Lewis’s Analysis of Experience

For Lewis - like Kant - the key to answering the Kantian question about objectivity lies in the correct analysis of experience. Lewis repeatedly says that experience, indeed, any state of mind that can count as a candidate for knowledge, that is liable to being true or false, must bear a constitutive relation to two separate elements: “the concept, which is the product of the activity of thought, and the sensuously given, which is independent of such activity” (Lewis 1929, 37). Distinguishing these two factors and understanding the separate functions performed by each in constituting experience is crucial to understanding how it is possible for us even to make claims about the world, claims that can be true or false. Lewis illustrates the crucial distinction with the following famous example, which I quote at length:

At the moment, I have a fountain pen in my hand. When I so describe this item of my present experience, I make use of terms whose meaning I have learned. Correlatively I abstract this item from the total field of my present consciousness and relate it to what is not just now present in ways which I have learned and which reflect modes of action which I have acquired. ... I bring to the present moment something which I did not then bring; a relation of this to other actual and possible experiences, and a classification of what is here presented with things which I did not then include in the same group. This present classification depends on that learned relation of this experience to other possible experience and to my action, which the shape, size, etc., of this object was not then a sign of. A savage in New Guinea, lacking certain interests and habits of action which are mine, would not so classify it. There is, to be sure, something in the character of this thing which is for me the clue to this classification or meaning; but that just this complex of qualities should be due to a “pen” character of the object is something which has been acquired. Yet what I refer to as “the given” in this experience is, in broad terms, qualitatively no different than it would be if I were an infant or an ignorant savage.

(Lewis 1929,49-50)

For Lewis, my experience has a content, which is to say that within my experience it is possible to draw a distinction between “what” I experience, that which is immediately given in my experience, and, so to speak, “how” I experience what I experience, or what I experience what is given to me in experience “as.” In this example, something is presented to me in my experience which I experience “as” a fountain pen. In describing my experience as an experience of a fountain pen, I implicitly connect my present experience with other possible experiences. In that sense, in so describing the content of my experience, I go beyond what is immediately, sensuously given, for the immediately given content of my experience cannot go beyond what is present in an experience I have at a single moment. That my present experience has the meaning “fountain pen,” or

C. I. Lewis on the Intersubjective 175 equivalently is brought under the concept of a fountain pen, is in part a function of acculturation, language acquisition, and practical interest. Of course, not anything that is presented in experience can be brought under the concept of a fountain pen. What is immediately presented to me when I am staring at my computer screen would not accept that “conceptual interpretation.” My experience can’t be conceptual interpretation “all the way down.” Thus, in addition to the conceptual interpretation, which is an activity of the mind, there must be a given element in my experience, an element that constrains how what is presented to me can be conceptually “taken.” It is this element that my experience of the fountain pen as a fountain pen has in common with, in Lewis’s rather problematic phrase, “an infant or ignorant savage.” Lewis writes, “the infant may see it much as I do, but still it will mean to him none of these things I have described it as being, but merely ‘plaything’ or ‘smooth bitable’” (Lewis 1929, 50).

One might wonder whether experience has meaning for the infant in the same sense in which it has meaning for a normal human adult, in particular, whether meaning for an infant is what Lewis calls “conceptual interpretation.” But that is not something Lewis needs to settle at this point, for his point here is just that the fact that what is immediately present in the infant’s experience has these “meanings” for the infant is not itself something that can be explained by what is immediately present in the infant’s experience, but only by what the mind of the infant “brings” to its experience. As the example with the infant is meant to illustrate, “fountain pen” is, of course, just one possible meaning that an experience can have. These possible meanings have a relation to our practical interests. Depending on my interests, what is present in my experience could have different contents: “a cylinder,” “hard rubber,” or a “poor buy” (Lewis 1929, 50). Despite the possible variation in content, there is something that remains constant, or “unalterable,” even if in the attempt to describe what this is, one inevitably brings what is presented under a concept and so goes beyond what is immediately given. Lewis writes,

In whatever terms I describe this item of my experience, I shall not convey it merely as given, but shall supplement this by a meaning which has to do with relations, and particularly with relation to other experiences which I regard as possible but which are not just now actual.

(Lewis 1929, 50)

I think that we misunderstand Lewis’s point if we take it to imply that the given is ineffable, in the sense of being inaccessible to us through description. After all, he has given us instructions about how to identify the given element in our experience. For example, it can be identified as what different experiences of something as something - for example, the experience of an object as a pen and as a smooth bitable, or as some other thing - have in common. We might put his point by saying that the given cannot be “directly described.” His view isn’t that the given is ineffable but that it is independent of conceptual interpretation.

From this example and Lewis’s later elaborations on it, we can glean the following theses. First, experience, and so all thought - since thought for Lewis bears an internal relation to the possibility of experience - is constituted by two elements, the given and the “conceptual interpretation”; both elements are necessary for experience, and hence for thought in general. Second, the given is immediate, and so is that in relation to which the mind is passive, and the conceptual element is a product of the “activity” of the mind. Third, these two elements are mutually irreducible to one another, or as Lewis puts it, they do not “limit” one another. Fourth, despite the separability of these two elements, they do not correspond to two different mental states or acts, but are rather separable moments of a single act or state, what Lewis calls “experience.” The two elements are thus “abstractions.” Fifth, the activity of mind, the interpretative element, is something that the mind “brings to experience” and so constitutes a “subjective” contribution to experience, in contrast to which the immediate element constitutes the contribution of the world, and so constitutes the “objective” contribution to experience. Sixth, it is not only the experience of the object that is constituted by activity of the mind but the object itself that is so constituted. The object is a logical construction: it is constituted by our concepts of it. I argue next that despite the ingenuity and sensitivity with which Lewis formulates his analysis of experience, his analysis of experience into “objective” and “subjective” elements as stated in the aforementioned fifth thesis, and implied in the sixth, is inconsistent with one of his best insights, the necessary intersubjectivity of thought.