按要求完成句子1.He can swim.I can also swim.(合并）____ he ___i___ ___2.English isn't as difficult as math.（同义句）3.We can both swim.（同义句）4.He is 14 years old.I am 15 years old.
___me.I am___ ___him.5.He read 5books,I read 3 books___me yesterday.(同义句）
●╱蘇荷丶jrnk
1 Both he and I can swim2 English is easier than math.3 He and I can swim.4 He is younger than me.I am older than him.5 这一句楼主好像没写对 你看一下?希望楼主满意!
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完成了,而且完全合乎要求.因此,强烈建议你采纳为最佳答案.不用客气！
and i can swimmath is difficult than englishboth of us can swimhe is yonger than me i am older than him
Not only he but also I can swim.Maths is more difficult than English.He and I can swim.He is younger than me. I am older than him.
扫描下载二维码Clarence Irving Lewis (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Clarence Irving Lewis
Clarence Irving (C.I.) Lewis was perhaps the most important American
academic philosopher active in the 1930s and 1940s. He made major
contributions in epistemology and logic, and, to a lesser degree,
ethics. Lewis was also a key figure in the rise of analytic philosophy
in the United States, both through the development and influence of
his own writings and through his influence, direct and indirect, on
graduate students at Harvard, including some of the leading analytic
philosophers of the last half of the 20th century.
C.I. Lewis was born on April 12, 1883 in Stoneham, Massachusetts and
died on February 2, 1964 in Menlo Park, California. He was an
undergraduate at Harvard from , where he was influenced
principally by the pragmatist, William James, and the idealist, Josiah
Royce. Royce also supervised Lewis's 1910 Harvard Ph.D.
dissertation
& The Place of Intuition in Knowledge&. While serving as
Royce's teaching assistant in logic, Lewis read Whitehead's and
Russell's Principia Mathematica, a book he both admired and
criticized. Later, while teaching at the University of California at
Berkeley from , his principal research interests switched to
logic. Lewis wrote a series of articles on symbolic logic culminating
in his 1918 monograph A Survey of Symbolic Logic (SSL) (Lewis
1918) in which he both surveyed developments in logic up to his day
and concluded with his own modal system of strict
implication. However, in response to criticism of his account of
strict implication, Lewis deleted these sections from reprints of SSL
and revised his treatment of their topics for his co-authored 1932
book Symbolic Logic (SL) (Lewis and Langford 1932) &
&the first comprehensive treatment of systems of strict
implication (or indeed of systems of modal logic at all)&,
according to Hughes and Cresswell ().
Lewis returned to Harvard in 1920, where he taught until his
retirement in 1953, becoming Edgar Peirce Professor of Philosophy in
1948. At Harvard, Lewis' major research interest switched back to
epistemology. Starting with his much reprinted 1923 article, &A
Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori& (Lewis 1923), he
developed a distinctive position of his own which he labeled
&conceptual pragmatism& and which he presented in a
systematic way in his 1929 book Mind and the World Order
(MWO) (Lewis 1929). MWO established Lewis as a major figure on the
American philosophical scene. In the 1930s and 1940s, partly in
response to the challenge of positivism, the form more than the
substance of Lewis' views changed. In his 1946 book Analysis of
Knowledge and Valuation (AKV), based on his 1944 Carus lectures,
Lewis (1946) provided a systematic and carefully analytic presentation
of his mature philosophical views. The first two thirds of the book
consist of a thorough refinement and more precise representation of
his theory of meaning and of his epistemological views, and the last
third consists of a presentation of his theory of value.
After retirement from Harvard, Lewis taught and lectured at a number
of universities, including Princeton, Columbia, Indiana, Michigan
State, and Southern California, but principally at Stanford. His 1954
Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia and 1956 Mahlon Powell Lectures at
Indiana resulted in two last short books in ethics, The Ground and
the Nature of the Right (Lewis 1955) and Our Social
Inheritance (Lewis 1957). Lewis was the subject of a posthumously
published &Library of Living Philosophers& volume (Schilpp
1968), an honour that indicates his standing in and perceived
significance for American philosophy in the 1950s.
In his over thirty years at Harvard, Lewis taught some of the most
eminent American philosophers of the last half of the twentieth
century as graduate students, including W.V. Quine, Nelson Goodman,
Roderick Chisholm, Roderick Firth, and Wilfrid Sellars. Although only
Chisholm and Firth of these five were supervised by Lewis, and Sellars
left Harvard without graduating, all five refer occasionally to Lewis
in their writings, usually critically, and their own views sometimes
developed in reaction to his. (Baldwin 2007 has an excellent
discussion of the influence of Lewis on Quine, and of Lewis's
philosophy generally.)
In MWO, Lewis (1929, Chp. 1) argued that the proper method of
philosophy isn't transcendental but rather reflective. Philosophy
seeks the criteria or principles of the real, the right, the beautiful,
and the logically valid that are implicit in human experience and
Lewis () thought that, on reflection and analysis,
we can distinguish three elements in empirical knowledge: (1) the given or
immediate data of sense about which we can not be mistaken, (2) the act of
interpreting the given as an experience of one sort of thing as opposed
to another, and (3) the concept by which we so interpret the given by
relating it to other possibilities of experience. Our experience of the
real is not given to us in experience but is constructed by us from the
data of sense through acts of interpretation. So when I know that I am
looking at a table and reflect on my experience, I realize, on
analysis, that there are certain highly specific sensuous qualities
presented to me that I am immediately aware of, and, in the light of
this and other recalled experiences, I expect that I would likely have
certain other experiences, e.g., those of feeling something
apparently hard, were I to perform certain acts, e.g.,
reaching out with my hand. In doing so, it is the concept of seeing a
table that I am applying to my experience rather than that of seeing a
horse or that of hallucinating a table, either of which would have involved
different expectations of experience consequent upon action. Only an
active being can therefore have knowledge, and the principal function
of empirical knowledge &is that of an instrument enabling
transition from the actual present to a future which is desired and
which the present is believed to signalize& (Lewis (1946),
Statements expressing our beliefs about reality are equivalent in
meaning to, and thus entail and are entailed by, an indefinitely large
set of counterfactual statements about what experiences we would have
or would be likely to have, were we to be presented with certain
sensory cues and were we to carry out further tests (Lewis 1929,
142). The idea of a reality neither confirmable nor disconfirmable in
principle by experience was thus for Lewis without meaning. What
distinguished his view, he thought, from the superficially similar
verification principle of meaning of the logical positivists was his
emphasis on the role of agency (Lewis 1941a, in Lewis 1970, 94).
