## 1. Biographical Sketch



John Dewey lead an active and multifarious life. He is the subject of
numerous biographies and an enormous literature interpreting and
evaluating his extraordinary body of work: forty books and
approximately seven hundred articles in over one hundred and forty
journals.



Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859 to Archibald
Dewey, a merchant, and Lucina Rich Dewey. Dewey was the third of four
sons; the first, Dewey's namesake, died in infancy. He grew up
in Burlington, was raised in the Congregationalist Church, and
attended public schools. After studying Latin and Greek in high
school, Dewey entered the University of Vermont at fifteen and
graduated in 1879 at nineteen. After college, Dewey taught high school
for two years in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Subsequent time spent in
Vermont studying philosophy with former professor H.A.P. Torrey, along
with the encouragement of the editor of the *Journal of Speculative
Philosophy*, W.T. Harris, helped Dewey decide to attend graduate
school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1882. There, his
study included logic with Charles S. Peirce (which Dewey found too
"mathematical", and did not pursue), the history of
philosophy (especially with George Sylvester Morris, and physiological
and experimental psychology with Granville Stanley Hall (who trained
with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and William James at
 Harvard).[1]



Though many years later Dewey attributed important credit to
Peirce's pragmatism for his mature views, during graduate
school, Peirce had no sizable impact. Dewey's main graduate
school influences--Neo-Hegelian idealism, Darwinian biology, and
Wundtian experimental psychology--created a tension, which he
sought to resolve. Was the world fundamentally biological, functional,
and material or was it, rather, inherently creative and spiritual? In
no small part, Dewey's career was launched by his attempt to
mediate and harmonize these views. While they shared the idea of
"organism", Dewey also saw in both --- and
rejected--any aspects deemed overly abstract, atomizing, or
reductionistic. His earliest attempts to create a "new
psychology" (aimed at merging experimental psychology with
idealism) sought a method by which experience could be understood as
integrated and whole. As a result, Dewey's early approach was a
modified, English absolute idealism. Two years after matriculating,
Dewey completed graduate school in 1884 with a dissertation
criticizing Kant from an Idealist position ("The Psychology of
Kant"); it remains lost.



While scholars still debate the degree to which Dewey's mature
philosophy retained early Hegelian influences, it is clear that the
*personal* influence on Dewey was profound. New England's
religious culture, Dewey recalled, imparted an "isolation of
self from the world, of soul from body, [and] of nature from
God", and he reacted with "an inward laceration" and
"a painful oppression". His study (with George Sylvester
Morris) of British Idealist T.H. Green and G.W.F. Hegel afforded Dewey
personal and intellectual healing: 



> 
> 
> Hegel's synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the
> divine and the human, was, however, no mere intellectual formula; it
> operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel's treatment
> of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same
> dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special
> attraction for me. (*FAE*, LW5: 153) 
> 
> 
> 



Philosophically, Dewey's early encounters with Hegelianism
informed his career-long quest to integrate, as dynamic wholes, the
various dimensions of experience (practical, imaginative, bodily,
psychical) that philosophy and psychology had defined as discrete.



Dewey's family and reputation as a philosopher and psychologist
grew while at various universities, including the University of
Michigan (1886-88, 1889-1894) and the University of
Minnesota (1888-89). At Michigan, Dewey developed long-term
professional relationships with James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert
Mead. In 1886, Dewey married Harriet Alice Chipman; they had six
children and adopted one. Two of the boys died tragically young (two
and eight). Chipman had a significant influence on Dewey's
advocacy for women and his shift away from religious orthodoxy. During
this period, Dewey wrote articles critical of British idealists from a
Hegelian perspective; he read and taught James' *Principles
of Psychology* (1890), and called his own view "experimental
idealism" (1894a, *The Study of Ethics*, EW4: 264).



In 1894, at Tuft's urging, President William Rainey Harper
offered Dewey the position of head of the Philosophy Department at the
University of Chicago, which at that time included both Psychology and
Pedagogy. Attracted by the prospect of putting these disciplines into
active collaboration, Dewey accepted the offer, and began to build the
department by hiring G.H. Mead from Michigan and J.R. Angell, a former
student at Michigan (who also studied with James at Harvard). Dubbed,
by James, the "Chicago School" Dewey along with Tufts,
Angell, Mead and several others develop "psychological
functionalism". He also published the seminal "Reflex Arc
Concept in Psychology" (1896, EW5; hereafter *RAC*), and
broke from transcendental idealism and from his church.



At Chicago, Dewey founded The Laboratory School, which provided a site
to test his psychological and educational theories. Dewey's wife
Alice was the school's principal from 1896-1904. Dewey
became active in Chicago's social and political causes,
including Jane Addams' Hull House, and Addams became a close
personal friend of the Dewey's. Dewey and his daughter and
biographer Jane Dewey credited Addams with helping him develop his
views on democracy, education, and philosophy; nevertheless, the
significance of Dewey's intellectual debt to Addams is still
being uncovered ("Biography of John Dewey", Dewey 1939a;
see also Seigfried 1999, Fischer 2013).



