C. I. Lewis in Focus: The Pulse of Pragmatism

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 them4 Through Experience to Metaphysics 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. 98 C. I. Lewis in Focus 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...