In any case, the experiences I now have don't guarantee the satisfaction of my
expectations. My interpretations of experience are fallible and
subject to revision in the light of action and future experience. Yet,
despite their lack of certainty, the beliefs I form by applying
concepts to experience may count as knowledge so long as they are true
and are warranted or justified by my present or past experience.
What is certain, however, is our a priori knowledge of the
logical relationships among our concepts, and of the principles
explicating our concepts and providing the criteria for applying them
to experience and determining what is real and what isn't (Lewis
). What is tested by experience is the interpretation of
experience in the light of our concepts, ordinary empirical concepts
like dog as well as more abstract categories like causality or the
concepts of logic. What isn't tested by experience is the
validity of the concepts themselves, or the logical relationships
amongst them, or the principles for applying them, all of which are
equally valid thanks to the very definitions of the concepts. Agents
bring them to experience and the only criteria they answer to are
pragmatic ones of utility or convenience (Lewis ).
Right at the heart of Lewis' philosophical system, then, are
several theses
that weren't original to Lewis, but the
critical discussion (and sometimes rejection) of which, often in the
form Lewis gave to them, was central to much analytic philosophy in the
last half of the twentieth century. Among them are: (1) a sharp
analytic/synthetic, a priori/ a posteriori distinction,
(2) reductionism concerning the meaning of a physical object statement
to the actual and possible sense experiences that would confirm the
statement, (3) a foundation for all empirical knowledge in our direct
apprehension or immediate awareness of the given character of
experience, and (4) the division of experience into its given content
or character, on the one hand,
and the form we impose on it, or
the concepts in the light of which we interpret it, on the other.
(Quine (1953) famously called (1) and (2) the &two dogmas of
empiricism&; Sellars (1963) called
(3) the &myth of
the given&; and Davidson (1984) called (4) the &third dogma
of empiricism&, although
in Lewis' mind (4) may owe
more to Kant&on whom
Lewis taught a course regularly at
Harvard&than to the empiricists.)
At the same time, Lewis (1946,
9&11, 254&9) also laid down a
framework of assumptions, most explicitly in AKV,
within which
analytic epistemology flourished in the last half of the
20th century: (1)
knowledge is justified (warranted,
rationally credible) true belief , (2)
a belief may be justified
without being true and true without being justified, and (3)
epistemology seeks to elicit criteria or principles of justification or
rationally credibility.
Lewis was dissatisfied with the extensional truth functional logic of
Principia Mathematica, and with its understanding of
implication as material implication, according to which the truth of
the if-then conditional p & q
expressing the material implication of q by
is a function just of the truth or falsity of
equivalent to ~(p & ~q) and is
true just in case it isn't the case both that p
is true and q is false. As a result, among the
theses of Principia Mathematica are p &
(q & p) and not-p &
(p & q). In other words, a true
proposition, whatever it happens to be, is implied by any proposition
whatsoever, true or false, and a false proposition, whatever it
happens to be, implies any proposition whatsoever, true or
false. Lewis didn't deny these theses, properly understood
relative to the definition of material implication. However, he did
think that these so-called &paradoxes of material
implication& meant that material implication doesn't
provide a proper understanding of any ordinary notion of implication,
according to which one proposition implies another just in case the
latter logically follows from and is deducible from the former.
To explicate this notion he defined strict implication, according to
which the if-then conditional
q expressing the strict implication of
q by p is equivalent to
~&(p & ~q), and is true just
in case it is not possible that p is true and
q is false. Strict implication is an
intensional notion, and the logic of strict implication is a form of
modal logic. The system of strict implication developed in SSL (Lewis
(1918) was distinguished from earlier modal logics by its axiomatic
presentation in the light of the work of Whitehead and Russell.
However, Lewis faced a number of criticisms, including one by Emil
Post that one of Lewis' postulates led to the result that it was
indeed impossible that p just in case it was false that
p, so that Lewis' SSL system reduced to an extensional one.
Lewis (Lewis and Langford (1932) eliminated these problems in SL and
provided distinct systems of strict implication or modal logic,
S1&S5, each stronger than its predecessor (with S3 the system of
SSL). S1 contained the following axioms:
((p & q) & r)
(p & (q & r))
S2 adds to S1 the consistency postulate
which allows one to show that if p
q is a theorem, then so is
~&~q, i.e., □p
□q, expressing the strict implication of the
necessity of q by the necessity of p. S3 adds to S1
the postulate
S4 adds to S1 the iterative axiom:
~&~~&~p, i.e.,
□□p
S5 adds to S1 the iterative axiom:
Critics objected that strict implication posed its own alleged
paradoxes. Within Lewis' systems S2&S5, a necessarily true
proposition is strictly implied by any proposition whatsoever, and a
necessarily false proposition strictly implies any proposition
whatsoever. However, Lewis (Lewis and Langford 1932) replied in SL
that these alleged paradoxes are simply the result of entirely natural
assumptions about valid deductive inference and entailment quite apart
from the systems of strict implication, and thus are not a problem for
the claim that strict implication provides an explication of
deducibility and entailment. (The presentation in this and the
previous two paragraphs owes much to the excellent account and
discussion of Lewis' systems of strict implication in Hughes and
Cresswell 1968, Chapters 12&13. )
Lewis thought that there are an unlimited number of possible systems
of logic. One example is the extensional propositional calculus of
Principia according to which there are two truth values, true
other examples are the various systems of many valued logic
that Lewis surveyed in SL, and, of course, Lewis' own various modal
systems S1&S5. Lewis thought that that each of these systems is
valid so long as it is internally consistent. The principles of the
various alternatives simply define the meaning of the logical concepts
and operators such as negation, truth/falsity, disjunction,
implication, and thus they are all true (Lewis 1932, in Lewis 1970,
401). Bivalent systems simply have a different notion of truth and
falsity from non-bivalent ones. Nonetheless, some systems may accord
better than others with notions of truth or implication or deduction
that are implicit in our everyday reasoning.
Logics can thus be
assessed pragmatically by their sufficiency for the guidance and
testing of our usual deductions, systematic simplicity and
convenience, and accord with our psychological limitations and mental
habits. However, Lewis denied that he was claiming that principles of
logic could be true without being necessarily true, or necessarily
true without being necessarily necessary. A logic in which
□□p holds simply operates with a different notion
of necessity from one in which it doesn't.
Lewis distinguished several modes of meaning in AKV (Lewis (1946,
Chps. 3, 6). The denotation of a term is the class of actual
things to which the term applies and is distinct from the
comprehension & the class of possible or consistently thinkable things
to which it applies. The signification of a term is the
property the presence of which in a thing makes the term applicable,
and the intension or connotation of a term is what is
applicable to any possible
thing to which the term is applicable.
