Lewis’s Characterizations of the Given Element in Experience
As is well known, Lewis argued that “[t]here are, in our cognitive experience, two elements; the immediate data, such as those of sense, which are presented or given to the mind, and a form, construction or interpretation, which represents the activity of thought” (Lewis 1929, 38). Lewis is clear that, on his view, knowledge of empirical objects requires both general concepts and the immediate sensuous given, stating firmly that “[t]here is no knowledge merely by direct awareness” (Lewis 1929, 37), that is, “no knowledge merely by acquaintance.” To the contrary, “knowledge always transcends the immediately given,” and “if it is to have cognitive meaning this immediacy must become the subject of an interpretation which transcends it” (Lewis 1929, 118).4 Both Lewis and Sellars wholeheartedly embrace the general Kantian claim that our knowledge or cognition of empirically mind-independent objects of possible experience requires both the application of a concept of the object (and thereby counterfactual-sustaining laws of experience), and that the object be capable of being “given” to us by affecting our senses. It is when we look more closely at the nature and role of the non-conceptual “given element” in our knowledge that complex difficulties and controversies arise, and again both Lewis and Sellars agree that the issues in this domain are not easy to sort out. In this regard, Lewis’s well-known reflection toward the end of his life on the difficulties involved in this question is worth quoting at the outset:
After thirty years of debating questions of the given element in experience, I come to think that an accurate and well-expressed phenomenology of the perceptual is the most difficult - the most nearly impossible - enterprise to which epistemology is committed. But we cannot fob it off and begin the story of empirical knowledge with chat about “accepted sentences” of observation.
(Lewis [1960] 1968, 18)5
Let us begin, then, with Lewis’s distinction between “the thick experience of the world of things” and the “thin given of immediacy” (Lewis 1929, 54). The “criteria” by which we can “isolate,” by reflection on our ordinary “thick” experience of physical objects, the “thin” or “immediate” given, as Lewis puts it, are: (1) its “unalterability” by thought - our conceptual thinking can neither “create” nor alter the character of the given element itself; and (2) “its character as sensuous feel or quality” (Lewis 1929,52,53; cf. 66,193). Lewis calls this “given element in a single experience of an object” a “presentation,” which is “an event and historically unique.” Its “content is either a specific quale (such as the immediacy of redness or loudness) or something analyzable into a complex of such” (Lewis 1929, 59-60). While “the presentation as an event” is unique, however, “the qnalia which make it up are not. They are recognizable from one to another experience" as “repeatable content" (Lewis 1929, 60, italics added). At the same time, however, Lewis holds that “such qua-lia, though repeatable in experience and intrinsically recognizable, have no names. They are fundamentally different from the universals of logic” and from the “objective properties” of conceptualized objects (Lewis 1929, 61, 131). These various characterizations of the given element will be important in what follows.
The given, in the form of the immediate presentation of “intrinsically recognizable” and “repeatable” sensuous qnalia content, is nonetheless “ineffable,” that is, not describable per se (Lewis 1929, 52-53, 73-75, 121-125). This is for the reason that “not a momentary presented quale but an ordered relationship of such, is the least that can be meaningfully named" (Lewis 1929, 130-131, italics added); and the latter, as well as knowledge in general (linguistic or non-linguistic), requires the predictive interpretation of the given by means of concepts. The immediate given or presented quale by itself, however, is strictly speaking “non-shareable” (Lewis 1929, 81) and “subjective”:6
Qualia are subjective; they have no names in ordinary discourse but are indicated by some circumlocution such as “looks like”; they are ineffable, since they might be different in two minds with no possibility of discovering that fact and no necessary inconvenience to our knowledge of objects or their properties.
(Lewis 1929, 124; cf. 75)
For the same reason, the given by itself simply presents its qualitative content to us immediately without any question of either verifiability or error being applicable to apprehension of it: “Apprehension of the presented quale, being immediate, stands in no need of verification; it is impossible to be mistaken about it,” and “it is not knowledge in any sense in which ‘knowledge’ connotes the opposite of error” (Lewis 1929, 125; cf. 131-132: “One cannot be mistaken about the content of an immediate awareness”). Sellars’s rejection of the given as a myth will ultimately entail a rejection of these claims concerning any allegedly incorrigible and ineffable apprehension or recognition of the “content of an immediate awareness,” to repeat Lewis’s phrase (see, for example, Sellars 1956, XVI).
Our empirical knowledge (in fact, our intentionality in general), for Lewis, by contrast, is not of this “thin” given, but of the “thick” experience of objects and behaviors that we conceptually categorize and generalize about in ordinary life. Such empirical knowledge of objects is by its nature pragmatic, predictive, and probable rather than certain, unmistakable, or (in the case of analytic truths) a priori. It is true that for Lewis our empirical knowledge is based on conceptual criteria that are themselves a priori in the sense of being “definitive” or analytic of what it is to be an object of the relevant kind, no matter what experience might bring in the form of the given. But on Lewis’s pragmatic conception of the a priori - and this is a matter about which Sellars explicitly agreed with Lewis7 - we can always in principle either persist with or abandon our interpretive criteria on overall pragmatic grounds (Lewis 1929,264). This is a non-foundationalist aspect of Lewis’s views about knowledge in MWO. It is also important for Lewis that there is no “knowledge,” properly speaking, unless there is the possibility of error, and error concerns not the “thin” given but its “thick” interpretation (Lewis 1929, 275). However, without the thin given, in the form of an “awareness of immediate and recognizable qualia,” as Lewis puts it, our “knowledge must be contentless and arbitrary; there would be nothing which it must be true to” (Lewis 1929, 39; for criticism of this claim in Lewis, see Williams 1999/1977, Ch. 1).
The following example from Lewis sums up the central distinction between the “thin,” “fragmentary” given and our “thick” experience and knowledge of objects that this section has highlighted:
At the moment, a certain “that” which I can only describe (in terms of concepts) as a round, ruddy, tangy-smelling somewhat, means to me “edible apple.” Now my ultimate purpose toward it may be the enjoyment of an ineffable taste. But that taste not being given, I need a conceptual go-cart to get me over the interval between this round, ruddy presentation and the end projected by my purpose. ... It is the function of mind to bridge these [intervals] by assigning to the present given an interpretation through which it becomes related to, or a sign of a correlation between certain behavior of my own and the realization of my purpose. . . . An object such as an apple is never given; between the real apple in all its complexity and this fragmentary presentation, lies that interval which only interpretation can bridge. The “objectivity” of this experience means the verifiability of a further possible experience which is attributed by this interpretation.
(Lewis 1929, 119-120; first italics added)
What we must now consider is whether the given element in Lewis’s account, briefly sketched in this section, falls afoul of Sellars’s argument that the given is a myth, that is (roughly), that it unwittingly embodies philosophical confusions of one form or another. One source of difficulty is that Sellars in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and in later works conceived the myth of the given as coming in different forms, for example, both rationalist and empiricist, subjectivist and physicalist, conceptual and non-conceptual, propositional and sub-propositional, foun-dationalist and non-foundationalist, epistemic and non-epistemic forms.8 In application to Lewis certain of these distinctions will be particularly important.
