Co to jest zawartość pojęcia? Sądy analityczne i syntetyczne według Clarence’a Irvinga Lewisa (What is containment of concepts? Analytic and synthetic judgments according to Clarence Irving Lewis)

Abstract

The paper is clarification of the category of content of concepts. This category is the key one for Kant and Lewis, as well as for Quinean refutation of distinction between the synthetic and the analytic. The question is: to what extent does Quine’s critique apply to Lewisean understanding of the synthetic and the analytic? The answer is a negative one. In fact, Quine’s critique in his famous Two Dogmas of Empiricism is based on resignation from the category of conceptual content. Just the opposite to Kant and Lewis, who both grounded the opposition of synthetic and analytic judgments in just this category. It brings about the necessity of some explanation of “content of concepts”. According to Kant this content is the presentations of senses, which at the same time are the arguments of concepts. In Critique of Pure Reason concepts are understood as intellectual functions, the value of which is the synthetic unity of apperception. This explanation is far from suffi cient clarity. Thus one needs to describe it in appropriate logical terms. And this was done in Analysis of Knowledge and Valuations by C.I. Lewis. Lewis achieved it by means of his intensional modes of meaning, that is: (1) comprehension, (2) signification and (3) intension. In our cognition these three intensional modes of meaning are primary to the forth mode, namely – extension. The three intensional modes of meaning determine what Lewis called the sense meaning. Sense meaning is at its bottom a kind of imaginary schema, enabling applications of linguistic terms to the world of possible experience.

Keywords

• analytic truth
• synthetic proposition
• transcendental
• pragmatism
• comprehension
• intension