C. I. Lewis Quotes on Truth
C. I. Lewis (1883–1964), the American philosopher whose Mind and the World-Order (1929) and the later Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (1946) gave early-twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy its most systematic version of conceptual pragmatism, defended a distinctive analysis of the concept of truth. Truth on Lewis's analysis is the fixed point of the verification process: a statement is true just in case the experiences it predicts would in fact occur under the conditions it specifies. The framework grounds the parallel doctrine of the "pragmatic a priori" — the categorial framework within which empirical verification proceeds is itself chosen on grounds of cognitive convenience rather than imposed by experience — that the later Quine would attack and displace.
Quotes
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“Mind and the world order require each other.”
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“There can be no a priori knowledge save by way of categorial schemes.”
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“Pragmatism is not the rejection of the a priori but the reinterpretation of it.”
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“All knowledge of the world is in some way categorical.”
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Attributed to C. I. Lewis:
“Values are qualities of experience, open to empirical investigation.”
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“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)