Lewis on the Given and Its Interpretation

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVIII (2004)

C. I. Lewis on the Given and Its Interpretation LAURENCE BONJOUR

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he epistemological position of C. I. Lewis, presented mainly in his two books Mind and the World Order (1929)1 and An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946),2 is perhaps as detailed and carefully worked out an epistemological view as is to be found anywhere in the literature of the subject. Though Lewis receives relatively little discussion nowadays, my own view is that his epistemological claims are still worthy of serious attention and indeed that the central issues that they raise should still be at the very center of the epistemological agenda. Two main theses lie at the core of Lewis’s epistemology: first, that the justification for empirical knowledge depends essentially on a foundation of “given” experience; and, second, that empirical knowledge itself consists in what Lewis refers to as the “interpretation” of the given, where this involves hypothetical predictions of future given experience on the basis of what is presently given together with hypothesized apparent actions of various sorts. Though Lewis sometimes attempts to deny this,3 it is clear that this second thesis essentially involves a phenomenalistic reduction of physical objects and situations to patterns of sensory experience. Though once very widely accepted, phenomenalist views have fallen on hard times, and it would be difficult if not impossible to find anyone with any serious sympathy for Lewis’s second thesis. I share the widespread conviction that it is utterly mistaken, though I am not sure that the most important—and obvious— reason that this is so has been stressed enough. But I have come to think that 1. New York: Dover, 1956; first published by Scribner’s in 1929. Hereafter abbreviated as MWO. 2. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1946. Hereafter abbreviated as AKV. 3. See especially his paper “Realism or Phenomenalism,” Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 233–47.

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Lewis’s first thesis is fundamentally correct, albeit in need of some serious clarification, and also that accepting the first thesis while rejecting the second leads to deep and difficult problems that have not been adequately appreciated or explored. My aims in the present paper are, first, to discuss and clarify the conception of the given that underlies Lewis’s first thesis; and, second, to say a little about his second thesis, focusing on the most fundamental reason why it is untenable, and then to make a beginning (for it can only be that) at setting out and grappling with the issues that result when the first thesis is accepted and the second rejected. All this will involve epistemology of a rather old-fashioned sort in which many recently popular views are largely ignored;4 I do not apologize for this, but the reader should be forewarned. I. THE GIVEN 1. Is There a Given? One central theme of recent epistemological discussion has been widespread doubts and denials that there is any such thing as the given, claims that, in Sellars’s popular phrase, “the given is a myth.” Much of this discussion has taken place since Lewis’s death in 1964, but it was already well under way prior to that.5 It is clear, however, that Lewis himself regarded the existence of the given as entirely indisputable, so much so that he had reached, in his own words, “the point of exasperation about this topic”:6 As it appears to me, no conscious being capable of self-observation and of abstract thinking, can fail to be aware of that element in his experience which he finds, willy-nilly, as it is and not otherwise; or to recognize that, without this, he could have no apprehension of an external world at all. In grandfather’s day, . . . anyone who, whatever he wished to say about it, did not understand what was so denoted, would have been regarded as a candidate for the booby hatch.7 I believe that Lewis was plainly right about the first of the two claims made in the initial sentence of this passage and that a very strong case can be made that he was right about the second as well. But to see clearly why this is so, both Lewis’s reasons and the conception of the given that underlies them have to be made clearer than he ever makes them. 4. I have in mind here mainly externalism and naturalism, views that of course overlap with each other to a substantial extent. It would be hard to overstate how impatient Lewis would undoubtedly have been with such views, which would have seemed to him, correctly I think, to simply ignore the deepest and most important epistemological issues. 5. Sellars’s paper “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in which the phrase “the myth of the given” is first employed, appeared in 1956 (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1 [1956]: 253–329). 6. This is from Lewis’s “Reply to My Critics” in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1968), p. 664. 7. Ibid., p. 665.