In 1904, conflicts related to the Laboratory School lead Dewey to
resign his Chicago positions and move to the philosophy department at
Columbia University in New York City; there, he also established an
affiliation with Columbia's Teacher's College. Among
Dewey's important influences at Columbia were F.J.E. Woodbridge,
Wendell T. Bush, W.P. Montague, Charles A. Beard (political theory)
and Franz Boas (anthropology). Dewey remained at Columbia until
retirement 1930, going on to produce eleven more books.



In addition to a raft of important academic publications, Dewey wrote
for many non-academic audiences, notably via the *New
Republic*; he was active in leading, supporting, or founding a
number of important organizations including the American Civil
Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors,
the American Philosophical Association, the American Psychological
Association, and the New School for Social Research. Dewey was spoke
out in support of both progressive politics and social change during
the first part of the twentieth century. His renown as a philosopher
and educator lead to numerous invitations; he inaugurated the Paul
Carus Lectures (revised and published as *Experience and
Nature*, 1925), gave the 1928 Gifford Lectures (revised and
published as *The Quest for Certainty*, 1929), and gave the
1933-34 Terry Lectures at Yale (published as *A Common
Faith*, 1934a). He traveled for two years in Japan and China, and
also made notable trips to Turkey, Mexico, the Soviet Union, and South
Africa.



In 1946, almost two decades after Alice Chipman Dewey died (1927),
Dewey married Roberta Lowitz Grant. John Dewey died of pneumonia in
his home in New York City on June 1, 1952.



### Short Chronology of the Life and Work of John Dewey



Source: *H&A* 1998, xiv


* 1859 Oct. 20. Born in
Burlington, Vermont
* 1879 Receives A.B. from
the University of Vermont
* 1879-81 Teaches
at high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania
* 1881-82 Teaches
at Lake View Seminary, Charlotte, Vermont
* 1882-84 Attends
graduate school at Johns Hopkins University
* 1884 Receives Ph.D.
from Johns Hopkins University
* 1884 Instructor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
* 1886 Married to Alice
Chipman
* 1888-89 Professor
of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota
* 1889 Chair of
Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
* 1894 Professor and
Chair of Department of Philosophy (including psychology and pedagogy)
at the University of Chicago
* 1897 Elected to Board
of Trustees, Hull-House Association
* 1899 *The School and
Society*
* 1889-1900
President of the American Psychological Association; *Studies in
Logical Theory*
* 1904 Professor of
Philosophy at Columbia University
* 1905-06 President
of the American Philosophical Society
* 1908
*Ethics*
* 1910 *How We
Think*
* 1916 *The Influence
of Darwin on Philosophy, Democracy and Education, Essays in
Experimental Logic*
* 1919 Lectures in
Japan
* 1919-21 Lectures
in China
* 1920 *Reconstruction
in Philosophy*
* 1922 *Human Nature
and Conduct*
* 1924 Visits schools in
Turkey
* 1925 *Experience and
Nature*
* 1926 Visits schools in
Mexico
* 1927 *The Public and
its Problems*
* 1927 Death of Alice
Chipman Dewey
* 1928 Visits schools in
Soviet Russia
* 1929 *The Quest for
Certainty*
* 1930 *Individualism,
Old and New*
* 1930 Retires from
position at Columbia University, appointed Professor
Emeritus
* 1932
*Ethics*
* 1934 *A Common
Faith, Art as Experience*
* 1935 *Liberalism and
Social Action*
* 1937 Chair of the
Trotsky Commission, Mexico City
* 1938 *Logic: The
Theory of Inquiry, Experience and Education*
* 1939 *Freedom and
Culture, Theory of Valuation*
* 1946 Married to Roberta
(Lowitz) Grant; *Knowing and the Known*
* 1952 June 1. Dies in
New York City



## 2. Psychology



Dewey's involvement with psychology began early, with the hope
that this emerging discipline would provide answers to
philosophy's deepest questions. His early approach was akin to
Hegelian Idealism, though, markedly, it did not incorporate
Hegel's dialectical logic but instead sought to incorporate new
methods in psychology (Alexander forthcoming). He wished to overcome
longstanding divisions (between subject and object, matter and spirit,
etc.) and show how human experiences --physical, psychical,
practical, and imaginative --were all integrated in one, dynamic
person (*FAE*, LW5: 153). Dewey had large ambitions for
psychology as *the* new science of self-consciousness, calling
it the "completed method of philosophy" ("Psychology
as Philosophic Method", EW1: 157). Although nominally a
textbook, *Psychology* (1887 EW2) was an introduction to
psychology's study of the self as ultimate reality.



