C. I. Lewis: Toward Categories of Process and a Metaphysics of Pragmatism

C. I. Lewis: Toward Categories of Process and a Metaphysics of Pragmatism SANDRA B. ROSENTHAL IN THECURRENTLITERATUREon American Pragmatism there is a strong tendency to view the major pragmatists as converging toward a pragmatic interpretation of the nature of experience as experimental. If there is such a convergence, then one would expect that the pervasive features of such experience, as developed by Peirce in his phenomenology and carried into his categories of metaphysics, would provide the characteristic features of a metaphysics of pragmatism. And, indeed, Charles Morris , in discussing Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, holds that the pragmatists under consideration, "whatever their terminology, ascribed to the cosmos the characteristics signified in the three Peircean categories.'" The following essay will attempt to show that C. I. Lewis, usually considered the least metaphysical of the major American pragmatists, incorporates these same characteristic features of the cosmos into his own philosophy in a way that helps illuminate the path toward a distinctive metaphysics of pragmatism. Further, such a metaphysics of pragmatism as it emerges in the philosophy of C. I. Lewis gives added support to a second strong tendency in the current literature, the tendency to view pragmatism as a type of process philosophy. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism is concerned with the development of an epistemological position in which knowledge arises by the application of concepts or categories to an independent element. In the context of Lewis's technical terminology, "categories" indicate the most fundamental principles of ordering by the mind. Hence, eliciting fundamental categories clarifies the fundamental purposive attitudes in terms of which we approach the independent element. It does not provide any information about the independent element in its character as independent. Thus, if "the problem of metaphysics is 'the problem of the categories'," then metaphysics is, in fact, systematic epistemology.2 However, if the epistemological process is such that knowledge arises by the application of concepts to an independent element, then certain conditions must hold of this independent element. In short, the universe must be one which 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 Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (New York: 1970), p. 118. 2Lewis, Mind and the World Order (1929; reprint ed., New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 10. The difference between concepts and categories is a difference in degree, not in kind. [1951 196 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY both ends of which necessarily lie in cognitive experience itself? 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. TM Here it is clear that Lewis sees metaphysics as related to the independent element, not to the epistemic categorization of experience. Metaphysics in this second sense, as the analysis of what 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 given data to produce epistemic reality, the known world in which we live? The categories as truly metaphysical stand above any context of epistemic reality as a description of those characteristic features of independent reality which make possible the epistemological situation in which alternative categories can be applied to given data to give rise to epistemic reality? It is this second sense which will be intended by the term "metaphysics" in the remainder of this article. This second sense is not one clearly and systematically developed by Lewis, for Lewis the conceptual pragmatist is very much Lewis the epistemologist, and his excursions into metaphysical issues are always brief, usually random, and at times almost apologetic. Thus, his strong epistemological interests often obscure at first glance the continuing metaphysical nature of the problems involved. In his justification of empirical knowledge, Lewis holds that the if...