American Pragmatism: Mind and the World Order by Clarence Irving Lewis

AMERICAN PRAGMATISM:

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice. Important positions characteristic of pragmatism include instrumentalism, radical empiricism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, and fallibilism. There is general consensus among pragmatists that philosophy should take the methods and insights of modern science into account. Charles Sanders Peirce (and hispragmatic maxim) deserves most of the credit for pragmatism, along with later twentieth century contributors, William James and John Dewey.

Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Another brand of pragmatism, known sometimes as neopragmatism, gained influence through Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late twentieth century pragmatists. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey. The word pragmatism derives from Greek πρᾶγμα (pragma), "deed, act", which comes from πράσσω (prassō), "to pass over, to practise, to achieve".

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism

SYNOPSIS:

Some years ago I bought a used Dover reprint of Clarence Irving Lewis' major full-length work, entitled "Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory Of Knowledge". It sat in a box in the garage until a few weeks ago, when I pulled it out on a whim and decided to read it.

The scope of Lewis' 1929 treatise extends from the first nerve impacts of experience to the whole of all reality and the end of time. The problem of knowledge is the problem of how we can possibly make that leap from the given—the undeniable flat fact of conscious experience itself in which sense-data such as "red" and "cold" are presented to our awareness—to "reality". In Lewis' view, we cannot have knowledge of reality except by conceptual interpretation of the given. This is because we decide the "reality" of something (an experience) by making use of our criteria of reality (of various sorts: physical reality, cognitive reality, mathematical reality). But since experience includes illusion, hallucination, and error, we reject something not fitting our criteria as "unreal". These criteria are therefore a priori—i.e. not empirical, certain in advance of experience—for whatever experience does not fit the criteria is thrown out of court in just this fashion. But these criteria do not appear out of nowhere; we arrive at them by generalization from past experience. And so the given nonetheless conditions and shapes the conceptual scheme we use to interpret it. For example we sense those tell-tale marks of a dream-experience, and therefore recognize it as unreal (either by becoming aware of this fact during the dream, or afterward by waking up in bed.) But we would not even divide our experience into dreaming and wakefulness without having first had both.

SOURCE: http://dto.github.com/notebook/blog-2008-01-15-1034.html

ANALYSIS:

Depicts different principles that allows the author to present the traditional problem of knowledge as resting on a mistake. It also shows the ''copy theory'' of thought in which knowledge towards an object is said to be coincidence with the idea in the mind. The whole story portrays different theories and principles of beliefs towards which is true and which is not.