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The American philosopher C.I. Lewis (1883-1946) was influenced by both Kant’s division of knowledge into that which is given and which processes the given, and a pragmatist emphasis on the relation of thought to action. Fusing both these sources into a distinctive position, Lewis rejected the shape dichotomies of both theory-practice and fact-value. He conceived of philosophy as the investigation of the categories by which we think about reality. He denied that experience conceptualized by categorized realities. That way we think about reality is socially and historically shaped. Concepts have meanings that signify the relevance to something reassembling a forming configuration that appears orderly and of a proper conditional state, by which human beings are a product of human interactions with the world. Theory is infected by practice and facts are shaped by values. Concept structures our experience and reflects our interests, attitudes and needs. The distinctive role for philosophy is to investigate the criteria of classification and principles of interpretation we use in our multifarious interactions with the world. Specific issues come up for individual sciences, which will be the philosophy of that science, but there are also common issues for all sciences and non-scientific activities, reflection on which issues is the specific task of philosophy.


The framework idea in Lewis is that of the system of categories by which we mediate reality to ourselves: 'The problem of metaphysics is the problem of the categories' and 'experience doesn't categorize itself' and 'the categories are ways of dealing with what is given to the mind.' Such a framework can change across societies and historical periods: 'our categories are almost as much a social product as is language, and in something like the same sense.' Lewis, however, didn't specifically thioamides the question that there could be alterative sets of such categories, but he did acknowledge the possibility.