Soon, Dewey began developing his own psychological theories; extant
accounts of behavior, he argued, were flawed because they were
premised upon outdated and false philosophical assumptions. (He
eventually judged that larger questions about the meaning of human
existence reached deep into cultural practices and exceeded the
resources of psychology; such questions required philosophical
investigations of experience in the fields of art, politics, ethics,
and religion, etc.) Dewey's psychological work reconstructed the
components of human conduct (instincts, perceptions, habits, acts,
emotions, and conscious thought) and these proved integral to later,
mature statements about experience. They also informed his lifelong
contention that mind, contrary to long tradition, is *not*
fundamentally subjective and isolated, but social and interactive,
made through natural and cultural environments.


### 2.1 Associationism, Introspectionism, and Physiological Psychology



Dewey entered the field of psychology while it was dominated by
introspectionism (arising from associationism, a.k.a.,
"mentalism") and the newer physiological psychology
(imported from Germany). Earlier British empiricists, such as John
Locke and David Hume, accounted for intelligent behavior with (1)
internally inspected ("introspected") entities, including
perceptual experiences (e.g., "impressions"), and (2)
thoughts or ideas (e.g., "images"). These accrue toward
intelligence by way of an elaborate process of associative learning.
Discovery-by-introspection was indispensable for many empiricists, and
for many physiological and experimental psychologists (e.g., Wundt) as
well.



Dewey was deeply influenced by his graduate school study of
physiological psychology with G. Stanley Hall; classes included
theoretical, physiological, and experimental psychology; he conducted
laboratory experiments on attention. Unlike introspectionism,
Hall's methods incorporated strict experimental controls, and
this biology-based approach promised Dewey an organic and holistic
model of experience capable of overcoming the subjectivist dualisms
plaguing the older, associationist
 models.[2]
 However, Dewey still found physiological psychology retaining an
atomized and mechanistic view of experience based on "sense
data". From his Hegelian perspective, this psychology could
never account for the wider world of lived meanings, the
socio-cultural environment. In other words, "organism"
entailed "environment", and "environment"
entailed "culture". A rigorously empirical psychology
could not merely study "the" mind, but had to forge
connections with other
 sciences.[3]


### 2.2 The "Reflex Arc" and Dewey's Reconstruction of Psychology



Thus, Dewey sought an account of psychological experience mindful both
of experimental limits *and* culture's pervasive
influences. William James's tour de force, *The Principles of
Psychology* (1890), modeled how he might explain the conscious and
intelligent self without appeals to a transcendental Absolute. As
Dewey recalled, *Principles'* emphatically biological
conception of mind gave his thinking "a new direction and
quality" and "worked its way more and more into all my
ideas and acted as a ferment to transform old beliefs"
(*FAE*, LW5: 157). Rather than measuring psychic phenomena
against preexisting abstractions, James showed how one might employ a
"radical empiricism" that starts from the phases and
elements of actual, lived experience. The goal would be to understand
experience's functional origins from a perspective that was,
typically, coherent and whole.



One expression of Dewey's early psychology (and Jamesean turn)
was his seminal critique of the reflex arc concept (1896), written at
Chicago. The "reflex arc" model of behavior was an
increasingly influential way to explain human behavior empirically and
experimentally using stimulus-response (cause-effect) pairings; it
sought to displace other, less observable and testable approaches that
relied upon "psychic entities" or "mental
substance". In the reflex arc model, a passive organism
encounters an external stimulus causing a sensory and motor response;
for example, a child sees a candle (stimulus), grasps it (response),
burns her hand (stimulus), and pulls her hand back (response). This,
it argued, makes explicit *the* event's basic stimuli and
responses, replete with connections satisfactorily describable in
mechanistic and physiological terms--and all without recourse to
mysterious and unobservable entities.



Dewey criticized the reflex arc framework on several grounds. First,
events (sensory stimulus, central response, and act) are artificially
separated for the purpose of analysis. "The reflex arc",
Dewey wrote, "is not a comprehensive, or organic unity, but a
patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied
processes" (*RAC*, EW5: 97). Second, the model falsifies
the nature of genuine interaction; organisms do not *passively*
receive stimuli and then *actively* respond; rather, organisms
*continuously interact* with environments in cumulative and
modifying ways. The child who encounters a candle is *already*
actively exploring, anticipating a room, for example; noticing the
flame modifies already *ongoing* actions. "The real
beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a
sensation of light" (*RAC*, EW5: 97). Third, and
relatedly, the model is too rigid in designating certain events as
*the* stimulus or *the* response--in a word, it
"reifies" them. Because events studied are enmeshed in a
wider, ongoing activity matrix, other designations (of
"cause" or "event") could be plausible,
contingent on the aims of some *other* experimental inquiry.
Effectively, Dewey pointed out how the reflex arc model, intending to
shed metaphysical assumptions, had inadvertently imported new and
different ones. We are seeking to discover, Dewey wrote, "what
stimulus or sensation, what movement and response *mean*"
and we are finding that "they mean distinctions of flexible
*function* only, not of fixed *existence*"
(*RAC*, EW5: 102; emphasis mine). This suggestion is pragmatic;
it says, rather than seeking an *underlying* reality
(*pure* stimulus, *pure* response), look to meanings. In
doing so, it is evident that terms such as stimulus, response,
sensation, and movement "mean distinctions of flexible function
only, not of fixed existence" (*RAC*, EW5: 102). The
meaning of terms is grasped by recognizing their functions as acts in
a wider, dynamic context which includes aims and
 interests.[4]




