C(larence) I(rving) (1883–1964), American philosopher who advocated a version of pragmatism and empiricism, but was nonetheless strongly influenced by Kant. Lewis was born in Massachusetts, educated at Harvard, and taught at the University of California (1911–20) and Harvard (1920–53). He wrote in logic (A Survey of Symbolic Logic, 1918; Symbolic Logic, 1932, coauthored with C. H. Langford), in epistemology (Mind and the World Order, 1929; An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, 1946), and in ethical theory (The Ground and Nature of the Right, 1965; Our Social Inheritance, 1957).
General views. Use of the senses involves ‘presentations’ of sense experiences that signalize external objects. Reflection upon the relations of sense experiences to psychological ‘intensions’ permits our thoughts to refer to aspects of objective reality. Consequently, we can experience those non-presented objective conditions. Intensions, which include the mind’s categories, are meanings in one ordinary sense, and concepts in a philosophical sense. When judging counts as knowing, it has the future-oriented function and sole value of guiding action in pursuit of what one evaluates as good. Intensions do not fundamentally depend upon being formulated in those linguistic phrases that may express them and thereby acquire meaning. Pace Kant, our categories are replaceable when pragmatically unsuccessful, and are sometimes invented, although typically socially instilled. Kant also failed to realize that any a priori knowledge concerns only what is expressed by an ‘analytic truth,’ i.e., what is knowable with certainty via reflection upon intensions and permits reference to the necessary inclusion (and exclusion) relations between objective properties. Such inclusion/exclusion relationships are ‘entailments’ expressible by a use of ‘i. . . the. . .’ different from material implication.
The degree of justification of an empirical judgment about objective reality (e.g., that there is a doorknob before one) and of any beliefs in consequences that are probable given the judgment, approximates to certainty when the judgment stands in a relationship of ‘congruence’ to a collection of justified judgments (e.g., a collection including the judgments that one remembers seeing a doorknob a moment before, and that one has not just turned around).
Lewis’s empiricism involves one type of phenomenalism. Although he treats external conditions as metaphysically distinct from passages of sense experience, he maintains that the process of learning about the former does not involve more than learning about the latter. Accordingly, he speaks of the ‘sense meaning’ of an intension, referring to an objective condition. It concerns what one intends to count as a process that verifies that the particular intension applies to the objective world. Sense meanings of a statement may be conceived as additional ‘entailments’ of it, and are expressible by conjunctions of an infinite number of statements each of which is ‘the general form of a specific terminating judgment’ (as defined below). Lewis wants his treatment of sense meaning to rule out Berkeley’s view that objects exist only when perceived. Verification of an objective judgment, as Kant realized, is largely specified by a non-social process expressed by a rule to act in imaginable ways in response to imaginable present sense experiences (e.g. seeing a doorknob) and thereupon to have imaginable future sense experiences (e.g. feeling a doorknob). Actual instances of such passages of sense experience raise the probability of an objective judgment, whose verification is always partial. Apprehensions of sense experiences are judgments that are not reached by basing them on grounds in a way that might conceivably produce errors. Such apprehensions are ‘certain.’ The latter term may be employed by Lewis in more than one sense, but here it at least implies that the judgment is rationally credible and in the above sense not capable of being in error. So such an apprehension is ‘datal,’ i.e., rationally employed in judging other matters, and ‘immediate,’ i.e., formed noninferentially in response to a presentation. These presentations make up ‘the (sensory) given.’ Sense experience is what remains after everything that is less than certain in one’s experience of an objective condition is set aside. Lewis thought some version of the epistemic regress argument to be correct, and defended the Cartesian view that without something certain as a foundation no judgment has any degree of justification. Technical terminology. Presentation: something involved in experience, e.g. a visual impression, in virtue of which one possesses a non-inferential judgment that it is involved. The given: those presentations that have the content that they do independently of one’s intending or deciding that they have it. Terminating: decisively and completely verifiable or falsifiable in principle. (E.g., where S affirms a present sense experience, A affirms an experience of seeming to initiate an action, and E affirms a future instance of sense experience, the judgment ‘S and if A then E’ is terminating.) The general form of the terminating judgment that S and if A then E: the conditional that if S then (in all probability) E, if A. (An actual judgment expressed by this conditional is based on remembering passages of sense experience of type S/A/E and is justified thanks to the principle of induction and the principle that seeming to remember an event makes the judgment that the event occurred justified at least to some degree. These statements concern a connection that holds independently of whether anyone is thinking and underlies the rationality of relying to any degree upon what is not part of one’s self.)
