On Quine’s Debt to Pragmatism: C.I. Lewis and the Pragmatic A Priori

Abstract

At the very end of his influential ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, Quine famously emphasized that his rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction resulted in a more ‘thorough’ pragmatism than that seen in the work of Rudolf Carnap and C.I. Lewis.¹ This remark has led many to assimilate Quine’s work to the American pragmatist tradition, where he is often depicted as either continuing or reviving some of the main issues representative of that tradition.² Quine, however, remained ambivalent about this affiliation, explaining that he was only referencing Carnap’s view concerning the pragmatic criteria involved in the choice of a linguistic framework for science, and recommending their extension to the whole of science (1991: 272). What he somewhat surprisingly forgets to mention is the influence of his teacher C.I. Lewis, who defended a form of ‘Conceptual Pragmatism’ in the 1930s when Quine was a graduate student at Harvard.³ While the links between Quine and the ‘classical’ pragmatism of Peirce, James and Dewey are, I think, tenuous at best, I have earlier argued that it is precisely this connection to Lewis that serves as the main source of Quine’s pragmatism (Sinclair, 2012). Here, I aim to further defend and elaborate on this claim by showing how Lewis’s influence can be seen in several early episodes in Quine’s philosophical development.⁴