Dewey's critique and reconstruction of the reflex arc presaged
other important developments in his pragmatism. His argument that
psychology needed to pay greater attention to context and function was
applied, in time, to all the sciences, as well as to logic and
mathematics. The methodological lesson was, in effect, a warning not
to mistake eventual outcomes of analysis for existents already
 there.[5]
 Theoretical distinctions which are meaningful in specific situations
depend upon a wider context that is both retrospective and
prospective.



While there is not space to present Dewey's extensive
reconstruction of the phenomena psychology considered permanent parts
of human beings, a cursory review can show his philosophical method at
work. Let us consider instincts/impulses, perceptions, sensations,
habits, emotions, sentiency, consciousness, and mind.


### 2.3 Instincts/Impulses



Attempts to explain complex, developed behavior by reference to
preexisting impulses and instincts had already been attacked by James
(e.g., in "Habit", James 1890: chapter 4) and Dewey
continued the assault. Such explanations fail to consider
instinct's plastic and pliable character. Across a variety of
individuals, instincts considered simple or basic are anything
but--they blossom into many different habits and
 customs.[6]
 They also fail to see that instincts are not pushing an essentially
passive creature, but are actively taken up in diverse circumstances,
for diverse purposes. As with "stimulus", the meaning of
any "instinct" depends on contextual factors, which can
include both biological and socio-linguistic responses. But, in a
phrase, there is no psychology without social psychology, no possible
inquiry into pure, biological instincts (or any other
"natural" powers) which does not also consider both the
social and environmental context of the phenomena studied *and*
the inquiry's own context. Instincts/impulses are interactive
phenomena-in-environment, and must be appreciated as transactions
(*HNC*, MW14: 66).


### 2.4 Perception/Sensation



Dewey's methodological lesson regarding instincts was twofold;
first, one cannot premise an empirical science on unquestioned,
metaphysical posits; even basic terms must be open to revision or
deletion; second, strictly analytical methods using simple elements to
build up complex behavior are often inadequate to explain the meaning
of psychological phenomena. This lesson also applies to perception and
sensation. Dewey attacked the view, common in his day, that a
perception (1) was simply and externally caused, (2) completely
occupied a mental state, and (3) was passively received into an empty
mental space.



All three elements, he argued, grow out of "psychophysical
dualism", the erroneous and radical separation of perceiver and
world. Consider (1), external causation. Perception as simply and
externally caused is contravened by the Darwinian, ecological model
where ongoing interactions between organism and environment include,
but are not ontologically reducible to, "minds",
"bodies", and their impingements--the so-called
"impressions" and "ideas" of modern
philosophy. While there *are* events which are unbidden,
surprising, or not under our control, this does not justify the
metaphysical conclusion of a world "out there" and a mind
"in here". While experience is profoundly qualitative,
qualities are never merely received (like packages in the mail) nor
are they simple or context-free. This is, in effect, a new view of
qualities that also rejects a longstanding dualism between
"objective" and "subjective". A lemon's
"yellowness" or "tartness" are neither
*in* a perceiver nor *in* a lemon; either quality
emerges from complex interactions and later become characterized
(*as* "tartness") for reasons germane to the
inquiry making that designation. Dewey wrote, 



> 
> 
> The qualities never were 'in' the organism; they always
> were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and
> organisms partake. (*EN*, LW1: 198-199) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, perceptions and qualities are discriminations made in inquiry
and language; they are not reports of ontological entities which are
simple, ultimate, or discrete. Always, pragmatic factors are decisive.
(Dewey makes the same point about nouns and concepts; cf. W.V.O.
Quine's example of "gavagai".)
"Perception", then, is shorthand for the more complicated
processes of interacting events. "Red" is an abstraction
from more complex experiences (such as red-car-merging-into-my-lane),
and the pragmatic question becomes, What is the function of this
abstraction? How does it mediate thought or action for future
experiences? ("A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception",
LW2: 51; *EN*, LW1: 198-199)



Regarding (2), perceptions pervading mental states, Dewey echoes an
important point made by James in "The Stream of Thought"
(James 1890: chapter 9). Namely, while a perception may occupy the
focus of awareness, each has an attendant "fringe" which
contributes a contrast and, to the wider situation, an
"underlying qualitative character" ("Qualitative
Thought", LW5: 238 fn. 1). In the lemon case, above, the
"tartness" has its character amidst a slew of
"fringe" conditions such as immediate past flavors,
anticipations, etc.