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One sort of argument for the existence of the given comes from the direction of epistemological theory. Lewis offers a version of the familiar epistemic regress argument for a foundationalist view of justification, claiming that only the sort of “direct experience” that involves givenness could play the role of the requisite foundation for empirical knowledge [e.g., AKV 187]. He also offers a more technical argument that claims of probability must rest on a foundation of certainty, which in his view only the given could provide [e.g., AKV 186].8 But arguments of this sort show at most only that the given must exist if there are to be justified empirical beliefs in general or justified claims of probability in particular. To establish that the given actually exists would require in addition the premise that skepticism about these things is false, a premise that Lewis himself would have been more than willing to supply,9 but which nonetheless does not seem as utterly undeniable as Lewis is claiming the existence of the given to be. And in any case, arguments of this sort offer little help in actually identifying the given or in understanding how and why it has the status that it is claimed to have. Many of Lewis’s attempts to point to and characterize the given more directly also seem to me relatively unhelpful, especially in the face of skepticism about its very existence. This is obviously so of familiar phrases like “direct presentation,” “immediate awareness,” the term “given” itself, and the various combinations and permutations of these. Though extremely natural and obvious to someone who already understands and accepts the basic idea of the given, these quasi-metaphorical characterizations are unlikely to convince the skeptics or even to be of much help to those who are seriously uncertain. Much the same thing is true of the first of the two “criteria of givenness” offered in MWO: “first, its specific sensuous or feeling-character” [MWO 66]. And the second of these two criteria, which is said by Lewis to be the only one that is really “definitive,” is even more problematic: “second, that the mode of thought can neither create nor alter it—that it remains unaffected by any change of mental attitude or interest” [MWO 66]. Lewis elaborates this by remarking that the given element in one of his experiences “is, in broad terms, no different than it would be if I were an infant or an ignorant savage” [MWO 50]. While this might be a defensible thesis about the given, it fails to identify it in any very direct way; and it is easy to see how the last quoted remark could play into the hands of those who reject the whole conception: how can Lewis be sure, as sure as he seems to be about the existence of the given, that there is any unvarying element in the experience of such differently situated individuals? (And why exactly would this matter for the epistemological role that the given is supposed to play?) Another passage, this time from AKV, is more helpful, even though it also contains another way of identifying the given that is problematic at best:

8. See also Hans Reichenbach, “Are Phenomenal Reports Absolutely Certain?” Philosophical Review 61 (1952): 147–59; and Lewis’s reply, “The Given Element in Empirical Knowledge,” Philosophical Review 61 (1952): 168–75. 9. See the end of the Lewis’s reply to Reichenbach (and Goodman), cited in the previous note.

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[The] point is simply that there is such a thing as experience, the content of which we do not invent and cannot have as we will but merely find. And that this given is an element in perception but not the whole of perceptual cognition. Subtract, in what we say that we see, or hear, or otherwise learn from direct experience, all that conceivably could be mistaken; the remainder is the given content of the experience inducing this belief. [AKV 182–3] This is a rich passage that needs to be carefully sorted out. The claim in the last sentence that the awareness of the given is infallible, incapable of being mistaken, is one that Lewis always insisted on (sometimes using variant terms like “certain,” “incorrigible,” or “indubitable,” whose most strict construal doesn’t say quite the same thing) and attached great theoretical importance to (especially in relation to the argument about probability mentioned earlier). But whether or not it is correct (an issue to be considered below), it is easy to see that the claim of infallibility fails to identify the alleged element in experience in any very clear way—and, more importantly, says nothing about why the given has this status. The first sentence of the passage, on the other hand, seems to me to point in very much the right direction: the content of a passage of conscious experience is something that the subject in question merely finds to be phenomenologically there. In a later letter discussing the idea of the given, Lewis begins with what he characterizes as “something broader”: “anything—any element or aspect—phenomenologically capable of being discovered directly in experience as ‘found’.” This includes, he says, the “immediate value-qualities of particular passages of experience” that he appeals to in his naturalistic account of value [AKV Part III], “sense-qualities,” and such things as “pain or angriness or feeling of conation.” Later on he mentions such things as “my morning feeling of irascibility or euphoria,” “thinking about buying a bright red tie,” and “remembering the color of a tie I think I could find in my closet.” It thus seems reasonably clear that for Lewis, the “found” includes everything that is included within the content of one’s conscious experience. He then proposes to delimit the given proper as “the class or classes of [such found] data that are normally assigned a cognitive significance.” (This at least partially explains the second sentence of the foregoing passage.) He grants, however, that this is only a rough demarcation, since (i) all such items are “found” in experience in the same way and (ii) any “found” item might have cognitive significance in relation to some imaginable issue. And he suggests at the end of the letter that it would work just as well to take the term “given” simply to refer to whatever “found” elements are cognitively relevant in a particular context.10 My suggestion is thus that while finer distinctions might be valuable for various specific purposes, it is clearest to view the given as just the entire content of conscious experience, a content of which a person is aware in the most fundamental way simply by virtue of that experience being, after all, conscious. This would then include sensory elements of various kinds, together with other sorts of 10. All this is from a letter from Lewis to Professor Thomas E. Hill, dated March 28, 1953, a copy of which is in my possession.

