in its concrete richness what is sensibly given underlies and eludes the strict con¤nes of language, over®ows our conceptual demarcations, and, as it enters our experience, already bears the imprint of the interpretations by which we get hold of it. Exploring Lewis’s understanding of the given or presented ingredient in experience involves discussing the various levels of interpretation by which we grasp it and the functionally different roles these levels play in experience and knowledge. Fallible empirical knowledge as probable arises in the interpretive act that brings together the certitudes of conceptual schemes and the indubitable givenness of something given. Lewis holds that there must be, in all cognitive experience, something that is given, some element with a ¤xed nature that is independent of the manner in which we may conceive it, conceptualize it, or organize it in cognition. It is this given that ultimately determines the workability of a chosen conceptual scheme as well as the truth of an empirical prediction. “Unless there should be some statements, or rather something apprehensible and statable, whose truth is determined by given experience and is not determinable in any other way, there would be no non-analytic af¤rmation whose truth could be determined at all and no such thing as empirical knowledge.”1 In order to have a signi¤cant difference between truth and falsity, or between workability and nonworkability, there must be some “hard” element in our experience that is independent of our purposes and that cannot be altered by our thinking about it; rather, the workability of our purposes or concepts depends upon their conformity to it. Perhaps no one aspect of Lewis’s philosophy has been subject to more frequent and diverse attacks than has his concept of the given element in experience. And there is ample basis in his writings for such criticisms. He holds that the given is mind dependent, yet asserts that it is ingredient in independently existing reality. He stresses that the given is an analytic aspect of experience, never found in its purity, yet apprehensions of the given provide certitude in the veri¤cation of terminating judgments. Such am-
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biguities concerning the status and availability to awareness of the given lead to an ambiguity in his general use of “experience” as well. He often speaks of that which is given as passages of experience, yet he also stresses that the given is only one component of experience, for all experience is a unity of the given plus interpretation. Lewis’s attempt to delimit the nature and function of the given in experience is plagued by confusions arising through the use of one set of terms to capture several conceptual distinctions. The above ambiguities arise because Lewis de¤nes the abstraction that characterizes the given in distinct ways, for distinct purposes, yet proceeds, without quali¤cation, to speak of “the given” in a general sense, characterizing it now in terms of one type of abstraction, now in terms of another. The given is private for each person, but as seen in the last chapter, this does not prevent communication between persons, for what is sharable is the pattern of relations among the given as embodied in sense meanings, and “the practical criterion of common meanings is congruent behavior.”2 The given represents that part or aspect that is not affected by thought, the “buzzing blooming confusion” that James characterizes as that upon which the infant ¤rst opens his eyes.3 It is not “subjective,” for the content of unmediated awareness, abstracted from any supplementation by the interpreting attitude, is signi¤cant neither of the subject nor of the object. We confront what is presented by the senses with certain readymade distinctions, relations, and ways of classifying, ways that are embedded in our anticipatory actions toward what is presented. Through interpretation the buzzing blooming confusion of the infant is transformed into an orderly world of things. In particular, we impose upon experience a certain pattern of temporal relationships, a certain order, which makes one item signi¤cant of others. A visual presentation becomes a sign of how something would taste or feel, and the taste or feel of the thing becomes a sign of the next taste or feel. The sensuous given, like James’s buzzing, blooming confusion, is not found in its purity but rather is separable by abstraction. It sets the problem of interpretation as we approach it with our purposes or intended ac-
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tions. The given is ineffable; by itself it has no reference to action and requires no veri¤cation. The given cannot be called the content of cognition, for cognition has as its content objectivities. Rather, it is the “stuff” of cognition. Our experience is thick; it is experience of a world of things, not experience of a thin immediacy of givenness. As Lewis says, we “do not see patches of color, but trees and houses; we hear, not indescribable sound, but voices and violins. What we most certainly know are objects and full-bodied facts about them.” 4 The given, according to Lewis, is structurable by mind, but yet it is itself not totally without structure, for “attention cannot mark disjunctions in an undifferentiated ¤eld.”5 Lewis holds that there is “in all strictness, only one given,” which he calls “the absolutely given”6 or “the total ¤eld of the given.” 7 The total or absolute ¤eld of the given provides the bedrock “stuff” for awareness, and the interested mind “takes” or abstracts from this ¤eld complexes that can be presentations of objects. Thus, the given, as the “stuff” that enters into conscious cognitive processes, becomes, in fact, a taken. This element of givenness is an event, and the form of this presentation as a gestalt or complex whole is partially dependent on the interested mind and the conceptual structures that de¤ne its purposes, but the ultimate stuff of the complex is as it is, independently of conscious cognitive processes. We “take” from the absolutely given complexes that can be presentations of objects. Yet we know objects only by apprehensions of presentations. This is not a vicious circle, but rather indicates a cumulative process based on the pragmatic interplay between immediate apprehension and thick experience. Here, at a more primitive epistemic level, there is operating the same type of interaction between past experience and modes of apprehending that is found at the higher level of conceptual structure. And at this point it becomes important to distinguish once again between logical or epistemic order and genetic or temporal order. Logically or epistemically, the object seen in any speci¤c perceptual transaction is the result of an interpretation placed upon a “relatively given” or “functionally given” complex that has in
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turn been abstracted from the ¤eld of the given. However, genetically, the manner of the abstraction of the functionally given in any perceptual transaction is determined by past experience with objects. Thus, the “given as taken,” as a content abstracted from the absolutely given via primitive cognitive processes, is partially determined by past experience, though it is logically prior to experience of objects in any particular perceptual transaction. The given as taken, then, is a product of the most primitive epistemic activity of the knowing mind, an activity that supplies us with the most basic complexes of which we can be aware. Because what we have in experience is what we have taken, an apprehension of the given in its absolute purity is a limiting point within experience. It is the ideal limit of that which is “there,” totally unaffected by the activity of mind. An apprehension of pure givenness is a philosopher’s abstraction. “The given, as here conceived is certainly an abstraction. Unless there be such a thing as pure esthesis (and I should join with the critic in doubting this) the given never exists in isolation in any experience or state of consciousness.”8 Or, as he elsewhere observes, “A state of intuition unquali¤ed by thought is a ¤gment of the metaphysical imagination.” 9 Though Lewis makes this distinction in levels of givenness he does not dwell upon it, since his interests lie elsewhere. His major concern lies in distinguishing that which is “there and given” from that which is not there but which is anticipated as a result of conceptual interpretation, and for this purpose a focus on the difference in levels of givenness is not important. For the purpose of analyzing knowledge, it is not the ultimate “integrality” of the given that is important but rather the element of givenness that we can “for usual and commonplace reasons, mark off as ‘an experience’ or ‘an object.’”10 This “element of givenness,” the given as “taken,” serves an important function in the veri¤cation of empirical knowledge. Experience, as it occurs, is of physical objects. However, at times, when questions of the validity of the act of perception arise, the focus in experience is not on the objective interpretation but rather on the datum that is “there and given.” The given must be
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discriminated within and abstracted from our ordinary awareness, which is attentive to the objectivity signalized rather than to what is directly present.11 In experience we can, by a conscious effort of withholding objective judgment and instead discerning appearances, arrive at the level of that which is “there and given.” 12 However, the level to which we can work back is the level of the appearance of objects, or, in other terms, the “element of givenness” or the given as a “taken”—the functionally given. It is that which we consciously abstract from “thick” awareness of an objective world. For example, if I claim to see a chair in the corner of the otherwise empty room I am passing, my claim implicitly includes the prediction that if I approach it, it will not disappear; that if I try to sit in it, I will not fall to the ground, and so forth. If I am in doubt as to whether there is really a chair in the corner or whether my tiredness, combined with the light and shadows of the corner area, is playing tricks with me, I will focus on just how the object appears—such as the apparent shape of the legs, the apparent thickness of what appears like a seat, and so forth. Moreover, when I say I see what looks like a chair, as opposed to saying I see a chair, I restrict myself to what is given, and what I intend to convey by this language is something about which I can have no possible doubt. There is a linguistic correlate to this interrelationship between objective knowledge and conscious awareness of appearances that is worth noting here because it is the form that the problem takes in most of the current literature. Descriptions in the language of appearing are not, for Lewis, epistemically derivative from physical object terms, although they make use of physical object terminology. To assert that they are epistemically derivative is to confuse at the linguistic level logical or epistemic order with temporal order. In the veri¤cation of perceptual experience, the manner of temporally abstracting the element of givenness from “thick” awareness of an objective world and in turn attempting to express this functionally given by approximation is in®uenced by our experience of objects and by our objective language structure. However, in any particular perceptual transac-
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tion, the abstraction of the element of givenness, or the given as a “taken,” from the absolutely given, as that content expressible by appearance statements that approximate, is logically or epistemically prior to the use of physical object terminology, though the very structure of the appearance as we take it re®ects our physical object concepts. Totally rejecting the claim made by Russell and others that there is such a thing as knowledge by acquaintance, Lewis considers the idea of knowledge by acquaintance to come about from two mistakes. First, one wrongly assumes that there are concepts denoting “simple qualities” that are directly exhibited in a single experience. Second, the term “knowledge” is wrongly applied to sheer contemplation of the given. The denotation of any concept extends beyond what is presently given. Pre-analytic data, those that confront us in the experience with which philosophy begins, and the level at which we know the world around us when no problems arise, is the “thick world of things,” not the “thin given of immediacy.13 Post-analytic data, however, can be taken in different senses, corresponding to the types of givenness discussed above. Philosophy, for purposes of analyzing the constituents of experience, recognizes the aspect of pure givenness as an element that enters into all experience but that, as an element analyzed out for purposes of philosophical understanding, is never experienced in its purity. However, common sense must also have its post-analytic data. These it can have when, in moments of doubt concerning the existence of an object, it focuses on “what appears as it appears,” in an attempt to verify a questionable interpretation or to better anticipate future experience through reinterpretation. Epistemic theory, if it is to give an account of the knowledge process, must recognize not only an element of absolute givenness, but also this common sense abstraction of appearances, or, in other terms, abstraction back to relative or functional givenness or the given as “taken.” Thus, Lewis observes that “[t]he explicit identi¤cation of such given elements in experience, and the recognition of the correlative expectancies as being such, is always the work of abstractive attention (analysis?) directed upon
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the perceptual experience, whether in common sense knowing or in any philosophical examination of knowledge.”14 The given is not before experience but in experience, but as Lewis points out, to condemn abstractions is to condemn thought itself. The content of thinking is always some abstraction that does not exist in isolation. The important question for Lewis is whether or not the abstracted content or the given is genuinely discoverable in experience.15 Pure or absolute givenness is logically or epistemically primitive in that it is “there” as the logically ¤nal basis and ultimate referent for all cognitive activity. However, appearances or passages of immediate experience are the bedrock data to which one can work back in conscious awareness and the bedrock data to which one can appeal in the veri¤cation of perceptual interpretations via the predictions they make. In brief, immediate experience is not the experience of pure immediacy. This is to be expected, for something that cannot be isolated in its purity for conscious awareness cannot serve as a basis for veri¤cation. What serves as veri¤cation are passages of experience, though what is ultimately given for cognitive activity at the most primitive level is the absolutely given or ¤eld of givenness. The given, in Dewey’s terms, both sets “the problematic context” for knowledge to resolve and serves as verifying or falsifying data concerning our attempted resolutions or interpretations. Lewis holds that in any sense presentation, the given content is some quale or complex of qualia. Though a speci¤c quale may be considered in isolation, what is given is generally given as a complex of qualia, not a single quale. Relations of qualia are themselves further structurable by mind, but as relations they are not without structure. In any perceptual awareness certain qualia are present. In our perceiving a red ball, for example, a sensory qualia is present that we classify as red. But we never see “red,” for that is a conceptual classi¤cation of a whole range of different shades; it is the particular, ineffable shades that are given qualia. Other qualities than the strictly sensory may be given. The pleasantness or fearfulness of something may be given as well as its color or sound.
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Qualia are characterized by their “sensuous feel.” In immediate apprehensions they are “felt” rather than known,16 but feeling represents not a psychological category but an epistemic level.17 Qualia cannot be reduced to sensations or de¤ned by correlation with nervous processes. They cannot be brought under psychological categories at all, for to do so is to conceptually interpret them and make an objective statement about one type of categorized reality—psychic reality. As Lewis notes, qualia are apprehended “not by introspection nor by extrospection, but simply by spection.”18 Peirce’s use of Firstness as involving both spontaneity and feeling can ¤nd its correlation in the above account. Feeling, sensuous feel, or quality of feeling, then, is intended to indicate precisely that which is, in its purity, apprehended below the level of knowledge, not a “state of” an organism. The distinction between qualia and objective properties is not the difference between the psychical and the physical or between internal and external, but between preconceptual and conceptual. Feeling refers to immediacy, not to sensation. James makes a similar point, stressing that sensation or feeling and perception are “names for different cognitive functions, not for different sort of mental fact.”19 As Dewey states of his primary experience as a unity of activity undifferentiated by any thought distinctions,20 such “experience ‘is double-barreled’ in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. In the same connection, he notes that likewise for James, “thing” and “thought” are “single barreled”; “they refer to products discriminated by re®ection out of primary experience.”21 Because the essence of qualia is to be sensed, Lewis at times characterizes qualia as subjective. However, this is a misnomer, for the content of a presentation is most aptly characterized as private rather than subjective, since the latter term is so associated with mental contents or psychological categories. Qualia, in their very being, are relative to consciousness. To speak of unsensed qualia or of qualia that remain unaltered though awareness of them changes is “merely a new kind of ding an sich” misleadingly characterized in phenomenological termi-
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nology.22 While a given presentation is unique, the qualia that make it up are not. Qualia are repeatable and intrinsically recognizable in experience, and thus are a “sort of universals,”23 but the very being of qualia as repeatable and recognizable is a product of the apprehending mind. Thus Lewis recognizes that one might say that there must be concepts of qualia because they are recognized or that such apprehension should be termed judgment.24 Lewis rejects such characterizations not because they are inaccurate, but because what he is again interested in pointing out is the distinction between qualia as characterizing the given content of awareness and knowledge of objects. And awareness of qualia is not judgment in any sense in which judgment may be veri¤ed; it is not knowledge in any sense in which “knowledge” connotes the opposite of error. Thus qualia are characterized as non-conceptual, intrinsically recognizable and immediately apprehendable to emphasize their contrast with our awareness of objectivities. Primitive epistemic levels of mind’s activity can again be given merely a passing glance because of Lewis’s stated purpose to emphasize their distinction from knowledge of objectivities. Qualia, then, are only in their relation to awareness, and their characteristics of recognizability, repeatability, and universality are dependent upon this relatedness. Such recognizable qualia, though products of primitive epistemic activity, are “felt” rather than known, for knowledge involves prediction of possibilities of future experiences. Furthermore, such qualia, though recognizable, are ineffable.25 They have no names, for they are epistemically prior to any language, though they can be expressed only by some language that attempts to approximate them. Qualia, as a “sort of universals,” then, are functions in cognitive acts. Even the isolation of a recognizable speci¤c quale as an ineffable, “felt,” atomic unit lifted out from the gestalt of an appearance is still not the isolation of “pure stuff,” but rather stuff as discriminated by mind’s primitive criteria of assimilation and recognition. We can in no way work back to pure givenness in experience. At this point the problem of the certitude of immediate appre-
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hensions comes into question, for if the content that is apprehended is not logically ultimate but rather involves interpretive elements, then our apprehension of it does not seem readily characterizable as certain. Lewis does not mean by certitude, certainly true, or certainly correct, as opposed to possibly false, or possibly incorrect. There is nothing for the apprehended data, as apprehended, to be true or false to. They are not copies of the independently real ¤eld of the given, but ways of having or taking or getting hold of it. Nor can their apprehension be characterized as correct or incorrect, for what a quale “is” is determined only in its apprehension; it is, only as it is related to consciousness. As had, rather than as known, qualia of the given can be characterized neither as true nor as correct. Rather, what is true or correct is what we do with the content via our interpretive structures. What Lewis means by certitude in this context can best be understood by again applying the characterization of pragmatic or functional. As Lewis states, the recognition of given data is immediate and indubitable “in the sense that veri¤cation would have no meaning with respect to it.”26 The recognition of the data is beyond doubt because to doubt it in the sense that one thinks it may be proven wrong is senseless; indeed, literally so, for to doubt it is to put into question something for which there is no more fundamental tool by which it can be questioned. One cannot test it by getting “underneath” it to a more primitive epistemic level. Nor can one test it by reference to future experience, for, as given, it indicates nothing concerning future experience; it has no reference to action. Hence, the most fundamental taken of conscious experience must be accepted, for all intents and purposes, as the bedrock of certainty upon which to build knowledge. Lewis stresses the “pragmatic certainty” of the ground of knowledge that is “there and given” for the same reason he stresses the “formal certainty” of our analytic propositions. These two types of certainty, which future experience cannot touch, prevent pragmatism from collapsing into skepticism.27 In short, Lewis stresses
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the given element in knowledge in order to combat skepticism by distinguishing carefully between justi¤cation and veri¤cation, between what is given and what is not given or present, but anticipated. His general characterization of the given element is usually precise enough only to capture the distinctions necessary for this purpose. Thus, Lewis will carelessly assert that “[o]n the one side, there is the Platonic heaven of our concepts . . . on the other side there is the chaos of given experience.”28 Yet elsewhere, that “[i]n empirical knowledge there are, thus, two elements concerning which we have certainty; the recognized qualitative character of the given presentation is one and the a priori elaboration of some concept . . . is the other.”29 The sense in which Lewis can hold that the given is minddependent yet ingredient in independently existing reality begins to emerge from the above discussion if the nature of abstraction is not misunderstood. To abstract does not mean to lift out, or to copy, but to delineate or focus attention upon. The distinction between the absolute ¤eld of the given and the given as “taken” is not a numerical distinction or an ontological distinction but a distinction in epistemic levels: the given as pure stuff and the given as discriminated by attention, interest, or orientation. Furthermore, in working back to appearances in the veri¤cation process, what is withheld is a level of interpretation. The difference between the absolute ¤eld of the given, appearances or the given as a taken, and objectivities is not be understood in terms of the difference between mental and physical, subjective and objective, or internal and external. Rather, the difference is best understood as a difference in levels of interpretation. To apprehend the appearance of an object as the “immediate” content of experience is to make no judgment concerning the objectivity of the appearance. To perceive appearing objects is to place the immediately apprehended appearance in a conceptual framework of causal relationships that indicate possibilities of future experience. The distinction is a functional distinction, not a metaphysical separation. The difference between the way things appear and the way things “really are” is not the difference between two different things or kinds of “stuff,” but the way in which what is
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presented in experience functions in different ways given our different intents or purposes in making use of it in experience. Empirical Knowledge and Types of Empirical Statements Lewis distinguishes three levels of empirical statements that enter into the formulation of empirical knowledge: expressive utterances, terminating judgments, and objective beliefs. The distinctive character of expressive statements, or the expressive use of language, is that such language signi¤es appearances or indubitable content. In referring to appearances, expressive statements neither assert nor deny any objective reality of what appears; neither do they predict anything. Because expressive statements are con¤ned to description of the immediate content of presentation, they cannot be in error. “Apprehensions of the given that such expressive statements formulate, are not judgments; and they are not here classed as knowledge, because they are not subject to any possible error.”30 It is somewhat misleading to say that expressive language describes the content of presentation, for the given is ineffable. “In whatever terms I describe this item of my experience, I shall not convey it merely as given.”31 However, expressive language is close enough for the purpose of analysis of knowledge, for “such formulations can be made, in a manner the intent of which, at least, is recognizable by what we have called the expressive use of language.” 32 Although apprehensions of the given cannot be in error, statement of such apprehension is true or false, for one may always choose to lie about the content apprehended. The immediate content apprehended, however, is not judged, it is “had.” Terminating judgments state the prediction of a particular passage of experience. They ¤nd their cue in what is given, but state something taken to be veri¤able by some test that involves a way of acting. What such terminating judgments express is classed as knowledge, for the prediction in question calls for veri¤cation and is subject to possible error. Terminating judgments are expressed in the form “S being given, if A then E.” All of the constituents
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entering into the judgment (“S,” “A,” and “E,”) require formulation in expressive language. Therefore, if the judgment is true, its truth is known with certitude. Finally, there are non-terminating judgments or judgments of objective fact. Such judgments express objective beliefs that can never be completely veri¤ed but are always further veri¤able. An objective belief or non-terminating judgment always involves possible consequences or possible terminating judgments that stretch beyond those terminating judgments actually tested. Because such beliefs can never be completely veri¤ed, they are probable, not certain. Non-terminating judgments are expressed in the form, “If this is a physical object ‘O,’ then if ‘S’ appearance and action ‘A,’ then in all probability ‘E’ appearance will occur.” The validation of these objective beliefs, expressible in non-terminating judgments and asserting some state of affairs, is the central problem for Lewis’s theory of empirical knowledge. To ascribe objectivity to what is had as a presentation is to conceptually interpret it, and this conceptual interpretation, expressed in a non-terminating judgment, indicates possibilities of experience many of which will never be actualized. Such conceptual interpretation also delimits reality, for reality is de¤ned and understood as the result of certain principles operative in our conceptual schemes. Concepts are sequences of possible experiences ordered in certain ways. To know reality of any type is to recognize sequences of possible experience by relating given experiences to possible experiences in a way anticipated by the conceptual pattern. To ascribe reality to something is to predict some possibility of experience. Lewis’s system of strict implication, it will be remembered, was in large part motivated by the attempt to formulate an implication relation that does not depend wholly on the truth values of the propositions related. The major, or ¤rst, implication relation of the non-terminating judgment expresses such logical entailment. The assertion of physical object “O” strictly implies an inde¤nite range of terminating judgments because these are built into the sense meaning of the physical objectivity of “O.” Thus, “the limits
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of the possibility of experience are the limits of meaningful conception,” 33 not the limits of what we can, in fact, verify. It is Lewis’s emphasis on conceptual interpretation as providing sense meaning in advance of veri¤cation that prevents his veri¤cation theory of empirical knowledge from being assimilated to that of the logical positivists or the operationalists. Sense meaning, then, becomes the tool by which Lewis, throughout his theory of empirical knowledge, avoids the extensionalist confusion of meaning and evidence. The real object cannot be translated into any series of actual veri¤cation instances, for it contains possibilities that in principle outrun any number of actualities. Possibilities are as real as the actualities that con¤rm them and the objects that house them. The second implication relation of the non-terminating judgment, or in other terms, the implication relation holding within the terminating judgment, expresses what Lewis calls “real relations.” Lewis, like Peirce, James, and Dewey before him, rejects a philosophical atomism of discrete disconnected events. These real relations or connections can also be called “matters-of-fact connections” or “natural connections,” and the type of consequence involved might be referred to as “natural consequences” or “real consequences.”34 These names are appropriate because this sense of “if-then” is the one connoted by any assertion of causal relationship or of connection according to natural law. “It is the kind of connection we believe in when we believe that the consequences of any hypothesis are such and such because of ‘the way reality is’ or because the facts of nature are thus and so.”35 Such real relations cannot be expressed by the logical relation of strict implication, for strict implications can be known a priori by re®ection on meanings, while the relationships in question are factual. Nor can these real relations be expressed by formal or material implication, for the potentialities embodied in real relations require the meaningfulness of counterfactual assertions, whereas formal or material implications do not allow for such meaningfulness. Belief in an objective reality that exists even when unobserved, as well as belief in real connections between natural
