Mind and the World Order

Lewis (1929), Mind and the World Order, is now seen as one of the most important 20th century works in epistemology.【{劉易斯文選}李園山編，北京：社會科學文獻出版社，2007。此書選譯第1-3章和第8章】

這本書 Deming 在 Out of the Crisis 有四處提到它：兩次指定參考第6-9章；另外兩處直接引文，意思類似下文：

An operational account of concepts mainly eliminates the ineffable: "If your hours are felt as twice as long as mine, your pounds twice as heavy, that makes no difference, which can be tested, in our assignment of physical properties to things." Hence a concept is but a relational pattern. But it does not follow that one ought to discard the world as it is experienced:

"In one sense, that of connotation, a concept strictly comprises nothing but an abstract configuration of relations. In another sense, its denotation or empirical application, this meaning is vested in a process which characteristically begins with something given and ends with something done in the operation which translates a presented datum into an instrument of prediction and control."

Clarence Irving Lewis