Finally, regarding (3), as mentioned, perception is an activity of
"taking up" by organisms *already* functioning in
situations, not an instant, passive apprehension of stimulus. As such,
there are always selective adjustments; quick or slow, they always
take *some* time. Perception is never naive, never a
confrontation with some "given" content already imbued
with inherent meaning. Long before Wilfred Sellars (see
 entry on Sellars)
 dismissed the passive-perception-encounter as modern
empiricism's "Myth of the Given", Dewey rebuked such
claims. All seeing is seeing *as*--adjustments within
larger acts. Over time, these habits of adjustment change and, as a
result, what is perceived can also shift; subsequent selections and
interpretations are modified (*DE*, MW9: 346).


### 2.5 Acts and Habits



Later writings develop the argument of "Reflex Arc",
namely that complex behavior cannot be explained by building up
simpler constituents. "Acts" provide a better starting
point, of organisms in environments (*HNC*, MW14: 105). Acts
are transactional: we act *with* and *on* things, in
contexts, amidst conditions. Acts are fundamental to understanding
behavior because they are *selective*. By directing movement
and organizing situations, they manifest *interest.* This
combination--of selectivity and interest--make activities
meaningful. For example, our ancestors acted selectively regarding how
to satisfy instinctive hunger; such selectivity created the conditions
for a more elaborate *interest* in the taste of food, and, much
later, in dining customs and cuisine.



Drawing upon James' and Peirce's uses of
"habit", Dewey integrates habit deeply into his
philosophy. Habit helps explain various dimensions of human experience
(biological, ethical, political, and aesthetic) as manifested in
complex and social behaviors--walking, talking, cooking,
 conversing.[7]
 Habits are not simple; they are composed of acts. Acts unfold in
time, beginning with instinct borne of need and muddling toward
reintegration and satisfaction. To become a habit, an act-series must
possess gradual and cumulative change; such change concresces as one
act leads to the next. When there is a cumulative linking of acts
which structure experience, there is "habit". Habit, Dewey
wrote, "is an acquired predisposition to *ways* or modes
of response, not to particular acts" (*HNC*, MW14: 32).
These ways are typically shaped by both past experience as an
individual and especially through social and linguistic interactions;
we call habits shared by groups "customs".



While habits may become routines, Dewey argued against the assumption
that they were therefore automatic or insulated from conscious
intervention. They cannot be automatic, because new situations vary,
and the same exact acts never repeat. Thus, unlike machine routines,
organic habits remain plastic, changeable. My habitual eating of
sweets is subject to contingency (a sharp toothache) and modification
(restraint, substitution); frequently, conscious reflection on an
existing habit is the first stage of habit revision.



Habits were also envisioned as dormant powers, waiting to be invoked.
Dewey argued that habits are, instead, "energetic and dominating
ways of acting" determining what we do and are: "All
habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute
the self" (*HNC*, MW14: 22, 21). Dewey inveighed against
the notion that habits are like individual possessions. Rather, habits
exist as transactions between organisms and environments; they are not
"inner forces" but functions which make adaptation or
reconstruction possible. 



> 
> 
> Habits enter into the *constitution* of the situation; they are
> in and of it, not, so far as it is concerned, something outside of it.
> ("Brief Studies in Realism", MW6: 120) 
> 
> 
> 



Because the situation is cultural as well as bio-physical, habits are
ineliminably social. So-called "individual" habits emerge
within the social world of friends, family, home, work, media, etc.
This means that effecting a change of habits does not require a
magical act of sheer willpower, but rather intelligent inquiry into
relevant conditions (psychological, sociological, economic, etc.).


### 2.6 Emotion



Like "habit", Dewey redescribed "emotion" as a
basic form of involvement present in "coordinated
circuits" of activity. Where habits are controlled responses to
problematic situations, emotion, by contrast, is not predominantly
controlled or organized; rather, it is an organism's resonance
with a situation, a "perturbation from clash or failure of
habit" (*HNC*, MW14: 54). As with the other aspects of
psychological life, Dewey's account reconstructed emotion as
fundamentally transactional with other experiences typically analyzed
as discrete (the "rational" or "physical"
dimensions, e.g.).



