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

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 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 rec2 Introduction 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...