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feelings and aspects of emotions, various kinds of occurrent propositional attitudes, and no doubt much more besides.11 From the most basic epistemological standpoint, all of these things are on a par with each other: they are simply there in conscious experience, whether described as “given,” “presented,” or “found”; and they are experienced “directly” or “immediately” simply in the sense that they are not experienced on the basis of anything else that is experienced in a more fundamental way (for if there were any such more immediate item, it would be that which had the status in question). Thus, I submit, the existence of the given in this sense (as opposed to the further issue of its epistemological role) can be denied only by denying the very existence of conscious experience itself (or perhaps by denying that such experience need have any specific or definite content). As Descartes argued long ago, the existence of this given content is as certain and undeniable for a given person as his or her existence as a conscious being. 2. Is the Apprehension of the Given Infallible? As already noted, Lewis claims that the awareness of the given is certain or infallible, incapable of being mistaken.12 My suggestion is that while there is one construal under which this claim is correct, there is a second, more obvious, and ultimately more important construal under which it is mistaken. Lewis often speaks, as indeed he must, of the apprehension of the given, but what is this apprehension and how does it relate to the given content itself? It is easy to assume that the apprehension of the given must be viewed as a separate cognitive state that has the given experience as its object and then to ask why such a state should be thought of as infallible—or even why it doesn’t require some sort of further justification if it is to be rationally acceptable at all.13 But this is to ignore the fact that the states whose content is alleged to be given are themselves conscious states and that what makes a state conscious is that one is aware of its content simply by having it. Thus the most fundamental awareness of the given content—which is what Lewis is, I think, referring to in speaking of “the apprehension of the given”—is not a separate apperceptive or reflective state directed on the given content as its object, but is simply the awareness of that content 11. It is the inclusion of occurrent propositional attitudes in this list that is most uncertain. Lewis never says in any completely explicit way that they are included, and he often seems to want to limit the given to things having the sort of phenomenologically sensuous “feel” that propositional attitudes notoriously lack. But I can see no principled reason for excluding them from the category of the “found” and am thus inclined to account for Lewis’s seeming perhaps to exclude them as resulting from the criterion of cognitive significance discussed above. Ordinarily a propositional thought would not have cognitive significance in itself (that is, would not serve as evidence for a cognitive claim), but there are plainly exceptions to this, most obviously where it is the existence of such a thought that is the cognitive issue in question. 12. See Roderick Firth, “Lewis on the Given,” in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1968), for a sorting out of the various claims in the vicinity. 13. For a version of this objection, see my book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 74–6.