Dewey's account connected those of Charles Darwin and William
James. Darwin argued that internal emotional states cause organic
expressions which, depending on their survival value, may be subject
to natural selection; for example, my feeling and expression of
emotion may earn sympathy that aids survival of like-feeling
offspring. James, in contrast, sought to decrease the distance between
emotion and accompanying bodily expression. In actual cases of
emotion, a perception excites a pre-organized physiological mechanism;
our recognition of such changes just *is* the emotional
experience: "we feel sorry *because* we cry, angry
*because* we strike" (James 1890 [1981: 450]).
Dewey's "The Theory of Emotion" (1894b & 1895,
EW4) pressed James further, toward the integrated whole of
feeling-and-expression. *Being sad* is not merely *feeling
sad* or *acting sad* but is the purposive organism's
overall experience. This is Dewey's attempt to gently correct
James' unfortunate reiteration of mind-body dualism. To
understand emotion, Dewey argued, we must see that "the mode of
behavior is the primary thing" ("The Theory of
Emotion", EW4: 174). As with habit, emotion is not the private
possession of the subject, but rather emerges from the fluid boundary
connecting event and organism; emotion is "called out by
objects, physical and personal", an intentional "response
to an objective situation" (*EN*, LW1: 292). If I
encounter a strange dog and I am perplexed as to how to react, there
is an inhibition of habit, and this excites emotion. As I entertain a
range of incompatible responses (Run? Call out? Slink away?), a
tension is created which further interrupts and inhibits habits, and
is experienced as emotion ("The Theory of Emotion", EW4:
182) Thus, emotions are intentional insofar as they are
"*to* or *from* or *about* something
objective, whether in fact or in idea" and not merely reactions
"in the head" (*AE*, LW10: 72).



Philosophically, emotion is a central feature of Dewey's
critique of traditional epistemology and metaphysics. He decried
traditional systems which, in their pursuit of rational access to
truth and reality, create an invidious distinction by casting emotion
as confused thought, distraction, or bodily interference which needs
to be suppressed, controlled, or bracketed. Emotion is intertwined,
psychologically, both in the individual (in reasoning and acting), and
in the wider culture (with social forms of meaning creation). Attempts
to balkanize emotion are motivated in part, he argued, by the desire
to segregate leisure from labor, men from women; on this reading, the
traditional rationalistic bent is, in effect, a power-play that
deserves intellectual and moral critique.


### 2.7 Sentiency, Mind, and Consciousness



Dewey's accounts of sentiency, mind, and consciousness build
upon those of impulse, perception, act, habit, and emotion. These are
complex topics, but a cursory view can complete this sketch of
Dewey's psychology.


#### Sentiency



As with other psychic phenomena, sentience emerges through the
transactions of organisms in natural environments. In general,
creatures seek to satisfy needs and escape peril; when stability
yields to precariousness, a struggle to reestablish balance begins;
there is adjustment to self, to one's environment, or both.
Methods successful in the past, pre-organized responses, sometimes
fail. In such cases, we become ambivalent--divided against
ourselves about what to do next. It proves advantageous to
*inhibit* practiced responses (to look before leaping); this
pause or inhibition of the action flow creates a space which, Dewey
wrote, "introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for
redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection,
anticipation" (*EN*, LW1: 237). In other words,
inhibition creates ambivalence, and ambivalence makes possible new
ways of considering alternatives; crude, physical situations take on
qualitatively new complexities of meaning. Thus, Dewey wrote,
sentiency or feeling 



> 
> 
> is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by
> events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events
> come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction.
> (*EN*, LW1: 204) 
> 
> 
> 



At this stage, the new relationships are not yet *known*; they
do, however, provide the conditions for knowing. Symbolization,
language, is the next step in liberating these noticed relationships
using intellectual tools including abstraction, memory, and
imagination (*EN*, LW1: 199).


#### Mind



Dewey rejected both traditional accounts of mind-as-substance (or
container) and more contemporary schemes reducing mind to brain states
(*EN*, LW1: 224-225). Rather, mind is activity, a range
of dynamic processes of interaction between organism and world.
Consider the range connoted by mind: as *memory* (I am
re*mind*ed of X); *attention* (I keep her in
*mind*, I *mind* my manners); *purpose* (I have
an aim in *mind*); *care* or *solicitude* (I
*mind* the child); paying *heed* (I *mind* the
traffic stop). "Mind", then, ranges over many activities:
intellectual, affectional, volitional, or purposeful. It is 



> 
> 
> primarily a verb...[that] denotes every mode and variety of
> interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and
> emotional. It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the
> world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to
> situations, events, objects, persons and groups. (*AE*, LW10:
> 267-68) 
> 
> 
> 



As Wittgenstein
 (entry on Wittgenstein, section on rule-following and private language)
 pointed out 30 years later, no private language (see
 entry on private language)
 is possible given this account of meaning. While meanings might be
privately entertained, they are not privately invented; meanings are
social and emerge from symbol systems arising through collective
communication and action (*EN*, LW1: 147).



Active, complex animals are sentient due to the variety of distinctive
connections they have with their environment. But
"mentality" (mindfulness) arises due to the eventual
ability to recognize and use meaningful signs. With language,
creatures can identify and differentiate feelings *as*
feelings, objects *as* objects, etc. 



