Mediation by “Activity of Mind”
A natural question that arises is what Lewis means by “activity of mind.” He sometimes employs a broad characterization of activity of mind, according to which anything that is not immediately given to the mind is activity of mind or the result of activity of mind. This is suggested by the passage about the infant. Activity of mind would include, then, all that which is acquired through acculturation and learning, as well as what is conditioned by the practical activity of satisfying needs, desires, and ends. Concepts, at least specific empirical concepts, are acquired, for the most part, through the process of language acquisition. And language functions as a vehicle of increasingly sophisticated forms of social cooperation. Concepts thus belong to the mind’s activity in this broad sense. But there is a narrower sense of activity of mind that is associated with the form of activity that is displayed by the use of concepts, in particular,
C. I. Lewis on the Intersubjective 177 the activity of judgment, and it is the notion of activity of mind in the narrower sense that Lewis needs.
We can get at the distinction I have in mind by considering a broadly Humean notion of the mind’s activity. In many respects Hume, perhaps surprisingly, could have agreed with much that Lewis says by way of initially laying out his analysis of experience into two mutually irreducible elements. Lewis says,
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.
(Lewis 1929, 49)
Hume could have accepted this while cashing out what Lewis says in his own, naturalistic, terms. Of course, no empiricist would have dreamed of thinking that the active operation of the mind is merely incidental to the possibility of knowledge. However, while for any empiricist the active operation of the mind is essential to reason, judgment, and thought, many empiricists, say Locke, would have held that experience itself is an entirely passive affair. Hume, though, is, I think, an interesting exception.
Lewis writes,
The world of experience is not given in experience: it is constructed by thought from the data of sense. The reality which everybody knows reflects the structure of human intelligence as much as it does the nature of the independently given sensory content. It is a whole in which mind and what is given to the mind already meet and are interwoven. The datum of our philosophic study is not the “buzzing, blooming confusion” on which the infant first opens his eyes, not the thin experience of immediate sensation, but the thick experience of every-day life.
(Lewis 1929, 30)
Like Lewis, Hume could distinguish between what Lewis here calls “thin experience” and “thick experience.” “Thin” experience consists simply of impressions following one after the other, but in “thick” experience, the mind connects experiences with one another, classifying each experience as belonging with other actual and possible experiences and not others. Thus, the “reality which everybody knows” reflects the process of classification by which the immediate data of sense are connected with each other. For Hume, this process is a function of the imagination operating according to the “association of ideas.” For Hume “thick” experience would be experience that is, so to speak, “filtered” through the association of ideas. The association of ideas goes beyond what is immediately given in any experience, since it connects the present experience with past experiences and potential future experiences. Like Lewis, Hume could say that experiences don’t classify themselves; rather, classification of experiences is something that the mind “brings to” experience. What is responsible for the meaning of experience is a product of mind because it is a product of the association of ideas. Further, it is only because experience is “thickened” by the operation of the imagination that it can so much as afford the mind material for thought. Contrary to the picture of empiricism that Lewis operates with throughout MWO, Hume, at least, in his naturalist guise, could accept Lewis’s dictum that experience requires not just the immediate consciousness of the given but mental activity, at least in a broad sense.6
Although Lewis does not explicitly distinguish what he calls “conceptual interpretation” from Humean association of ideas, it is clear from what he says about concepts that he would have done so. For Lewis, the key to the constitution of experience in the “thick” sense, an experience of an object, is the possibility of error. That possibility cannot be provided for by what is immediately given in experience:
A purely passive consciousness, if such can be conceived, would find no use for the concept of reality, because it would find none for the idea of the unreal; because it would take no attitude that could be balked, and make no interpretation which conceivably could be mistaken.
(Lewis 1929, 30)
That is, it is only if the mind takes what is given to it in some way, as a pen, as a cylinder, as a good buy, etc., that there is the possibility of error. In “the thin experience of immediate sensation” there is no possibility of error. There is no such possibility because in a purely receptive consciousness of this sort, there is no distinction between what is given in consciousness and consciousness itself. And where there is such perfect coincidence between what is given to the mind and the mind itself, there can be no possibility of error.