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that is intrinsic to the various conscious states themselves. And this awareness is indeed infallible simply because there is nothing for it to be mistaken about, no independent object that it might get wrong: for a conscious state to have a content of a particular sort just is for the subject to be aware of this content in this way.14 But what about further sorts of awareness or judgment or belief pertaining to the content of the given? In MWO, Lewis’s explicitly stated view is that the content of the given, at least the sensory given on which he is there focusing more or less exclusively, is ineffable—where this seems to mean, not just that this content cannot be conveyed in public language, but that it cannot be conceptually described at all or thought about at all [MWO 52–3, 124–5]. How exactly this is to be understood or how ineffable givens could play a role in objective knowledge are difficult and elusive issues. But by the time of AKV, the doctrine of ineffability has been abandoned, and we are told that the given can be conceptually grasped and publicly described by using what Lewis calls “expressive language”: . . . when I say, “I see what looks like granite steps before me,” I restrict myself to what is given; and what I intend by this language is something of which I can have no possible doubt. . . . This use of language to formulate a directly presented or presentable content of experience, may be called its expressive use. . . . The distinctive character of expressive language, or the expressive use of language, is that such language signifies appearances. . . . It is confined to description of the content of presentation itself. [AKV 179] As this passage suggests, and as Lewis makes abundantly clear elsewhere, claims about the given that are or could be formulated in expressive language are in his view also incapable of being mistaken (as long as the person is sincere and not deliberately lying). But the infallibility of conceptual claims or judgments of this sort about the given does not follow from that of the intrinsic awareness of content, nor, as far as I can see, is there any other way to defend it. Supposing that I do have a reasonably clear conception of what sorts of visual experiences would be correctly describable as it looking as though there was a flight of granite steps before me,15 why couldn’t I be mistaken in judging that my present experience satisfies this conception, even though I am in the way already indicated infallibly aware of its sensory content? Isn’t it possible that someone standing beside me as I offer this description might say “look again—does it really look like granite?” and that I 14. I am thus rejecting David Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory of consciousness. See Rosenthal, “Two Concepts of Consciousness,” Philosophical Studies 94 (1986); and my discussion of this point in Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa, Epistemic Justification (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 66–8. 15. It is not at all obvious, I would suggest, just what makes a description of this sort correct: what the conceptions that we undeniably have of what sorts of sensory experience correspond to various kinds of physical situation amount to or where they come from. This is an issue that will be considered later in the paper.

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might on reconsideration decide that I was being insufficiently attentive to that aspect of the experience and that it didn’t really look like granite steps after all? Where the feature or aspect of experience in question is relatively simple and obvious, such mistakes may seem very unlikely: it is much harder to imagine being mistaken about the step part of the description than about the granite part. But while I think this is correct, it is hard to see why such a mistake would ever become completely impossible (or how it could ever be determined in which cases this was so). And as experiences become more complex and multifaceted, it seems to become increasingly easy to see how mistakes in describing them become not only possible but even in some cases likely. (Imagine, for example, trying to describe in detail one’s experience of a complicated abstract painting, involving a complicated pattern of shapes and colors.) It is possible, in light of some of the things he says, that Lewis would respond to this objection by saying that the mistakes in question are merely linguistic in character, that what the person is mistaken about is not the given content itself but only the appropriateness of a certain linguistic description [AKV 30, 183]. The idea is that what the subject means or understands by that linguistic description is in fact correct, even though he is mistaken that the language in question is standardly or normally used to convey that meaning. Now this is certainly a possible case: I may have a mistaken conception of what the description “I see what looks like granite steps before me” standardly conveys, and so may mistakenly use that description in relation to my present experience, while still being correct that the conception I do have fits the experience. (The most plausible version of this is where I have a mistaken idea of what granite looks like.) And I think that Lewis is right that this sort of mistake is epistemologically insignificant, however troublesome it may be for communication. But there is no reason to think that this is the only sort of mistake that is possible, that I might not also mistakenly judge that the experience fits the conception that I in fact have, whether or not I am right about its proper linguistic expression. The only way to avoid this possibility, one that has sometimes been adopted but which does not seem to be endorsed by Lewis, would be to say that the verbal description expresses no antecedent conception of any sort but means only that the experience has the character that it is consciously apprehended to have: in effect saying only “this experience is like that.” This would, as far as I can see, avoid any possibility of mistake, but at the price of eliminating any serious conceptualization of the given content and making it impossible for beliefs about the given content to play the role they are supposed to play in Lewis’s epistemological system—or indeed in any serious epistemological view. Two other things that Lewis says are relevant to the issue of infallibility. Sometimes he seems to half-recognize the possibility of mistakes in the conceptual characterization of the given, as when he says that “Immediate apprehensions of sense possess certainty—if we are careful to restrict ourselves to just the directly given content and as it is given” [AKV 28]. The last part of this surely suggests that mistakes are possible, claiming at most that they can be avoided if sufficient care is exercised. This relates to Lewis’s claim that a formulation of the given content “will be independent, for its truth, of anything further and not contained in just