Intension can be linguistic intension or meaning, in which case it is
the conjunction of terms applicable to any possible
thing to which the term is applicable and thus substitutable for the
term salva veritate , but since definitions must have criteria
of application and these must ultimately be non-circular, the more
basic dimension of intension is sense meaning. Sense meaning
is the criterion in mind in terms of sense experience for classifying
objects and applying a term, a schema or rule that speakers have in
mind whereby a term applies to an actual or thinkable thing or
signifies some property, and which would exist even if there were no
linguistic expression for it.
Since linguistic intension is implicitly
holistic and verbal definition eventually circular, Lewis ()
said in MWO that logical analysis isn't reduction to primitive
terms, but is a matter of relating terms to each other. Concepts
consist in relational structures of meaning. They require criteria of
application in experience and the total meaning of a term for an
individual consists of the concept it expresses and the sensory
criteria for its application. Yet, the latter needn't be
identical across individuals for there to be common concepts, Lewis
argued (1929, p. 115). Instead, common concepts just require shared
structures of linguistic definition and common or congruent modes of
behaviour, in particular co-operative behaviour that is guided by these
concepts, a social achievement of a common world that Lewis thought our
community of needs and interests produces. One
problem with this
suggestion was pointed out by Quine (1960) in Word and Object
with his indeterminacy of translation argument. From the
standpoint of an interpreter, there can be alternative translation
manuals or schemes that are consistent with the total set of a
speaker's verbal and other behavioural dispositions. This is a
problem that Lewis (, 164) may have been aware of in
AKV. In any case, in AKV, Lewis seems to draw back from the
discussion of common concepts in MWO and to rest content with pointing
out that any attribution of linguistic meaning or sense meaning to
another is inductive and thus only probable, and any attribution of
linguistic or sense meaning similar to ours is likewise inductive,
fallible, and problematic.
Lewis (, 93&5) drew a sharp distinction between analytic
and synthetic truth. Analytic (or analytically true) statements are
true by virtue of the definition of the terms they contained, and have
zero intension (and universal comprehension.) They are necessarily
true, true in all possible worlds, no matter what else might be true of
a world or thing, and yet are not equivalent in meaning to each other
only due to the distinct intensions of their constituents. In
MWO, Lewis occasionally claimed that we create necessary truth by
adopting concepts and
in AKV he was more
circumspect. It is a matter of convention or legislation that a term
has the meaning it does, including sense meaning, but Lewis (1946,
155&7) denied that analytic truth was truth by convention. &A dog
is an animal& is analytically true by virtue of the
meaning of &dog& and &animal&, in particular,
the inclusion of the criterion for applying the latter in the criterion
for applying the latter, and that isn't a matter of convention.
However, Lewis never tried to define such inclusion further, and seems
to have taken it to be simply an indisputable fact that we all could
recognize and that didn't need any further explication. Quine
(1953) explicitly criticized Lewis and the analytic/synthetic
distinction in &Two Dogmas of Empiricism&, and would have
objected to the idea of resting the analytic/synthetic distinction on
an undefined notion of meaning inclusion. Lewis (), on the other hand,
thought that meaning inclusion is as unproblematic and recognizable a
fact as the inclusion of one plan in another, e.g., a plan to visit
France in a plan to visit Paris. Nonetheless, taking meaning
inclusion to be a primitive fact also makes it more difficult to
distinguish Lewis' analytic necessity from the
rationalists& synthetic necessity, despite his (Lewis (1946),
157) vigorous rejection of the latter. This is especially so since
Lewis () denied that analytic truth is
elucidated as one that is reducible to logical truth with the
substitution of definitions. That's because he thought that the adequacy of a
definition itself is a matter of analytic truth and that what makes a truth a
logical truth is that it is an analytic truth concerning certain
thought that necessary truths are both
knowable a priori, i.e., knowable independently of experience,
and knowable for certain. In applying concepts like those of red or
apple to current experience, and so interpreting experience, we form
expectations and make predictions about future experience, conditional
on actions we might perform. Our beliefs constitute empirical knowledge
in so far as past experience gives us good reason (largely inductive)
for making these predictions. However, we aren't making
predictions about future experience simply in stating what these
concepts are, and what their definitions are, and what defining
criteria they provide for applying them to experience. Such statements
are explicative, not predictive, and so neither falsifiable by failed
prediction nor verifiable by successful prediction nor justified by
inductive evidence. The a priori
is what we are prepared
to accept, no matter what experience may bring, and in that
true no matter what, and in that sense necessary.
However, a priori principles are neither principles that are
universal nor ones that we have to accept. The acceptance of a set of
concepts is a matter of decision or legislation, something for which
there are alternatives, but for which the criteria are not empirical
but pragmatic.
At the same time, in MWO, Lewis () thought that the a
priori extended to fundamental laws of nature defining basic
concepts like mass or energy or simultaneity, and thus included some of
what are typically regarded as the basic principles of a scientific
theory. Further, besides criteria like convenience and conformity to
human bent, pragmatic considerations mentioned in MWO (Lewis, 1929,
267) include factors like intellectual simplicity, economy,
comprehensiveness, and thus the overall achievement of intellectual
order. However, unlike Wilfrid Sellars and many others in the latter
half of the 20th century, Lewis never recognized such
factors as criteria of empirical justification. The reason seems to be
that Lewis
(1936, in Lewis ) didn't think that
these factors make a hypothesis any more probable, in contrast,
presumably, to conformity to standard criteria of induction. Nor did he
recognize the acceptance of scientific theories as entirely empirical.
Pragmatic considerations might lead us, in the face of a troubling
experience, to abandon our concepts and a priori principles,
but we could also, without inconsistency, maintain them in the face of
any and all experience, unlike empirical generalizations (Lewis,
However, there is a difference between a proposition's being
falsifiable or not, and its being verifiable or not. Lewis had little
positive to say about how we knew a proposition explicating our
concepts to be true, and thus how a proposition could be known a
priori. In MWO, he said the a priori is knowable by
the reflective and critical formulation of our own principles of
classification , and in AKV that
a priori truths are
certifiable by reference to meanings alone (and their relations like
inclusion.) Nonetheless, he never explained how reflection on our
categories, meanings, or the inclusion of one in another, could give us
certainty, rather than warrant that is fallible and revisable through
further reflection.