This is the basis of Lewis’s diagnosis of the mistake of empiricism (Lewis 1929, 46). The empiricist thinks that we can explain thought as the result of abstraction from the data of experience. Thought is possible only if error is possible - thought is the sort of mental act or state that can be true or false. However, in the data of experience itself the possibility of error has not yet been provided for. Hume’s sensory impressions are such that appearance and reality are indistinguishable from one another: a sensory impression is something that appears to be as it is and is as it appears. In other words, in the pure consciousness of a sensory impression, the data of experience from which the mind draws its materials for thought according to the empiricist, there is no distinction between the
C. I. Lewis on the Intersubjective 179 subject and the object. Consequently, it is a serious misunderstanding to construe the empiricist’s thin notion of experience as an experience of reality, as an experience of an object. In order to have an experience of an object at all, something that could have an internal relation to thought -so that it is the sort of state that could confirm or disconfirm a thought, judgment, or belief - there must be within the experience two elements, something given to the experience and an “attitude” taken by the mind itself, an “interpretation,” as Lewis calls it.
But, of course, the Humean view I have described does not try to explain the content of experience in terms of what is passively, immediately received by the mind, but rather by that together with the activity of mind conceived in a naturalistic fashion, that is, in terms of the association of ideas. But would that explain the possibility of error? A calculator is something that can be in error, given that we interpret it as a machine that performs arithmetic functions. The numerals that appear on the screen of a calculator count as representations of numbers just in case it is possible to interpret the inputs and outputs in accordance with the relevant arithmetic functions. But as it is sometimes put, the calculator has only “extrinsic normativity” - its operations are not such as to be intrinsically correct or incorrect. The possibility of error has its source in the viability of interpreting the calculator as an arithmetic machine. Similarly, while it would be possible to interpret an association of ideas so that it tracks, say, causal inference - as Hume himself did - the association of ideas could not, contra Hume, explain the act of inference, since the association of ideas is not intrinsically normative and the act of inference is. For Lewis, interpretation in the relevant sense is a matter of articulability in the form of judgment. He writes,
The objectivity of the real requires always construction by the mind. This thesis does not imply any denial that the given is independent of the activity of thought in the sense explained above. It requires only the denial that the presentation of sense-data can by itself constitute valid knowledge. That I credit this presentation, or attribute to it, objectivity, is a judgment, and is as such an act of thought. (It would equally be an interpretation to discredit the presentation as merely subjective.) This interpretive fiat is what Fichte stresses as the positing of the “not me”. The data of sense, apart from such positing, are neither external reality nor explicit self. In immediacy, there is no separation of subject and object. The givenness of immediate data is, thus, not the givenness of reality, and is not knowledge.
(Lewis 1929, 46)
The “taking of an attitude” or the “making of an interpretation,” that is for Lewis a necessary condition of the possibility of error is the taking of a judgmental attitude, the making of a judgment. It is only if the subject in response to what is immediately given in sense makes a certain judgment - or to be more accurate, can make a certain judgment - that there can be the possibility of error and so of truth. This would give us the narrower sense of mental activity that we were looking for. For Lewis, what the mind must bring (in the narrow sense) to its experience is an exercise - or again, to be more careful, the potentiality of an exercise - of the capacity to judge, an exercise of the capacity to bring an object under a concept. Thus, what it is for me to take what is immediately given to me to indicate a fountain pen is for me to be prepared to formulate the judgment, “this is a fountain pen.” As Lewis frequently says, the immediately given sensory content of my experience cannot be the sort of thing that can be veridical. It is only the attitude I take in response to the immediately given sensory content that can be veridical.
One might wonder whether we have then lost sight of the experience itself as something that can either be correct or incorrect. We have two elements that are supposed to compose an experience of an object. The sensuous given cannot be correct or incorrect, and the attitude or interpretation is a judgment that is a response to experience, and so not part of the experience itself. If so, it would seem that we don’t have a distinction between experience in the thin sense and experience in the thick sense at all, but rather only a distinction between experience in the thin sense and a judgment that is formulated in response to experience. Lewis insists that experience of an object, “thick experience,” is experience in which the immediately given and the activity of judgment are interwoven. But what is that supposed to come to?7
Leaving this worry aside, it might still be objected that Lewis hasn’t really explained how what the mind contributes to experience explains the possibility of error. Even if we grant to him that there is the possibility of error only insofar as the mind “takes attitudes” or formulates “interpretations” in connection with the immediately given, it seems that he has simply helped himself to the notion of judgment as that in which the mind’s “taking attitudes” consists. No doubt a judgment is intrinsically normative, but what is it about a subject that constitutes its “taking an attitude” in the relevant sense, in the sense of making a judgment? If we think of an “attitude” or “interpretation” in the broad sense as the formation of any representation in response to what is immediately given in sense, which of such responses is to count as a judgment?8 Lewis does not take up this question, for, as I said, he simply helps himself to the notion of judgment in characterizing the activity of mind that is necessary for experience of an object. However, Lewis does connect up the relevant notion of activity of mind with self-consciousness, for, as he says in the previous passage, the relevant activity of mind is that through which one distinguishes the “me” from the “not me,” the subjective from the objective. As he stresses, in the consciousness of the immediately given there is no distinction between subject and object. One is able to draw such a distinction only insofar as
C. I. Lewis on the Intersubjective 181 one makes a claim that something is so, and so thereby understands that there is a distinction between what makes the claim correct and the making of the claim itself. In other words, a judgment is an act that has a certain understanding of itself, namely an understanding of itself as a correct judgment. And it is only because it has this understanding of itself that it is the sort of thing that can be correct or incorrect. It is commonly supposed that objectivity and subjectivity are opposed to one another, but, as pointed out earlier, the self-consciousness of judgment underlies both objectivity’ and subjectivity, the distinction between what is merely a state of mine and what is really so. The idea of the objective and the idea of the subjective arise together and do so through the self-consciousness of judgment. And this is, I think, the key to understanding the notion of judgment.