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this given experience itself” [AKV 26]. Taken together, these remarks could be taken to suggest the rather different view that while mistakes about the given are possible, they could always, at least in principle, have been corrected by attending more carefully to the details of the experience. But whether or not this is correct, it is a very different claim from a claim of actual infallibility.16 3. The Given as the Foundation of Empirical Knowledge Many, including Lewis himself, have thought that the given cannot play the foundational epistemological role that Lewis and others assign to it unless beliefs or judgments about it are infallible in the way that I have argued they are not. It is easy, however, to see that this view is mistaken. We may begin by looking briefly at the familiar epistemic regress argument for foundationalism, alluded to earlier. The regress argument begins by noting that one obvious way in which a belief can be epistemically justified is by being inferable from one or more other premise beliefs that are themselves justified. These premise beliefs may also be justified by being inferable from still further premise beliefs, and so on, but to say that beliefs can only be justified in this inferential way seems clearly to threaten an infinite regress of justification. It is difficult or impossible to imagine such an infinite regress actually being realized in the beliefs of a particular person. And even if it were realized, since the justification of the beliefs at any particular stage is only hypothetical, dependent on that of the further, justificatorily prior beliefs in the sequence, the result would seem to be that none of the component beliefs is really justified simpliciter at all, only justified if further and still further logically prior beliefs are justified, with the antecedent of this conditional never being definitively satisfied.Assuming, as I will here, that this alternative does not yield genuine justification,17 there seem to be only two remaining possibilities (other than simply conceding that the regress terminates with unjustified beliefs, so that again no belief is really justified). One is the coherentist idea that the sequence of justification circles back on itself and that somehow this circle or closed curve of justification is not vicious (perhaps because the justification of the whole coherent system is prior to that of the component beliefs), while the other is the foundationalist view that there is a non-inferential mode of justification in which a foundational belief can be justified by something other than a belief, something that does not raise any further issue of justification and so stops the regress. Lewis’s view, which I now believe to be correct, is that a coherentist view of justification

16. A further issue is the relevance of future experience to a description of an experience that is already past and gone. See Reichenbach, “Are Phenomenal Reports Absolutely Certain?” for an argument that future experience can always give us reasons to think that an earlier characterization of the given was mistaken. 17. But see Peter Klein, “Foundationalism and the Infinite Regress of Reasons,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998): 919–25, for an attempt at defending the genuine infinite regress view.

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cannot succeed,18 leaving foundationalism as the only possibility for a nonskeptical account of empirical knowledge.19 What is needed for a defensible foundationalist view is thus some sort of reason or basis other than further beliefs for thinking that foundational beliefs are true. My suggestion, here following Lewis, is that the intrinsic awareness of the content of conscious experience provides such a basis. If I have a conscious awareness of the content of a passage of experience and at the same time entertain a belief that purports to describe or characterize that experience, then I am seemingly in an ideal position to discern directly whether or not that belief is true. If on this basis I find the description or characterization of the experience to be correct and accordingly come to accept the belief, I am in the most standard sorts of cases thereby justified. To be sure, mistake is still possible in the way already argued for above; and in unusual cases, where the experience and description is complicated enough, the possibility of mistake may become significant enough to call justification into question. But where this is not so, where I seem to myself to see clearly and unproblematically that the description or characterization is correct, this is, I suggest, enough for a very high level of justification, albeit one that still falls short of infallibility.20 If being able to compare a purported description directly with its intended object in this way were not enough to yield justification for the belief that the description is true (or perhaps that it isn’t), it is very hard to see what empirical justification could possibly consist in.21 My main thesis so far is thus that while Lewis was mistaken in thinking that infallibility extends beyond the intrinsic, non-conceptual apprehension of the content of experience to conceptual descriptions thereof, he was entirely right that conceptual beliefs about the given, such as those that could be formulated in expressive language, can be justified by appeal to that non-conceptual apprehension in a way that gives them foundational status. Much heavy weather has been made of the idea that an awareness that is in itself non-conceptual could justify a conceptual claim,22 but if I am right, this is no more problematic than the much more general and commonsensical idea that a description of an object can be justified by appeal to an independent awareness thereof. What makes the case of the

18. For my own earlier attempt to elaborate and defend a coherentist view, see The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, Part II; for my reasons for thinking that Lewis is right that such a view cannot succeed, see BonJour and Sosa, Epistemic Justification, pp. 53–59. 19. I limit the discussion here to empirical knowledge and justification. An analogous issue arises also for a priori knowledge, but that is beyond the scope of the present paper. (For my own attempt to defend a foundationalist account of the a priori, see my book In Defense of Pure Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997].) 20. High enough, I believe, to satisfy any level of justification short of certainty that might be required for knowledge. (But for my doubts that there is any such level of justification, see BonJour and Sosa, Epistemic Justification, pp. 21–3.) 21. For further discussion of this point, see BonJour and Sosa, Epistemic Justification, pp. 119–31 (Sosa’s critique) and 190–96 (my reply). 22. See, for example, Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Dieter Henrich (ed.), Kant oder Hegel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983), p. 428.