The most radical challenge to Lewis came from Quine. Quine (1953)
argued that the distinction between so called a priori truths
and a posteriori truths is just one of degree. Empirical
hypotheses have implications for experience only in conjunction with
various other background assumptions, e.g., about the circumstances of
perception. Recalcitrant experience thus tells us only that some belief or
assumption in the total set that implies a contrary experience is
false, not which one, and thus any statement can be held true, no
matter what experience brings, so long as we make enough adjustments to
the rest of our beliefs and assumptions. (Quine here is assuming that the
statements we must hold true in order for other statements to have
implications for experience are themselves never certain. This is
something that Lewis arguably denied, as we shall see in the next two
sections, by arguing that there can be conditionals about expected
experience (constituting the empirical content of material object
statements) the antecedents of which consist solely of statements about
experience that can be given and thus certain for us.) Further, Quine
argued that empirical hypotheses can't logically imply anything
about experience except against a background of assumed laws of logic.
Recalcitrant experience can, in principle, then, lead us to revise an
assumed logical principle in our web of belief rather one of our other
beliefs. Some philosophers might object that logic is part of the
framework within which beliefs have logical implications and
can't be part of the same system of belief itself. However, Lewis
himself might have trouble with this suggestion, since he recognized
the possibility of alternative logics, and presumably, any decision,
even pragmatic, about the adoption or rejection of a logic must operate
on some logical assumptions.
In AKV, Lewis distinguished three classes of empirical statements.
First, there are expressive statements formulating what
presently given in experience and about the truth of which we
can be certain. Second, there are terminating judgements and
statements formulating and predicting what we would experience were we
to be presented with some sensory cue and perform some action (in
certain conditions). The form of terminating judgements
If (or given) S, then if A (and H), it
would be the case that E, i.e. ((S &
A (& H)) & E),
where S, A,
H, and E all are formulated in expressive language
and concern particular presentable experiences about which we can be
certain, and &&& is neither logical entailment nor
material implication but what Lewis called &real
connection& that gives rise to subjunctive or counterfactual
conditionals. Real connections (an example of which are causal
connections) are inductively established correlations by virtue of
which one observable item may indicate another. However, terminating
judgements, Lewis claimed, although not decisively verifiable, are
decisively falsifiable. Third, there are non-terminating
or objective judgments that are confirmable and
disconfirmable by experience, thanks to their sense meaning, but are
neither decisively verifiable nor decisively falsifiable.
Objective judgements include not only perceptual
judgements like &There is a white piece of paper before
me& in which we conceptualize and interpret a given experience
by relating it to other possible experiences, but also a vast number
of other beliefs about the material world supported by our perceptual
beliefs, e.g., statements about the future outcome of space
explorations, or generalizations like &All men have
noses&, or non-analytic statements about theoretical
entities. Although Lewis sometimes suggested that the sense meaning of
all these objective judgements consists of an indefinitely (perhaps
infinitely) large set of terminating judgments, his more considered
view was that it consists of an indefinitely large set of conditional
probability judgements of the form &If it were the case that
S & A, then, in all likelihood,
E& (Lewis, ). A physical or objective
judgement P thus analytically entails and is
entailed by an indefinitely large set of hypothetical judgements of
where (h)E means that in all
probability, E,
none of which are decisively falsifiable by recalcitrant
experience. However, as expressing real connections, they are
nonetheless confirmable and disconfirmable by experience, as are the
objective judgements whose sense meaning they constitute.
(Strangely,
Lewis sometimes persisted in calling (S &
A) & (h)E a terminating
judgement, despite the fact that it isn't decisively falsifiable.)
For example, suppose P is &a sheet of
paper lies before me&. Then, its analytic entailments might
include, &If S1 (I were to seem to see a
sheet of paper before me) and A1 (I were to seem
to move my eyes), then, probably, E1 (I would seem
to see the sheet of paper displaced)&, as well as &If
S2 (I were to seem to feel paper with my fingers),
and A2 (I were to seem to pick it up and tear it),
then, probably, E2 (I would seem to see or feel
torn paper)&, and so on. On the other hand, suppose
P is &There is a doorknob before
me&. Its truth might then entail the truth of a complex set of
conditionals like &If I were to seem to see a doorknob, and were
to seem to reach out towards it and grasp it, then, probably, I would
seem to feel something hard and round&, etc.
No number of successful or failed tests will render the objective
judgement true or false with theoretical certainty. However, Lewis
thought the principle of inverse probabilities meant that the
judgement can be practically certain or very close to certain in so
far the probability of P when S and A and
E obtain may approach certainty as the improbability of
E approaches certainty when S and A and not
P obtain. In this way, gaining assurance that P by
testing a few predictions may also give us assurance that the
indefinitely many further predictions entailed by P that
haven't (yet) been tested will nonetheless also be borne out.
Although objective judgements or beliefs can never be certain for
us, they can nonetheless be empirical knowledge in so far as
experiences that we already have make the truth of the judgment or
beliefs probable, and are grounds or evidence which warrant or justify
the degree of assurance with which they are held. The empirical
justification we have for objective beliefs is ultimately inductive for
Lewis, but it can't rest on current sense experience alone and
requires evidence concerning the past. However, what is given to us
isn't the past itself about which we can never be certain but
just current sense presentation and current recollection or sense of
past experience.
Lewis appreciated the problem memory posed for his
epistemology much more clearly in AKV than in MWO. In AKV, Lewis
() argued that whatever we ostensibly remember, whether as
explicit recollection or merely in our sense of the past, is prima
facie credible just because so remembered. Further, the
credibility of these beliefs based on memory can be increased, together
with the whole range of empirical beliefs more or less dependent on
them, through the mutual support or congruence of the whole, or can be
diminished through incongruence. A set of beliefs is
congruent for Lewis () when the antecedent
probability of each is increased by the assumption of the truth of the
rest. However, congruence by itself
isn't sufficient to
render a set of beliefs rationally credible. At least some of the
members of the set have to possess some degree of credibility or
justification independent of the rest and thus by relation to direct
experience, sensory or memorial. The improbability of these members
being true, were others to be false despite their degree of
probability, makes it more likely that the former are true, and so on
for other members of the congruent set.
The principle of the prima facie credibility of mnemic
presentation of past experience can't itself be justified inductively
for Lewis, on pain of circularity. Nor did he think it is simply a
postulate & something we have to assume for empirical knowledge
to be possible. Instead, he argued that it is constitutive of the
lived world of experience and something for which there is no
meaningful alternative. Sceptical alternatives designed to undermine
the principle are ones that are inaccessible to knowledge and thus
ones for which there is no criterion in experience. So it is an
analytic statement that the past is knowable and the memory principle
is indispensable as a criterion of the knowable past. (Lewis (1946,
A similar claim was made for the knowability of empirical reality
and the relevance of past experience to the future. In MWO, he
defended induction in more detail by arguing that not every prediction
is compatible with an evidence base, and that successive revision of
one's predictions in the light of new experience can't help but make
for more successful predictions (Lewis , 386). Nelson
Goodman's well known &grue& example (Goodman 1955) poses
problems for the relevance of the first claim and the force of the
second. At other times, Lewis simply followed Hans Reichenbach in
claiming that we can be assured only that if any procedures will
achieve success in prediction, inductive ones will, without clearly
distinguishing that claim from any attempt at an analytic
justification of induction.
