For Lewis, this sort of empiricism is not worthy of the name. After all, the experiential element does not seem to show up at all in this kind of formal analysis. Lewis claims instead that a proper empiricism must treat sentences of the form “This looks red.” as special, indubitable statements. We might err when classifying things as being red, but we cannot err when it comes to recognizing things as looking red. This is “the given” in experience, the phenomenal states we find ourselves in when making experiences. Without such an indubitable element, Lewis fears that our epistemology would necessarily collapse into a coherence theory of truth (Lewis 1952).  Goodman, on the other hand, is ready to bite that bullet when throwing away the indubitable given. Lewis, the major advocate of pragmatism, comments on this move by Goodman that his “proposal is, I fear, a little more pragmatic than I dare to be” (Lewis 1952, 118).