> 
> 
> Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings
> are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially
> and proleptically. With language they are discriminated and
> identified. They are then "objectified"; they are
> immediate traits of things. (*EN*, LW1: 198) 
> 
> 
> 



The bull's charge is stimulated by the red flag, but unlike the
driver ignoring a broken red stoplight, the bull cannot detach
"red" as a sign; it remains a crude stimulus.



Dewey thus demoted and promoted the mind's significance. No
longer our spark of divinity, as some ancients held, it is also
rescued from merely being a ghost in a machine. Mind becomes
*vital*, investigating and addressing problems, and inventing
new tools, aims, and ideals. Mind bridges past and future, an
"agency of novel reconstruction of a pre-existing order"
(*EN*, LW1: 168).


#### Consciousness



Like mind, consciousness is also a verb--the brisk transitioning
of felt, qualitative events. Dewey was profoundly influenced by
James's metaphor of consciousness as a constantly moving
"stream of thought" (*FAE*, LW5: 157). In the end,
however, Dewey did not believe a fully adequate account of
consciousness could be captured in words. Talk about consciousness is
elliptical--it is "vivid" or
"conspicuous" or "dull"--and such
characterizations are never quite adequate. Because the experience of
consciousness is ever-evanescent, we cannot fix it as we do for the
objects of our attention--as, for example, "powers",
"things", or "causes". Dewey, then, did not
define consciousness, but evoked it using contrasts and instances.
Consider these contrasts in *Experience and Nature*,
(*EN*, LW1: 230)




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Mind is** | **Consciousness is** |
| A whole system of meanings as embodied in organic life | Awareness or perception of meanings (of actual events
*in* their meaning)  |
| Contextual and persistent: a constant background  | Focal and transitive  |
| Structural and substantial: a constant foreground  | A punctuated series of heres and nows  |
| Enduring luminosity  | Intermittent flashes of varying intensities  |
| A continuous transmission of messages  | The occasional interception and singling out of a message that
makes it audible  |



Given the processual, active nature of our psychology, Dewey was
forced to depict consciousness with a dynamic, organismic vocabulary.
Consciousness is thinking-in-motion, an ever-reconfiguring event
series that is qualitatively felt as experience transforms. Whereas
mind is a "stock" of meanings, consciousness is
realization-and-reconstruction of meanings, enabling activities to be
reorganized and redirected (*EN*, LW1: 233).
*Consciousness* is drama; *mind* is the indispensable
back story. This back story is not radically subjective; it is social,
constituted by communities past and present.



Dewey also tried to get at consciousness performatively, so to speak;
he provoked the reader to consider the nature of consciousness while
reading. Here, again, he utilized notions of "focus" and
"fringe", emphasizing how the latter is indispensable for
mental orientation (*EN*, LW1: 231). As physical balance
controls walking, mind's meanings constantly adjust and direct
present, focal interpretation. The progressive advance of vivid
consciousness is enabled by mind's pervasive and persistent
system of meanings.



Having concluded this review of Dewey's psychology, we turn now
to his account of experience.


## 3. Experience and Metaphysics


### 3.1 The Development of "Experience"



Dewey's notion of "experience" evolved over the
course of his career. Initially, it contributed to his idealism and
psychology. After he developed instrumentalism in Chicago during the
1890's, Dewey moved to Columbia, revising and expanding the
concept in 1905 with a historically significant essay, "The
Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (*PIE*, MW3). Further
developments show up in "The Subject-matter of Metaphysical
Inquiry" (1915, MW8) and the "Introduction" to
*Essays in Experimental Logic* (1916, MW10) which consolidated
and advanced his view that "experience" was more than just
way to rebut subjectivism in psychology, but was also factored into
metaphysical accounts of existence and nature (Dykhuizen 1973:
175-76). Dewey
advanced this in the1923 Carus Lectures, revised and expanded in his
metaphysical magnum opus, *Experience and Nature* (1925,
revised edition, 1929; *EN*, LW1). Many other significant
elaborations on experience follow, notably in *Art as
Experience* (1934b, *AE*,
 LW10).[8]
 Because experience is pivotal across his philosophical oeuvre,
interested readers should track its functions in other sections of
this entry; here, experience is treated concisely, with a focus upon
Dewey's philosophical method and metaphysics.



To begin, why was experience such an important concept that it
penetrated Dewey's very approach to philosophy? Keep three
influences in mind. First, recall that Dewey inherited from Darwin the
idea of nature as a complex congeries of changing, transactional
processes without fixed ends; in this context, experience means the
undergoing and doing of organisms-in-environments, "a matter of
functions and habits, of active adjustments and readjustments, of
coordinations and activities, rather than of states of
consciousness" ("A Short Catechism Concerning
Truth", MW6: 5). Second, recall that Dewey took from James a
radically empirical approach to philosophy--the insistence that
perspectival experience, including that called *personal*,
*emotional*, or *temperamental*, was philosophically
relevant and worth factoring into abstract and logical theories.
Finally, recall that Dewey accepted from Hegel experience as
manifested in particular social, historical, and cultural modes. Not
only is the self constituted through experiential transactions with
the community, but this recognition vitiates the Cartesian model of
the simple, atomic self and methods based upon that presumption.
Philosophy may start where *we* start, *personally
--* with complex, symbolic, and cultural forms--and then
articulate further emergences from them.



