Editing C. I. Lewis (section)

===Pragmatist but no positivist===
Around 1930, with the introduction of [[logical empiricism]] to America by German and Austrian philosophers fleeing Europe under [[Nazi Germany]], [[American philosophy]] went through a turning point.

This new doctrine, with its emphasis on scientific models of knowledge and on the logical analysis of meaning, soon became dominant, challenging American philosophers such as Lewis who held a naturalistic or pragmatic approach.<ref name="dayton">Dayton (2004)</ref>

Lewis was perceived as a logical empiricist, but actually differed with it on some major points, rejecting logical [[positivism]], which is the notion that all genuine knowledge is derived solely from sensory experience as interpreted through reason and logic, and rejecting [[physicalism]] with its notion that the mind along with its experience is actually equivalent to physical entities such as the brain and the body. He held that experience should be analyzed separately, and that [[Value (semiotics)|semiotic value]] does have [[Cognition|cognitive significance]].<ref name="dayton" />

Reflecting on the differences between [[pragmatism]] and [[positivism]], Lewis devised the notion of cognitive structure, concluding that any significant knowledge must come from experience. [[Value (semiotics)|Semiotic value]], accordingly, is the way of representing this knowledge, which is stored for deciding future conduct.

[[Charles Sanders Peirce]] the founder of [[pragmaticism]] saw the world as a system of signs. Therefore, scientific research was a branch of semiotics, primarily needing to be analyzed and justified in semiotic terms, before actually conducting any kind of experiment, and the meaning of meaning must be understood before anything else could be "explained". This included analyzing and studying what experience itself is.<ref>Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, footnote 5.448, from ''The Basis of Pragmaticism'' (1906)</ref>
In ''Mind and the World Order'' (1929) Lewis explained that Peirce's "pragmatic test" of significance should be understood with Peirce's own limitation which prescribed meaning only to what makes a '''verfiable difference in experience''' although experience is subjective.

A year later, in ''Pragmatism and Current Thought'' (1930) he repeated this but emphasized the subjectiveness of experience. Concepts, according to Lewis' explanation of Peirce, are abstractions in which the experience is to be considered, rather than any "factual" or "immediate" truth.<ref>"the immediate is precisely that element which must be left out..." ''Pragmatism and Current Thought'', C. I. Lewis (1930)</ref>

The validation of the perceived experiences are achieved by doing comparison tests. For example, if one person perceives time or weight as double that of the other's perception, the two perceptions are never truly comparable. Thus a concept is a relational pattern.

Still, by checking the physical attributes which each of the two people assign to their experiences, in this case the weight and time in physical units, it is possible to analyze some part of the experience, and one should not discard that very important aspect of the world as it is experienced.

{{blockquote|In one sense, that of connotation, a concept strictly comprises nothing but an abstract configuration of relations. In another sense, its denotation or empirical application, this meaning is vested in a process which characteristically begins with something given and ends with something done in the operation which translates a presented datum into an instrument of prediction and control.}}

Thus knowledge begins and ends in experience, keeping in mind that the beginning and ending experiences differ.

Furthermore, according to Lewis' interpretation of Peirce, knowledge of something requires that the '''verifying experience''' itself be actually experienced as well.

Thus, for the pragmatist, verifiability as an operational definition (or test) of the empirical meaning of a statement requires that the speaker know how to apply that statement, when not to apply it, and that the speaker will be able to trace the consequences of the statement in situations both real and hypothetical.

Lewis firmly objected to the positivist interpretation of value statements as being merely "expressive", devoid of any cognitive content.

In his 1946 essay ''Logical Positivism and Pragmatism'' Lewis set out both his concept of sense meaning, and his thesis that valuation is a form of empirical cognition. He disagreed with [[verificationism]], and preferred the term empirical meaning. Claiming that [[pragmatism]] and [[logical positivism]] are forms of [[empiricism]].

Lewis argued that there is a deep difference between the seemingly similar concepts of pragmatic meaning and the logical-positivist requirement of verification.

According to Lewis, pragmatism ultimately bases its understanding of meaning on conceivable experience, while positivism reduces the relation between meaning and experience to a matter of [[logical form]]. Thus, according to Lewis, the positivist view  precisely omits the necessary empirical meaning as it would be called by the pragmatist.

Specifying which [[observational statement]]s follow from a given sentence, helps us determine the empirical meaning of the given sentence only if the observation statements themselves have an already understood meaning in terms of the experience which the observation statements refer to.

According to Lewis, the logical positivists failed to distinguish between "linguistic" meaning - the logical relations among terms, and "empirical" meaning - the relation that expressions must experience. (In [[Carnap]] and [[Charles W. Morris]]' terminology, empirical meaning falls under [[pragmatics]], while [[linguistic meaning]] under [[semantics]].) Lewis argues against the logical positivist who shut their eyes to precisely that which properly confirms a sentence, namely the content of experience.