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events, requires the meaningfulness of a relationship that cannot be adequately analyzed within the framework of an extensional language. Belief in an objective world incorporates belief in the possibility of an inde¤nite number of ways of acting with resultant speci¤c consequences, many or most of which will never be actualized. Or, in other terms, belief in an objective reality incorporates the belief that untested hypotheses have speci¤c consequences, though these hypotheses are not now put to the test.36 The epistemic role of real connections is not to provide a certitude based on “necessary” relations of matters of fact—a necessity that Lewis emphatically rejects—but rather once again to extend the meaning of reality beyond all actual experience. The conceptual interpretation of a given content was seen to lead to a conception of a reality that transcends all actual experience because of the inexhaustibility of the possible terminating judgments entailed by the physical object concept. Now, with the relation expressed by the terminating judgment, Lewis again takes the meaning of reality beyond actual occasions of experience, this time through causal potentialities that real relations embody and that the counterfactual assertions of terminating judgments express. Real relations embody potentialities that outrun actual experiences and thus require expression in counterfactual statements, but what is asserted as holding counterfactually is a probability relation among events, not a necessary connection. Real relations are not held by Lewis to require 100 percent correlations, and thus cannot be characterized as “necessary relations of matters of fact.” “Such probability-connection would be inappropriately spoken of as ‘necessary,’ but it has the essential character mentioned above; it is signi¤cantly assertable when the hypothesis is contrary to fact and in cases where the factuality of the hypothesis is undetermined.”37 Because the various terminating judgments representing possible con¤rmations of an objective belief are implied in the perceptual or non-terminating judgment, it would seem that the failure of a terminating judgment to prove true upon trial would provide decisive disproof of the objective or non-terminating
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judgment implying it by the simple rules of modus tollens: If A implies B, then not-B implies not-A. However, Lewis ¤nds that a direct inspection of cognitive experience itself leads him to doubt this conclusion. As he observes: “What I see arouses a belief in a real doorknob in a certain position before me. . . . But suppose I fail to locate and turn the knob with my hand; shall I be convinced forthwith that my belief in a doorknob where I seemed to see it is false? As a fact, no. . . . We cannot well suppose that any test in direct experience will either prove or disprove an objective belief with absolute certainty.”38 Lewis does not believe that the sole reason for this lack of positive proof lies in the fact that real relations may be less than 100 percent correlations, for there are too many other possible ways of explaining the situation and other conditions that must obtain in order for the occurrence or non-occurrence of the expected sequence of experience to serve as an adequate test.39 Thus, Lewis concludes from an inspection of experience that something similar to the contextual interactions of auxiliary hypotheses is operative in our awareness of the world around us. In the prediction of any passage of experience, the non-occurrence of the anticipated result may be due not to the falsity of the physical object belief but rather to other conditions, the non-ful¤llment of which would prevent the anticipated result. The probability factor that Lewis builds into the terminating judgment thus serves two functions, each of which prevents the strict operation of modus tollens, but for different reasons. First, the probability factor that Lewis builds into the logical structure of the perceptual judgment supplies the epistemic equivalent of auxiliary hypotheses. Secondly, it allows for the less than 100 percent correlations of real relations. Lewis often speaks in an imprecise way that seems to indicate that this probability factor lies between the non-terminating judgment and the terminating judgment. However, his own clari¤cation of his position indicates clearly that the probability factor is to be found between the antecedent and the consequent of the terminating judgment.40 Thus, strict implication, with no probability factor involved, holds between the non-terminating judgment and the terminat-
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ing judgments. But what is asserted by any terminating judgment so implied is a probability relation between its antecedent and consequent. The internal structure of a perceptual judgment, then, can be most precisely symbolized in the following way. “If physical object belief ‘O’ is true, then if presentation ‘S’ is given and act ‘A’ is performed, then it is more or less probable that presentation ‘E’ will be observed to follow.” The if-then relation of the terminating judgment, then, is both a contrary-to-fact conditional and a probability relation. As a contrary-to-fact conditional it provides the function of extending the meaning of reality beyond actual occasions of experience. And as a probability relation, it incorporates a radical fallibilism into the logic of physical object statements, preventing any certitude in either the veri¤cation or the falsi¤cation of terminating judgments. Lewis, in his classi¤cation of empirical statements, characterizes the terminating judgment as a type of judgment capable of certitude in its veri¤cation or its falsi¤cation, since initial data, act, and anticipated appearance are all stated in expressive language. Such certitude of veri¤cation provides the foundation for our probable knowledge concerning objectivities. Furthermore, such certitude of veri¤cation is crucial for Lewis’s position, for “if anything is to be probable, then something must be certain.”41 However, what is veri¤ed with certitude is the terminating judgment “strictly so called,”42 which applies to only a single occasion. The general form of the terminating judgment can be held true only if the objective belief holds; it has a conceptual certitude based on the hypothesis of the applicability of the object concept.43 To understand the way in which these two forms of the terminating judgment interact with each other and with the two other levels of empirical apprehensions, it will be useful to distinguish among the orders of the genesis of concepts, the structure of concepts, and the evidential data for the applicability of concepts. The distinction between the functional genesis and the structural analysis of concepts was introduced earlier in understanding Lewis’s pragmatic a priori. The third distinction was not then needed, however, as the truth of a priori knowledge does not
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require data of experience but rather arises from a direct inspection of the logical relations of meanings. Lewis holds throughout his writings that our concepts are genetically conditioned by experience. An objective statement means that certain “test routines” will probably yield certain empirical observations, and for Lewis these probability relations are learned inductively. We can construct and understand the concepts that are applicable to them only because they occur in our experience. We assert this applicability in our statements concerning objective beliefs, and in these assertions the connections are contained analytically, though what is thus asserted are inductively learned probabilities. Thus, schemata that indicate the relations among appearances and that are analytically contained in our physical object concepts must be understood, in their application to experience, as assertions of probabilities. The meaning of objectivity is something over and above a collection of related appearances, and this meaning is supplied by the ¤xed rule of organization. Thus, though a physical object statement is con¤rmable by verifying experiences, it is not reducible to or totally translatable into the verifying experiences. Similarly, though the general form of the terminating judgment is veri¤able by particular experiences, what the general form asserts outruns any collection of particular instances. It is here that the answer to the problem of the meaningfulness of real potentiality is to be found, for a disposition or habit as a rule of generation is something whose possibilities of determination no multitude of actually generated schemata can exhaust. It is the awareness of habit as a disposition or readiness to respond to more than can be speci¤ed that gives a concrete meaning to the concept of unactualized possibilities. Thus, the meaning of potentiality, and hence the meaning of real relations, is found in the awareness of the actuality of habit as that which can never be exhausted by any number of exempli¤cations. That readiness to respond to more than can ever be made explicit, which is there in the functioning of habit, is immediately “had” in the temporal passage of the “epistemic present”44 and gives experiential content to the concept of unactualized possi-
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bilities. One may object that “the present” is too knife-edged for such apprehension, but as Lewis observes, “it is not the timeextended cognition but the chopping of it up into unextended instants that is ¤ctitious.”45 The concrete meaning of unactualized possibilities, of real alternatives and real potentialities, then, is gained by reference to the experiential “feel” within the passing present of habit as a rule of generation of, and a readiness to respond to, more than can ever be speci¤ed. In the order of evidence, the occurrence of the expected data is certain and offers certain evidence for the probability of there being a real connection among appearances. This, in turn, serves as evidence for the probability of the truth of the objective belief. At no time does a relationship receive or require complete veri¤cation. Lewis holds that the meaningfulness of empirical statements as well as the validity of empirical knowledge demands the acceptance of empirical relationships that are not observable but that are con¤rmable through particular instances of the relationships.46 What is decisively veri¤ed, then, is not the truth of the probabilistic contrary-to-fact conditional relation of the general form of the terminating judgment, a truth that is logically contained in the truth of the physical object statement. Rather, what is decisively veri¤ed is the truth of the occurrence or non-occurrence of the expected consequent appearance of the terminating judgment “strictly so-called.” Such a decisive veri¤cation in turn serves as evidence for or against the empirical existence of the real connection, an existence that must be true if the physical object statement is true, but that can be stated categorically as probable only. Lewis succinctly summarizes the interrelatedness of the conceptual and the empirical in the functioning of sense meaning in the process of gaining empirical knowledge when he notes that “[e]xplicit formulation of such inductively established real connections gives us, at one and the same time, the sense meaning of our customary beliefs that we express by af¤rming matters of fact, and the basic probabilities by which an experienceable world of objects is recognized to exist.”47 Knowledge, for Lewis, not only must be veri¤ed as true; it must
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be justi¤ed as rationally credible. In the case of a priori knowledge, there is no distinction between these two dimensions. The validity of a priori knowledge coincides with its truth. In the validation of empirical knowledge these two dimensions are distinct and stem from two major characteristics of empirical knowledge. It is based on a ground arising from past experience, and it is checked by reference to the future of which it asserts something. If a person asserts something without having justifying rounds for the claim, then even if it happens to be true, that claim is not valid, nor is it knowledge. Lewis rejects what he considers the overemphasis on future experience contained in empiricist theories that put forth an account of the veri¤cation of knowledge as if it were the whole story. It is the function of empirical judgment to save us the hazards of action without foresight, and this requires the justi¤cation of knowledge. Lewis is thus led to de¤ne empirical knowledge not as veri¤ed belief but as justi¤ed belief.48 Lewis’s justi¤cation of knowledge can best be approached via his rejection of Humean skepticism, for such a skepticism attacks not the veri¤cation but the justi¤cation of knowledge. Lewis’s rebuttal of Hume centers on two Humean assumptions: ¤rst, that necessary connections of ideas are absent from our empirical knowledge, thereby leaving empirical knowledge with no rational basis; second, that part of the rational basis for empirical generalizations from given data must lie in the certainty of our inferences from the data. Part of Lewis’s response has already been provided. Necessary connections of ideas are indeed relevant for the interpretation of what is empirically given and for the delineation of reality. In this sense, the ground of the terminating judgment in its general form is logically contained in the truth of the non-terminating judgment, though Lewis explicitly recognizes that such a de¤nition “involves the admission that we may on occasion ‘know’ something which is false.”49 The relation of the judgment to its ground is logical, for the truth of the physical object statement strictly implies the truth of the terminating judgments contained in it. But such truth is hypothetical. If the non-terminating judgment is true, then the terminating judgment is true.
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However, if we are to categorically assert that something is the case, that either the terminating or non-terminating judgment is true of the world, then we turn from a logical ground providing certitude to an empirical ground providing probability. It is this empirical and probable relation that must be defended against Hume’s second line of attack, and the fact that empirical generalizations are not necessarily true is no reason for holding that we have no rational basis for believing them. Lewis’s aim, then, is to offer a justi¤cation of knowledge as probable. The major tools of justi¤cation for Lewis are memory, the rule of induction, the existence of real causal relations, and an adequate theory of probability, the empirical workability of which is dependent upon the other three. Lewis’s own theory of probability, in its synthesis of elements of both the a priori and empirical views, develops out of an orientation set in terms of the pragmatic a priori. Workable a priori relationships can be established only in the light of past experience; yet such relationships assert something the truth of which is not dependent on future experience. He agrees with the logical theories of probability to the extent that he considers a probability statement to express a logical and a priori determinable relation between an inductive conclusion and the ground or data on which it is asserted. However, he rejects the assumption of a priori theorists that ignorance or indifference is a valid ground for determining the probability of an event. Such a view neglects the crucial role of past experience. He agrees with the empirical frequency theory of probability to the extent that he considers that probability should be assessed on the basis of induction. However, he rejects the assumption that the probability of an event can be identi¤ed with an objective frequency de¤ned as a limit approached by an in¤nite series. Such a view fails to recognize that a probability must be something completely assured at the time of judgment. Combining elements of both the empiricist and a priori views, Lewis holds that probability is to be determined on the basis of known frequency from past experience, but only on appropriate
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grounds in relation to which the known frequency may be said to stand in a logical and a priori–determinable relation according to valid rules of probability. He considers that the only way to explain the cognitive status of empirical beliefs as warranted or justi¤ed but less than certain is to identify the probability with something a priori knowable when the data by which to judge it are given. “Rational credibility of belief can, in the nature of the case, depend on nothing more than the supporting premises of what is believed and some relationship of it to these premises which is of the general type of logical relations.”50 Thus, an adequate estimate of credibility depends on the acceptability of the data from which it is drawn and the use of correct principles of judgment to derive conclusions from the data. We see that here, again, it can be said that the data must be drawn from experience, but the relations between such data and the present belief are ¤xed, logical, and a priori knowable. And just as non-terminating judgments can be asserted either hypothetically or categorically, so there are hypothetical and categorical probability statements. A hypothetical probability statement asserts that “If data D obtain, then probably P,” while a categorical probability statement asserts, “Since data D obtain, it is probable that P.” A probability judgment asserts an empirical factuality by being a consequence of empirical facts. When the degree of justi¤ed belief becomes suf¤ciently high, we do not express it by “probably P,” but rather simply by “P.” “Probably P” may be certain through “P” is only probable. That which is believed when “Probably P” is asserted is “P,” and the content of the cognition is the empirical factuality “P,” which is probable. Even if we are disappointed in our expectation of P, the probability of P has not been disproved, for “P” remains credible on the grounds on which it was believed. Lewis holds that the aspect of cognitive experience that he is attempting to explicate must, ultimately, be grasped by a “primordial sense of probable events,”51 for if one lacks such a primordial sense every categorical probability statement must fail. Probability for Lewis, then, is a “category of cognition which is
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fundamental and as different from theoretically certain knowledge as apprehension of the future is different from observation of the present.”52 The role of memory enters because no empirical judgment can be justi¤ed solely by reference to immediately present data of sense. The justi¤cation of any terminating judgment and, mutatis mutandis, the justi¤cation of any non-terminating judgment, requires the truth of generalizations based on past experience. Our only evidence for past experience comes in the form of present reports of past fact, or in other terms, the reports of memory. Memory of course is not always accurate, but whatever is remembered is prima facie credible because it is so remembered. Moreover, the whole range of empirical beliefs based on memory and present perception is assured by their congruence. Neither prima facie credibility nor congruence of acceptable beliefs is alone suf¤cient to ensure the credibility of empirical knowledge, but rather each lends support to the other. Prima facie credibility of memory is simply the acceptance of anything reported by memory in one’s own immediate awareness. Any remembered incident is accepted as credible as it occurs, though it may in fact prove to be inaccurate. As a practical solution to the problem of the inaccuracies of memory, one may, of course, further test the belief based on the memory. This, however, does not answer the theoretical question, for the problem for Lewis is the justi¤cation, not the veri¤cation, of beliefs. Congruence provides an added dimension in the insurance of credibility. A set of statements, or the assertion of a supposed set of facts, to be congruent, must be related in such a fashion that the antecedent probability of any one of them is increased if the rest are taken as given premises.53 The relation of congruence is more than mutual consistency, but less than logical deducibility. Consistency is not enough, for any contingent statement is contained in some self-consistent comprehensive system. Congruence cannot be assimilated to coherence or logical deducibility, for the consequences of a hypothesis are not deducible from it. And, while empirical beliefs are congruent in that the probability of any one of a given set is increased
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by ¤nding the others in that set to be true, some of the items, at least, must “be independently given facts or have a probability which is antecedent. There must be direct evidence of something which would be improbable coincidence on any other hypothesis than that which is corroborated.”54 Thus, congruence, in its very function, must “feed upon” the prima facie credibility of memory; it cannot test itself. Here Lewis is once again drawing upon his conclusions from logic, observing that the function of congruence gains clari¤cation by considering certain well-known facts about logical systems.55 The assumption about the prima facie correctness of memory is usually taken for granted, and Lewis holds that there is no comprehensible alternative to it. Without some genuine relevance of past experience to future experience, we would have no sense of empirical reality. “This assumption in question has a certain kind of justi¤cation, in the fact that mnemic preservation of past experience, its present-as-pastness, is constitutive of the world we live in. It represents that continuing sense of a reality beyond the narrow con¤nes of the merely sensibly presented; the only reality which as humans we can envisage; the only reality which could come before us to be recognized as such.”56 The above “kind of justi¤cation” is basically the type of ultimate justi¤cation offered by Lewis not only for memory but also for empirical generalizations using the rule of induction, and for the reality of law-like relations upon which such generalizations ultimately depend. The case for their validity rests on their necessity for our knowledge of reality. In connection with law-like relations, Lewis once again attacks Humean skepticism, this time by showing that such skepticism is not radical enough. Hume questions the possibility of the knowledge of laws only and does not put in question the possibility of the identi¤cation or recognition of things. However, the validity of both of these kinds of knowledge turns on the same considerations, for “A world without law must likewise be a world without recognizable things. The recognition of objects requires that same kind of order or reliable relatedness which law also requires.”57 Thus, we cannot take our world as a world of recognizable things and yet doubt
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the validity of all generalizations. The only alternative to such validity is chaos. Lewis, in his ¤nal justi¤cation of the basis of empirical knowledge, falls back on the insights of Kant, “because the deduction of the categories consist at bottom in this: that without the validity of categorial principles no objective experience is possible.”58 And without the assumptions of the prima facie validity of memory, the rule of induction, and the if-then order of real law-like relations, the application of categorial principles is not possible. Lewis’s pragmatic appropriation of Kant’s insights, however, does not assume that experience is limited by ¤xed forms of thought or modes of intuition. The prima facie credibility of memory and the rule of induction as epistemically operative principles constitute neither pervasive features of experience nor limitations on possible experience, but rather are epistemic tools for dealing with any features of experience that may present themselves. The assumptions of their credibility have a “type of justi¤cation,” a pragmatic justi¤cation. Such assumptions work. They cannot be justi¤ed in any other way, for they themselves are the epistemic tools for the justi¤cation of any empirical knowledge. However, knowledge of objects requires more than our own epistemic tools for dealing with experience. It requires a certain orderly sequence in the content of experience, and the content of experience is independent of mind.59 Or, put a slightly different way, a minimal amount of order within the independent content of experience is necessary for knowledge of a world of things, and since we do have this knowledge of a world of things, we can assume something about the independently given aspect of experience. Lewis realizes that such a presumption concerning what is independent of mind might be thought to be dogmatic and foundationless, but concludes that he has made no assumption of anything concerning the independently given that could conceivably be false, granting the fact that we can and do distinguish a world of things. He must assume only three things, which he calls Principles A, B, and C. Principle A, which is the fundamental principle, states,
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“It must be false, that every identi¤able entity in experience is equally associated with every other,” or in other terms, “actuality must be a limitation of the all-possible.”60 Principle B, which is almost a corollary of A, states that in any suf¤ciently extended situation in which there are identi¤able entities that fail to satisfy Principle A—that is, whose association is random—there will be other entities, systematically connected with the former or speci¤able in terms of them, that do satisfy Principle A.61 Thus, from the random constituents we proceed by analysis to simpler elements, or take larger wholes, or con¤ne attention to abstracted elements. Principle C, which follows from principles A and B, asserts that the statistical prediction of the future from the past cannot be generally invalid, “because whatever is future to any given past, is in turn past for some future.”62 In short, there is no conceivable way in which what is given can present itself that could be such that our predictions would not be better if we intelligently observed past dealings and continually revised our predictions on the basis of accumulated experience. In less technical terms, it might be said that all we need to assume is that “the deck is stacked.” If the deck is not stacked, then past cuts turning up jacks more often then queens, for example, gives no indication of what one may expect in future experience. But if we know the deck is stacked in some way, then the frequent occurrence of jacks gives a basis for what to expect in future cuts; and if that does not materialize, we revise our expectations in terms of other ways cumulative experience now indicates as to just how the deck may be stacked. Given these minimal metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of independent reality, Lewis holds that a mind with epistemic activities such as ours can “introduce order by conceptual classi¤cation and categorial delimitation of the real, and would, through learning from accumulated experience, anticipate the future in ways which increasingly satisfy its practical intent.”63 These three principles concerning the independently given can be seen to provide a metaphysical correlate to the epistemically operative principle expressed by the rule of induction. To the skeptical attempt to take the other of the two alternatives
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offered by Lewis and assert that possibly there is no such thing as valid objective knowledge, genuine knowledge of reality, Lewis’s reply is ready. “Empirical reality does not need to be assumed nor to be proved, but only to be acknowledged. Nor does the thesis that empirical reality can be known, require to be postulated or to be demonstrated.”64 Thus, Lewis’s ¤nal defense of his tools of justi¤cation is that only if the common assumptions of the prima facie credibility of memory and the rule of induction are acknowledged and accepted, and only if the independently real has those characteristics indicated by his brief excursion into metaphysics, can the indisputable fact that we do have empirical probable knowledge be explained. Lewis’s general excursions into metaphysics, however, run much broader and deeper than what he here needs to explain the possibility of empirical knowledge, and his position offers signi¤cant implications for rethinking the nature of metaphysics in the context of pragmatism and contemporary debates in general, as will be seen in the following chapter.
4 Through Experience to Metaphysics
Lewis’s position incorporates diverse understandings of reality, each of which a vision of embodies a reality in the making, a reality that is in an ongoing process of evolving or restructuring itself. And his understanding of the nature of and interrelation between them offers a solid pathway for avoiding some of the traditional problems of philosophy as well as the paradoxes of which thoughtful common sense frequently becomes aware. Types of Categories; Types of Metaphysics Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism is concerned with the development of an epistemological position in which knowledge arises by the application of concepts or categories or meanings to an independent element. As discussed in a previous chapter, in the context of Lewis’s technical terminology, “categories” indicate the most fundamental concepts or principles of ordering by the mind. Hence, eliciting fundamental categories clari¤es the fundamental purposive attitudes or fundamental meanings in terms of which we approach the independent element. They exhibit interpretive attitudes, not that which is interpreted. They do not, in them-
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selves, provide any information about the independent element in its character as independent. Lewis does state that the categories are “the principles which formulate criteria of the real.”1 However, what he here means by reality is that experiential content that has been subsumed under its proper category. Thus, he says, “The problem of distinguishing real from unreal, the principles of which metaphysics seeks to formulate, is always a problem of right understanding, of referring the given experience to its proper category.”2 And again, “Metaphysics is concerned to reveal just that set of major classi¤cations of phenomena, and just those precise criteria of valid understanding, by which the whole array of given experience can be set in order and each item (ideally) assigned its intelligible and unambiguous place.”3 In this context he notes that while principles of interpretation do not impose limitations on the given, they condition the given as a constituent of reality.4 The reality thus “produced” is not independent reality in its character as independent of our interpretive categories, but rather is a reality that results from the epistemic process of conceptually structuring that which is given for interpretation. In this sense, metaphysics is, in fact, systematic epistemology. However, if the epistemic process is such that knowledge arises by the application of concepts to an independent element, then certain conditions must hold of this independent element.5 In short, the universe must be one that allows for the knowledge situation as Lewis’s pragmatic epistemology interprets it. Lewis himself recognizes this second sense of metaphysics when he states that the problem of realism, idealism, or phenomenalism is at one and the same time epistemological and metaphysical, because it concerns the subject-object relation, instead of any relation both ends of which necessarily lie in cognitive experience itself.6 Similarly, he holds that there are “metaphysical presuppositions which are essential to epistemology, for example, the nature of knowledge itself, presupposes a reality to be known which transcends the content of any experience in which it may be known.” 7 Here it is clear that Lewis sees metaphysics as related to the independent element, not to the epistemic categorization of experience.
