Abstract

This examination of C. I. Lewis’s theory of meaning and theory of value argues that while Lewis’s own statement of the connection between them is inadequate, a way can be shown which allows for a connection between the two. The amount of space devoted to this endeavor is even briefer than the length of the book indicates, for the last nineteen pages consist of an appendix on Quine’s theory of meaning, and there are numbered but blank pages between chapters. The remaining pages are devoted to lengthy expositions of Lewis’s key concepts, interspersed with discussions of the issues and problems involved. Washington neither shows that Lewis’s connection between meaning and value is inadequate nor establishes an adequate connection of his own. This shortcoming, however, is secondary to a much more fundamental problem with the book: his understanding of Lewis’s key concepts. For example, Washington holds that terminating judgments are those made in ordinary discourse in which knowledge is partial because always contingent upon further corroboration. That this is not a philosophical slip of the tongue is evinced in his numerous examples, all expressed in the objective language of nonterminating judgments, such as the following: "If I send Sue a bouquet of roses she will marry me." When he examines nonterminating judgments, he contrasts them with empirical propositions and describes them as tantamount to the type of assertions made by scientists and historians—claims about events not directly associated with one’s immediate experience or one’s way of acting, morally or otherwise.