Abstract
I argue that Quine’s naturalization of Lewis’s Kantian pragmatism should be understood in terms of Lewis’s attempt to de-psychologize pragmatist epistemology. Lewis wants epistemology to be a priori in order to be distinct from psychology. Quine’s criticisms of Lewis result in a picture that weakens the distinction between epistemology and psychology. Nevertheless, Quine’s naturalized Kantian pragmatism remains far more Kantian than is widely recognized, due to what Quine retains from Lewis.
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Notes
On Lewis’s relation to pragmatism, see Browning, (2022), Gava, (2018), Hookway, (2008), Misak, (2013), Pinkard, (2018), and Rosenthal (2007). On the status of the given and the tension between pragmatism and foundationalism, see Dayton (1995), Gowans (1984; 1989), and Klemick, (2020; 2022). See also two recent edited collections in Olen & Sachs, (2017) and Kammer et al., (2021) for an overview of recent interpretative concerns.
Pearce, (2020) suggests that Lewis moved away from the emphasis on biology due to a concern about whether a biological approach could ground our interest in objective truth (p. 336). I suspect that Lewis’s ambivalence about the centrality of biology to pragmatism had more to do with his interest in philosophy of logic and mathematics.
I shall omit discussion, fascinating as it is, of Sinclair’s argument that Quine’s “Truth by Convention” influenced Lewis’s conception of analyticity between MWO and AKV. But it should be noticed that it is the account of sense-meanings that is central to Sellars’s critique of Lewis (Klemick, 2022). If both Sinclair and Klemick are right, then Lewis commits himself to the Myth of the Given as a consequence of trying to evade Quine’s critique of analytic truths as purely conventional.
References
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Sachs, C.B. Quine’s critique of C. I. Lewis: pragmatism, psychologism, and naturalism—a response to Quine, conceptual pragmatism, and the analytic-synthetic distinction (Robert Sinclair, 2022). AJPH 2, 33 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-023-00093-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-023-00093-z