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Metaphysical speculation in this second sense, as the analysis of that which must hold of independent reality if the knowledge process is to be possible, must itself, as a form of knowing, utilize categories. However, the categories as metaphysical are not on the same level as the categories applied to the given, independent element to give rise to the epistemically contoured reality, the known world in which we live. The categories as truly metaphysical stand above any context of epistemic reality as tools for understanding and describing the pervasive textures of all experience, textures that are embedded within any alternative category or concept by which the independently real is grasped and that are held to characterize that independently real universe within which such meaning functions. It is this second sense that will be intended by the term “metaphysics” in the remainder of this work. Lewis holds that the metaphysical categories indicate conditions necessary for the application of categories to a given content in the epistemic process. Yet these categorizations of independent reality themselves arise within the knowledge process—though at a higher level of re®ective inquiry. And if the knowledge process is characterized as one in which alternative sets of categories can be applied to the given data, then it would seem that there must be alternatives to the categories by which Lewis delimits the outlines of independent reality. This, however, is precisely what Lewis would hold—at least in a sense. Though Lewis speaks of metaphysics as providing the presuppositions for epistemology, he notes that though a presupposition is logically prior, the idea of necessity must be given up. Nor is such a presupposition known by some “higher” type of knowledge, for as he explains: Where the body of facts which such a presupposition implies is considerable and well established, and there are no implications of it which are known to be false, the presupposition gains that kind of veri¤cation which particulars can give to general principles—that is, the partial and inductive veri¤cation of it as an original hypothesis.8
Such a metaphysics can be only tentative and responsive to experience while at the same time legislating for the analysis of ex-
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perience. This type of procedure, however, is not peculiar to metaphysical analysis but rather is continuous with the method of the pragmatic a priori that pervades all levels of knowledge. As Lewis observes, when dealing with the highly abstract level of scienti¤c theory (and, mutatis mutandis, the level of metaphysical theory), it “is no longer easily possible to say whether concepts are devised, and laws discovered, to ¤t phenomenal facts, or whether the conceptual system itself rules and facts are reconceived in conformity to it.”9 Our interpretive concepts and categories at all levels, from the most primitive apprehensions of common sense to the most sophisticated knowledge of metaphysics, have arisen out of past experience, have been made prescriptive for the interpretation of future experience, and are subject to the demands of workability in the ongoing course of experience. Such a self-corrective method is not viciously circular, nor is it circular at all. Rather once again what is evidenced is a cumulative process based on the pragmatic interplay at every level between concepts or categories and experience. Like all categories at all levels, the categories of metaphysics are drawn from experience, but they are universally applicable because we make them analytic tools for the understanding and interpretation of the experiential data with which we are trying to deal—in this case the given fact that we do have “metaphysically veridical” empirical knowledge.10 Like any set of categories at any level, they are justi¤ed by the intelligibility they introduce into their given data. The categories of metaphysics, then, instead of prescribing the features of types of epistemic realities to which there can be alternatives, attempt to get at the pervasive features of that independent reality to which there is no alternative. The categories of metaphysics have no necessity, but they are attempting to express that which is “necessary” in the sense that they are attempting to get hold of the all pervasive general features of reality that give rise to the general texture of experience as we ¤nd it and that make possible the kind of knowledge that we do, in fact, have. Our most all-pervasive modes of experiencing re®ect not only our own purposive attitudes, but also the general features of that
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which is independently given. What Lewis is attempting to capture through the metaphysical categories he utilizes are those unalterable pervasive features of the independently given, metaphysically ultimate reality, as evidenced in the general texture of our experience into which it enters. This leads to the categorial net that Lewis uses to catch the general features of that which is “there.” From Meaning to Metaphysics Lewis’s theory of meaning is relevant for coming to grips with the issue of the meaningfulness of metaphysical claims within a philosophy that concentrates on the clari¤cation of meaning in terms of sense experience. It will be seen below that Lewis’s metaphysics, like that of the other pragmatic philosophers, tends toward process as opposed to substance, realism as opposed to nominalism, and an element of spontaneity as opposed to determinism. Typically, all three of these types of issues have been attacked as meaningless in various ways from the perspectives of various empirical frameworks. However, the meaningfulness of all of these issues is clearly grounded in Lewis’s pragmatic understanding of the structure of meaning as dispositional. First, such a structure of meaning grounds in lived experience a primordial grasp of time as process. What occurs within the present awareness is not the apprehension of a discrete datum in a moment of time, but rather the time-extended experiential “feel” within the passing present of a readiness to respond to more than can ever be speci¤ed. This “feel” provides the experiential basis for the meaningfulness of a process metaphysics. As Lewis observes, “it is not the time-extended cognition but the chopping of it up into unextended instants which is ¤ctitious.”11 Or, as he elsewhere states, “There is only one given, the Bergsonian real duration. . . . The absolutely given is a specious present, fading into the past and growing into the future with no genuine boundaries.” 12 Further, Lewis’s dispositional theory of meaning leads to a realism as opposed to nominalism, not a realism of eternal es-
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sences but a “process realism” in which there are real modes of behavior that govern what occurs. Laws cannot be understood as some shorthand for what occurs. Laws, which outrun any number of actualities, are, as modes of behavior, the source of the structures emerging in what occurs. While their veri¤cation requires actual occurrences in experience, their meaning is irreducible to verifying experiences, actual or possible. Our dispositional modes of response are precisely lawful modes of behavior structuring emerging activities. Lewis’s position lies in opposition to the Bridgman-type operational de¤nition of meaning that reduces meaning to its veri¤cation instances. And, as seen earlier, it requires the meaningfulness of counterfactual claims, which in turn requires strict implication as opposed to material implication. In claiming that the rooting of meaning in experience makes any assertion of realism as opposed to nominalism meaningless, the question often is posed, “How can any experience of what occurs provide a meaningful experiential content for the concept of unactualized possibilities, of a reality of potentialities that outruns any experienced actualities?” Here, in Lewis’s pragmatic understanding of meaning in terms of action, the answer to the problem of the meaningfulness of real potentiality is to be found, for a disposition or habit as a rule of generation is something whose possibilities of determination no multitude of actually generated instances can exhaust. The awareness of habit as a disposition or readiness to respond to more than can be speci¤ed gives a concrete meaning to the concept of a “process realism,” of a real lawfulness that governs unactualized possibilities. Thus, the meaning of the potentialities and real relations of which Lewis and the other pragmatists speak is to be found in the awareness of the actuality of habit as that which can never be exhausted by any number of exempli¤cations. Further, that readiness to respond to more than can ever be made explicit, which is “there” in the functioning of habit, is immediately experienced in the passing present and gives experiential content to the concept of the “more than” of objectivities that can never be exhaustively experienced, to the concept of unactualized
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possibilities of being experienced that pervade every grasp of the world around us and that belie any attempt at phenomenalistic reductionism. Finally, the sense of unactualized possibilities embedded in meaning as dispositional brings a sense of real alternatives—the “could do otherwise”—into the heart of perceptual awareness. Thus it provides an experientially meaningful basis for the rejection of deterministic hypotheses and a recognition of what Lewis refers to as a “primordial sense of probable events.” 13 These subtle tones of experiencing within the internal structure of meaning make the above metaphysical issues meaningful. To move from the meaningfulness of the issues to Lewis’s claim that they are in fact features of the metaphysically real leads to Lewis’s pragmatic understanding of the transactional nature of experience. For Lewis, as for all the pragmatists, humans are natural organisms in interaction with a natural environment. One of the most distinctive and most crucial aspects of pragmatism is its concept of experience as having the character of an interaction or transaction between humans and their environment. For Lewis, as for the pragmatists in general, experience is that rich ongoing transactional unity, and only within the context of meanings that re®ect such an interactional unity does what is given emerge for conscious awareness. And if experience is an interactional unity of our responses to an environment, then the nature of experience re®ects both the responses we bring and the pervasive textures of the independently real. There is, thus, for the pragmatist in general and for Lewis in particular, a “two-directional openness” within experience. What appears opens in one direction toward the structures of the independently real or the surrounding natural environment and in the other direction toward the structures of the human modes of grasping that independently real, for what is experienced is in fact a unity formed by each in interaction with the other. There is, for Lewis, an ontological dimension of what appears that reveals itself in experience and that forms a limit on our interpretations. The pervasive textures of experience, which are exempli¤ed in
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every experience and embedded within the meanings by which we respond to the world, are at the same time indications of the pervasive textures of that independent universe which, in every experience, gives itself for our responses and provides the touchstone for the workability of our meanings. Though how we get hold of reality is relative to the conceptual net we bring, Lewis stresses that “what is relative is also independent; if it has no ‘absolute character’ it would have no character in relative terms.”14 As he explains, “We know objects only as we know certain objective properties of them, which are potentialities or reliable dispositional traits resident in the nature of them as they objectively exist, and whose manifestations are variously observable: directly in the presentational content of human experience to which they give rise.”15 Knowledge, for Lewis, is neither a copy of the independently real, nor qualitative identity between that of which consciousness is immediately aware and the independently real in its character as independent. Rather, knowledge is justi¤ed prediction. We know the independently real by knowing its potentialities for interacting in various ways to give rise to various qualitative emergents, among the most important of which are its potentialities for giving rise to certain qualia under certain speci¤ed conditions. As Lewis takes pains to show, knowledge is relative to the mind, the content of knowledge is of the real, and yet the real is independent of mind. He holds that this understanding negates the fundamental premises of phenomenalism and idealism, meets some of the main dif¤culties of skepticism, and supports the general attitude of common-sense realism without attempting the impossible task of trying to avoid the relativity of knowledge.16 The function of conceptual interpretation is to transcend the relativity of qualia to the mind by comprising a “relational pattern in which the independent nature of what is apprehended is exhibited in experience.” We “construct” objective reality through conceptual interpretation of given qualia of sense, but our constructions that work do so because they “¤t on to” or “logically cut into” the real potentialities and real modes of interacting inherent in the nature of reality in its character as independent.
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Thus, epistemic theory must show how, from the contents present to consciousness, we build up interpretations by which we have “metaphysically veridical”17 knowledge of the independently real. He objects to phenomenalism on the grounds that it commits a fallacy by claiming that because of the relativity of knowledge to the mind, knowledge of the independently real is impossible.18 In short, Lewis is not advocating phenomenalism, but rather is presenting a “phenomenology of the perceptual.”19 Qualia are the independently real in its relation to consciousness. They are qualitative emergents in organism-environment interaction. As Lewis states, “It is still possible in terms of the conception here presented, to af¤rm that the content of presentation is an authentic part or aspect or perspective which is ingredient in the objective reality known. . . . The hiatus implied in the view here presented, between immediate sense presentation and objective reality thus evidenced, is not the denial that the content of presentation may be ‘numerically indentical’ with a part of the objective reality.”20 Even the mirage, “although not real trees and water, is a real state of atmosphere and light.”21 And in the givenness of hedonic types of qualities such as fear, joy, sorrow, and so forth,22 or what Dewey succinctly calls “tertiary qualities,” as well as in the case of illusion, the state of the physical organism is a “peculiarly explanatory part of the objective state of affairs.”23 Lewis makes the distinction between the “order of being” and the “order of knowing,” and stresses that an epistemological analysis does not make analyses of other sorts super®uous. The “order of being” is what is known, but the “order of knowing” must explain how it is that we know.24 He stresses that the mistake of too much philosophy “since Kant, and perhaps particularly amongst idealists,” is the tendency to “attach to epistemological analyses a kind of exclusive truth.” As he further observes, “In some one of the innumerable meanings of the word ‘is’ it must be true that a thing is what it is ‘known as’, identi¤able with its ratio cognoscendi, but it is also the effect of its causes, the cause of its effects, the organized whole of its physical or other constituents, and a hundred other signi¤cant things besides.”25 Though Lewis’s main emphasis is usually on the epistemic as-
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pect, the other senses of “is” are always there in the background, providing the context for his discussion. The basic textures of experience thus lead to the outlines of the categories of metaphysics. The categories of metaphysics, for Lewis, are the categories of a philosophy of nature, but not the nature of the natural scientist. Rather, it is the sense of nature before natural science, the level of nature to which humans, as active agents, are fundamentally bound. Toward a Metaphysics of Process Lewis’s view of metaphysics is very much that of the epistemologist drawn into metaphysical speculation. It has been seen that he has two different yet interrelated views of the role of metaphysics: metaphysics as systematic epistemology and metaphysics as concerned with the nature of the independent element that enters into the knowledge situation. However, even his statements relating to the latter position can be seen as an epistemologist’s view of metaphysical problems, for though he will state a problem in terms of the nature of independent reality and begin discussing the problem from such a metaphysical perspective, he tends frequently to shift gradually in his discussion from the problem of the nature of independent reality to the problem of our knowledge of independent reality. Thus, Lewis’s strong epistemological interests often obscure, to ¤rst glance, the real metaphysical nature of the problems involved. However, when Lewis’s diverse metaphysical assertions are brought into sharper focus, the outlines of a pragmatic metaphysics emerge as a systematization of the metaphysical features implicit in his pragmatic understanding of experience and meaning. It was seen earlier that Lewis, in his justi¤cation of empirical knowledge, holds that the if-then order of real relations is a condition required for knowing rather than a way of knowing. It is an order expressed in our knowledge system by “If A, then probably B.” In this expression of the relationship involved, two features of metaphysical reality emerge, both rooted in the pervasive textures of experience. The ¤rst feature is indicated by Lewis’s
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statement that the kind of connection holding between what is asserted by “If A then B” bears on the possibility of knowing an independently real world.”26 The aspect of real relations of which Lewis here speaks is their nature as embodying potentialities that no number of actual occasions can exhaust. Metaphysical reality, then, includes potentiality or lawfulness. Lewis frequently refers to such potentiality as possibility, but it is a strong sense of possibility, the “would-be” of Peirce’s category of Thirdness, as distinct from a weaker sense to be discussed below. Thus, our creative concepts embodying dispositional modes of response can grasp the real dynamic tendencies of reality to produce operations of a certain type with a certain regularity. In the relation expressed by “If A, then probably B,” a second important feature of metaphysical reality emerges. B need not be actualized, for real relations are probability connections. Alternative actualizations are possible. Lewis, like Peirce and James before him, recognizes that reality has a certain amount of “loose play” that allows for exceptions to lawfulness; possibility is a real feature of metaphysical reality. This, then, is a weak sense of possibility, the “may-be” of Peirce’s category of Firstness as opposed to the “would-be” of Thirdness. The “could do otherwise” experienced within the structure of meaning as dispositional has its counterpart in the “could do otherwise” contained within the modes of behavior of the universe. Independent reality, which is ultimately given as one component in experience, thus assists in providing, as an all-pervasive texture of experience, that which enters into our “primordial sense of probable events.”27 As noted earlier, Lewis holds that our grasp of empirical knowledge rests on such a primordial sense of probable events. Independent brute hereness and nowness, or the force of interaction,28 is also a condition required for knowing rather than a way of knowing. Lewis is emphasizing here that same pervasive texture of experience that Santayana expresses as “shock,” and Peirce as “Secondness.” It is the aspect of brute existence or actuality asserting its “thereness” through interaction, the surdity of that ontological dimension which reveals itself in experience and forms a limit on our interpretations.
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The categories of possibility, potentiality, and actuality, then, stand above any speci¤c epistemic context as the conceptual net by which to catch the all-pervasive textures of experience and features of the independently real. The importance not only of these three categories but also of their mode of interrelation can be seen from a fundamental metaphysical requirement that Lewis is forced to make within the context of a purely epistemological discussion. He notes that knowledge as predictive requires the assumption that though “any possibility is a possible actuality, it is not possible that all possibilities should be concomitantly real.”29 Or, in other terms, actuality must be a “limitation of the allpossible.” 30 With these three all-pervasive “categories of being” as tools of analysis, Lewis develops his understanding of objects and qualities. Lewis notes that the ontological problem of the status of objects comes down to whether an object is nothing but a bundle of attributes and existential surdity or whether more is needed, and he articulates this by connecting it to traditional discussions of substance: “One must either ¤nd in the object something which persists unaltered, or one must penetrate to some law-like or predictable mode of such alteration.”31 Quality and surd existence, then, are not suf¤cient; objects require either unalterable substance or lawful alteration. He avoids the concept of substance as “unhelpful”32 and opts rather for lawfulness, a type of lawfulness embodied in process. As he states, “An object is an event; some continuous volume in space time comprising a history of enduring. Characteristically, the process of change in this kind of event is never too abrupt or too pervasive.”33 This option for process metaphysics is to be expected, for it has been seen that Lewis’s theory of meaning incorporates, as a pervasive texture of experience, the “feel” of the passage of time, of time as duration. Were it not for such a primordial sense of duration, the “feel” of the potentialities and alternatives that are constitutive of the meaning of objectivity could not be “had” in experience through the functioning of habit. Such a tendency toward process is mirrored in the writings of all of the classical American pragmatists.
