The Analytic Pragmatist Conception of the A Priori: C. I. Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars

It is a familiar story that Kant\u27s defense of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. 1 One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant\u27s outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the American philosophers C. I. Lewis (1883\u271964) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912\u2789), most notably in Lewis\u27s 1929 classic, Mind and the World Order , followed by Sellars\u27s critical reworking of Lewis\u27s outlook in \u27Is There a Synthetic A Priori?\u27 ( 1953 ), and other mid-century articles. Both Lewis and Sellars defended central aspects of Kant\u27s analysis of our a priori knowledge of mind-independent physical objects and necessary causal connections. But both also radically transformed Kant\u27s view by defending the idea that there are alternative a priori conceptual frameworks that are subject to an ongoing process of reassessment and replacement on overall pragmatic and explanatory grounds. Furthermore, while Sellars\u27s answer to his question, \u27Is There a Synthetic A Priori?\u27 thus represented a partial endorsement of Lewis\u27s pragmatic relativization of the a priori, I argue that Sellars\u27s account of meaning diverged from Lewis in ways that constituted a signifi cant improvement upon the previous \u27analytic\u27 defenses of the a priori, not only in Lewis but also in general. This arguably has implications for wider disputes concerning the nature and possibility of a priori knowledge in non-formal domains