Congruence: the relationship among statements in a collection when the following conditional is true: If each had some degree of justification independently of the remaining ones, then each would be made more justified by the conjoint truth of the remaining ones. (When the antecedent of this conditional is true, and a statement in the collection is such that it is highly improbable that the remaining ones all be true unless it is true, then it is made very highly justified.)
Pragmatic a priori: those judgments that are not based on the use of the senses but on employing a set of intensions, and yet are susceptible of being reasonably set aside because of a shift to a different set of intensions whose employment is pragmatically more useful (roughly, more useful for the attainment of what has intrinsic value).
Valuation: the appraising of something as having value or being morally right. (What has some value that is not due to its consequences is what has intrinsic value, e.g., enjoyable experiences of self-realization in living rationally. Other evaluations of what is good are empirical judgments concerning what may be involved in actions leading to what is intrinsically good. Rational reflection permits awareness of various moral principles.) See also ANALYTIC – SYNTHETIC DISTINC – TION ; A PRIORI ; CERTAINTY ; FOUNDATIONAL – ISM ; PHENOMENALISM ; PRAGMATISM ; SEL – LARS , WILFRI. R.K.S. C(live) S(taples) (1898–1963), English literary critic, novelist, and Christian apologist. Born in Belfast, Lewis took three first-class degrees at Oxford, became a tutor at its Magdalen College in 1925, and assumed the chair of medieval and Renaissance studies at Cambridge in 1954. While his tremendous output includes important works on medieval literature and literary criticism, he is best known for his fiction and Christian apologetics. Lewis combined a poetic sense and appreciation of argument that allowed him to communicate complex philosophical and theological material to lay audiences.
His popular writings in the philosophy of religion range over a variety of topics, including the nature and existence of God (Mere Christianity, 1952), miracles (Miracles, 1947), hell (The Great Divorce, 1945), and the problem of evil (The Problem of Pain, 1940). His own conversion to Christianity as an adult is chronicled in his autobiography (Surprised by Joy, 1955). In defending theism Lewis employed arguments from natural theology (most notably versions of the moral and teleological arguments) and arguments from religious experience. Also of philosophical interest is his defense of moral absolutism in The Abolition of Man (1943). See also PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGIO. W.J.Wo. David K. (b.1941), American philosopher influential in many areas. Lewis received the B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore in 1962 and the Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1967. He has been a member of the philosophy department at U.C.L.A. (1966–70) and Princeton (1970–). In philosophy of mind, Lewis is known principally for ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory’ (1966), ‘Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications’ (1972), and ‘Mad Pain and Martian Pain’ (1980). He argues for the functionalist thesis that mental states are defined by their typical causal roles, and the materialist thesis that the causal roles definitive of mental states are occupied by physical states. Lewis develops the view that theoretical definitions in general are functionally defined, applying the formal concept of a Ramsey sentence. And he suggests that the platitudes of commonsense or folk psychology constitute the theory implicitly defining psychological concepts. In philosophy of language and linguistics, Lewis is known principally for Convention (1969), ‘General Semantics’ (1970), and ‘Languages and Language’ (1975). His theory of convention had its source in the theory of games of pure coordination developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. Roughly, conventions are arbitrary solutions to coordination problems that perpetuate themselves once a precedent is set because they serve a common interest. Lewis requires it to be common knowledge that people prefer to conform to a conventional regularity given that others do. He treats linguistic meanings as compositional intensions. The basic intensions for lexical constituents are functions assigning extensions to indices, which include contextual factors and a possible world. An analytic sentence is one true at every index.