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Lewis holds that whatever is an object is a discrete individual, and that objects as individuals answer to the law of excluded middle,34 but this concerns the issue of objects as we experience them, as being abstracted by relation to something distinctive of the human.35 There are stars in the heavens, but constellations only for our seeing. Perhaps likewise there are molar masses only for our senses, directed upon the quanta or wavicles which inhabit the ocean of energy. But at least the potentiality of so appearing to us, instead of otherwise, and of being discriminable as just these molar masses, in just these relations to one another, is in the ocean itself, as constituted independently of us.36
Objects as individuals depend upon interaction with a “minded organism,” but the potentiality of thus appearing is in the independent reality itself. This potentiality is not the potentiality of ideal archetypes or substantive features in any sense but rather is the potentiality inherent in “modes of persistence” or “continuities.” 37 Just as a continuum is real apart from the cuts actualized, so the potentialities of process are real apart from the occasions actualized. Such real connections are not “possible things” but rather real connections among possible events or matters of fact. An object as an experienced particular, then, is an abstracted or selected portion of some continuum of events that contains potentialities for more and other experiences. Such a process or continuum of events reveals itself to us through the meaning structures we bring. Thus it can be seen again, this time from the metaphysical perspective, that what is given is not without structure, but yet is further structurable by the meanings through which it reveals itself to us. Lewis here provides the metaphysical foundation for the pragmatic claim that experienced particulars are products of organism-environment interaction or transaction. Lewis’s discussion of the ontological status of objects leads directly to the problem of the ontological status of qualities, and his concern here is to distinguish properties of objects from qualia of sense-presentation. The problem he attacks is that we persistently confuse sense-qualia with objective properties of things, although
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one can never be an instance of the other. This is not because we use a color such as “blue” for an entire range of objective color properties or for an entire range of visual qualia, for “Make ‘blue’ as precise a word as the artist’s ‘crimson lake’ when he buys a tube of paint, and it is still true that this speci¤c property of any object presents itself to the eye by some whole range of visual qualia.” 38 The immediately presented quale, in the context of its circumstances, is a manifestation of the objective color-property of something, and is a frequently used way of verifying that objective property, though other ways, such as spectroscopic examination, may be more precise and decisive. But the visual quale and the objective color of an object cannot be identical “because they belong to different categories of being.”39 But of course for Lewis the categories are our tools for abstractive understanding. The categories of metaphysics are tools for analysis of the pervasive textures of the independently real, ongoing process. They are not intended to indicate some sort of distinct metaphysical realms. Quality as an objective property is a “dispositional trait,”40 a “propensity of behavior.”41 As such, it belongs to the category of potentiality. Qualia, or qualitative immediacies, however, are the dispositional traits as they manifest themselves through interaction with a perceiving organism, emergents within the context of interacting potentialities. Such qualia are as metaphysically real as the dispositional traits, but their reality consists in their emergence within the context of interacting continuities. For Lewis, as for Peirce, qualitative immediacy belongs to the category of diversity, spontaneity, or sheer “suchness”—in short, to Peirce’s category of Firstness. Or, in Dewey’s terms, the qualitative endings of interacting continuities have an aspect of the unpredictable, the spontaneous, the unique, the ineffable. Neither qualia as repeatable sense presentations nor objective qualities as abstract repeatable universal entities belong to the categories of metaphysics. To attribute repeatable sense presentations or repeatable objective qualities to the independently real in its character as independent is to confuse the categories of substance metaphysics with those of process epistemology, for they
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are functions of epistemic activity. If there were no epistemic structuring of what is given, “there would be no abstract entities”; reality would be classi¤able but there would be there would be “no classes.”42 As seen earlier, meaning as dispositional provides the possibilities for the emergence of classes within experience. The Making of Worlds Lewis’s concept of world and its relation to an independently real universe is intertwined with his two distinct meanings of metaphysics. The independently real universe has been seen to be a concrete, ongoing, inde¤nitely rich process composed not of discrete substances but of continua of events. Or, as he states within the context of epistemology, the absolutely given is a “Bergsonian real duration.” It is concrete in the sense that it contains an inde¤nite richness of possibilities and potentialities inherent in its nature as a “hard” or “brutely there” reality in process. Our knowledge can never embody more than a partial selection or abstraction from its inde¤nite concreteness. The world, for Lewis, develops as a precise encompassing structure that emerges from the application of an abstract conceptual system to the concrete process and that, as the product of the logical interaction of both, is identical with neither. Or, as expressed in less abstract terms, the world is the outermost horizon or encompassing frame of reference of organism-environment interaction, of our active engagement with a processive universe. Lewis, discussing the difference between systems and worlds, notes that “[a] system may omit both a fact and its contradictory, but a world must have one or the other. Thus, a system will be indeterminate in ways that a world cannot be. The relation of a system to a world which includes it is the relation of knowledge to reality.”43 Here Lewis seems to equate “world” and “reality” as the concrete process. Yet Lewis also states that “[i]n the only sense in which we can speak of a world at all, whether actual or possible, there is a possible world for every self-consistent system.”44 There is but one concrete process, but a plurality of self-consistent systems that may be applied to it. It is precisely
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Lewis’s point that what is given to mind allows for alternative self-consistent interpretations. And it is our interpretive structures that must be orderly and self-consistent, not what is given for interpretation, for “a mind set down in any chaos would proceed to introduce order by conceptual classi¤cation and categorial delimitation of the real.”45 As he points out, if we could even imagine anything violating the laws of excluded middle or noncontradiction, then “the ever present fact of change would do it every day.”46 A world is similar to reality as the concrete process in that “world” indicates a concrete whole that can be only partially grasped. Yet, a world is dependent upon the abstract system that grasps in a way in which reality as the concrete process is not, for a world is that perspective of the concrete process which has been “¤xed” or “carved out” by an abstract system. Knowledge is abstractive and selective. A world, though concrete, is nonetheless selective in the sense that a world, as the concrete content denoted by an abstract system, is one way among many possible ways in which the one metaphysical reality or concrete process can be delineated or “¤xed.” And, though alternative classi¤catory systems are always possible, a system, once chosen, limits the alternatives possible within it, though the richness of the possible alternatives so ¤xed can never be fully grasped. Thus, he holds that “no conceivable knowledge can ever be adequate to a world.”47 This is because “our knowledge ¤xates a whole system of facts but cannot exhaust it.” 48 A ¤xated system of facts can never be exhausted because any meaning or conceptual demarcation has its own implicated meanings that limit the range of possibilities of experience— though they do not determine which possibility will become actual. We can never know the precise range of possibilities or the complete implications of any conceptual delineation that we make. What is implied here is an objectivity in an epistemological sense. Lewis is not here asserting that we cannot know a “space time slab of reality” in absolute completeness, though of course we cannot49—whether we mean the space-time slab denoted by
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a single concept or by a systematic set of propositions—but rather that because we have limited intellectual capabilities, we cannot know all the implications or range of possibilities allowed by any conceptualization of experience. The world is determined by a system of facts, but facts are not independent of the selective knowledge process.50 “A fact is an actual state of affairs. But ‘fact’ is a crypto-relative term, like ‘landscape’. A landscape is a terrain, but a terrain as seeable by an eye. And a fact is a state of affairs, but a state of affairs as knowable by a mind and statable by a statement.”51 And, though our knowledge ¤xates a system of facts or abstractions from the concrete process, it cannot exhaust them because of their in¤nite number. Thus, no knowledge can be adequate to a world because the world requires precisely such a completed system of facts. Just as knowledge cannot be adequate to a world, in that it cannot grasp the epistemological richness of its content—and, mutatis mutandis, the space-time concreteness of its content, so it would seem that a world cannot be adequate to reality in that different worlds, as the concrete content or denotation of different systems, could ¤xate the concrete process from a different though perhaps equally adequate perspective. No one “¤xation” of the concrete process, no matter how broad it be, can be exhaustive of its in¤nite richness, for a process over®ows any rigid limits set. Or, in terms of the continuum of events that constitutes metaphysical reality in its total concreteness, it can perhaps be said, somewhat metaphorically, that while reality is the in¤nity of a continuum or ongoing process, the world is the logical ¤xation of an in¤nite number of possible cuts within it. Thus, the world is the context of meaning within which all other frameworks and objects may be articulated in the sense that “the world” is the denotation or the “outermost” content or encompassing frame of reference of the application of a set of de¤nitive categories and hence of the propositions that can delineate experience within the context of these categories. The world is the ideal of a complete synthesis of possible experience in the sense that “anything which could appropriately be called a world must be such that one or other of every pair of
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contradictory propositions would apply to or be true of it; and such that all the propositions thus holding of it will be mutually consistent. “52 A world is by de¤nition consistent because a world is that concrete content which is denoted by a total set of consistent propositions. The world answers to the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction because it is that which has been conceptually articulated, and hence made precise, to its ideal limit. In this sense reality is “simply a regulative ideal of reason.”53 “The world,” then, is at once the basis for every experience and the ideal of a complete synthesis of possible experience. To say that the world is the ¤xation of an in¤nite number of possible cuts may seem to indicate an arbitrariness in which the concrete process is amenable to our wish or will, but here Lewis’s several precise meanings of possibility come into play. When he speaks of possible experience, he at times means consistently thinkable, at other times one or another of the two senses of possibility determined by the nature of real connections. Such possibilities embodied in the nature of real connections are to be found within the concrete process. They are there whether we choose to focus upon them or not. Moreover, “possible” in the sense of consistently thinkable is also used in two ways. In addition to the distinction between the consistently thinkable and the two types of metaphysical possibilities indicated above, Lewis distinguishes, within the consistently thinkable, what he calls relative possibility and absolute possibility.54 Absolute possibility means logical conceivability or the absence of self-contradiction. Thus, absolute possibility is logical possibility. Relative possibility refers to the relationship between what is being considered and a set of data or our knowledge as a whole. In this second sense, “possible” means “consistent with the data” or “consistent with everything known.” Possible in this second sense seems to indicate a type of “physical possibility.” He points out that while relative possibility implies absolute possibility, absolute possibility does not imply relative possibility.55 But if a proposition that is absolutely possible but not relatively possible (not consistent with the given data) is com-
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bined with the body of given data, a logically impossible set results. In this sense, the range of relative possibilities is implied by the absolutely possible. Thus, at any time, a range of what is relatively possible can be determined ideally or logically, though what speci¤c possibility will in fact be actualized in the future cannot be determined in this manner. The logically conceivable or the logically possible is the realm of the ideal or conceptual within which the facts of experience must be located. And what is logically possible from the perspective of one organization of data will not be logically possible from the perspective of a different systematization. As Lewis states, there is a “plurality of equally cogent systems which may contain the same body of already veri¤ed propositions but differ in what else they include.”56 And what else they include is not merely what facts will be but also what facts conceivably may be. The hereness and nowness of events is independent of our categorizations and the possibilities that they allow, but what the hereness and nowness can consistently be held to be is determined by the range of “epistemological possibility” or relative possibility within which facts can be consistently abstracted. Thus, relative possibility, which in its broadest sense determines what may occur “in the world,” cannot be understood apart from the knowledge structure that grasps the concrete process— though this does not lead to an arbitrariness in which the concrete process is amenable to our wish or will. What is “physically possible” within the context of our world itself arises from a “logical ¤xation” of the in¤nite number of possible cuts inherent in the concrete process in its nature as a continuum. Thus, in a somewhat loose sense it can be said that what occurs must be ontologically possible, while what occurs must be epistemically possible as well. What must be stressed again, however, is that what is ontologically possible cannot be de¤ned as that which obeys the law of non-contradiction, for the law of non-contradiction applies to our conceptual structures and that which is grasped by them, not to the continuous processes that are given for conceptual interpretation. As Peirce has pointed out in similar fashion,
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what is continuous is both general and vague and hence that to which neither the law of non-contradiction nor the law of excluded middle is perfectly applicable.57 This distinction between ontological possibility and epistemic possibility must be clearly maintained if the most all-inclusive functioning of the pragmatic a priori is to be understood. The inconceivable cannot occur “in the world” because the world is by de¤nition the outcome of the conceptual knowledge process and thus what occurs in the world must by de¤nition conform to the requirements of conceivability. The mind conceptually structures the concrete process that is given for interpretation; it is through conceptual interpretation of that which is given that it creates the world in which it lives; and it is the function of knowledge to so structure what is given that it does become intelligible. What can occur “in the world” must conform to the possibilities available within the world we have structured—though the world we have structured has itself arisen through the successful handling of what is there to be dealt with in experience. Our surrounding natural environment, our world of sensible experience, is the independently real as it enters the contours of our ¤eld of active, purposive interest. Because the hereness and nowness of events and the real connections they display are independent of our conceptualizations and the possibilities they allow, coherence or consistency is not a suf¤cient criterion for the truth of empirical assertions. And because of the indeterminacy inherent in the universe in its nature as an ongoing thick process, the concept of truth as conformity is senseless, indeed literally so. Rather, there must be a pragmatic interplay between our concepts or categories and actual experience. Truth is relative to a context of interpretation, then, not because truth is relative but because truths can arise only with an interpretive context. The position that emerges from Lewis’s statements concerning “the world” both re®ects and helps complete the position he develops in his epistemology. For Lewis, our world is a world determined through and through by the operation of the pragmatic a priori in interaction with the “hard” independently given ele-
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ment. From the most all-inclusive re®ections upon that encompassing frame of reference that determines what facts conceivably may be to the most self-contained apprehension of a speci¤c recognizable quale that presents itself in a given passage of experience, that which we apprehend is partially determined by interpretive structures that have emerged from past experience but that have been made prescriptive for the structuring of future experience. The Dilemma of Labels Lewis concludes that his metaphysical convictions “are, as it happens, realistic,” because the very nature of knowledge presupposes a reality there to be known which transcends the content of the experiences by which it may become known.58 Here Lewis embraces realism not because there is a fully structured independent reality that mind mirrors in adequate knowledge, but partially because metaphysical nominalism is not adequate to express the operations of independent reality in its character as independent. Because of the nature of Lewis’s realism, when he discusses epistemic alternatives he rejects the realist alternatives of representation or identity, and instead states that pragmatism and objective idealism are the two alternatives that allow for a reality that transcends the content of experience.59 Lewis’s realism tends toward the idealist position because what is real are not discrete individual substances but rather law-like relations that go beyond the content of particular experiences— for Lewis, relations among events. However, Lewis rejects idealism on both epistemic and metaphysical grounds. Speaking within the context of epistemology, he notes that while for objective idealists there is a deductive relation between a real object and an experience of it, for the pragmatist there is an inductive relationship.60 And within a more metaphysical context, he holds that idealism, taking the relativity of knowledge as its main premise, argues from that to reality’s complete dependence on mind.61 Thus, he further embraces realism because it recognizes that the reality known is independent of mind in its brute “thereness,” yet
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he explicitly rejects the realist efforts to “reconcile the possibility of knowing reality with its independence of mind by one or another attempt to escape the relativity of knowledge.”62 When Lewis speaks within the context of epistemology, he readily notes that his assertions are not merely a modi¤cation of idealism or of realism, but rather are a switch to pragmatism. When ontological issues are discussed, however, Lewis fails to explicitly recognize that if pragmatism presents, in matters of metaphysics, its own “principle of orientation in the search for positive conclusions,” 63 then traditional metaphysical alternatives are not satisfactory. Thus Lewis, after attempting to claim af¤nities with several metaphysical positions but identity with none, accepts metaphysical realism as the lesser of the available evils, never explicitly recognizing the possibility that he has redirected all the available alternatives into a path leading toward a distinctively pragmatic metaphysics. Such a metaphysics envisions a universe of interacting qualitative continuities guided by, but not determined by, the lawfulness or potentialities inherent in a process in its nature as a continuum; a universe in which the passing present brings with it chance reactions and the novel directions of emergent activities; a universe in which we are at home and with which our activities are continuous; a universe in which our lived qualitative experience can grasp real emergent qualitative features of reality and in which our creative concepts embodying dispositionally generated abstract or logical potentialities can grasp the real dynamic tendencies of reality to produce operations of a certain type with a certain regularity. A universe, in short, that is both grasped by and re®ected within the structure of meaning and experience. It is meaning as dispositional that allows for the grasp, at its most basic level, of continuity, real relations and real potentialities; for a sense of an anti-deterministic world in which one grasps real alternative possibilities; for the “feel” of the surd, brute, otherness of the environment to which one must successfully respond. These subtle tones of experience that make our awareness of a world of appearing objects possible are at once the subtle tones, or modes of being, of that ontological reality that enters
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into all experience, for, as has been seen, experience opens in one direction toward the structures of the independently real and in the other direction toward the structures of our modes of grasping or interacting with the independently real. Or, in other terms, what we experience is a function of both in interaction, and thus mirrors neither exactly, though it re®ects characteristics of each. Overview and Signi¤cance Lewis, like many contemporary philosophers, strives to recapture the richness of lived experience within nature. In so doing, his position has signi¤cant implications for contemporary analysis of meaning and experience broadly construed, illustrating that a rigorous analysis of meaning in terms of sense experience can capture the richness of each rather than analyze it away. Further, his emerging metaphysics of “cosmic activity” contains insights helpful for the understanding and further development of contemporary process metaphysics in its various facets. His philosophy illustrates clearly that the contemporary drive toward rigorous and “narrowly technical” analysis of meaning in terms of experience, and the renewed recognition in contemporary times that philosophy without metaphysical vision is incomplete, need be neither antagonistic nor externally related philosophic strains, for Lewis’s pragmatic analysis of meaning in terms of organism-environment interaction incorporates the textures of the ontologically real within the very heart of the structure of meaningful experience. It is perhaps not an overstatement to say that those who ignore the internal structure of meaning in Lewis’s philosophy have not just lost his pragmatic theory of meaning, they have truly lost his encompassing pragmatic vision. Lewis’s technical understanding of world and its relation to the independently real natural universe within which we have our being can contribute its clarifying insights to the many issues and paradoxes that arise at the levels of both philosophy and common sense as the ¤ndings of science and the deliverances of sense compete, con®ict, or collide. We do not know the natural universe in its pristine purity independently of the interpretations we bring
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to it, but the natural universe is always that which we experience, providing the given or presented dimension within experience. Our lived perceptual world and the independently real natural universe are not two spatially, temporally, or experientially different realities, but rather our everyday worldly environment is the result of the way the natural universe enters into our interpretive experience, into the horizons of our everyday active engagement with it. And the various worlds of various abstract levels of re®ection arise from within this concrete everyday world of lived perceptual experience as various explanatory nets cast upon it. The common sense world and the scienti¤c world result from two diverse ways in which we approach the richness of the natural universe in our interpretive activity. They do not each get hold of different realities, nor does one get hold of what is “really real” to the exclusion of the other. Rather, they arise as different ways of understanding the natural universe in which we live, as different areas of interest, serving different purposes. The nature onto which our concrete experience opens is not captured by the contents of science, for its richness over®ows such abstractions. The perceived world of everyday experience grounds the abstract inferences and experimental developments of physical science, which, through its use of the tool of mathematics, leaves behind, for its own valid purposes, the very sense of concrete experience that grounds its endeavors. The things and events within nature as they arise within the world of science cannot be confounded with the natural universe in its ontological fullness. To speak of a slab of concrete reality is not to indicate the ordered content of some particular mathematical system, but rather to indicate the ongoing unfolding of the concrete universe that ultimately both grounds the possibility of, and renders “peculiar” to common sense, the contents of the abstract world of science. The concrete processes of nature are a dimension of our everyday natural environment. Nature as a system of scienti¤c objects or events is a re®ective, creative, abstract explanatory net that arises out of our meaningful everyday world and is cast upon an
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inde¤nitely rich universe, one that works well for the purposes of scienti¤c explanation. If this explanatory net is substituted for the temporally grounded features of an inde¤nitely rich universe, or becomes in any way the absolute model for understanding it, then the roadblock constituted by the problems and dilemmas that have haunted the philosophical tradition will remain impassable. The various abstract environments of the various disciplines, each utilizing its specialized tools of abstraction, are diverse, limited approaches to the concrete matrix of the intertwined relational webs within which individuals operate. There is needed a recognition that each area of interest is highlighting a dimension of a uni¤ed concretely rich complexity from which each draws its ultimate intelligibility and vitality. The problem is not to ¤gure out how to unite ontologically discrete facts studied by different disciplines. Rather, the problem is to distinguish various dimensions of the concrete matrix of relational webs in which human experience is enmeshed. Distinguishing these dimensions is necessary for purposes of intellectual clarity and advancement of understanding, and is accomplished through the dynamics of experimental method. If the problem and solution are viewed in this way, then there will be no temptation to view the resultant “products” in ways that distort both the inde¤nitely rich, concrete natural universe they are intended to clarify and the creative process by which these products are obtained. If such distortion is allowed to happen, then these products can too easily become seen either as self-enclosed relativistic environments immune from criticism from “outside” or as a direct grasp of “what is” in its pristine purity. This is especially the case when one operates within more abstract environments with the speci¤c experimental tool of mathematical quanti¤cation and the “rigor” this allows. One tends to forget that this tool, in the very process of quantifying, leaves behind all of the richness of nature which cannot be caught by a quantitative net. The use of the tool of quanti¤cation predetermines the type of content that is apprehended as being inherently
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mathematizable, while the exclusively mathematizable type of content apprehended in turn reinforces the belief that quanti¤cation is the tool for observational truth. The abstract re®ections of philosophy itself are not a grasp of the universe in its purity, but rather they offer an interpretive network, a theory, that attempts to make meaningful and integrated the full range and reality of human experience and human knowledge, including scienti¤c knowledge. The universe as depicted by Lewis’s metaphysics is different than that depicted by science, for science and philosophy serve different purposes and have different goals. For Lewis, speculative metaphysics is an endeavor rooted in and veri¤ed by lived experience. It provides a speculative analysis, via extrapolation from the pervasive features of lived experience, of what that independent reality must be like, in its character as independent, to give rise to the pervasive features of experience and to the meanings by which it becomes known to us. It thus offers an “explanation” of lived experience by providing a speculative examination and integration of the features of the independently real universe that presents itself in the immediacy of organism-environment interaction, that is “open to” certain meanings, and that is known only through such meanings. The categories of speculative metaphysics are drawn from the phenomenological analysis of experience, and in this sense are rooted in experience; as attempting to describe the independently real that provides the concrete basis for all experience, they must be “guided through” experience toward it by philosophical extrapolation of the pervasive textures of experience. And there is a vast difference between the illicit rei¤cation by past philosophies of common sense or scienti¤c meanings and the speculative extrapolation from within experience of the pervasive tones and textures of the thick processive “thereness” that enters into all experience. The categories of metaphysics provide the illumination by which traits of “what is there” can come into focus. Such categories represent the persistent attempt to illuminate and articulate, through a creative scheme or explanatory structure, the
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processes and textures present within all experience. These categories, as objects of second-level re®ection, are then held universally applicable to the independently real because we make them interpretive tools for the understanding of their data, to be veri¤ed by their workability in accounting for our experience of and knowledge about the world in which we live. Lewis’s understanding of metaphysics as that of an open system or explanatory structure gives rise to a view of explanation rooted in, rather than distortive of, the pervasive features of lived experience. And, though rooted in the lived level, it is never completely adequate to the lived level, but must constantly be fed by, and veri¤ed by, the lived level. It is open to change and development, just as all interpretations or explanations are open to change and development. The ultimate justi¤cation is pragmatic; do the metaphysical categories make sense of or explain how experience and knowledge, as we have them, are possible? In this sense, philosophy “can be nothing more at bottom than persuasion.” 64 “Is Metaphysics Possible?” is a much debated question these days. Announcements of the death of metaphysics pour in from commanding ¤gures such as Rorty, Derrida, and others, while opposing camps proclaim that the announcements themselves are fraught with unexamined metaphysical presuppositions. Debate occurs almost as strongly among advocates of the importance of metaphysics. For many who accept some version of traditional metaphysics, the rejection of the possibility of metaphysics “in the grand tradition” signals the rejection of metaphysics itself. Opposing camps adamantly respond that the rejection of metaphysics traditionally understood nonetheless allows for an understanding of metaphysics as an enterprise that, though changed in nature, yet retains its vital function. This new function is itself understood in widely varying ways, some limiting it to a phenomenological depiction in one sense or another of the features of concrete human existence, others including within its scope more cosmic claims of one sort or another, with varying types of justi¤cation.
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In the midst of this controversy, Lewis’s understanding of the metaphysical enterprise offers a positive path for the reconstruction of metaphysics that avoids traditional paradigms and the false dichotomies to which they give rise. In this way it is more contemporary than much of what is contained in so-called cutting edge contemporary debates. For much of contemporary metaphysical criticism, though operating within the seemingly novel paradigm of language or within other seemingly novel paradigms radically restrictive of the nature and limits of metaphysical pursuits, has yet not succeeded in breaking with the alternatives offered by, and hence the possible solutions allowable by, a long philosophical tradition. Though the alternative and possible solutions may take distinctively new turns and though seemingly new alternatives and new limitations emerge, they can too often be seen as new paradigmatic twists to old paradigmatic offerings. Too often the collapse of spectator absolutes, of closed systems, of indubitable foundations, leads to the claims of the demise of metaphysics and a relativistic, antifoundationalist turn to conversation or to the play of differance. Lewis’s position has its foundations in the interactional unity of the noetic creativity of humans and the ontological presence that “intrudes” within experience in a way that undercuts the alternatives of foundationalism-antifoundationalism, objectivism-relativism, or realism-antirealism, providing instead an objectively grounded perspectivalism at all levels of human experience and knowledge. In assessments of the positive value of metaphysics today, the claim is frequently made that metaphysics provides meaningfulness rather than truth and that it is interpretive rather than cognitive, but these are again false alternatives. No ¤eld of endeavor can assert truth apart from a context of meaningfulness. And different worlds give rise to different contexts, asserting different kinds of truths. Truth involves veri¤cation, and it has been seen that for Lewis the a priori organization of experience in meaningful ways sets the framework for anticipations of possible experience and veri¤cation in experience. Until our world is infused with meanings that contain the conditions for the veri¤cation of
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their application in experience, the concept of truth makes no real sense. Thus the claims of common sense, science, and metaphysics alike provide meaningfulness, a way of orienting oneself to the world, before the issue of truth can emerge. If one does not con¤ne truth to conformity or correspondence to non-perspectival, unchanging, totally structured reality that we merely “¤nd,” then meaningful, creative world orientation and truth as workability go hand in hand. For Lewis, metaphysics is a cognitive enterprise, but cognition at all levels involves noetic creativity. Metaphysics includes interpretive activity, but so do the most rudimentary experiences of concrete existence. Cognitive experience is by its very nature interpretive. It is indeed concerned to discern meaning, but not meaning rather than fact, for facts themselves emerge within the contours set by the meaning-bestowing activity of a priori structures or creative interpretations, and hence are partially the results of such activity. Indeed, it can be said that Lewis’s understanding of the metaphysical enterprise re®ects the ingredients and dynamics, “writ large,” of his pragmatic understanding of experience as experimental and transactional. One can see in the dynamics of his understanding of metaphysical method an exaggeration of the experimental method by which we have meaningful everyday experience. Metaphysical meanings are more creative, more like weaving a story, but the compulsive ontological element always intrudes and renders some creations, some stories, more workable than others. Thus, there should be and there is, for Lewis, a concurrent heightened attentiveness to what appears in experience, to its pervasive features or textures, to the sense of ourselves as active beings, an attentiveness that both founds the categories and serves to verify their adequacy. For that to which we attend opens onto the ontological presence with which we are in constant transaction. This transactional, experimental understanding of the nature of metaphysics can be utilized both to complement and to illuminate the speculative excursions—at times explicit, often implicit—within the writings of the other classical pragmatists. More broadly, it has important implications
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for contemporary attempts to “situate” metaphysics in the context of philosophic inquiry, offering novel insights for the world of contemporary philosophy at large. Further, Lewis’s position opens a pathway for new constructive dialogue with later analytic/linguistic philosophies, such as that of Donald Davidson. While rejecting traditional realism, Davidson is open to the possibility that we can “get outside our beliefs and our language so as to ¤nd some test other than coherence” for truth and knowledge.65 Thus, he does not accept an unquali¤ed coherence theory of truth but turns instead to a modi¤ed correspondence theory of truth in which there is “correspondence without confrontation.”66 What he is rejecting here is the view that true beliefs correspond to something real that can be confronted and compared with thoughts or sentences. But he can “accept objective truth conditions as the key to meanings, a realist view of truth, and we can insist that knowledge is of an objective world independent of our thought and language.”67 However, correspondence without confrontation for Davidson is in fact correspondence with more beliefs, and these beliefs can be evaluated only in the description of their causes, which are physiological, cultural, or psychological. Davidson holds that true sentences are true because of situations in the world. For example, the sentence “Snow is white” is true as a result of the situation of snow’s being white. But it is not appropriate to ask if snow is “really” white. This question can be interpreted only as asking if the sentence “Snow is white” coheres with the bulk of our accepted beliefs as these are expressed in sentences. The grounding of beliefs is, ultimately, a web of widespread agreement by speakers as to what sentences about objects, situations, events, and so forth can be asserted. Davidson does not try to understand how or in what ways reality is such that we can provide evidence of the probable truth of our collective beliefs. Rather he is concerned “to ¤nd a reason for supposing most of our beliefs are true that is not a form of evidence.”68 What Davidson seems to be reacting against is the overdetermined “furniture” realism of a totally structured reality which our beliefs confront and to which each must correspond, a ¤xed
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set of thought-independent structured objects, or brute facts consisting of relations among atomic elements. He also seems to be reacting against the alternative position, which holds that we cannot get outside our beliefs/concepts/language and which thus embraces an unquali¤ed coherence theory of truth. But Lewis’s understanding of knowledge and reality does not require, nor does it allow for, the confrontation to which Davidson objects. For Lewis, the indeterminacy inherent in the universe in its nature as an ongoing thick inde¤nitely rich process, combined with the interpretive nature of all experience, renders such a confrontation literally senseless. But coherence is not the only remaining alternative. Rather, all that is necessary is to acknowledge, from within the con¤nes of our conceptual webs, a resistance that is not itself concepts, language, or beliefs, even though our grasp of it develops within these interpretive contexts and truths can arise only within these contexts. We do not know this resistance by escaping our linguistic/conceptual webs but by encountering it through such webs—whether at the level of everyday common-sense experience or at the more re®ective levels of science or philosophy. It is not that to which our beliefs confrontationally correspond but that which instigates changes in networks of beliefs and constrains the way our networks of beliefs develop. In large measure, Davidson’s world functions the way Lewis’s world functions, but Lewis’s world making, for pragmatic reasons, is constrained and contoured by the resisting element that lies within the conceptual web we cast upon it. Lewis’s understanding of truth, like Davidson’s, can be said to incorporate aspects of the coherence theory, with a resultant rejection of the traditional realist correspondence of concepts, language, or beliefs with a thought-independent prestructured, overdetermined reality, what Davidson calls a confrontational correspondence. But the constraining, resisting element within experience allows Lewis, and pragmatism in general, to forge a new understanding of the meaning of truth. True beliefs are those that work in allowing us to engage a resisting, constraining reality in fruitful ways.