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given epistemologically special is that only there do we have a conscious awareness of an “object” that is itself entirely unproblematic from an epistemological standpoint, since it is in virtue of that very awareness that the “object” has the character that it in fact has. There are two important issues remaining in the vicinity, however, which I want to mention before concluding this part of the paper. One of these can only be briefly raised here, while the second will be dealt with at least somewhat further in the second part of the paper. First. I have argued that beliefs involving conceptual descriptions of the given can indeed have the foundational status that Lewis ascribes to them. But even if this is correct, it does not so far rule out the possibility that there might be other sorts of empirical beliefs that are foundational as well, perhaps beliefs that are directly about physical objects and situations, thereby avoiding the difficulties that arise (see below) from the attempt to reconstruct the edifice of empirical knowledge on the basis of the given alone. In particular, some recent philosophers have attempted to argue that perceptual beliefs about physical objects can be directly justified by non-conceptual perceptual experience in a way that makes them foundational. Anything like an adequate exploration of this possibility would greatly exceed the allowable bounds of this paper, but it is possible to indicate briefly why Lewis would have undoubtedly rejected such a view, a response to it that I am inclined to agree with. The basic problem is to understand what the relation is supposed to be between the perceptual experience and the claims about physical objects that are allegedly based on it, in virtue of which the former provides a good reason for thinking that the latter is true. And it is hard to see how this question can be satisfactorily answered without characterizing experience in conceptual terms and then arguing in some way that if experience of that sort is given, then the physical claims in question are likely to be true. Perhaps it is for some reason not necessary in order for the perceptual beliefs of ordinary folk to be justified that they explicitly form beliefs about the content of experience or be in a position to actually make such an argument. But a perspicuous reconstruction of their justification would still seem to depend on the foundational status of the description of experience, together with the cogency of the argument from that description to the relevant claims about physical objects. And that would be enough to make it true that the real foundation still lies in the given. Second. I have so far followed Lewis in thinking of foundational beliefs about the given as being of the sort that can be captured in expressive language: beliefs about appearances characterized in terms derivative from physical descriptions. But although this is the easiest and most natural way to think of descriptions of the given, it is open to question, as we will see, whether it really gets at the given content in a sufficiently specific and detailed way to provide the basis for an inference to claims about the physical world—or whether something more phenomenological is needed, something more like the sense-datum concepts and descriptions that have sometimes been envisaged. Obviously this will depend in significant part on how claims about the physical world are themselves to be understood, which brings us to Lewis’s second main thesis—and to the second main section of this paper.

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II. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE GIVEN 1. Lewis’s Phenomenalism Assuming then, as I will for the balance of this paper, that Lewis is correct in holding both that the given is capable of providing a foundation for empirical knowledge in the way already indicated and also that no other sort of empirical foundation is available, the question is then what the relation is between the given (or our beliefs about it) and the various other things that we think that we know, especially claims pertaining to the physical world. As already noted above, Lewis’s answer to this question is a version of phenomenalism, according to which claims about physical objects are translatable into claims that pertain only to given experience. The central concept in Lewis’s account of this position in AKV is the concept of a terminating judgment. Terminating judgments are hypothetical and probabilistic statements about the relation between actually given experiences and others that are merely possible (or, better, obtainable). In the most standard cases, such a judgment has the following form: S being given, if A, then with high probability E. Here S is an initial sensory cue of some sort, A is the given experience of seeming to act in a certain way (something that is assumed in general to be within my voluntary control), and E is the expected sensory result. We may take two of Lewis’s own examples as illustrations: (i) A “visual sheet-of-paper presentation” being given, if I seem myself to move my eyes to the left, then it is highly probable that the paper presentation will be displaced to the right. (ii) the visual presentation of a doorknob in front of me and to the left being given, if I seem to myself to be reaching out and grasping in the appropriate way, then it is highly probable I will have the tactile experience of seeming to make contact with a doorknob. The crucial point, to repeat, is that such judgments pertain entirely to given experience as it could be formulated in expressive language. And this in turn, with a slight reservation resulting from the probability qualification, makes them directly verifiable or falsifiable: if I bring it about that I seem to act in the indicated way, the experimental result in question will either occur or fail to occur as anticipated.23 It is using some given experiences to anticipate the obtainability of others in this way that Lewis refers to as the interpretation of the given. His phenomenalist thesis is then that the cognitive content of any “objective” judgment about the physical world must be entirely “translatable” into terminating judgments [AKV 181], indeed into an “inexhaustibly” large collection of them that involve consequences extending further and further into the indefinite future [AKV 23. This is a very condensed summation of material that is developed at length in chapters 7 and 8 of AKV.

