The history of qualia and C.I. Lewis’ role in it
British Journal for the History of Philosophy August 4, 2023 J. Browning
The strict concept of qualia—focused solely on sensory states and credited to C.I. Lewis in current histories—actually originates with Johannes Müller in the mid-nineteenth century and was developed by structuralist psychologists who denied qualitative experience any causal role. Lewis himself rejected this strict notion, endorsing instead a pragmatic conception derived from William James in which evaluative states like painfulness play an essential, causal role in an organism's life. The paper argues that Lewis positioned himself against the strict conception, finding it phenomenologically false and philosophically misguided.