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The pervasive features or textures of the resisting element in experience, along with the experiential world that emerges through the conceptual web we cast upon it, provide the path for moving from epistemology to metaphysics without engaging in the impossible task of trying to get “outside” all of our conceptual webs. We do not think to a reality to which language or concepts conform, but rather we live through a reality with which we are intertwined and the intertwining of which constitutes experience. Lewis’s pragmatic alternative does not seem totally alien to what Davidson is attempting to achieve in trying to move between the extremes of both coherence and correspondence. In this way it opens up new horizons for dialogue between the pragmatic and analytic/linguistic traditions and for the exploration of the implications for philosophy of both their convergences and differences.
5 The Process of Valuation
Lewis’s moral theory incorporates and extends the themes developed in his epistemology. He counters the view, popular in his time, that ethical assertions are merely emotive or persuasive, developing the position that valuations are cognitive and that ethical judgments are rational. His ethical theory, in keeping with pragmatism, accepts the continuity of experience and extends the general method of gaining knowledge to all areas of human activity. Lewis held that “knowledge, action, and evaluation are essentially connected,”1 and his position provides, in its own way, the pragmatic connection between value knowledge and reasonable purposive action. Indeed, ultimately, for Lewis, all knowledge is for the sake of guiding our purposive activity. Unlike the general pragmatic trend, however, Lewis makes a sharp separation between values, goods, purposes, on the one hand, and imperatives, obligations, rules, on the other. Value judgments, judgments of goodness, are empirical, and while having an important function in his understanding of the right or the imperative, by themselves they cannot determine what is right, what ought to be. This chapter will focus on his general theory
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of value, while the next chapter will turn to the development of his ethics and the imperative of the right. Lewis characterizes his position as “a naturalistic or humanistic conception of values” because it holds the view that “the natural bent of the natural man stands in no need of correction in order validly to be the touchstone of intrinsic value.”2 He rejects transcendentalist views that claim just evaluations require a transvaluation or correction of our natural valuings and disvaluings, as well as the various alternatives of relativism or the cynicism of the emotivist claim that normative expressions of any kind are neither true nor false. Valuations are empirical cognitions, the test of which is a quality disclosed in experience, directly apprehendable and unmistakably identi¤able. In presenting his position that value claims are a type of empirical knowledge and that there is a continuity of method in dealing with value and empirical knowledge in general, Lewis distinguishes three types of value assertions, corresponding to the three types of empirical apprehensions discussed previously. Immediately apprehended experiences as reported in expressive language are the closest we can come to direct reports of immediate value or disvalue in experience—of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, happiness or sadness, grati¤cation or grievousness, and so forth. Immediate value apprehensions are the experiential and “pragmatically certain” or unquestionable date upon which value judgment is founded. To understand value or goodness one must experience it; value exists only as it affects the experience of individuals. Felt value or disvalue is disclosed in experience. There is no attempt here to de¤ne value or goodness. Rather “immediate or directly ¤ndable value is not so much one quality as a dimension like mode which is pervasive of all experience.”3 Lewis reminds us here that the neat categorization of what is empirically presented ignores what “spills over the edges” of the verbal containers. Moreover, in the area of immediate values the phenomenal as such does not require such neat determinations because what is the focus of concern is “universally familiar and universally regarded. Value/disvalue is that mode or aspect of the given or the contemplated to which desire and aversion are ad-
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dressed; and it is that by apprehension of which the inclination to action is normally elicited.”4 Terminating judgments consisting of expressive terms predict the quality of an experience resulting from a particular action, and can be decisively tested for veri¤cation. Non-terminating judgments are built up from a set of terminating judgments, and their predictions of value qualities cannot be decisively veri¤ed, but rather are inde¤nitely testable and subject to revision. Even if they attain a “practical certainty” they are objective probability claims attributing a value quality to an object or situation. Utilizing the above types of value claims, Lewis clari¤es the ambiguities inherent in value words such as “good” or “valuable” and takes note of several different meanings or modes of value that are important to distinguish. Saying that something is good or that something is valuable can mean that it has intrinsic, extrinsic (either inherent, instrumental, or utilitarian), contributive, comparative, or social value. Only experience can be intrinsically valuable, for intrinsic value is immediate value. Objects and actions can have extrinsic value only, and such claims are non-terminating judgments. The attribution of value to an unexamined object or to an examined one is no different than the attribution of any property to an object. It asserts a real connection between a hypothetical operation or observation and a resultant experience or observation. In so doing, it is asserting the truth of an if-then conditional as a statement of a real connection, and such a truth is independent of the factual truth or falsity of either clause of the statement. Thus, Lewis stresses that the beauty of the gold, if it should be presented to a connoisseur of beauty in metals, is no more “in the eye of the beholder than is the speci¤c gravity of it.”5 Here again, the importance of Lewis’s development of a logic of strict implication that allows for the commitment to real relations or real potentialities comes to the forefront. Objective value is extrinsic value and lies in the potentiality of an object, action, or state of affairs to provide immediate satisfaction to someone under speci¤c conditions. Something may be objectively valuable even though it is not valued by anyone, and
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things may be valued by someone without their being objectively valuable. The fact that different individuals do not ¤nd value in the same experiences does not negate the objectivity of the value, for objective value depends on its relation to actual or possible experience, and these experiences depend on the capacities of the subject.6 In the area of objective value one must distinguish between inherent value and instrumental value. Objects, situations, or actions have inherent value if they lead directly to experiences that are intrinsically valuable. Objects or actions have instrumental value if they lead to something that is inherently valuable. For example, a ¤ne piece of sculpture is inherently valuable, for individuals tend to experience immediate value in its presence, but the tools and clay by which the sculpture is brought to fruition have instrumental value. Lewis distinguishes also between instrumental value, which is a means to an end that is good, and utility, which identi¤es something as “good for” reaching something further, irrespective of the question of whether or not what it is “good for” is itself good or not. Not all utilities of things are instrumental values of them. For example, matches and kerosene may be good for engaging in arson, but arson is not inherently good. The assessment of value is further complicated by the fact that the relation of the value potentialities of objects to our possibilities of action is a major factor that affects evaluations of objects in every mode other than bare potentiality. Both the potentialities of objects and the degree to which their realizations are under our control affect their value to us. Positive values are greater in proportion to the control we have over their realization, and disvalues are greater accordingly as the conditions of their realization are uncontrollable. Lewis notes that when it comes to instrumental values there is a dual type of predication of value. In one sense, they indicate a simple possibility that the object or situation of which they are predicated will produce a particular type of effect. In another sense, they are predicated “relative to circumstances known to be or assumed to be actual.” Returning to an example of gold, a gold
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nugget hidden in the earth has potential as a thing of beauty and of great commercial value, but in another sense it has no value because its potential will never be actualized.7 Lewis calls value attribution in this second sense “value-in-fact,” a term that is applicable when the conditions of realization or non-realization are actual or at least highly probable. He notes that “actual value” would be more idiomatic for what he intends, but he shies away from this term as he considers it more likely to mislead, since values in the mode of simple potentiality are actual values, though they may not be actualized.8 These considerations allow Lewis to handle the relativity of value to persons—be it one person, a class of persons, or all persons. Values-in-fact vary greatly in type because of the different actual or probable conditions within which they are located. Value attributions as relative to persons are one type of value-infact, and one that Lewis considers of special importance for clarifying value theory. They attribute to something the potentiality for producing value quality within the limits of personal circumstances. For example, the gift of two theater tickets has no value to you because you are already committed to attending a concert that evening. The determining factor is found in circumstances accidental to your situation. Thus, Lewis points out, the importance of the phrase “to you.” While this makes objective value relative to personal experience, the objective claims of any empirical knowledge rest ultimately in the actual or possible experience of someone. And while value experiences or felt satisfactions are perhaps more variable than other empirical experiences, such as the experience of looking blue or feeling hard, the difference is one of degree and not of kind. Values attributed relative to persons are not the same as what we call “subjective.” They are personal, but not subjective. That what has value for a person in one set of circumstances has no value for someone in another set of circumstances is not an issue of subjectivity, but rather is one type of value-in-fact. The meanings of the terms “subjective” and “objective” as applied to value terms is analogous to their meanings in other areas. All empirical apprehension is by way of appearances. Any presen-
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tation can serve as a clue for the correct interpretation of some objective situation, and additionally the particular state of the subject may enter into the situation. At times, the state of the subject will be a major fact, such as in illusions or hallucinations. If the apprehended data lead to reliable judgments, judgments that are veri¤ed by experience, we call them objective; if not, we categorize them as subjective. If the value quality at issue is due to the peculiarities of the individual, it is categorized as “subjective.” If it is due to the objective situation and generally shared human apprehensions, it is categorized as “objective.” Either way, the experience has positive intrinsic value if there is a positive value-quality apprehension, although it may be misleading as concerns real instrumental value. As Lewis says, “Its esse is percipi.”9 The experience is prior to any division into subjective and objective. Pain or enjoyment is immediately disclosed and is not an illusion. But while the experience is apparent, it may be illusory as indicative of an objective state of affairs, and the ways of dealing with it may differ from case to case. If an actual existent brings satisfaction to somebody, it obviously has the potential to do so for that particular individual under those particular circumstances. Even if an essential factor in the realization of value is something peculiar to the individual, it is not completely worthless. If an essential factor in the realization of value is something peculiar to the individual and misleading as to further possibilities of value realization, and hence is “subjective,” this nonetheless indicates that the object producing it has that much value, even if trivial.10 However, this does not prove the objectivity of the value apprehension or of the value apprehended. This issue requires reference to the conditions of the value realization on the side of the subject. It is important to be on guard about the subjectivity of value experiences not because the value realized is unreal, but because it does not indicate that the object possesses the potentiality for value experiences for others. Lewis recognizes that value disagreements are more common than disagreements regarding other types of phenomenal disclosures. But we only become aware of individual differences in ex-
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perience of phenomenal qualia through incongruent behavior. And since there is such a close tie between apprehended value qualities and conduct, we are more likely to become aware of what differences there are. Moreover, there is a greater commonness of language in, for example, the characterization of shapes or colors than in the characterization of values, which makes the differences more noticeable. But without the commonness, our interpersonal relations would be chaotic, and this is in fact not the case. Lewis thus holds that the different modes of value as he has distinguished them can help obviate the debates concerning the “relativity” or “non-relativity” and “subjectivity” or “objectivity” of values. He further takes note of the fact that help is provided also by his distinction between value judgments or judgments of goods and ethical judgments or judgments right and his analysis of their interrelationship. For there is unnecessary concern about accepting the relativity of values to persons because this issue is mistakenly intertwined with the concern that the acceptance of genuine value relative to persons denies the possibility of objective moral standards and that accepting the validity of judgments of what has value for me but not for others will result in subjectivism or egoism in ethics. Judgments of goods are about if-then judgments of empirical relationships, of the potentialities of objects, while judgments of rightness or justice are ethical, and the answer cannot be derived from empirical facts alone. It is also necessary to consider the comparative value of an object, situation, action, or experience, which is the assessment of its relation to other objects, situations, actions, or experiences. Objects, situations, or actions that result in more of immediately apprehended value experiences than other alternatives are comparatively most valuable, either instrumentally or inherently. Lewis refers to the “Fallacy of the Epithet” and the similar fallacy that is a form of the “fallacy of the attribute” in showing the way names given to things bear with them valuational implications that are false or misleading to the facts. And the issue of the comparison of values and of whether or not all values can be arranged in a single hierarchy he sees as affected by the same issues
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involved in the naming of objects. For example, the question as to which is best, a warm fur coat, a ¤lling meal, or a sharp knife, cannot be resolved because the utilities of the objects do not overlap. Lewis uses comparative value to help clear up the paradox in which objects having no objective value yet give rise to the experience of intrinsic value in some persons. He does this by reference to a distinction between ascriptions of value as noncomparative or absolute and ascriptions of comparative value. For example, Lewis notes that one might consider a tool valuable because it is better than average, but if the tool is virtually unusable, has no comparative value, one might still object to throwing it away, claiming that it still has a value even if the value is sentimental value. He points out that it would be a little dif¤cult to ¤nd any object which has no potentialities whatever for leading to satisfaction, and is thus absolutely without value of any kind. A degree of utility does not necessarily correlate with a degree of instrumental value. And as Lewis emphasizes, “It is not in the lowest category of utilities but in the highest category of contributory values—the values of things as contributory to some individual life or to lives in general—that any two things are comparable as better or worse, and that we may be obliged to assess such comparative values of them”11 And, those intrinsically valuable experiences that contribute more value to the whole of a person’s life are comparatively most intrinsically valuable. This brings us to Lewis’s understanding of the summum bonum and focuses once again on the crucial role of temporality in his pragmatic vision. Contributory value involves the recognition that our lives are temporally continuous, and our experiences are self-consciously cumulative; we live in time, as do all living organisms, but additionally, as human, we are self-consciously aware that we are temporal beings, that we live in time. For this reason the quality of concern permeates our lives. Concern for the future and self direction as we step into it are at the very core of rationality.12 It is concern that takes us past animal compulsion to self-direction, and because of concern and self-direction we make appraisals. This is also “The root of what we call our rationality.”13
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We are rational in that we are constrained by foresight, by a vision of some future good or ill. The logical is derivative from this sense of ourselves as having foresight and self direction. The validity of reasoning is rooted in consistency and consistency is the adherence to what we have accepted. Our concern for the future leads us to be consistent or rational, and in achieving this, what we say, think, or do has logical validity, though the issue of truth or falsity still remains. The summum bonum, represented by the good life, the life that is found good in the living of it, is not, according to Lewis, something to be argued. Rather it is “a datum of the human attitude to life,” but it is not the kind of datum that we commonly call psychological.14 The intrinsic values of immediate experiences are valued not just for themselves but as they contribute to the good life. The value immediately had in experience is not subject to critique. However, the goal of realizing and the value of having that particular experience are subject to rational critique in accordance with the value it may contribute to some whole of experience which includes it.15 There are dual dimensions here in the process of valuation. Immediately experienced goods are good for their own sake but are also valued according to their contribution to the good life. This whole of one’s life of which Lewis speaks is not limited to one’s physical existence but rather is marked off by its horizon. Individuals may live prospectively through what they may do for their children and the lives of others who come after, as well as by the hope of a good reputation. Accepting ends productive of goodness that lies beyond one’s possible experience genuinely infuses the living of one’s life with a goodness realizable in the living of it through relation to a temporally extended future beyond the boundaries of one’s life. Lewis, distances himself from Bentham’s position here. Bentham’s position, Lewis acknowledges, would not deny the necessary reference to the whole of experience in a ¤nal determination of the value of any constituent of it. But, in contrast to his own position, it would nonetheless hold that this ¤nal determination
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can be carried out in piecemeal fashion using the procedures of arithmetic. But Lewis reminds us that not only is the quality of the whole quali¤ed by its constituent parts, but the quality of the whole in turn quali¤es these constituent parts. The intrinsic value that characterizes a whole life is realized in the living of it. But the experiences that constitute it are not a series of externally related moments. No experience is an isolated bit, but is part of a whole. The value quality of an experience is transformed both by the value qualities of past experience and the value qualities surrounding our anticipations of future experience. Moreover, the value quality of the emergent whole or Gestalt is irreducible to, and may be different from, the value quality of the various experiences from which it arises. This is one reason, among others, that Lewis considers a “calculus of values” to be impossible. The good life as a composition rather than an aggregate is in this respect analogous to a literary or musical composition. Lewis compares it to a symphony. The value quality of a musical composition depends on its order and progression in experience, and the realization of that value is progressive as well as cumulative. A symphony is not heard and appreciated in a segment of one of its movements but as a progressive and cumulative whole. The holistic value of it is realized in its progressive movement that begins with the beauty disclosed in its opening chord. Moreover, the value is not only progressive and cumulative but consummatory. Rather than leave in the middle of a movement, one would prefer to leave at the end of the prior movement. Like the symphony, the good life is both cumulative and consummatory.16 The value quality of experience is thus not found in merely momentary experiences or in an aggregate of such experiences as separately disclosed. Rather, it is found in the temporal ®ow and relational pattern of a whole of experience and the progression of such a whole as both cumulative and consummatory. Lewis holds that this is particularly the case for the value of life as active. A goal that one strives purposefully to achieve is different from that goal achieved through accidental circumstances. Moreover, the value quality of the goal infuses the striving, and the goodness of
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the purposive striving colors the realized goal. A hike in the mountains, for example, is more enjoyable if there is an objective such as, perhaps, the view of a splendid panoramic vista or mountain lake, while the vista or lake is more enjoyable because of the manner in which it has been obtained. Experience has instrumental and intrinsic value, and the ¤nal assessment of the value or disvalue of any experience must take into account both dimensions. Or, perhaps more aptly put, means and ends are inextricably fused in the holistic nature of ongoing experience in its temporal ®ow. The goodness or badness of a life on the whole is thus mutatis mutandis not immediately disclosed, but rather can be envisaged or contemplated only by an imaginative synthesis of its “on-thewhole quality.” Our assessment requires a synthetic apprehension, which involves judgment and fallibility. Lewis suggests such apprehension can be terms ‘synthetic intuition’, though it shares the characteristics of non-terminating judgments in general, and hence is inherently fallible and probable at best. That a life found good in the living of it is the summum bonum is “a datum of the human attitude to life.” While in the routines of our daily living we for the most part do not assess our actions from the perspective of such a ¤nal value quality, yet the more serious the decision in affecting the depth and breadth of our lives, the more do we consider our actions from the perspective of such ¤nal value. This “moral concern for the whole of life sets that end to which all particular aims must be subordinated, and constitutes the rational imperative,”17 one of the imperatives that will be developed in his ethics. It is “that norm which can be repudiated only by repudiating all norms and the distinction of valid from invalid in general.”18 What is intrinsically valuable may be evaluated prudentially or socially. In evaluating it prudentially, we are judging, for example, how it will contribute to the value of an individual’s entire life. In evaluating it socially, we are judging how it will contribute to the entire lives of all those whom it affects. And further complexities arise when considering social value. Bentham proposed his calculus, Lewis points out, precisely to handle the complexi-
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ties of social evaluations, though Bentham’s concern was acts and their consequences rather than objective existences and their value effects. Lewis, as seen earlier, rejects values as measurable and additive. Values, however, can be compared and ordered at least to some extent in terms of their contributory value, their contribution to a good life. But the issue of social values brings in the problem of comparison among persons. Lewis holds that we can know the orderings of other persons only though “empathetic imagination,” by putting ourselves in the place of the other.19 Judgment of social value is highly complex. It takes into account all the value potentialities of the object rather than one type and involves some collation of them; it takes into account all persons likely to be affected by the object, in terms of both the number impacted and the degree to which they are affected; it requires consideration of the circumstances that affect these value realizations and the assessment of their probability if beyond control; and ¤nally it involves bringing all these facts together in a resultant evaluation. It is this type of complexity of judgment that is required in deciding whether and to what extent something will be in the public interest or socially desirable. Lewis acknowledges that carrying out social judgments with the complexities he analyzes, while theoretically possible, is practically a “fantastic supposition.” However, it offers an ideal toward which to strive in our actual and practical estimates of something’s value for society at large. These estimates will be more or less accurate in proportion to their approximation to the total evaluation. The theoretical possibility of such value determination gives practical signi¤cance to our practical estimates. The ¤nal evaluation of any particular experience is evaluation of it as contributing to a whole of experience into which it enters as a constituent, and the overarching temporal gestalt that is ¤nal is the purview of a whole life.20 It is this that comes nearest to indicating an unquali¤ed imperative for rational actions. But for Lewis, all ¤nal imperatives belong to ethics, and all valuation is subject to ethical critique. In this sense, he considers his discussion of valuation a “prolegomena to ethics.”21
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Before turning to aesthetic value, we should note Lewis’s relevance for environmental concerns. He is explicit in extending the realm of valuings to non-human organisms. “The potentialities of objects for conducing to the enjoyment or suffering of animals other than man, is equally a fact about the nature of things; and it is not necessary to erect human experience as an exclusive standard of value-facts.”22 The consideration of this, he holds, can prevent confusing what grati¤es humans with some ultimate, transcendental standard of values ¤xed in the metaphysical nature of reality. Such a consideration further leads to the recognition that we owe compassion and an attitude of respect to every sentient being to the degree that it is capable of enjoying or suffering. He will reintroduce this point in his discussion of imperatives of rightness. Aesthetic Value In turning to aesthetic value, Lewis ¤rst offers what he calls a “phenomenology of the esthetic,”23 which focuses on the nature and conditions of the esthetic in experience. It is concerned with the value quality of the given experience, with its phenomenal content. Aesthetic values are intrinsic values and esthetically valuable objects have inherent value, but neither all intrinsic values nor all objects having inherent value are esthetic. For Lewis there is no single characteristic that delineates esthetic value from all other values. Rather, a complex set of criteria is called for, involving the attitude toward what is presented, the degree of positive value quality, and the natural associations of one experience with another.24 Lewis believes all experience is esthetic in the sense that whatever is presented to us is a value laden qualitative complex. The esthetic runs through experience in general, a consideration that takes center stage in Dewey’s writings. He would agree with Dewey that experience is a unity such that characterizing it as emotional, practical, or intellectual, and so forth, is to name distinctions that re®ection makes within it.25 As he emphasizes,
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there is actually no such thing as “esthetic experience,” for all experience has the aspects of both esthesis and cognitive signi¤cance.26 But, in contrast to Dewey, his interest lies almost exclusively in marking off and focusing on those experiences that are most intensely dominated by the esthetic dimension. In so doing, Lewis distinguishes three types of attitude we can take toward that which we encounter: the moral or active, the cognitive, and the esthetic. While these are neither mutually exclusive nor independent, in any experience one of them will dominate. The moral or active attitude is utilitarian; it is concerned with the way things can be used to reach certain ends. The cognitive attitude is closer to the esthetic than is the attitude of action; both require that we be disinterested and dispassionate. But knowing is for guiding action, and our cognitive attitude is concerned with possible ways of using immediate experience as a clue to future experience. The attitude that yields aesthetic values is unconcerned with utilitarian goals and is “amoral” in the sense that it is not the active attitude. It primarily connotes the empirical apprehension and contemplation of what is presented in its value character as given. He sees the aesthetic attitude as focused upon what Prall calls the “esthetic surface.”27 Distinctively esthetic objects not only must possess inherent value but must possess it in such a way and to such a degree that they solicit the esthetic attitude of absorbed contemplation and afford a high degree of grati¤cation. Lewis recognizes that his initial characterizations of the esthetic are too inclusive and narrows the category of distinctively esthetic goods by turning to a further complex of criteria.28 Not only must distinctively esthetic objects have a predominant and reliable potentiality to yield grati¤cations and be able to elicit and satisfy the esthetic attitude, but also the values to which they give rise must be enduring rather than transitory and must be unentangled with conditions that may spoil our satisfactions. Additionally the realization of esthetic values should be noncompetitive or non-exclusionary. An increase in value for one person does not decrease the possible value for others. Not only are the goods not divided by being shared, but the enjoyment may
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be enriched by a sharing. Turning to the relevance of what he refers to as the economy of values, Lewis points out the way the esthetic may be tinged with the moral. By the rational economy of values, which arises through concern for the possibilities of the good life, he means that we particularly seek what Bentham refers to as “fecund pleasures”; they yield or enhance our realization of other intrinsic values or are reinforced by derivative goods.29 Lewis is convinced that the measure of esthetic value, primary esthetic quality, is to be found in the appreciation of the untutored but esthetically sensitive person. While acknowledging the importance of technical excellence and virtuosity in art for critical evaluation, he holds that focusing on these considerations may not only dominate but also subvert intrinsic enjoyments with their distractions. At the same time, however, appreciation or cultivation of virtuosity can provide a context of creative activity and intellectual satisfaction, thus contributing to keeping alive or enhancing our more purely esthetic values. In such cases, the creative activity and intellectual satisfaction can perhaps be said to infuse rather than replace primary esthetic quality. But Lewis warns that “[i]t is a ¤rst dictate of cultivated taste that life should not be too exclusively devoted to the mere exercise of cultivated taste, lest everything should become tasteless to it.”30 The direct having of immediate esthetic value is not judgment because, like all apprehensions of givenness, it cannot be in error. Claims about the esthetic value of objects, however, are judgments, and like all non-terminating judgments are fallible. As seen earlier in the chapter, Lewis holds that the failure to distinguish between the intrinsic value of the quality of experience and the inherent value in the object as a potentiality for such experience gives rise to views of value as subjective and relative and value predications as “emotive” or non-cognitive, and hence devoid of either truth or falsity. For objective esthetic values, as for all objective qualities, there are conditions of the subject that may affect that person’s experience of the object. Immediate experience is important as evidence of the qualities of any object, and for esthetic experience it is the best evidence, but the inherent