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175–78]. For a claim about the physical world to be true, then, is on Lewis’s view just for all of this inexhaustible collection of terminating judgments to be true. Many complicated and subtle objections have been raised to views of this general type, including concerns about the ontological status of presently unperceived objects, doubts about whether the realm of experience really possesses the sort of lawful order that such a view would require, denials that any terminating judgment is really an analytic consequence of a physical object judgment in the way that Lewis claims, and many more besides. But the fundamental problem, one that is obvious but sometimes seems to be almost lost sight of or at least downplayed in the course of developing these more subtle objections, is that Lewis’s view is simply and obviously mistaken about the meaning or content of claims about the physical world. What we have in mind when we think of a physical object or situation is not in any way reducible to any sort of constellation of patterns of experience, but rather is something that exists (if it does indeed exist at all) entirely outside and independent of experience generally: people having various patterns of experience is simply not what it is for such an object to exist or have the various properties that are ascribed to it.24 Once denied, this point is not easy to argue for directly, and this is one motive for the more sophisticated objections. But it is true all the same, as indeed few if any would now deny, and this means that any adequate epistemological view must acknowledge this fact and attempt to come to grips with it—something that Lewis’s view conspicuously fails to do.25 2. What Is the Alternative? The falsity of phenomenalism does not mean, of course, that there are no connections or relations between given experience and the physical realm that would allow the one to be a basis for knowledge of the other. But it does mean that these connections must be understood—and justified—in some quite different way, and it is not immediately obvious what that might be. Here it will help in formulating the issue to look again at Lewis’s terminating judgments and the expressive language that they involve. Consider, for example, the claim that when it looks as though there is a large evergreen tree a short distance in front of me, if I seem to myself to walk straight toward it, I will almost certainly have the experiences of such a tree at closer and closer apparent distances and eventually the experience of seeming to make contact with the tree. Since phenomenalism is false, this is not any part of what it means for there to be 24. One qualification is worth noting at this point: for certain properties commonsensically ascribed to physical objects, roughly those standardly characterized as “secondary qualities,” it is plausible to suppose that what it is for an object to have those properties is for people to have the right sorts of experience in the right contexts. But the contexts in question cannot be specified in purely experiential terms, but rather must make ineliminable reference to physical objects. And in any case, this sort of treatment cannot be extended to other sorts of physical properties, especially spatial ones. 25. For Lewis’s attempt to reply to this objection by arguing that his view of the physical world is not objectionably subjectivistic or phenomenalistic in character, see “Realism or Phenomenalism,” cited above, and also AKV, pp. 200–202.

