C. I. Lewis The Given Element in Experience
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ShaughanLavine - 16 Oct 2005
Quine = Mind and the World Order - Analytic-synthetic distinction
Quine's Two Dogmas, next reading, includes his argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction.
A lot of Quine's philosophy, and, indeed a lot of what gets attributed to Quine is C. I. Lewis, Quine's teacher. Davidson says that Quine came to Harvard from Oberlin not knowing any philosophy, and so, when he took his first courses, from C. I. Lewis, he just assumed what he was learning was standard fare, and so he uses it without attribution.
It is often said that Mind and the World Order is a statement, even a classic statement, of logical positivism, which is a great irony because the book was written without influence or contact with the logical positivists, and most of his subsequent work was motivated by his disagreements with the logical positivists. All it reflects is the ascendancy of logical positivism at the time C. I. Lewis wrote.
His chief disagreement with the logical positivists was that he took questions of value to be meaningful, even central: as a pragmatist, he took the way in which we attempt to fulfill our goals and desires to be fundamental. The logical positivist claim that claims about value are nonsense was at least one motivation for his later work on ethics.
C. I. Lewis on "the given." The most extraordinary thing about his notion of the given is that it isn't given. One important role for things called the given, sense data, qualia, and so forth, has generally been foundational. For example, knowledge of the given is indubitable, we have direct acquantance with sense data, blah, blah, blah. C. I. Lewis, in absolute contradiction with that, says that we have no experience of the given, that it is abstract, that we only know of its existence through philosophical analysis. He also says things that are apparently inconsistent with that strong view, but the strong view is distinctively his.
He says we only know of the existence of the given through philosophical analysis, but he gives a positive argument for the existence of the given which, at least as I understand analysis, is not philosophical analysis. That is, it is not a careful dissection of what must be true in order for certain shared facts to be true. His argument bears strong affinities to a Kantian transcendental argument, though it is certainly not intended to be transcendental in a strong Kantian sense.
His argument does seem, by his lights, to be a priori. And I believe that the argument presupposes that there is such a thing as the a priori.