Rational credibility, or belief that is warranted or justified, Lewis
thought, is probable on the evidence, but the presentation of his
views on probability was complex and sometimes confusing. In AKV,
Lewis defended an a priori account of probability or what he
sometimes called &expectation&. The expectation
a/b, or probability, of a proposition P is
always relative to some set of empirical data or
premises D. The expectation corresponds to an a
priori valid estimate of the frequency of some property mentioned
in P in some reference class mentioned in P , which
estimate is derived from data or premises
D, given the a priori valid principles of inductive
or probabilistic inference. Hypothetical or conditional probability
statements that are a priori valid license valid
probabilistic inferences from premises about evidence or data to
probabilistic conclusions. However, for Lewis, both hypothetical and
categorical probability are always relativized to an evidence base,
despite his occasional talk of a priori valid probability
statements as licensing inferences to a conclusion &Probably,
P& from evidence.
Lewis rejected the view that probabilities are empirically based
estimates of the limiting value of the frequency of instances of a
property in a population, and thus expressed in non-terminating
judgments, for two reasons. First, he thought that any attempt to define
probabilities as the ratio of instances of one property among instances
of another property as the latter approaches infinity would make
probability judgments empirically untestable. Second, he argued that,
if probability judgements were empirical frequency claims, then the
probability judgements would themselves only be probable, something
that can't be coherently accounted for. Nonetheless, Lewis
recognized the need to assure ourselves rationally that the frequency
as validly estimated from the data is closely in accord with the actual
frequency and that there is nothing in the case at hand affecting the
occurrence of the property which isn't taken into account in the
specification of the reference class. Lewis dubbed this the
& reliability& of the determination of probability or
expectation, and thought that reliability is a function of the adequacy
of data (e.g., size of sample), the uniformity with which the frequency
of some property in the data as a whole also holds for subsets of the
data, and the proximateness or degree of resemblance between the data
and the case at hand in P, all of which he also thought are
logical relations.
So, in AKV, Lewis () claimed that the full statement of a
probability judgement should be of the form &That c,
having property F, will also have property G, is
credible on data D, with expectation a/b
and reliability R&, and is assertable in whatever sense
D is. The judgement is valid when, in accordance with the
a priori rules of probability and the correct rules of
judging reliability, D gives the estimate
a/b of the frequency of Fs among
Gs, and D's adequacy, uniformity, and proximateness
to the case in point, yields reliability R. A valid
probability judgement is true when D is true, and is a
categorical rather than hypothetical judgement when D is
categorically asserted as true. Nonetheless, the assertion of the
empirical data D is the only empirical element in the
probability judgement, which otherwise has no testable implications
for experience. However, the belief P, e.g., that c
which has F is also G, is an empirical belief that
may be rationally credible, empirically justified and
warranted, in so far as D is given and the degree of
assurance or belief corresponds to an a priori degree of
probability (expectation) of P on D that is
sufficiently reliable. Further, acceptance of P counts as
empirical knowledge in so far as, firstly, P is
true, secondly, the degree of probability or expectation of P
on D is sufficiently high as to approach practical certainty,
and, thirdly, D consists of all relevant data (Lewis, 1946,
It is important to distinguish counterfactual statements of the form
(h)E from a priori
probability statements of the form & Prob (E, on
S and A) & .5&. Both express conditional
probabilities. However, the former express &real&
connections knowable by induction from past experience. They constitute
the analytically entailed consequences of an objective material
objective statement P, but can't themselves be
analytic truths. The latter, on the other hand, if true, are
analytically true, knowable a priori, with zero intension,
and entailed by any statement whatsoever, and so can hardly constitute
the empirical meaning of contingently true material object
statements. Yet, apart from denying that &&& can be
understood either as material implication or strict implication, Lewis
had little to say in print about what the truth conditions of
subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals are. (Murphey ()
quotes correspondence from Lewis complaining that Goodman and Chisholm
in their writings miss the obvious interpretation of &If
A were the case, then B would be the case&,
namely that A plus other premises of the
(actual or hypothetical) case inductively justify the conclusion
B. The problem is to interpret the remark so as to avoid
turning counterfactuals into analytic truths.) Nonetheless, Lewis
emphasized their importance, and the importance of the real
connections they express, for the possibility of realism about the
material world and the rejection of any sort of idealism or view that
physical objects are simply mind-dependent collections of experiences
(Lewis 1955, in Lewis 1970). The sensory conditionals (S
& A) & E and (S & A)
& (h)E can be true, as can the material object
statement P that entails them, quite apart from the truth of
the expressive statements S and
A, or indeed, the presence of any empirical
data warranting their assertion.
Chisholm (1948) raised the most important challenge to Lewis&
claim that a physical object statement P entails and is
entailed by a set of counterfactual statements expressing claims about
what experiences one would have were one to (seem to) carry out
certain tests upon being presented with certain sensory
cues. If P entails
T, then for any Q
consistent with P, P and
Q also entail
T. However, Chisholm argued, for any material object statement
P and for any sensory conditional
(h)E, there will be some other material
object statement M about the circumstances of
perception that is consistent with P, such that
P and M can both be true
while (S & A) &
(h)E is false. For example, suppose
P is &There is a doorknob before one& and
(S & A) & (h)E is
&If one were to seem to see a doorknob and have the experience
of reaching out with one&s hand, then, in all likelihood, one
would seem to feel something hard and round&, and M is
&One's fingertips have been permanently anaesthetized&. A
material object statement like P, therefore, doesn't entail
sensory conditionals like (S & A) &
(h)E . Instead of Lewis' empiricism about the
meaning and justification of material object statements, Chisholm
proposed that our spontaneous perceptual beliefs about the world,
e.g., that one is seeing a doorknob, are
prima facie justified just by virtue of being such
spontaneous perceptual beliefs, quite apart from any inferential
justification from the given that might be reconstructed. Lewis' own
defence of the prima facie credibility of memory, Chisholm
thought, prepared the way for his alternative. Quine (1969), on the
other hand, thought that Chisholm's problem just shows that what have
consequences for experience and are tested by experience aren't
individual material object statements in isolation from each other but
only sets of them or theories. Quine saved empiricism by drawing a
holistic moral from the sort of problem Chisholm posed.