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a tree there. But it nonetheless seems true and seems moreover to offer a way in which I can be assured that the tree is genuinely there, rather than being a momentary hallucination of some sort. How are we to understand this? My suggestion, which I believe to be in a way obvious once phenomenalism has been set aside, is this. In making judgments of this sort, we are relying on a correlation (or set of correlations) between the detailed features of sensory and introspective experience, on the one hand, and perspectivally characterized physical situations, on the other (including seemingly voluntary actions, viewed from the perspective of the actor). Taking this complicated correlation for granted, as we usually do, it is easy to see why terminating judgments (as I will continue to refer to them) of the sort in question seem to follow: Given the experience that I (using this correlation) characterize as it’s looking as though there is a large evergreen tree a short distance in front of me, it follows according to the correlation that there is (probably) a tree in that position. Given the experience that I (again using the correlation) characterize as walking in that direction (an experience that I seem to be able to voluntarily bring about by, as I think, actually acting voluntarily in that way), it follows according to the correlation that I am (probably) moving closer and closer to the tree, eventually reaching it. And from this, again using the correlation, it follows that I will (probably) have closer and closer experiences of the tree and eventually the experience of making contact with it (all as specified by the correlation). If I am right, it is in fact the tacit acceptance of this correlation and the reliance on it in this way that gives Lewis’s phenomenalist account what little intuitive plausibility it possesses; if the various elements of the terminating judgments were specified in purely phenomenological terms not derivative from physical object concepts (assuming that this is possible), there would be no plausibility at all that the truth of judgments of this kind, even infinitely many of them, genuinely captures what it is for physical objects like the tree to exist. How we come to think in this way is far from clear. Perhaps the correlation is substantially innate, perhaps it is learned early in life, and most likely, as it seems to me, both of these possibilities play some role. But the crucial issue of course is justification: what reason, if any, do we have for thinking that the correlation is correct (or at least approximately correct): that the various sorts of sensory content really do indicate the existence of the correlated physical situations? Clearly, as Hume noted long ago, the correlation cannot, at least for the most part, be justified by appeal to experience in any straightforward way, since any such appeal would have to presuppose the very correlation in question. (I say “for the most part” because it does seem possible that once the correlation in question is at least largely established, it might be possible to extend or refine it on an empirical basis.) What seems to be needed instead is an a priori argument for the correctness of the correlation. And if this argument is not to be reductive in character, like Lewis’s, the only very obvious alternative is an a priori argument that the specific features and patterns of experience are best explained by the existence of the physical situations which are associated by those features by the correlation. But though an argument of this kind seems to be the only very clear dialectical alternative, the task of actually spelling it out in reasonable detail is daunt-

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ing in the extreme, for at least two main reasons. First, even apart from general doubts about the a priori, the idea that results of this character could be obtained via an a priori argument would be looked upon with extreme skepticism by most philosophers. Second, it seems likely that an adequate argument of this sort would have to start from an account of the relevant features and patterns of experience that is far more detailed and comprehensive than has almost ever been attempted. Moreover, the sort of characterization of experience that is suggested by Lewis’s idea of expressive language, a characterization in terms of appearances of physical objects and situations, plainly will not do, since it is the very appropriateness of that characterization that is at issue. What appears to be needed instead is a detailed description of experience in purely phenomenological terms. I see no reason for thinking that such a characterization is impossible, and some few philosophers have made serious attempts in this direction, even though many of them have had a more reductive program in mind.26 But at the very least, it is hard to be sure that such an account can be reasonably completed or to be very confident about what it would reveal if it were. For both these reasons, the prospects for such an argument must be acknowledged to be extremely uncertain at best.27 But if Lewis is right, as I believe him to be, that only the given can in the end provide a basis for empirical justification, and if phenomenalism is indeed untenable, as it surely is, then there appears to be no alternative to such an argument if we are to have any good reasons for thinking that our beliefs about the physical world are true. And while the search for such an argument has been clearly on the philosophical agenda since the time of Locke and Descartes, both of whom make tentative but also pretty feeble attempts in this direction, it is also true that the vast majority of epistemologically minded philosophers have attempted instead to evade somehow the need for an argument of this kind. In earlier times, this evasion took the form of idealism and its more technically refined descendent, phenomenalism; in more recent times it has taken the various forms of externalism or reliabilism, various versions of direct realism, contextualism, and pragmatism. Some of these views have useful things to say about other issues, but none of them really addresses the issue that Lewis, correctly in my view, regards as central: how are our beliefs about the world justified in a way that is accessible to us and in a sense that makes them genuinely likely to be true? Perhaps Lewis is mistaken in thinking that such a justification must be available, that the correlative version of skepticism is simply unacceptable from an intellectual standpoint. But it seems to me a clear mistake to opt for the skeptical alternative, whether or not it is dressed up in one of the ways just enumerated, until a more concerted and widespread effort at solving the problem than has ever taken place so far has at least been made.

26. See especially H. H. Price, Perception, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1950); and C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1923), Part II. 27. I have made a small initial effort in this direction in BonJour and Sosa, Epistemic Justification, pp. 87–96.