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value of an object is not subject to or reducible to the “subjective” conditions of immediate experience. Lewis sees the importance of such conditions not as conditions of the value in the object but as conditions of reliable tests of an objective value that is independent of any particular valuing experience. Because the esthetic qualities of things have an independent status, mistakes can be made in attributing aesthetic value to something, and cultivation of our capacity to discern these qualities is important.31 Those with more background, experience or training in the arts, awareness of an ongoing tradition, or better natural discernment can make more reliable judgments concerning the objective esthetic value of an art object, and Lewis points out that the same can be said in eliciting the truths of natural science. In neither case are the objective properties of the object created by the experts in the ¤eld. In judgments of esthetic value, there are various levels of apprehension to consider. First, the immediate value quality apprehended in experience may be assessed. Lewis explains his intension here by making a comparison with the experienced redness of an apple. The immediately given appearance of redness is indubitable, but its comparative redness to some past redness, a redness remembered, is something requiring judgment, though he holds that whether or not we call such assessment “judgment” is not important. In the same way, while the apprehension of the immediately presented value quality does not involve judgment, the comparison of the degree of immediately apprehended esthetic value quality of a presentation with past presentations involves a judgment. Lewis points out a difference in the two cases in that with the red appearance there is only the apparent redness, while value appearance is actual, not merely apparent, intrinsic value. However, with this difference in mind, one can see here something analogous to what, in the context of his general epistemic focus, was called “pragmatic certainty” or “functional certainty.” The apprehension of a present content involves the process of assimilation to or comparison with past instances, with the memory this involves. Hence it is a type of judgment, but it
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is pragmatically certain in that no future experience can prove it false, for it does not refer to future experience. Not only may the value quality directly experienced be confused with a comparative assessment of it, but complicating the matter even further, the comparative assessment may be confused with the objective value of the presented object. As a result, what does not require any objective judgment is confounded with what does require objective judgment. While these distinctions are somewhat complex, failure to make them leads one astray in the area of esthetics and results in highly regrettable errors. Finally, even in the sense in which the apprehended value quality is found and not judged, its quality as esthetic or non-esthetic requires judgment via certain indirect criteria such as whether or not this kind of experience can endure or would perhaps lead to dissatisfaction down the road. Lewis gives as an example a teataster who has cultivated a capacity to predict that a particular type of tea will lose its bouquet in the near future, and as he sips the tea he ¤nds that the tea does not taste quite right. It is still the predictable loss of bouquet that is signalized rather than the immediately experienced signal of it that allows the judgment that it is not a good-quality tea. This judgment is a judgment concerning the esthetic quality in the object presented and only indirectly of the aesthetic character of the immediately disclosed experience. And even indirectly it is not a judgment of the immediately apprehended value quality, but a judgment classifying it as aesthetic. Lewis is careful to distinguish his focus on the theory of esthetic value from the positive science of aesthetics with which the esthetician is concerned. However, he does ¤nd it relevant to consider certain aspects of the esthetic object. Musical compositions, poems, and dramas are not physical objects, while paintings, sculptures, and buildings are physical objects. The former are abstract objects that are actualized in various performances or renditions that can vary greatly in quality. But even for the latter, each physical object is one member in a class of actual or potential replicas, and what is actualized in each replica is something ab-
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stract, just as in music, poetry, or drama. Lewis even includes natural objects such as landscapes in this, for no natural object elicits aesthetic experience if we just let it pour through our senses. In all of these cases there are essential contextual associations that are not literally physical properties located within them. What Lewis calls the “esthetic essence” is the abstract entity associated with the physical object and in some sense literally embodied in, or capable of being embodied in, something physical that serves to present it. The differences in the various types of esthetic objects discussed above result in the differences in the degree to which the esthetic essence is embodied in the physical properties of the object. This is a difference in degree, but not in kind. For literary objects, as in a poem for example, the esthetic actuality is physically presented through print or voice, though the esthetic essence is for the most part constituted by the meanings symbolized and lies in the context associated with the physical entity through which it is actualized. On the other end of the spectrum, for example a natural object, the esthetic essence is constituted by and large by the physical presentation, but nonetheless something that is essential is not literally physically presented, but rather is associated with the physical properties. Moreover, in any physical object that elicits esthetic interest, there are some qualities that are not relevant and could be different without changing the esthetic quality. Thus, even for the landscape the esthetic essence is an abstraction. The objective value of an esthetic object is not located solely in the physical properties. The experienced gestalt that constitutes the esthetic essence is never reducible to the mere physical presentation. In any artistic creation, the artist aims at an ideality, and this is the esthetic essence and the object of esthetic appreciation. Thus, in confronting any kind of art object “one may, and possibly should, seek to penetrate beyond the actual incorporation to the intent of its creator.”32 The abstraction that is the esthetic essence represents, for Lewis, the basic category of esthetics. But he is quick to point out that this is no way implies that esthetic objects are transcendental entities. He cautions against viewing the esthetic essence as transcendental, arguing that in
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what he has presented there are no more grounds for a transcendentalist interpretation of esthetic goals than there are, for example, for such interpretation of economic ones or engineering ones, or the creative endeavors of physics, which project idealities while recognizing the limitations of materials and workmanship. In short, there is no more reason for turning the esthetically ideal into a metaphysical reality than there is for believing in “some New Atlantis as a metaphysical reality.”33 As Lewis stresses, concerning things that are not ¤ne arts we also at times grasp the intentions of another person, which that person not only may not fully achieve but may not even adequately envision. And what that person fails to actualize still has its own standing as the object of a purpose and perhaps as realizable even though as yet unrealized. In such cases, our “interpretation” is made possible through an act of empathy and creative imagination. But he also cautions that in esthetics as elsewhere, there is always the danger of winding up with a romanticized or deceptive perception rather than a realistic grasp of the idealized intention, and that in the case of objects in nature it is “sheer folly” to attribute intentions concerning the object presented.34 For Lewis, then, esthetic contemplation is in a sense active recreation, and the esthetic essence is the idealized meaning at which the artist aims and which is recreated in various ways and various approximations in art objects and the esthetic experiences to which they give rise. And while Lewis’s focus on the esthetic is usually narrowly con¤ned to the esthetic experience of “¤ne art,” yet its features are continuous with, though more intensi¤ed than, certain features that run though experience in general. Moreover, an esthetic essence is ultimately a “world of meaning,” which experience in general, as experimental, as activity guided by purpose and expressive of meaning, always embodies in its ongoing course. Finally, experience, as value-laden throughout, leads us to direct this purposive activity toward the consummation of ideal possibilities. These pervasive characteristics of experience, which manifest themselves in intensi¤ed form in esthetic experience and the art object, lead directly to Lewis’s ethics and his pragmatic understanding of imperatives.
6 Morality and Sociality An Evolving Enterprise
Lewis’s ethics integrates the importance of consequences, experimentalism, workability, and the pragmatic understanding of humans and nature, with a vital role for imperatives. Human behavior as goal oriented and problem solving is rule-guided behavior, and rules are normative, or in other terms, are imperatives directing right ways of acting. As such, all our purposive activity has a normative dimension. Empirical knowledge in general, as incorporating conceptual schemes and criteria in mind, is ruleguided behavior. Like all the pragmatists, Lewis embraces the view that knowledge is for the sake of guiding action. And the goal of action is a life found good in the living of it, or the summum bonum. But, while evaluations are a type of empirical knowledge, there is no continuous line from knowledge of good and bad consequences to decisions that are morally right, to which among competing goods ought to be pursued. While the empirical facts concerning the goodness or badness of the consequences of any act enter into whether or not an act is right, empirical facts alone are not enough, because while “the good solicits,” it is the right that com-
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mands. “It is desirable to cleave to what is good, imperative to conform to what is right.”1 Humans, as free and self-governing, govern themselves through rules. Human behavior is rule-guided modes of behavior or general ways of behaving, and rules, Lewis holds, are general imperatives that are normative in that they prescribe what should be done in particular situations.2 While Hume and others have made the point that one cannot obtain an “ought” from an “is,” Lewis claims that they have posed the issue in the wrong way. The issue is not whether an “is” can provide the validation of an “ought,” but whether any belief as to objective matters of fact can be validated without antecedent presumptions of the validity of normative principles.3 Again stressing the need for the distinction between justi¤cation and veri¤cation as developed in his epistemology, Lewis makes a related critique of James, pointing out that while warranted beliefs usually lead to good results in practice, such results are not the criterion of justi¤ed believing. There is not a 100 percent correlation between beliefs that are warranted and beliefs that work out well. For example, even the best diagnosis that the wisest of physicians makes may have an unfortunate outcome. But this does not show the diagnosis was unjusti¤ed any more than a successful outcome can prove a diagnosis justi¤ed. Truth indicates a relation of the belief to existent actuality rather than a relation between the belief and the evidence, which is the relation by which it meets the norms of cogency or justi¤ed acceptance. In short, “The normative character of warranted beliefs is not their good working, and good working is not the warrant of them, even though adherence to what is thus warranted has, as its sanction, that such adherence is the best we can do, in taking our commitments of belief, to assure a good result.”4 An act is absolutely right according to Lewis if its consequences are cogently expected to be good and are good; it is objectively right if they are cogently expected to be good, whether they actually are good or not; and it is subjectively right if they are expected to be good, whether this expectation is cogent or not.5 Two things are necessary to determine that an action is right. What is
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needed is both a rule of some sort to direct right doing and a judgment that the consequences of the act are good. Normally we consider the judgment of good consequences to sanction a particular act by the rule, and the rule to sanction acts of this general type, “as a general directive extending to this case.”6 Too frequently it is not recognized that both of these are needed to constitute an act as right, with only one of them being put forth as adequate for ethical judgment. Lewis sees this as a possible explanation as to why there is such an intense and enduring opposition between those who emphasize goodness and consequences and those who emphasize conformity to principles and moral perfection. If either one is presumed, then it is the other that explicitly makes the act the right thing to do. Yet in fact, without a presumption of the other, neither is adequate in determining what is right to do in any particular instance. If an issue concerns the imperativeness of any act or the ground of rightness in any of its species, what is important is the rule or principle. The rule carries the sense of directive, while the consequences of the act are a matter of empirical fact. Lewis’s interest in ethics is ultimately not an interest in ethics narrowly taken but in ethics as the normative basis of all knowledge. Science itself has normative imperatives in the form of its explicit rules of evidence that govern its procedures. The morally right, which deals with justice and prudence, is one category of rightness, with its correlative imperatives. Action requires decision making, and for any decision making, the issue of its rightness enters. All areas of human activity as deliberate and self-governed, are subject to critique as to their rightness. These areas of human activity are distinguished as thought, technique, prudence, and morality or justice. Each of these areas involves a special type of right as well as a special kind of good. Further, in each of these areas there are rational imperatives, universal rules or principles that govern our activity. Thinking for Lewis, as for the pragmatists in general, is itself a type of action. Lewis considers that distinguishing a rule or principle as valid
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or itself right is “the deepest and most dif¤cult of all questions concerning right and wrong.”7 His ethics integrates the importance of consequences and the role of imperatives rooted in our natural capacities as temporal, goal-oriented, problem-solving beings who, as free and self-governing, act according to ruleguided behavior. The ultimate justi¤cation of imperatives in general, like the ultimate justi¤cation of the laws of logic, is rooted in his pragmatic conception of humans, their natural capacities, and their natural embeddedness in a universe that they must engage in ways that allow the enrichment of human living. In characterizing his position, Lewis observes that it is naturalistic in that no act can be found right or wrong without reference to the goodness or badness of its consequences, and good and bad are natural qualities of experience. However, he continues, his position may be considered antithetical to naturalism in that the determination of right and wrong requires reference to rules or principles, and the validity of these imperatives is grounded in what is called the character of human nature. But Lewis points out that these features of naturalism and socalled rationalism con®ict only if rationality is understood as nonnatural in some sense or signi¤cant of some transcendent realm instead of naturalism being understood as inclusive of human nature.8 What cements Lewis’s position as a thoroughgoing pragmatic naturalism is that the roots of what we call rationality are to be found in the consistency required to engage the world in which we live in ways that work not just in letting human life proceed but in letting it thrive in enriching ways. The rule-guided action it sanctions is ground-up, not top-down. The understanding of human behavior as rule-guided ways of acting is found in Lewis’s understanding of the pragmatic nature of a priori knowledge and is operative in his understanding of a sense meaning as a rule or criterion in mind for the application of an a priori concept to the ®ow of experience. And, just as the a priori arises from past experience but is held legislative for future experience, so the rules of rightness arise from the interactions of past experience and prescribe ways of acting in the fu-
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ture. Neither are absolutes handed down from on high, but rather they are legislative because of their ongoing success in engaging the world in which we live in enriching ways. Rules of rightness in general are the way successful past experience is formulated to guide us as we move into the future. These rules cannot be true or false, but rather, like the a priori in general, they issue constraints on our decisions, actions, or interpretations while held, but may be rejected if experience shows them to be ill suited in the furtherance of human knowledge and the enrichment of human existence. All disciplines have rules of rightness that issue constraints upon the method or ways of acting that are justi¤ed. Recognizing an ongoing tug between reason and impulse, Lewis holds that rationality itself includes the need to subordinate immediate goods for greater long-term goods. This need is part and parcel of our behavior as temporal and anticipatory, and gives rise to the imperative of consistency. The imperative of consistency, “Be Consistent,” is the ¤rst imperative of action. This is intended in a broad sense of practical consistency, which requires that we not pursue con®icting goals, but govern ourselves according to rule-guided behavior geared to maximizing long-range goods. Logical consistency is but one species of practical consistency. The claim by Empimenides the Cretan, that all Cretans are liars, while not involving a logical contradiction, is pragmatically contradictory, for the assertion implies what the claim denies. Lewis holds that a rule of decision is valid a priori if its denial involves a pragmatic contradiction. Such a non-repudiable principle is “pragmatically a priori.” “The broadest of imperatives, ‘Be consistent,’ exempli¤es this matter. A decision without intent to adhere to it would not be a genuine decision. But one who should adopt the decision, ‘Disregard consistency,’ would be deciding to disregard his decisions as soon as made. And adherence to that decision would require that it be promptly disregarded.”9 If as the Cyrenaic does, one denies “this categorical imperative” to be consistent, one contradicts oneself, and could certainly not engage in argument from a point of view. Concerning those who argue against the claim that there are imperatives that cannot be
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rationally repudiated, Lewis points out that if their own claims did not implicitly contain the claim that their own views, as expressed, are intelligent and rational, and hence imperative to believe, their expressed claims could carry no weight.10 Moreover, to live by the dictum “have no concern for the future” is to live or attempt to live according to a concern for the future and a particular way of dealing with it. Consistency is an imperative because of the temporal characteristics of human life; it is a “datum of human nature.” And indeed, ultimately for Lewis the principles that govern our lives neither have nor require any warrant other than the nature of human life itself. Logic is the critique of consistency, of validity in making inferences and drawing conclusions. If one repudiated this one would be repudiating being reasonable. But consistency cannot by itself answer questions of relevancy and evidence. The critique of empirical knowledge leads to the imperative of cogency—following rules of induction and considering all the relevant evidence. The critique of cogency draws from the consistent those choices that meet the demands of relevancy and evidence. The norms or rules that have worked in the past and continue to work are binding. Knowledge itself is a normative word. What is cognitively right, what is right in the way of believing, are empirical judgments that are justi¤ed. This requires more than consistency; it requires cogency, meaning that, as seen previously, they take into account all the relevant data and the degree of probability based on the rules of induction. Cognitive rightness is necessary for any deliberate activity, for an act cannot be right if the deliberation from which the activity resulted is not right. Further, there must be a consistency between right thinking and right doing, and thus the imperative to guide our actions in accordance with our knowledge of objective reference. The main modes in which the right or wrong of doing is assessed are the technical, the prudential, and the just. According to Lewis, hypothetical imperatives are binding if the objective the rule-guided behavior is to achieve is accepted or assumed. But if you decide not to reach that objective, then you are not bound by that rule. Imperatives in general have this hypo-
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thetical or if-then character, but if the goal or objective cannot be denied, then the “if” clause is always operative and the imperative is categorical. The technical imperatives are hypothetical. If I want to achieve a particular end, then I must follow this course of action. The technical critiques are the simplest, for they assume the desirability of the results as already determined fact. Its directives govern technical activity in ways that most reliably produce these results, and the rightness of the directives stems from the assumed goodness of the results and the reliability of achieving such results by following these directives.11 As distinct from the hypothetical imperatives of technical activity, the prudential and moral imperatives are categorical. But here it should be noted that Lewis has naturalized imperatives, including categorical imperatives of ethics, for rules or imperatives govern our ways of acting and making decisions in all areas, not just the ethical, and in all areas some directives are categorical in that the goals they specify cannot be repudiated if one is to be rational. Prudence and justice are the two categorical imperatives that govern the interrelation of individuals and society. In this area, objective reference involves the acknowledgment that individuals are capable of governing themselves, have needs of their own, and are involved in the complexities of interpersonal relations. Lewis holds that in the broadest and most important sense of the word, “moral” means rightness not only in the way we act toward others but in the governance of deliberate actions in general. The moral dimensions of human life in general are the critical dimensions. And they are critical in a twofold sense. The moral factors determine the goals toward which human life directs itself, and the morals and mores themselves are the result of critical determination.12 A more narrow, but yet still broad, meaning of “moral” as indicating self-government at large refers to prudence and justice, and Lewis considers the prudential sense to be “the beginning of moral wisdom.”13 This broader sense founds the more narrow and more common meaning of “moral,” which limits it to our acts as they affect others. The constraint to respect our own interests of
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the future, which are not now immediate, provides the basis for respecting the future interests of others, which are not and never can be immediate to us. Just as we imagine our own future, so we appreciate the future of others through what Lewis calls empathetic imagination. Prudence is the critique of one’s actions from the perspective of one’s life as a whole, the overall objective being the summum bonum. The imperative of prudence cannot be avoided, though this gives the category no particular content. To say one need not be prudent is to say that one need not develop as a person or that one need not be consistent. Prudence is not some sort of selfconcern set over against or in con®ict with social goods. Social goods involve a community of lives, and the shared ordering of lives presupposes the principles of ordering of individual lives, which is prudence. Prudence is prior to justice in that we must be able to have the self-interests of prudence in order to even acknowledge the interests of others as comparable with our own. We must be able to recognize rules governing our own lives that are valid in all like cases, in order to raise the issue of rules or principles or imperatives for all. And we must be able to govern our own actions such as to weigh future effects as if realized with the poignancy of the immediate if we are to act toward others with the recognition of the effects of our actions on them as being experienced with the poignancy of our own immediacies. If there were no imperative for prudence there could be none for justice. Justice draws from among the alternatives that prudence offers. If we are to have rules governing our actions as they affect others, the issue of justice has arisen. In the realm of justice, objectivity involves that one recognize that others are persons who, like ourselves, feel, think, follow rules, are selfgoverning individuals in accordance their own knowledge and decisions. Since prudence and justice are both categorical, their demands are always relevant. Sometimes the claims of prudence can be overruled in the name of justice, but its claims remain valid, and choices in the name of justice must seek to minimize con®icting
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interests by offering creative resolutions of situations to the extent possible. Moreover, in some extreme cases, it may be that the reasonable directive is for each person to follow the demands of prudence. Here prudence becomes “justice” for the moment. Lewis at times suggested that what lies at the heart of all imperatives, as the most fundamental imperative of both thinking and doing, is what he called the “Law of Objectivity,” and this always remained for him an important imperative, though it perhaps lost its unique status in his later writings on ethics. It commands that decisions concerning one’s activities should conform to the objective actualities as we apprehend them rather than be in®uenced by immediate feeling, and that one’s conduct, with reference to the predictable effects of future eventualities, should be carried out as if these eventualities were to be realized at the moment of decision with the poignancy of the present instead of the less poignant feelings aroused by envisioning the future. The basic imperative for humans in their social relations is the social counterpart of prudence. Actions that affect other individuals should be carried out as if their effects were to have the poignancy of what is immediate, in this case, as if their effects were to be realized in one’s own person. Lewis divides the social imperative into two parts. The law of compassion concerns the effects of one’s actions on any sentient being, a claim on one’s compassion made by its capacity to enjoy or suffer; it applies to all sentient life. The Law of Moral Equality holds that any thought or action is valid for oneself only if, given the same premises concerning the circumstances and evidence, it is valid of everyone. The Law of Moral Equality applies to our “full peers,” and one of its more morally important implications is that it is also the principle of Equality before the Moral Law: “There shall be no law for one which is not the law for all.”14 Recognition of the desirability or undesirability of what is not present, what is absent but possible to realize in the future, is what Lewis calls “intelligence.” The capacity to direct our actions in accordance with deliberately adopted attitudes and precepts is reasonableness or rationality.15 These are not distinct features of mentality but two dimensions of self-government, two
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different ways of choosing a course of action which are helpful to distinguish, both of which are essential in any sense of right and wrong. It is a failure of intelligence if we fail to adequately grasp a situation, while it is a failure of rationality if we do grasp the situation adequately, know what is best to do, but do otherwise, governing our actions by how we feel rather than by what we know. Because we can recognize the value consequences of our choices and can act deliberately in light of cognitively understood future satisfactions rather than merely impulsively in line with present affective feeling, governing our actions in accordance with what we know rather than merely how we feel has the force of an imperative. Lewis holds that since we are all more or less stupid, failure of intelligence may not be an imputed fault, but rather the fault lies in refusing to conform to what intelligence advises. “A maxim which formulates such a sanctioned way of acting—‘Do not sacri¤ce your future good to any lesser present good’—is recognized as a valid prudential precept.” Or as he clari¤es it as “more accurately put”: “So act as to maximize your total probable realizations of satisfaction over time.”16 Moreover, because we are able to place cognition of objective situations above immediate feeling and have the intelligence to appreciate the goods and bads of others as comparable to our own, it becomes “a dictate of rationality” that just as we would call upon others to respect our own interests we should respect the interests of others.17 As he puts it “more clearly and obviously: a way of acting, to be right in a given case, must be one which would, in the same premises of action, be right in every instance and right for anybody.”18 He considers this a basic principle of all social morals. But, because prudence is also a rational concern, if one puts self interest ¤rst this is a failure of rationality only if the person doing so does not recognize that this involves a claim as to what any other person who was to be in this precise situation should do. At this point it becomes important to balance Lewis’s emphasis on imperatives with his emphasis on both their contentless nature and the crucial role of empirical consequences in giving
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them content. The two main forms of critical judgment are of the good or bad and the right or wrong. As seen in the previous chapter, qualities of good and bad are contextually emergent real natural qualities. They cannot be reduced to physiological functions or to epiphenomena or non-natural qualities. And the sense of good and bad must precede the appraisal of right and wrong, for if there were no immediately had value qualities of experience, there would be nothing to be right or wrong about. But value qualities cannot lead to any sense of right and wrong until there is not merely felt good and ill but knowledge of good and ill, and this requires an understanding of what natural processes lead to good and bad results and what choices are conducive to obtaining the good and avoiding the bad. Conscious life in general naturally tends to seek the gratifying and avoid the grievous, but humans are the only beings capable of objective knowledge and thus are the only ones with a developed sense of right and wrong. The sense of right and wrong is founded in our knowledge of the good or bad in the consequences of our actions. We learn to guide our actions through knowledge of causal relationships, and to recognize the desirability or undesirability of our actions through inductive generalizations. Lewis is quick to point out that there are no rules that categorically mandate some particular act rather than allow some freedom of moral choice. For example, the manner in which one pays one’s debts is left open by the command to pay one’s debts, and the Law of Moral Equality leaves open the content of justice.19 Basic moral principles must be highly abstract and general, though they ultimately apply to concrete moral situations, situations requiring deliberate decisions that bring out consequences involving others. This always requires “collateral judgment” of the consequences and how they affect others for better or worse, something only experience can teach us.20 The reason fundamental moral principles do not depend on particular empirical facts for their validity is that they do not apply directly to empirical situations. They formulate the ultimate criteria of morally right action or of justice, but they become applicable only mediately, through another type of secondary premise.