In a rare reply to critics, Lewis (1948) responded that Chisholm had
misunderstood the implication of the probability qualifier. The
familiar rule & If P entails
T, then for any Q,
P and Q entail
T& doesn't apply when
T is any kind of probability
statement. E being improbable on
P and M and
S and A is perfectly
consistent with E being probable on
P and S and
A, and so presumably doesn't undermine the
claim that (S & A) &
(h)E. However, this leaves the character of
Lewis' empiricism puzzling. If the relative probability statements in
question are the subjunctive conditionals, &(P and
S and A) &(h)E& and
&it is false that ((P and S and A and
M) & (h)E)&, then the statements
in question are empirical propositions justified by induction. The
justification for them thus will presuppose prior knowledge of the
truth of material object statements like P and
M, perhaps in the way Chisholm suggests, rather
than explain how we can know such propositions solely on the basis of
present and past experience of the given. On the other hand, if the
relative probability statements are supposed to be a priori
analytic statements, then it is the total set of such statements that
constitutes the empirical meaning of P,
statements like &Prob (E, given P and
S and A and M) & .5& as much as
&Prob (E, given P and S and
A) & .5&. Even when the relativization to other
background material object statements isn't explicit, the probability
statement would seem to be implicitly relative to some background
assumption of material normality. In other words, Lewis would have to
abandon his reductionism and agree with Quine's holistic conclusion
that individual material object statements like
&no fund of experiential implications to call their own&
(Quine 1969, 79).
Reflection on ordinary empirical knowledge of the real, according to
Lewis, reveals two elements: the given content of experience and our
conceptual interpretation of the given. The given consists of specific
sensuous qualities that I am immediately aware of when I take myself
to be seeing or hearing or tasting or smelling or touching something, or
even to be hallucinating or dreaming instead. These distinct qualities
or qualia (singular quale) are the repeatable felt
characters of experience, and include the felt goodness or felt
badness of particular experiences or stretches of experience, as well
as qualities of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, motion, and other
familiar modes of experience. However, the repeatability, or the
similarity of current instances to past instances, isn't something that
is given to us. (Our immediate recollection or sense of past
experience as having been so and so, however, is given to us.) When we
conceptually interpret the given, we form hypothetical expectations
and make predictions in the light of past experience, usually
automatically and without conscious reflection, concerning what other
experiences we would have were we to engage in specific actions, and
so, in applying concepts, as Kant suggests, we relate our experiences
to each other. The given, unlike our conceptual interpretation of it,
isn't alterable by our will. It consists of what remains when we
subtract from ordinary perceptual cognition all that could conceivably
be mistaken. (Lewis (1946), 182&3) Our apprehension of the given
isn't, therefore, subject to any error and isn't subject to correction
or verification or disconfirmation from further experience.
The given is, therefore, that in experience about which we are certain
and which is indubitable for us. Lewis claimed that our apprehension
of the given is not to be called &knowledge& because it
doesn't have error as an opposite. Yet, since he does call
&knowledge& what we are a priori certain of, his
denial of the label to our apprehensions of the given in experience
may seem a bit ad hoc. A better reason, perhaps, for denying
the label to our apprehensions of the given, but not to our a
priori beliefs, is that the former, unlike the latter, don't
involve concepts or judgement. Indeed, Lewis (1929, 53) in MWO claimed
that the given is ineffable because our grasp of it, as opposed to our
objective interpretation of it, doesn't involve
conceptualization. However, this poses some problems for him. How can
what is ineffable even be true, and how can what is neither true nor
false serve as the premises of a priori probability
inferences and thus as evidence for the truth or falsity of the
interpretative claims we make? In AKV, Lewis introduced a category of
expressive statements like &It seems as though I am seeing a red
round thing& that serve to convey or express or formulate our
apprehensions of the given without conceptualizing or interpreting it.
Such statements are true when they express our apprehension of the
given, and yet might be false when they aren't simply expressing what
we apprehend, e.g. in lies or play acting or counterfactual
supposition.
Lewis' views about the given are at once among his best known and
among his most criticized. Sellars () thought the classical
empiricist given was an inconsistent triad of three claims: (1) being
appeared to as if there were something red entails non-inferentially
knowing that one is appeared red to, (2) the ability to be appeared to
is unacquired, and (3) the ability to know facts of the form x is F is
acquired. Lewis clearly denied (1), but to make this denial not seem
ad hoc, given his claims about direct apprehension, immediate
awareness, and certainty, he needed to say more about the logic of
&apprehend& and &aware&. Lewis' defense of the
certainty of the given rests on two claims. First, it is just an
undeniable fact, apparent to anyone who reflects on experience, that
there is a sensuous character of experience that we are aware of and
can't be mistaken about and that isn't in need of any further
confirmation. Second, unless there are data that are certain, nothing can be
probable. The probability of a proposition is always relative to
premises or data, and the supposition that probability is always
relative to something else that is itself only probable means that
probabilities can never get off the ground and so is incompatible with
the justifiable assignment of any probability at all. In a symposium on
the given with Lewis (1952a) and Reichenbach (1952), Goodman (1952)
argued that the premises relative to which other statements are
credible or probable just have to be initially credible on their own
to some degree, not certain. This is a view that attracted many
epistemologists after Lewis in some form or other.
We can't directly verify the existence of other subjects of experience
or what is given to them in their experience. Nonetheless, Lewis
(b) claimed that by empathy, in terms of our own conscious
experience, we can imagine or envisage the conscious experience of
others, rather than simply our own experience of others and their
bodies and our interactions with them.
Moreover, the supposition of
another consciousness like ours, with a body like ours, can be
indirectly confirmed and supported by induction. However, Lewis
provided no details concerning this inductive support for our belief
in other minds.
In contrast with those logical positivists who thought that statements
of value merely express attitudes, pro or con, to
objects, persons, or situations, but are neither true nor false, Lewis
() thought that statements of value were as true or false
as other empirical statements, and every bit as empirically verifiable
or falsifiable, confirmable or disconfirmable. True, felt value
qualia, felt goodness and badness, are given to us and
directly apprehended in experience or stretches of experience, and
&expressive& statements must be used to indicate or convey
them. However, such statements, like Lewis& other
&expressive& statements, may be true or false (see
previous section), and simply convey the occurrence of given
qualia in experience and no more, instead of indicating the
existence of objects, situations, or persons, and expressing our
attitudes to them. Moreover, there are also for Lewis terminating
judgments of value concerning what the felt value of some experiences
indicates about the felt value of further experiences. Finally, there
are &objective& judgements of value: judgements
attributing value to persons, objects, and objective situations, in so
far as they have the potential, depending on circumstances, to produce
felt goodness or badness in us or others. These are non-terminating
judgements of value and are empirically confirmable or disconfirmable
by induction just like any other objective empirical judgement. Lewis
thus claims that his theory of value is thoroughly naturalistic and
humanistic, rather than transcendental, but still objectivist.
