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Two Concepts of the Given in C. I. Lewis: Realism and Foundationalism CHRISTOPHER W. GOWANS SCHOLARSof C. I. Lewis's epistemology have usually assumed that it developed without major discontinuities or reversals, and with increasing sophistication, and hence that it reached its culmination in the 1946 An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (AKV), ~the 192 9 Mind and the World-Order (MWO) 2 being a more naive and less detailed--but substantially similar--version of the later work. It has also generally been assumed that a central component in Lewis's thought, the doctrine of the given, involves a commitment to foundationalism. The combination of these two assumptions natually leads to the conclusion that what Lewis says about the given in MWO and AKV is essentially the same, and that both works are defenses of foundationalism. There is a good deal of plausibility to this reading of Lewis, but it faces two formidable problems. The first is that it is very difficult to bring Lewis's diverse remarks on the given into coherence, especially when those in MWO are compared with those in AKV. 3 The second is that, though AKV is a manifest defense of foundationalism, there is much in MWO that can be read as a i c. i. Lewis,An AnalysisofKnowledge and Valuation (La Salle,IL: Open Court, 1946). " C. I. Lewis,Mind and the World-Order(New York: Dover, 1929). s For examples of those who find difficulties or complexities in Lewis'saccount of the given, see Virgil G. Hinshaw, Jr., "Basic Propositions in Lewis's Analysis of Knowledge," Journal of Philosophy46 (1949): 176-84; Roderick Firth, "Lewison the Given,"in The PhilosophyofC. I. Lewis, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1968),329-5o; JacobJoshua Ross,The Appeal totheGiven (London: George Allen and Unwin, 197o), 12-14; Sandra B. Rosenthal, The Pragmatic A Priori:A Study in theEpistemologyof C. I. Lewis(St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1976),68-93; and Michael Williams, GroundlessBelief: An Essay on the Possibilityof Epistemology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977),chap. 2. [573] 574 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:4 OCTOBER 1989 critique of foundationalism.4 In this paper a different reading of Lewis is proposed, one that avoids these problems. Central to this reading is the claim that Lewis used the expression 'the given' to refer to two quite different ideas, but failed to recognize the difference between them. This can be brought out by going farther back in Lewis, to his 1910 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, The Place of Intuition in Knowledge (PIK). 5 By tracing Lewis's discussion of the given from PIK through MWO up to AKV it can be shown, first, that the phrase 'the given' is used to refer to two different doctrines, and second, that Lewis's position on foundationalism undergoes a fundamental change, roughly, from indifference to rejection to acceptance. To begin, it will be helpful to describe briefly the two doctrines referred to by 'the given'. 1. The first doctrine arises out of an approach to epistemology that focuses on describing the relationship between the human mind and the physical world. According to this doctrine, there is an element in the mind's perceptual experience that is presented or given to the mind by the physical world; and, since the physical world is regarded as being independent of the mind's conceptual and volitional activities, this given element is also thought to be in some fashion independent of these activities. The given, on this view, is that aspect of perception that is not contributed by the mind itself. To accept this doctrine is to reject outright idealism in favor of some form of realism: it is to maintain that the mind has access to a reality that is in some way independent of the mind. Lewis accepted realism throughout his career. However, the realism he defended, especially in PIK and MWO, was a Kantian realism: "reality" is independent of the mind all right, but "reality as we know it" depends upon both the given and mental activity. In fact, as will be seen, the realist doctrine of the given has its origin in Kant's doctrine of...

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