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They cannot specify whether a particular act under particular circumstances will or will not meet the criteria they formulate. That must be established by empirical facts about the good or bad results of speci¤c ways of acting in speci¤c concrete situations. To the charge that such principles are “empty,” Lewis responds that to ask for a principle that is at once comprehensive in extending to every case, independent of empirical facts, yet able to determine in every case whether the relevant act is right or wrong, is to “cry for the moon,” and to want what not only is not possible but is contradictory.21 A principle can set criteria for judging particular concrete situations. But Lewis notes that it is suf¤cient only if phrases that refer to “you” are properly understood. Thus, for example, if “you” choose to lift weights every day, and would be happy with that as a practice for all, this does not justify such a universality, for the “you” has its signi¤cance in directing our imagination to ourselves suffering the act in question from the standpoint of the good and bad consequences imposed on others. Consequences must be viewed from the perspective of those who will enjoy or suffer from the consequences, for the meaning of acts cannot be separated from the possible consequences they embody if they were to be performed. In this way personal preferences cannot be transformed into moral percepts at the expense of others, and universality is at once impartiality. There are two different criteria involved, one formal and one empirical. The formal criterion of a valid rule is universality and impersonality, and this holds whether the rule concerns the moral, prudential, logical, or technical. The empirical criterion concerns content, what practices we want as universal, and this must be judged according to the good or bad consequences as evaluated from the perspective of those who will be affected by these practices, and the viewpoint of the person acting can be considered only as that person is thus included. Lewis recognizes that the most comprehensive moral precept will by its very nature not be derivable from any more underlying premise without circularity. It is in fact a priori “in some sense,” and this sense is that of the pragmatic contradiction discussed ear-
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lier: repudiation of it would be self-contravening. However, what actions will or will not comply with it must be decided empirically by considering the consequences of an act for those who will be affected by it. And, like judgments concerning any kind of empirical matter, this judgment is fallible. One’s intent to conform to principles of right is what Lewis considers to be integrity, but integrity alone does not guarantee that what is done is what should be done. In addition to the intent to follow fundamental moral principles, good moral practices call for both envisionment of the far-reaching consequences of different ways of acting and an enlightened sense of and attunement to human values.22 While Lewis draws from Kant in asserting categorical imperatives, for Lewis happiness is the end toward which directives aim. As always, Lewis’s Kantianism is a pragmatically reconstructed Kantianism in which he naturalizes Kantian insights to ¤ll in certain dimensions of an issue—here dimensions of the ethical, dimensions that pragmatism must assume but does not acknowledge in any explicit development. Imperatives are not rules for making particular decisions, which are context dependent. What is right or just is what will most contribute to the good life for those affected by the consequences of the decision in the speci¤c concrete situation, with all its complexities. Moreover, rules of rightness offer choices, for any situation may allow for alternative actions that can meet the demands of universalization or impartiality. The intermediate generalizations that must be utilized in concrete moral judgments because of the remoteness of the fundamental principle become our “moral rules” or maxims, familiar among them being “Lying is wrong,” “Stealing is wrong,” “Be kind and charitable,” “Pay your debts,” and so forth. Experience has taught us that these indicate ways of acting that can, by and large, be counted upon to satisfy the requirement of the fundamental principle. Lewis stresses that there are exceptions to the rules. Moreover, rules are often in con®ict with each other in concrete cases. For example, common sense tells us that in being kind or charitable
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one must at times “color the truth.” Trying to formulate any of these precepts as strictly universal would be impossible because of the endless number of quali¤cations that would be necessary— many of which could not even be envisioned until arising in some concrete case, and every concrete case is at least a little different than any other, unique in its own way. Moreover, we sometimes have a case where speci¤c rules just are not appropriate and we do not know what should be done, and we have to turn to the ultimate principle itself, implementing it by making a judgment of the individual case in light of our general wisdom of life.23 The lesson to be learned from this, according to Lewis, is that while the roots of the moral lie in something common to all humans as a native endowment, correct moral practice, like correct practice in general, has to be learned and developed through relevant experience, and requires social reinforcement and re¤nement by the critical processes involved in social living and common thinking. Speci¤c issues of moral conduct need to call on accumulated social wisdom and social criticism. Moral wisdom, like all wisdom, requires the maturation of rationality and empirical learning concerning ways of acting that work, and this maturation and learning is inextricably interwoven with the social. We inherit tendencies that are “savage and imprudent,” but are born without beliefs. Thus criticism, even self-criticism, is a more dif¤cult task than merely collecting information. Like other forms of learning, moral and other rational insights, including prudence and our native logical sense, ®ourish through social reinforcement. “The peculiarly human kind of life is imperatively social. That fact is a datum of ethics.”24 While Lewis holds that justice presupposes prudence, it must be emphasized that he also holds that the ordering of an individual life that is prudence involves the shared ordering of lives. Prudence, for Lewis, incorporates areas of mutual undertakings, common obligations, cooperative behavior involving diverse roles, and “reasonable competition” within cooperative institutional frameworks. The practices of a society are part and parcel of the good life. The social and the individual are inextricably inter-
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woven; the development of social goods and the development of individual goods are inseparably intertwined, and together are constitutive of the good life. Prudence also includes the freedom to pursue self-chosen goals. Lewis’s focus on the role of society and its institutions does not lead to the ideal of conformity, for while he stresses our social nature, he holds strongly to the concept of individual freedom. What he means by “freedom” is not merely the lack of constraint imposed by others, but the availability of concrete possibilities for realizing self-chosen goals. Humans posses the capacity for selfdetermination and self-realization through participation in the social process as autonomous individuals. Though freedom mainly refers to one’s individual liberty, it also includes the freedom that individuals attain as part of a social order and its inheritance from the past. Disparity between individual inclinations and the requirements of the social order is bound to occur, and this requires self-criticism and self-restraint.25 Liberty is in fact rational self-government, and the restriction of action that this involves is not a limitation on the individual, for it springs from imperatives of the individual’s own nature.26 In this interwoven web the development of selfhood proceeds. While Lewis clearly acknowledges that all these issues are inextricably intertwined in the nature of selfhood, his understanding of selfhood is mostly implicit, with hints and assumptions rather than explicit development. But the self-society relation is an ongoing dynamic process of mutual in®uence, and Lewis’s entire position here, with its hints at the nature of selfhood it incorporates, points to the individual-social relation as internal to and constitutive of the very dynamics of developing selfhood. Because of his view of the nature of selfhood, Lewis’s concern is not focused on traditional issues of the tensions between prudence and justice, egoism and altruism, self and other. He rejects the dichotomy of individual-social as a fundamental ethical distinction because the ultimate demands of justice lie within the very nature of selfhood as inherently social. This understanding undercuts the long-held dichotomies upon which Lewis chooses not to direct his focus, instead embracing the pragmatic view,
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best highlighted by Dewey and Mead, that the very constitution of selfhood lies in the ongoing dynamic interplay between individual creativity or uniqueness and the “common other” of the social/cultural matrix in which this individual uniqueness is embedded. Liberty, as implying autonomy and self-criticism, includes the right to a certain amount of privacy.27 But society is not an infringement on one’s absolute freedom, for the “natural” state of humans is to be relationally tied to others. Rights are not possible without obligations, and freedom is not possible without constraints. These are two sides of the same coin. Freedom does not lie in opposition to the restrictions of norms and authority, but in a self-direction that requires the proper dynamic interaction of the two dimensions of the self. Freedom does not lie in being unaffected by others, but in the way one uses one’s incorporation of “the other” in novel decisions and actions. A free society, like free individuals, requires the proper balance of novelty and conformity in an ongoing dynamic interaction. What this indicates is that humans qua humans are born into arrangements that in turn embody in their very nature reciprocity, accommodation, and justice. The position grounds autonomy, solidarity, and fairness by rooting these features in the communal nature of human existence. Neither society and its institutions nor an individual is means or end, but rather both are contributor and recipient in a reciprocal relationship. Indeed, the separation of means and ends is itself rooted in a remnant of two legacies of the Modern World View: the fact-value distinction and an atomistic separation of cause and effect. Relations are qualitative throughout and thus are infused with emergent value. The moral worth of the ®ourishing of the individual is inseparable from the moral worth of the ®ourishing of the human community. Thus Lewis holds that as society advances there is at once an increasing sense of community and also an increasing independence from the community. There is a heightened sense of community as incorporating a high degree of individual creativity and initiative, of diversity, a freedom to participate, a freedom for self-realization. The sense of self is in large part formed by the
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social context; increased freedom and sense of self as creative participant in turn increases the need for rational self-government or self-control. The role of social institutions is not to create conforming individuals but rather to further the ®ourishing of free participation, autonomy, and liberty of thought within the ongoing evolution of society. In this interwoven web of mutual in®uences social evolution thus proceeds.28 Lewis stresses that social evolution is irreducible to the effects of biological adaptation and the natural environment or to instinctive sociality, taking note of the fact that humans are the only species for whom modes of life evolve even though biological and environmental conditions remain virtually the same. The alteration of human life is progressive because human inheritance changes progressively. At any given time and in any historical context, prevailing morals are relative to the stage of human development, just as are prevailing science and technology. And the hope for further moral progress is tied to that same working of the critical processes and of learning, and to the social inheritance of ideas, which likewise make for progress in science and technology and in our political and other social institutions. The enrichment of individual human life and the valid imperatives of individual human action are in®uenced by the way social agencies or social relations lead to modi¤cations of individual mentality itself, just as individual mentality feeds into and modi¤es social agencies or relations. We learn from the cumulative “social recollection” of the successes and failures of past generations, using these as guides for the shaping of our goals or ideals. Human decisions are shot through with social recollection, for social memory molds individual intelligence. In this sense we are members of the only species that has a history. Moreover, this social recollection and the individual intelligence it molds in turn feeds into and modi¤es our very apprehension of our own history. Through institutions, as through imperatives in general, we make use of the successes of the past to anticipate the future. There is an inseparable interrelation not only between self and other, private goods and social goods, but also between individual intelli-
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gence and social intelligence. There is an intimate functional reciprocity between individual and social intelligence, a reciprocity based on the continual process of adjustment. Novelty within society is initiated by individuals, but such initiation can occur only because individuals are continuous with others and with social institutions of which they are a part. Individual intelligence and reasonable activity operate within and are products of the historically evolving social matrix, even as social evolution is in®uenced by the individual intelligence that affects its ongoing direction. And hence the crucial importance of the critique of social institutions or social practices, for these are not merely instrumental to the good life but enter into its very constitution. They are part and parcel of it. For this reason, Lewis has a major concern with the development, ongoing critique, and reconstruction when necessary, of social institutions expressive of rational ends and the social ideals they represent. In a manner analogous to his discussion of imperatives, Lewis stresses that while the quality of social life is a crucial factor in the realization of selfhood, this does not imply any particular social order, types of social institutions, or types and degrees of balance between creative and conforming dimensions of the selfcommunity relation. This requires a knowledge of temporally rooted concrete situations and the needs, valuings, and demands that emerge within them. But these empirically based decisions require directives as to what constitutes the public good, though these themselves are evolving norms. Like several of the pragmatists, Lewis turns to the history of science as the prime example of the way intelligence operates in the context of sociality. Scienti¤c advancement depends on the self-corrective method of science as individual creativity feeds into and modi¤es a collective intelligence that shares common interests and common history. And the creative discoveries of past generations become part of our taken-for-granted “facts” within our common-sense world, the way we perceive it, and our utilization of it to enrich quality of life. Moreover, scienti¤c method itself—with its freedom of inquiry, ®ow of communication, and objective, public imperatives of validity, consistency, cogency, and
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truth—as well as the institutions or social order through which it thrives—is a product of historical, sociocultural evolution. In this way not only does science allow for the development of ideals to enrich quality of life or enhance the value dimension of experience, but the values of science themselves embody a moral community. Lewis makes a distinction between technology and science on the one hand, and mores and morality on the other. This is not meant as an absolute separation but is done in order to highlight different dimensions or features of our sociocultural inheritance. The ¤rst is concerned mainly with material products and their distribution, while the second is concerned with developing and preserving the quality of communal life. The evolving ideals of universal rights and increased participation in community living and the good life it offers are constitutive in the social domain, just as consistency and cogency are in science. Our evolving mores or moralities both transmit knowledge acquired from the past and provide common, long-range goals or ideals that extend into an inde¤nite future. They incorporate an evolving, growing sense of communal life and common interests, such as preserving social institutions and enriching the quality of community life. Without the social transmission of ideas there could be no civilization and no continuing progress—in science or technology or in morals—but he emphasizes that if such ideas become authoritative in the sense of being uncriticizable, then at that point progress would be halted. Lewis not only considers the liberty of thought to be essential to personality and to be one of the highest human ideals, but he also sees that the preservation of individual freedom of dissent has a crucial social function. For anything learned or any social consensus attained originates in individual minds and re®ects both the diversity and experimentalism characteristic of independent thinking. While the social order is the main selecting and preserving agency, without the freedom of private judgment, which frequently runs counter to established tradition, there would be no intellectual innovation, and no progress. Preserving freedom of thought and action is necessary for social progress.
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Like the pragmatists in general, Lewis holds that human society must be a pluralistic community, utilizing individual differences of inclination, aptitude, and free choice to achieve a harmonious accommodation of varied interests and goals in a process of ongoing growth. “Human good, whether in the individual life or in the social order, is achieved as the ordered relationship of multiple ingredients; as the enrichment of life, and not by reduction of it to any common denominator.”29 In this way he sees human society as the counterpart of the human individual. Individuals and societies alike achieve integrity and moral development through a consistent pattern of growth incorporating the harmonious accommodation of diverse interests.30 Free societies, like free individuals, require this ongoing adjustment of diverse interests and critical thinking, and such freedom is necessary for ongoing growth. This is particularly so with respect to ideas having moral signi¤cance. Moral traditions contain attitudes and practices that either nurture or repress the free critical thinking about accepted mores themselves. Prevailing mores can prohibit their own critical reconsideration or provide for this reconsideration and improvement. In considering diverse moral traditions as they relate to this issue, Lewis ¤nds it to be the key aspect of civilizations, the most decisive for their fates, and the point at which vast differences emerge. It determines whether the social inheritance of ideas will work for human betterment or become the source of stagnation. He takes this to be the most deeply moral of all moral issues, the one most crucial for the future of humankind, and the one on which civilizations most differ.31 Lewis’s moral-social philosophy grows out of his pragmatic understanding of humans as temporal, active, rule-guided social beings engaged in a process of ongoing growth. Imperatives as normative, as rule-guided ways of behaving or choosing in all areas of human activity, are rooted ultimately in the need for consistency if we are to engage the natural universe in which we are embedded in the most fruitful ways as we cast upon it a perspectival network of meanings by which to anticipate and utilize its possibilities and potentialities, if we are to engage it in ways that
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nourish the ongoing growth of knowledge, humans, and the societies in which they are embedded, an ongoing growth essential in achieving the good life. Imperatives are the fruits of lessons learned from the past and direct rule-guided ways of behaving as we move into the future. Throughout human experience, there is an a priori dimension that arises out of past experience and is held legislative for future experience. As prescriptive or legislative of ways of behaving, interpreting, or choosing, no imperative can be proven false by future experience, but its adequacy in serving as a rule is subject to its workability in the ongoing course of experience. Imperatives, like a priori knowledge in general, are rooted in the concreteness of rudimentary purposive or intentional human behavior; they arise from, are made possible by, and are alterable within, the ¤nite temporal structure of such behavior. The norms are not external to, but emerge within, the process of concrete human existence as inherently experimental. And in all areas of human experience, some directives are categorical in that the goals they specify cannot be repudiated if one is to be rational. The ultimate principles of consistency, prudence, and justice are rooted not in abstract human reason but in human praxis; far from being universal rules handed down from on high, they are elicited from the action-oriented need to deal successfully with the natural/sociocultural environment in which we are embedded. The vague but rich moral sense that guides us in this ongoing activity contains perceptions of universal signi¤cance not because these perceptions are clear to reason but because they are infused with a primal moral vitality rooted in our natural embeddedness in communal life and our drive for enriching lives. The nurturing of this moral vitality for the ®ourishing of individuals and the societies of which they are a part and in which they are embedded requires the promotion of individual creativity; shared meanings; participatory community life; attunement to the other, with the concomitant attunement to existence in its manifold relational contexts and in its manifold value-laden, qualitative richness; recognition of growth as an infusion of life with meaningfulness, as an increase in the esthetic-moral richness of
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human existence; and open experimental inquiry as a way of engaging the world that allows for ongoing growth. From the most abstract excursions into the logical origins of the pragmatic a priori to the most concrete analyses of primal human existence, Lewis’s philosophy is imbued with, and contributes to, the ongoing vitality of the pulse of pragmatism.