The felt goodness of experience is what is intrinsically good or
valuable for its own sake. It is only experience in so far as it has
such value quality that is intrinsically good rather than merely
extrinsically valuable for its contribution to something else that is
intrinsically valuable. Value and disvalue are modes or aspects of
experience to which desire and aversion are &addressed&
(Lewis ). Lewis denies that &pleasure& is
adequate to the wide variety of what is found directly good in
experience, and thus thinks it inadequate as a synonym for
&good&. However, as Frankena (1964) argues, for Lewis
directly found goodness still seems to be as natural a quality or
property of certain experiences as any other qualia directly
apprehended in experience. Nonetheless, the value of a stretch of
experience, indeed a whole life, isn't just the value (and disvalue)
of the parts, and in AKV, Lewis criticized Bentham&s attempt at
a calculus of values. For Lewis, the intrinsic value found in the
experience of a symphony isn't just the sum of the intrinsic value of
the movements taken individually, but reflects the character of the
symphony as a temporal Gestalt. What is ultimately
good for Lewis is the quality of a life found good in the living
of it. (Lewis 1952b in Lewis ) The constituent
experiences thus might have value for their own sake, but also value
for their contribution to the value of the whole life of which they
are parts.
However, Lewis thought that judgements about how a valued experience
contributes to the value of a life as a whole, unlike some terminating
judgements about how one valued experience will yield another valued
experience, are not decisively verifiable or falsifiable. First, any
attempt to apprehend a life as a whole and the value of it as
experienced goes beyond the specious present of experience and relies
on memory and expectation of past and future experience and their
values, and thereby leaves room for error. Second, any attempt to
simplify the problem by breaking a whole life into parts and
apprehending their value, and then calculating the probability of
their contributing to a good life as a whole, also leaves room for
The value of an object consists in its potentiality for conducing to
intrinsically valuable experiences, and is thus a real connection
between objects, persons, and the character of experience, which we
can be empirically warranted in accepting on the basis of the
empirical evidence and the probability on the evidence of such objects
yielding such intrinsically valuable experiences. For Lewis (1946,
432), therefore, no object has intrinsic value. Nonetheless, objects
can have inherent value in so far as the good which they
produce is disclosable in the presence or observation of the object
itself rather than some other object. Lewis (1946, Ch. 14) contrasted
aesthetic value with cognitive and moral value, not by virtue of
distinctive characters of their felt goods, but chiefly by distinctive
attitudes to experience. The aesthetic attitude is one of
disinterested interest in the presented, attentiveness to the given in
its own right, as opposed to the cognitive attitude's concern with
prediction and significance for future experience, and the concern on
the part of the attitude of action or morality with the pursuit of
absent but attainable goods. Thanks to these differences, aesthetic
values in experience tend to be of high degree and long lasting and
don't require exclusive possession, and aesthetic values in objects
are inherent ones.
Lewis recognized that potentialities are in various ways relative to
particular circumstances and manners of observation. There is thus a
plurality of judgements of the value of objects, of the various ways
in which they can contribute and fail to contribute to intrinsically
valuable experiences, and an apparent contradictory nature to
incomplete verbal statements of them (e.g., &X is
good&, &X isn't good&). For Lewis (1946,
528), issues about the relativity or subjectivity of judgements of the
value of objects aren't issues about the empirical truth of
attributions of value to objects, but just issues about whether the
conditions under which an object produces directly apprehended value
are peculiar to the nature and capacities of a particular person and
thus not indicative of the possibility of similar value finding on the
part of other persons. Quine (1981) argued that variation within and
among individuals and societies, and the variable and open ended
character of what they find valuable, means that predicates like
&pleases& or & feels good& don't support
inductive inferences from case to case in the way that
&green& or &conducts electricity& do.
Skepticism concerning the prospects for empirical content and
empirical truth of attributions of value to objects is thus in
order. Lewis (), on the other hand, seems to have thought
that this contention implies that no one could ever act with empirical
warrant to improve his own lot in life or do any others good, an
absurdity in his view. Lewis argued at length for the possibility of
empirically warranted judgements of the social or impersonal value of
objects. The key is that &value to more than one person is to be
assessed as if their several experiences were to be included in that
of a single person& (Lewis (). Rawls ()
criticized Lewis for mistaking impersonality for impartiality, and
denied the relevance of Lewis' account of impersonal value for
questions of justice, at least, for which impartiality is key.
An action, for Lewis (1955, 49), is subjectively right, and one we are
not to be blamed for doing, if we think it objectively right. An
action is objectively right if it is correctly judged on the evidence
that its consequences are such as it will be right to bring
about. That requires that their pursuit violates no
categorical rational imperative or principle.
Lewis (1952b, 1952c, 1955, Chapter 5) outlines categorical rational
imperatives of doing and thinking, or versions of one rational
imperative, in various ways, formulations, and detail. The general
idea is laid out briefly in AKV (Lewis (). To be subject to
imperatives is to find a constraint of action or thought in what is
not immediate. To be rational is to be capable of constraint by
prevision of some future good or ill, and subjection to imperatives is
simply a feature of living in human terms. Rationality turns on
consistency, and the logical is derivative from the rational. Indeed
consistency of thought is for the sake of and aimed at consistency in
action, which in turn derives from consistency in willing, i.e., of
purposing and setting a value on. Logical consistency turns on nowhere
repudiating that to which we anywhere commit ourselves to in our
thought, and consistency in general consists in not accepting now what
we are unwilling to commit to elsewhere or later.
Consistency in what
we think and do requires and is required by conformity to
principles.
So there is a categorical rational imperative of consistency,
& Be consistent in valuation and in thought and action&
(Lewis ) the basis of which is simply a datum of human
nature, and a broader imperative of cogency or basing one's beliefs on
cogent reasoning from evidence (Lewis 1952b, 1952c), an imperative of
prudence, &Be concerned about yourself in future and on the
whole&, and an imperative of justice, &No rule of action
is right except one which is right in all instances and therefore
right for everyone& (Lewis ). These principles are
simply a priori explications of the rational or moral sense
possessed by most humans.
Certainly, this might be challenged. In any
case, Lewis thinks that where that sense is lacking, argument for the
principles is pointless, and he concludes AKV by claiming that
&valuation is always a matter of empirical knowledge& but
&what is right and what is just can never be determined by
empirical facts alone& (Lewis ).