As we saw, a judgment is intrinsically normative - it is a state that has, so to speak, the possibility of error, and so of correctness, built into it. In what does the intrinsic normativity of judgment consist? A calculator is extrinsically normative - it is normative given that it is taken by those who are its potential users as a calculator. Suppose that judgment were extrinsically normative; then, its normativity would be constituted by subjects who adopt the attitude of treating a judgment as a judgment, just as the normativity of a calculator is constituted by subjects who adopt the attitude of treating it as a calculator. On such a view, judgment would be normative because it is constituted by a kind of consciousness. In the case of the calculator, it is the consciousness by the potential users of the object as a calculator that constitutes its being a calculator and so normatively evaluable as such. Similarly, it is the consciousness of a particular attitude one takes toward a state as a judgment that constitutes the attitude as a judgment and so as something that is normatively evaluable as a judgment. The difference is that in the case of the calculator the source of the normativity is a consciousness of something distinct from oneself, the calculator, but in the case of judgment the source of the normativity is consciousness of oneself, self-consciousness. How, though, on the view that judgment is extrinsically normative, is self-consciousness conceived of? It would be conceived of on the model of our relation to the calculator. Is that coherent? I am conscious of the calculator as a calculator, and it belongs to my consciousness of the calculator as a calculator that I am able to distinguish between two separate elements, the object, the “what” of my consciousness, and my consciousness of it. However, in my consciousness of my judgment as a judgment, I cannot distinguish between two separable elements, the object, the “what” of my consciousness, and my consciousness of it. What I am conscious of just is my consciousness of it, and my consciousness of the “what” is what I am conscious of. Indeed, it is precisely the inseparability of the subject and the object of consciousness that marks an act of self-consciousness as an act of self-consciousness. So just as a calculator is constituted as a calculator by consciousness of it as such, a judgment is constituted by consciousness of it as such. However, since the consciousness of a judgment as a judgment is not a separate state - such as a “higher order state” - distinct from the judgment itself, the judgment is intrinsically normative. The intrinsic normativity of a judgment is rooted in the intrinsic self-consciousness of judgment, the fact that in judging that p, I am conscious that I judge that p.
In other words, it makes no sense to think of myself as imposing normativity onto my own states and so thereby constituting my own states of thinking as states of thinking at all, as something that can be correct or incorrect. Rather, it is constitutive of an act of thinking that I take my act of thinking to be correct. My taking my act of thinking to be correct is inseparable from the act being an act of thinking at all. After all, were the normativity of my acts of thinking to be extrinsic to them, were to derive from a state of taking myself to be engaging in an act of thinking conceived of as a further, “higher order” state, that would just push the question back. The further, higher-order state would itself be an act of thinking, one that could therefore be correct or incorrect; from whence does its normativity derive? If it is from a yet further state, at a higher order in the third degree, we would need an explanation of its normativity as well. And so on. We would be launched on a vicious regress. The only way to block the regress is to prevent it from ever getting going. Self-consciousness is the source of normativity, but normativity is intrinsic to acts of thinking, or judging, since such acts are constituted by selfconsciousness.9 To think that p is to think that p is the thing to think. What, though, is the standard that a thinker either implicitly or explicitly employs in thinking that what she thinks is correct? For Lewis the standard is the “pure concept.”