Notes 1 . L i f e , Wo r k , a n d I m p o r t a n c e 1. Lewis, “Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis, 1. 2. Ibid., 3. 3. Ibid., 5. 4. Ibid., 9. 5. Lewis, “Logic and Pragmatism,” in Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis, 31–32. 6. Lewis, “Autobiography,” 10. 7. Ibid., 11. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 12. 10. Ibid., 9–10. 11. Lewis, “Logic and Pragmatism,” 32. 12. Lewis, “Autobiography,” 15. 13. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, xi, 133–34, 417n. 14. Lewis, “Autobiography,” 16. 15. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, xi. 16. Lewis, “Autobiography,” 7 17. Ibid., 18. 18. Lewis, “Logic and Pragmatism,” 19. 19. Lewis, “Experience and Meaning,” in Collected Papers, 258–76. 20. Ibid., 258. 21. Ibid., 20. 22. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. 23. Lewis, “Autobiography,” 20. 24. Lewis, The Ground and Nature of the Right. 25. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance. 26. Lewis, “Foundations of Ethics,” in Values and Imperatives. 2 . Rat ion a l Cer t it ude a nd P r a g mat ic E x p er i ment a l i s m 1. Lewis, “Logic and Pragmatism,” 6. 2. Ibid., 10. 3. Ibid., 12. 4. Ibid., 6. 5. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 39–56. 6. Peirce, MS 647, 8.
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7. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 78. 8. Lewis, “Modes of Meaning,” in Collected Papers, 316 9. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 141. 10. Ibid., 134. 11. Ibid., 163. 12. Ibid., 6. 13. Ibid., 134. It is not unusual for Lewis to make explicit an important conceptual distinction only once or twice in his writings, though the distinction is implicit throughout his position. 14. Ibid., 143–44. 15. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 88. 16. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 110. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 375. 19. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 260. 20. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 210. 21. Ibid., 210. 22. Ibid., 213. 23. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance, 101. 24. Ibid., 100–101. 25. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 112. 26. Lewis, “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” in Collected Papers, 236. 27. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 375. 28. Ibid., 269. 29. Ibid., 269. 30. Ibid., appendix F, 434. 31. Ibid., 86. 32. Ibid., 265. 33. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 105. 34. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 259. 35. Kuhn, Structure of Scienti¤c Revolutions. 36. Lewis, “Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” 235–36. Lewis takes this from Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, trans. R. W. Lawson (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 26–28. 37. Lewis, “Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” 234–35. 38. Lewis, “The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge,” in Collected Papers, 255. 39. Ibid., 256. 40. Ibid., 257. 41. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 271. 42. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in The Later Works, vol. 12, 17ff. 43. Ibid., 18. 44. Ibid., 296. 45. Ibid., 255–56. 46. Ibid., 283–84. 47. Ibid., 242–43. 48. Ibid., 25.
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49. Ibid. 50. Dewey, “Experience and Objective Idealism,” in The Middle Works, vol. 3, 136. 51. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5, 288. 52. Ibid., vol. 4, 233. 53. Ibid., vol. 7, 498. 54. Ibid., vol. 4, 480n. 55. Ibid., vol. 2, 778. 56. Peirce, New Elements of Mathematics, 850. 57. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5, 288. 58. Ibid., vol. 2, 352. 59. Ibid., vol. 8, 191; vol. 2, 29. 60. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1255. 61. Ibid., 1269. 62. Ibid., 1215–70. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 1255n. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 1257. 68. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 195–97. Heidegger points out that though Mill’s classi¤cation does not agree with Kant’s, this difference is irrelevant here. Ibid., 195. 69. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 231. 70. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View. 3 . E m p i r ic a l Cer t it ude a nd P r a g mat ic F a l l i b i l i s m 1. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 171–72. 2. Lewis, “The Pragmatic Element in Knowledge,” in Collected Papers, 248. 3. Ibid. 4. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 54. 5. Ibid., 59. 6. Ibid., 58. 7. Ibid., 134. 8. Ibid., 54. 9. Ibid., 66. 10. Ibid., 59. 11. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 444. 12. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 134. 13. Ibid., 54. 14. Lewis, “Autobiography,” 18. 15. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 55. 16. Ibid., 52–53, 57. 17. Ibid., 56–57. 18. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 444. 19. James, The Works of William James, 651.
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Notes to pages 77–95
20. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in The Later Works, vol. 4, 188–89; “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?” in The Middle Works, vol. 4, 137–38. 21. Dewey, Experience and Nature, in The Later Works, vol. 1, 18–19. 22. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 64. 23. Ibid., 121. 24. Ibid., 123–24. 25. Ibid., 124. 26. Ibid., 125. 27. Ibid., 271; Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 259. 28. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 307. 29. Ibid., 292. 30. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 183. 31. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 50. 32. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 183. 33. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 217. 34. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 226–27. 35. Ibid., 226–27. 36. Ibid., 215. 37. Ibid., 229. 38. Ibid., 232. 39. Ibid., 230–31. 40. Lewis, “Replies to My Critics,” in The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis, 657. 41. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 186. 42. Ibid., 219. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 331. 45. Ibid., 330. 46. Lewis, “A Comment on the Veri¤cation Theory of Meaning,” in Collected Papers, 334. 47. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 236. 48. Ibid., 323. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 290. 51. Ibid., 320. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 338. 54. Ibid., 352. 55. Ibid., 342. 56. Ibid., 357–58. 57. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 320. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 345. 60. Ibid., 368. 61. Ibid., 383. 62. Ibid., 386.
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63. Ibid., 391. 64. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 361. 4 . T h r ou g h E x p er ienc e to Met aphy s ic s 1. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 307. 2. Ibid., 11. 3. Ibid., 12. 4. Ibid., 14. 5. This role of metaphysical categories is indicated in Lewis, “Logic and Pragmatism,” in Collected Papers, 17. 6. Lewis, “Realism or Phenomenalism?” in Collected Papers, 345. 7. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 173. 8. Lewis, “The Structure of Logic and Its Relation to Other Systems,” in Collected Papers, 377–78. 9. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, appendix A, 399. 10. Lewis, “Realism or Phenomenalism?” 345. 11. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 330. 12. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 58. 13. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 320. 14. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 169. 15. Lewis, “Realism or Phenomenalism?” 345. 16. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 155. 17. Lewis, “Realism or Phenomenalism?” 345. 18. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 173. 19. Lewis, “Autobiography,” 18. 20. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 187–88. 21. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 10–11. 22. Ibid., 57. 23. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 409. 24. Ibid., 149, 425. 25. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 149–50. 26. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 211. 27. Ibid., 330. 28. Lewis, “Realism or Phenomenalism?” 339. 29. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 368. 30. Ibid., 368. 31. Lewis, “Realism or Phenomenalism?” 341. 32. Ibid., 341. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 342. 35. Ibid., 346. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 341. 38. Ibid., 343–44. 39. Ibid., 344.
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Notes to pages 110–133
40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Lewis, “Some Suggestions Concerning Metaphysics of Logic,” in Collected Papers, 438. 43. Lewis, “Facts, Systems, and the Unity of the World,” in Collected Papers, 387. 44. Ibid., 390. 45. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 301. 46. Lewis, “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” 232. 47. Lewis, “Facts, Systems and Unity of the World,” 390. 48. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 236. 49. Ibid., 54. 50. Lewis, “Facts, Systems and Unity of the World.” 51. Lewis, “Replies to My Critics,” in Collected Papers, 660. 52. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 56. 53. Lewis, “Facts, Systems, and the Unity of the World,” 390. 54. Lewis and Langford, Symbolic Logic, 160–61. 55. Ibid. 56. Lewis, “The Structure of Logic and Its Relation to Other Systems,” 372. 57. Peirce asserts that the general is that to which the law of excluded middle does not apply, while the vague is that to which the principle of non-contradiction does not apply. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5, 448. He then explicitly identi¤es continuity with generality. 58. Lewis, “A Comment on ‘The Veri¤cation Theory of Meaning,’” in Collected Papers, 333. 59. Lewis, “Experience and Meaning,” in Collected Papers, 264–65. 60. Ibid., 265. 61. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 154. 62. Ibid. 63. Lewis, “Pragmatism and Current Thought,” in Collected Papers, 79. 64. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 23, 207. 65. Davidson, “The Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Truth and Interpretation, 1. 66. Ibid., 307. 67. Ibid. 68. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 314. 5 . T h e P r o c e s s o f Va l u a t i o n 1. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 3. 2. Ibid., 398. 3. Ibid., 401. 4. Ibid., 403. 5. Ibid., 514. 6. Ibid., 532. 7. Ibid., 511. 8. Ibid., 520.
Notes to pages 134–157
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.
177
Ibid., 407. Ibid., 416. Ibid., 537. Ibid., 479. Ibid., 480. Ibid., 483. Ibid., 483–86. Ibid., 496–97. Ibid., 510. Ibid., 483. Ibid., 545. Ibid., 503. Ibid., 540. Ibid., 531. Ibid., 457. Ibid., 437. Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works, vol. 10, 44. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, appendix B, 405. Lewis, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 438. Ibid., 447ff. Ibid., 446–50. Ibid., 452. Ibid., 461. Ibid., 471. Ibid., 471–72. Ibid.
6. Moralit y and Soc ialit y 1. Lewis, Values and Imperatives, 106–107. 2. Lewis, “Pragmatism and the Roots of the Moral,” in Values and Imperatives, 119–25. 3. Lewis, Values and Imperatives, 103–104. 4. Lewis, “Pragmatism and the Roots of the Moral,” 105–107. 5. Lewis, “The Right and the Good,” in Values and Imperatives, 38. 6. Lewis, Ground and Nature of the Right, 75–76. 7. Ibid., 72–77. 8. Ibid., 97. 9. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance, 100–101. 10. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance, 100. 11. Lewis, Ground and Nature of the Right, 80–81. 12. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance, 78. 13. Ibid., 91. 14. Lewis, Ground and Nature of the Right, 90–94. 15. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance, 86–87. 16. Ibid., 91, 91n. 17. Ibid., 92.
178
18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
Notes to pages 157–167
Ibid., 93. Lewis, Ground and Nature of the Right, 89–97. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance, 96. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 103. Lewis, Ground and Nature of the Right, 90. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance, 54–59. Lewis, “The Meaning of Liberty,” 14–22. Ibid., 17. Lewis, Ground and Nature of the Right, 90. Lewis, Our Social Inheritance, 107. Ibid. Ibid., 109.
Bibliography Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. 1. Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Ed. Ernest Lepore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Dewey, John. The Early Works. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1972. 1. The Middle Works. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976–1983. 1. The Later Works. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–1989. Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Trans. R. W. Lawson. New York: Henry Holt, 1920. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 1. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. James, William. Principles of Psychology. Vol. 2, The Works of William James. Ed. Frederick Burkhardt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scienti¤c Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Lewis, C. I. A Survey of Symbolic Logic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1918. 1. Mind and the World Order. New York: Dover, 1929. 1. An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1946. 1. The Ground and Nature of the Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955. 1. Our Social Inheritance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957. 1. The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis. Ed. Paul Schilpp. LaSalle: Open Court, 1968. 1. Values and Imperatives. Ed. John Lange. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969. 1. Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis. Ed. John Goheen and John Mothershead Jr. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970. Lewis, C. I., and C. H. Langford. Symbolic Logic. New York: Dover, 1959. Mead, G. H. Mind, Self, and Society. Ed. Charles Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. Peirce, Charles. Collected Papers. Vols. 1–6. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1931–1935.
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1. Collected Papers. Vols. 7–8. Ed. Arthur Burks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. 1. The New Elements of Mathematics. Ed. Carolyn Eisele. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. 1. Writings of Charles Peirce. Ed. Max Fisch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. 1. Micro¤lm Edition of the Peirce Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Quine, W. V. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953. 2nd ed., 1980.
Index a priori, the: and the analytic, 30–31, 34–35, 39; and experience, 53–54, 62–64, 151–52; in knowledge, 23; Lewis’s understanding of, 2–4, 26, 45; pragmatic, 12, 56–68; synthetic, 37–39 action, rightness of, 148–57 actuality as category, 108, 109 alternative logics, 2, 30 analytic-synthetic distinction, 23, 26, 54, 57–58, 64–68 analyticity, 28, 30–32, 39, 42–45, 66 anticipation, 44–45 anti-foundationalist turn, 124 apprehension: immediate, 78–79, 81; of value qualities, 144–45 assertions, types of, 130–35 attitude, types of, 142 behavior, human: imperatives rooted in, 168; and meaning, 39–40, 42–45, 47, 67–68; as rule-guided, 149–66 beliefs: Davidson on, 126–28; empirical, 91–93; justi¤ed, 149 Bentham, Jeremy, 137–40 categories: as tools for analysis, 110; types of, 97–101 certitude: of apprehension, 78–80; empirical, 69–96; rational, 25–69; of veri¤cation, 86 cognition, 72, 125 community, individual in, 162–69 concepts: applicability of, 86–87; as categories, 97–98; vs. events, 116–17; and worldly properties, 68 “con¤rmation holism,” 65 congruence, 92–93 consistency, principle of, 46–48, 152– 53, 168 containment, problem of, 37, 43, 60–62, 66 continental philosophy, 63 Copernican Revolution, 52 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 7–8
data: from experience, 91–92; pre-vs. post-analytic, 75; recognition of, 80 Davidson, Donald, 126–28 de¤nitions, real, 34–36 Derrida, Jacques, 123 Dewey, John: on esthetics, 141–42; and the given, 76; on interacting continuities, 110; and Lewis, 5; and logic, 58–60; and logical positivism, 20 difference, play of, 124 disposition: as rule of generation, 87; as a rule of organization, 40–44, 60–64, 87; and theory of meaning, 101– 106, 118 duration, time as, 108 Einstein’s theory of relativity, 52–54 Empimenides the Cretan, 152 empirical statements, levels of, 81–82 empiricism, 69–96 “epistemic present,” the, 87–88 epistemology and metaphysics, 97–98, 106–17 “Epithet, Fallacy of the,” 135–36 esthetics, 141–47 ethics: as basis of knowledge, 150–66; Lewis on, 4, 19, 23; social, 140–41, 148–69; value and, 135, 140–41 excluded middle, law of, 109 experience: a priori as structuring, 53– 54, 57–60, 62–64, 151–52; cognitive, 91–92; concepts and, 46–52; esthetic, 144–47; as experimental, 45, 168–69; given element in, 69– 80; imperatives and, 168–69; interpretive structures and, 116–17; and knowledge, 2–3, 17; meaning rooted in, 101–106; metaphysics rooted in, 122–25; of objects, 72– 75, 143–44; and reality, 98; resisting element in, 127–28; texture of, 108; value of, 133–34, 138–39, 143; world as synthesis of, 113–14
182
Index
experimentalism, pragmatic, 45–56, 168–69 fact, as not independent of knowledge, 112–13 falliblism, 54–55, 65–66 First Principles (Spencer), 8 Firstness, 77, 107, 110 freedom, 162–69 generalization, empirical, 49–52, 54–55, 57, 66 given, the, 2–3, 17, 48, 69–81 good, the, 3–4, 23; and action, 148–51; social, 162–69; in valuation, 130– 32, 137–39 Heidegger, Martin, 63, 64, 173n68 Hume, David: on empirical knowledge, 89–90; on “ought/is,” 149; and skepticism, 93 idealism: attacks on, 15; and knowledge, 104–105; objective, 11–12; vs. realism in Lewis’s thought, 117–19, 127–28 image, 41–42 imperatives: and goods, 3–4, 167–68; categorical, 152–61; hypothetical, 153–54; and the social, 161–69 implication: material, 18, 26–29; strict, 2, 19, 82–83, 131 individual, the, in society, 162–69 induction, rule of, 90, 94 inference, ordinary, 47 interpretation: conceptual, 83–84, 104; levels of, 80; problem of, 71–73 interpretative structures: and experience, 116–17; interrelationships of, 56 James, William: and a priori, 61–62; and belief, 149; on feeling, 77; and Lewis, 5, 9, 10; and logical positivism, 20; on truth, 55–56 judgments: of empirical matters, 160; in probability, 91; terminating vs. nonterminating, 81–87; truth of, 88– 90; in valuation, 131, 143–45 justice, as imperative, 4, 152–56, 158, 161–62, 168 justi¤cation: and belief, 149–50; pragmatic, 92–96; types of, 123–24; vs. veri¤cation, 80–92 Kant, Immanuel: and categorical principles, 94, 160; and ethics, 22–23;
Lewis’s appropriation of, 7–8, 10, 12, 14–15; synthetic a priori of, 36–39 knowledge: a priori in, 23, 57–68, 151– 52; action as goal of, 148–49; by acquaintance, 75; vs. apprehension, 81; empirical, 59, 69, 81–96; ethics as basis of, 150–66; fallible, 54– 55; justi¤cation of, 80–92; Lewis’s understanding of, 2–4, 13–14, 37; and logic, 27; objective, 74–75; vs. qualia, 78; and reality, 126–28; value in, 15–16; and world, 112–17 Kuhn, Thomas, 53 language: expressive, 17, 81; as indeterminate, 127; and object, 74–75; and sense meanings, 35–36, 69 Lewis, C. I.: at Berkeley, 13–16; development of doctrines, 1–4, 28; early life of, 6–9; Harvard association of, 7, 9–13, 16; logic and, 28–29; metaphysics of, 119–28; realism vs. idealism in, 117–19; retirement, 22–23 Library of Living Philosophers, 22–23 logic: alternative, 2, 30; as consistent thinking, 46–48, 152–53; extensional vs. intensional, 26–34; and knowledge, 27–28; in Lewis’s thought, 28–29, 46–47; of strict implication, 2, 18–19, 82–83, 131 logical positivism, 20–21 mathematics: and perceived world, 120– 22; revisability of, 65; theories of, 61–62 Mead, George Herbert, 5, 163 meaning: analytic vs. holophrastic, 31– 34; biological basis of, 39–41, 44– 45, 67–68; change of, 61; as dispositional, 101–106, 118; intensional, 41; and metaphysics, 101–106, 124– 25; and propositions, 48–52; sense vs. linguistic, 34–36; as subject to error, 66; theory of, 28–29, 101 meaningfulness, 124–25 meanings: relations between, 52, 54–55, 64–65; as revisable, 5–6 memory: in justi¤cation, 90; prima facie correctness of, 92–96 metaphysics: and empirical knowledge, 95–96; of process, 106–11; signi¤cance of Lewis’s thought in, 119– 28; speculative, 122; types of, 97– 101; “world” concept in, 111–28 mind as structuring the world, 62–63
Index morality: principles in, 157–61; in social relations, 163–65; vs. science, 166; as term, 154–55 Moral Equality, Law of, 156, 158 Newtonian mechanics, 52–53 naturalism, 15, 21–22, 151 nature: concrete processes of, 120–22; philosophy of, 106 non-contradiction, law of, 115 object: esthetic essence of, 146–47; experience of, 73–75, 143; knowledge of, 94; ontological status of, 108– 10; phenomenal, 38; and terminating judgment, 82–83, 87–89; value of, 143–44 objectivity, 82, 87, 132–36, 155–56 Objectivity, Law of, 156 organism-environment interaction, 109, 111, 119, 122 Peirce, Charles Sanders: on containment, 60–62; on the continuous, 115–16, 176n57; on Firstness, 77, 107, 110; and Lewis, 5, 16–17, 22; and logical positivism, 20 Perry, Ralph Barton, 9, 10–12 phenomenalism, 104–105 phenomenology, 64, 68 Platonic ideas, 61 possibility: as category, 108, 109, 112– 14; of metaphysics, 123–25; ontological vs. epistemic, 114–17 potentiality as category, 108, 109, 130–34 pragmatism: a priori in, 12; American, 5– 24; as comprehensive vision, 1; conceptualism in, 19; empiricism in, 2– 3, 6; and Kant, 36–39; metaphysics in, 118; moral claims in, 3–4, 167– 69; naturalism and, 21–22 Principia Mathematica (Whitehead/ Russell), 14, 18–19, 26, 28 principles, moral, 157–62 Principles A, B, and C, 94–95 Principles of Psychology (James), 61–62 probability: as factor in judgments, 83– 86; theory of, 90–96 process: metaphysics of, 106–11; and realism, 101–102 propositions: analytic, 48–52; signi¤cation of, 31–34; synthetic, 69 prudence, as imperative, 4, 152–56, 158, 161–62, 168 Ptolemaic system, 52–53
183
qualia: vs. properties of objects, 109–11; and the real, 104–105; relations of, 76–78 qualities, ontological status of, 109–11 quanti¤cation, tool of, 120–22 Quine, Willard V. O., 20–21, 64–68 real, the, 104–105, 108, 117–19 realism: critical, 15; vs. idealism in Lewis, 14–15, 117–19, 127–28; neo-, 10–11, 15; process, 101– 102, 104 reality: and analytic claims, 68; categorical, 95–96; and experience, 98; and knowledge, 126–28; Lewis’s understanding of, 3; objective, 104–105; and “world” concept, 112–28 relations/connections, real, 83–85, 87– 88, 109, 131 right: rules of, 157–61; and wrong, 148–54 Rorty, Richard, 123 Royce, Josiah, 9, 11–15, 18 Russell, Bertrand, 14, 26, 75 Santayana, George, 9, 10, 15 schematism, Kantian, 37–44 Schilpp, Paul, 22–23 science: history of, 165–66; revolutions in, 52–53; as world, 120–22 selfhood, development of, 162–63 Sellers, Roy Wood, 15 sense data, 2–3, 69–73 sense meaning: in analytic a priori, 67, 68; as disposition or habit, 40–44; and empirical knowledge, 59; vs. linguistic meaning, 34–36 sentences, true, 126–27 series, generation of, 43–44 skepticism, 80, 93, 95–96 social ethics, 4, 19, 23, 140–41, 161–69 Spencer, Herbert, 8 strict implication, logic of, 2 subjectivity vs. objectivity, 132–36 summum bonum, the, 136–39, 148, 155 Survey of Symbolic Logic (Lewis), 13–14 Symbolic Logic (Lewis/Langford), 19 symbols, meaning of, 35 synonymy, 65–67 temporality, 44–45, 136–37 truth: a priori, 62; analytic, 34–36, 52; correspondence theory of, 126–28; of description vs. appreciation, 18; determination of, 5; and epistemological analyses, 105; and experi-
184
Index
ence, 67; James on, 55–56; in logic, 29; and meaningfulness, 124–25; of terminating judgments, 88–90; and value, 143; vs. validity, 11–12, 88 “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (Quine), 20–21, 64–68 universe: as indeterminate, 127; meaning in, 118–22; real, 111–12 utility, 136–37
valuation, theory of, 3, 129–47 value: aesthetic, 141–47; assessment of, 132–36, 139–40; claims of, 130– 32; comparative, 136–40; as concept, 15–16; and morality, 156–58; social, 140–41 Vienna Circle, the, 20 Whitehead, Alfred North, 14, 18, 26 world, as concept, 111–28
Sandra B. Rosenthal, Provost Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, New Orleans, has published 12 books and approximately 250 articles on pragmatism and on its relation to other traditions. She has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad, has served as president of several major philosophical societies, and is a member of numerous editorial boards of journals and book series. Recently she received the Herbert Schneider Award given by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy for “distinguished contributions to the understanding and development of American philosophy.”