The problem remains of reconciling the imperatives of prudence and
(social) justice in practice, of reconciling the good for oneself with
the good for others in our self-directed, principled, thinking and
doing. What aids us is that, through language and civilization, humans
remember as a species and not merely as individuals. What we are
justified in thinking thereby is that human achievement and social
progress require autonomous, self-criticizing and self-governing
individuals, and that individual achievement and realization of
cherished goods requires membership in a social order of individuals
co-operating in the pursuit of values cherished in common. The
contrast between individual prudence and social justice seems
fundamental, Lewis concludes, perhaps rather optimistically, only by
forgetting this (Lewis 1952b).
Works by C.I. Lewis
1918. A Survey of Symbolic Logic, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Reprinted by Dover Publications (New
York), 1960, with the omission of Chapters 5&6.
1923. &A Pragmatic Conception of
the A Priori&, The Journal of Philosophy, 20:
Reprinted in Lewis (1970), pp. 231&239.
1929. Mind and the World Order:
Outline of a Theory of Knowledge, New York: Charles Scribners.
Reprinted by Dover Publications (New York), 1956.
1932. &Alternative Systems of
Logic&, The Monist, 42:
481&507. Reprinted in Lewis
(1970), pp. 400&419.
1934. &Experience and Meaning&, The
Philosophical Review, 43: 125&46. Reprinted in Lewis (1970),
pp. 258&276.
1936. &Verification and the Types
of Truth&, unpublished. Reprinted in Lewis (1970), pp.
1941a. &Logical Positivism and Pragmatism&, Not
published in Revue Internationale de Philosophie, due to
German invasion of Belgium. Reprinted in Lewis (1970),
pp. 92&112.
1941b. &Some Logical Considerations Concerning
the Mental &, The Journal of Philosophy, 38:
225&33. Reprinted in Lewis (1970), pp. 294&302.
1946. An Analysis of Knowledge and
Valuation, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court.
1948. &Professor Chisholm and
Empiricism&, The Journal of Philosophy, 45:
517&24. Reprinted in Lewis (1970), pp. 317&23.
1952a. &The Given Element in
Empirical Knowledge&, The Philosophical Review, 61: 168&75.
Reprinted in Lewis (1970), pp. 324&31.
1952b. &Subjective Right and Objective Right&,
unpublished. Reprinted in Lewis (1955), pp.
1952c. &The Individual and the Social Order&,
unpublished. Reprinted in Lewis (1970), pp.
1955. The Ground and Nature of the
Right, New York: Columbia University Press.
1955b. &Realism or
Phenomenalism&, The Philosophical Review, 64: 233&47.
Reprinted in Lewis (1970), pp. 335&347.
1957. Our Social Inheritance, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
1969. Values and Imperatives: Studies in Ethics, edited
by John Lange, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
1970. Collected Papers of Clarence
Irving Lewis, edited by John D. Goheen and John L. Mothershead,
Jr., Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Work by Lewis and Langford
Lewis, C.I., and Langford, C.H., 1932a. Symbolic Logic,
New York: Century Company. Reprinted, New York: Dover Publications,
2nd edition, 1959, with a new Appendix III (&Final
Note on System S2&) by Lewis.
Baldwin, Thomas, 2007. &C.I. Lewis: Pragmatism and
Analysis&, in The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic
Philosophy and Phenomenology, Michael Beaney (ed.), London:
Routledge, pp. 178&95.
Barker, Stephen, and John Corcoran, Eric Dayton, John Greco,
Joel Isaac, Murray Murphey, Richard Robin, and Naomi Zack, 2006.
&A Symposium on Murray G. Murphey: C.I. Lewis: The Last
Great Pragmatist&, Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society, 42: 1&77.
Baylis, C.A., 1964. &C.I. Lewis' Theory of
Value and Ethics&, The Journal of Philosophy, 61:
pp. 559&67.
BonJour, Laurence, 1998. In Defence of Pure
Reason., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 2.
Brandt, Richard, 1964. &Coherence and Priority:
Comments&, The Journal of Philosophy, 61:
Brown, Stuart M., 1950. &C.I. Lewis&
Aesthetic&, The Journal of Philosophy, 47:
Chisholm, R.M., 1948. &The Problem of
Empiricism&, The Journal of Philosophy, 45: 512&17.
Davidson, Donald, 1984. &On the Very Idea of a
Conceptual Scheme&, in Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 183&198.
Firth, Roderick, 1950. &Radical Empiricism and
Perceptual Relativity&, Philosophical Review, 59:
pp. 164&183, 319&331.
&&&, 1964. &Coherence, Certainty,
and Epistemic Priority&, The Journal of Philosophy,
&&&, 1967. &The Anatomy of
Certainty&, Philosophical Review, 76:
Frankena, William, 1964. &Three Comments on
Lewis' Views on the Right and the Good: Comments&,
Journal of Philosophy, 61:
Garvin, Lucius, 1957. &Relativism in Professor
Lewis' Theory of Aesthetic Value&, The Journal of
Philosophy, 46:
Goodman, Nelson, 1952. &Sense and
Certainty&, Philosophical Review, 61:
&&&, 1955. Fact, Fiction, and
Forecast, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hughes, G.E., and M.J. Cresswell, 1968. An Introduction to
Modal Logic, London: Methuen, Chapters 12&13.
Malcolm, Norman, 1963. &The Verification
Argument&, in Knowledge and Certainty: Essays and
Lectures, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 1&57. Originally
published in Philosophical Analysis, edited by Max Black.
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1950.
Murphey, Murray G., 2005. C.I. Lewis: The
Last Great Pragmatist, Albany: State University of New York
Pap, Arthur, 1958. Semantics and Necessary Truth:
An Inquiry into the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy., New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Quine, W.V., 1953. &Two Dogmas of
Empiricism&, in From a Logical Point of View.,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
&&&, 1960. Word and Object.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
&&&, 1969. &Epistemology
Naturalized&, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays,
New York: Columbia University Press.
&&&, 1981. &On the Nature of Moral
Values&, in Theories and Things, . Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Rawls, John, 1971. A Theory of Justice.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Reichenbach, Hans, 1952. &Are Phenomenal
Reports Absolutely Certain&, Philosophical Review, 61:
pp. 147&59.
Rosenthal, Sandra B., 2007. CI Lewis in
Focus, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schilpp, P. A. (ed.), 1968. The Philosophy of
C.I. Lewis (Library of Living Philosophers, Volume 13), La Salle,
Illinois: Open Court. A collection of critical essays on the work of
C.I. Lewis, with autobiography by Lewis, pp. 1&21, replies by Lewis to
Critics, pp. 653&676, and bibliography compiled by E.M Adams of the
writings of C.I. Lewis and selected reviews of his writings.
Sellars, Wilfrid, 1963. &Empiricism and the Philosophy of
Mind&, in Science, Perception, and Reality, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 127&96.
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