The Given

Lewis’s empiricist epistemology sets the context for his account of sensedata such as color, the phenomenon which he likes to compare with values such as being good. As we have seen, he takes it that sense-data are “contents” that are just “given” in sensory experience. By calling them “given” (“data”), it is clear enough that he means that we do not create or choose them; but what is it that is thus given as the “content” of an experience? He uses the familiar term “qualia” in the following passage:

In the case of perceiving the white paper, what is given is a certain complex of sensa or qualia - what Santayana calls an “essence”. This is describable in expressive language by the use of adjectives of color, shape and size, and so on.

(Lewis 1946, 188)

Since visual experience itself does not have qualities of color, shape, or size, the qualia involved in this visual experience must be given as qualities that are somehow inherent in the “content” of the experience. Lewis often says that the “content” of an experience is that which is “presented” in experience (Lewis 1946, 183); but what is this? One might take it that, in Lewis’s example of “perceiving the white paper,” what is presented is just the white paper itself. But, despite the passage cited earlier concerning the “things which are now given in experience” (Lewis 1946, 17), it is clear that, for Lewis, the presented content of experience is to be distinguished from any objective fact (Lewis 1946, 188-189) such as the presence of a white sheet of paper before one. Instead, the “content” of an experience comprises the ways in which it presents appearances - Lewis writes:

The distinctive character of expressive language, or the expressive use of language, is that such language signifies appearances. And in thus referring to appearances, or affirming what appears, such expressive language neither asserts any objective reality of what appears nor denies any. It is confined to description of the content of presentation itself.

(Lewis 1946, 179)

This description of the contents of experience as “appearances” is familiar, but when considering the application of this framework to ethics it is important to clarify Lewis’s conception of the relationship between appearances such as the apparent redness of a rose and objective qualities such as the redness of the rose. A preliminary issue here is whether Lewis takes it that appearances are to be thought of as phenomenal objects along the lines of traditional “ideas” and sense-data, with qualia as sensible qualities of them, or whether his talk of appearances is simply a way of describing how things appear to people, without any implication that appearances are themselves objects with qualities. When introducing his position Lewis does not confront this issue head on; nonetheless the following passage seems to fit with this second, “descriptive,” conception of appearances:

For example, if I should say, “There is a flight of granite steps before me,” I should not merely report my experience but assert what it would require a great deal of further experience to corroborate fully. . . . But when I say, “I see what looks like granite steps before me,” I restrict myself to what is given; and what I intend by this language is something of which I can have no possible doubt.

(Lewis 1946, 179)

It would not be easy to interpret the visual appearance of granite steps before one as a matter of having a visual experience whose content comprises a phenomenal object with certain visual qualities: for even if granite steps have a distinctive visual profile, their appearance as “before one” is not a further visible quality, but an apparent spatial reference. One might assume that Lewis’s empiricist conception of the sense-meaning of objective statements, as comprising a series of hypotheticals concerning conditions governing perception, courses of action to be undertaken, and consequential sensory experiences which would confirm the statement, points in the other direction, in accordance with traditional empiricist programs to construct the physical world from phenomenal objects and sensible qualities (qualia) given in experience. But Lewis’s use of his example here suggests otherwise: there is no suggestion in what he writes that the meaning of “I see what looks like granite steps before me,” needs to be constructed in this way. On the contrary, he explicitly affirms that in making this statement “I restrict myself to what is given.” So the “given” in this case is just the fact that it appeared visually to Lewis there were granite steps before him.

One implication of this descriptive construal of appearances is that there is no reason to regard the properties of objects which are apparent in experience as constructed from the limited palette of sensible qualities that are the obvious candidates to be qualities of phenomenal objects (“qualia”). And this is definitely a feature of Lewis’s position. He writes, concerning the relationship between looking round and being round, that it is not the case that for something to be round is for it to look round under normal conditions; on the contrary, something looks round “when it looks the way a really round object looks, under the given conditions of observation.” Thus, as he puts it, in the case of “round,” the expressive meaning (looking round) is derivative from and ruled by the objective meaning (being round) (Lewis 1946, 381, 388). This is perhaps a surprising feature of Lewis’s position, given his empiricist conception of sense-meaning, and he does not specify how broadly it applies. But it indicates that, for Lewis, epistemological priorities do not dictate metaphysical priorities. There is no question of him deviating from the view that appearances, the given, such as looking round, are fundamental from the point of view of justifying the objective belief that something is round; but, as we now see, he also holds that what it is for something to look round is not a metaphysically fundamental property; instead, it depends on the way in which something which is “really round” - that is, non-derivatively round - looks. There is no inconsistency here; indeed, there is very good sense in distinguishing between epistemological and metaphysical priorities, although the verificationist philosophy of language Lewis advances in Book I of An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation might well lead one to expect him to hold that the epistemological priorities also apply in metaphysics. But it is not necessary to pursue the questions concerning Lewis’s philosophy of language to which this issue gives rise, and it is now time to turn to Lewis’s theory of the good.