C. I. Lewis' A Priori

Gary Hardcastle

While Quine's profound influence in 20th century philosophy is not contested, significant portions of Quine's own heritage are rather shrouded. In this paper I explore the views of one of Quine's teachers and colleagues, C. I. Lewis, a pragmatist who authored a succession of papers on logic, epistemology, and the a priori, culminating in his defense of "conceptual pragmatism" in the 1929 Mind and The World Order. In particular, articulating Lewis's account of the a priori (according to which the a priori is a free human creation, void of empirical content yet changeable over time) suggests that a common understanding of recent philosophical history, and Quine's role in it, is not correct. On that common understanding, Quine disabled the possibility of "first philosophy," seen as the embodiment of phenomenalistic reductionism and a linguistic doctrine of analytic truth, and replaced it with a notion of philosophy as science. Lewis' a priori, and the view of philosophy it suggests, is, however, innocent of first philosophy and sympathetic to views associated with Quine and Kuhn.