These three major influences, plus Dewey's own discoveries,
convinced him that "experience" was the linch-pin to a
broader theory of nature and humanity's axiological place within
it. More than just another node in a system, experience also amounted
to a *metaphilosophical method*, a way of doing philosophy.
Within this *Weltanschauung*, philosophy was not a rational
bridge to transcend life, but was equipment for living. Thus,
clarifying what experience meant assumed the greatest importance,
insofar as this was vital to philosophy earning back its status as a
*wisdom* which might aid survival, growth, and flourishing.



It should be noted that "experience", both as sheer
terminology and as Dewey deployed the concept, generated much
confusion and debate. Dewey recognized this and commented about it
toward the end of his
 life.[9]
 Decades later, one of the Dewey's foremost philosophical
celebrants, Richard Rorty, lambasted Dewey for both the term and (what
Rorty perceived as) Dewey's
 intentions.[10]
 (Rorty 1977, 1995, 2006)
Nevertheless, since the term lives on, both in Dewey's work and
in everyday discourse, it deserves continued analysis.


### 3.2 Traditional Views of Experience and Dewey's Critique



Understanding Dewey's view of experience requires, first, some
notion of what he rejected. It was typical for many philosophers to
construe experience narrowly, as the private contents of
consciousness. These contents might be perceptions (sensing), or
reflections (calculating, associating, imagining) done by the
subjective mind. Some, such as Plato and Descartes, denigrated
experience as a flux which confused or diverted rational inquiry.
Others, such as Hume and Locke, thought that experience (as atomic
sensations) provided the mind at least *some* resources for
knowing, albeit with reduced ambitions. Both general philosophical
approaches agreed that *percepts* and *concepts* were
different and in tension; they agreed that sensation was perspectival
and context-relative; they also agreed that this relativity
problematized the assumed mission of philosophy--to *know*
with certainty--and differed only about the degree of the
problem.



Dewey disputed the shared empiricist conviction that sensations are
categorically separable contents of consciousness. This belief, he
argued, produced a "whole epistemological industry"
devoted to solving the general problem of "correspondence"
and a host of specific puzzles (about the existence of an external
world, other minds, free will, etc.) ("Propositions, Warranted
Assertibility, and Truth", LW14: 179). This
"industry" isolates philosophy from empirically informed
accounts of experience and from pressing, practical problems.
Regarding the phenomenon of mental privacy, Dewey argued that while we
have episodes of what might be called mental interiority, it is a later
human development. "Personality, selfhood, subjectivity, are
eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions,
organic and social" (*EN*, LW1: 162; see also
178-79). Regarding sensorial atomicity, discussed previously in
the section on psychology, Dewey explained sensation as embedded in a
larger sensori-motor circuit, a transaction which should not be
quarantined to any single phase--nor to consciousness. Sensation
emerges dynamically from the engagements of minds, bodies, and their
environments, where "environments" includes human language
and culture. (Consider, as evidence of how blurry the boundaries
between "sensation" and "culture" can be, how
differently food tastes in varying circumstances and cultures.)



Dewey levied similar criticisms against traditional accounts of
reflective thought. Mind is neither static nor a substance which
stands, somehow, apart from the body--or from history, from
culture. Reasoning is one function of mind, not the product of a
separate "faculty", and not "purified" of
feeling. Rather, reasoning is always permeated with both feelings and
practical exigencies. While it can help to "bracket out" a
feeling or exigency scrambling a present calculation, it is
nevertheless true that reasoning subsists in a wider
"qualitative world", one that "forms the field of
characteristic modes of thinking, characteristic in that thought is
definitely regulated by qualitative considerations"
("Psychology and Work", LW5: 243).


### 3.3 Dewey's Positive Account of Experience



So far, these details, and the section on psychology, limn an outline
of Dewey's view: experience is processual, transactional,
socially mediated, and not categorically prefigured as
"rational" or "emotional". Here are three
additional, positive characterizations: first, experience as
*experimental*; second, experience as *primary*
("had") vs. *secondary* ("known"); and
third, experience as *methodological* for philosophy.



First, experience exhibits a fundamentally experimental character.
This was impressed upon Dewey in a variety of his educational roles.
Children's experiences involve alternating phases: acting and
being acted upon. Such phases become "experimental" when
agents consciously relate what is tried with what eventuates and
eventually understand which actions are significant for controlling
future events. "Learning" is the name for the outcome of
experience as
 experimental.[11]



Second, as shown, Dewey did not think experience was primarily known
or reflective; much is "felt" or "had". Dewey
calls such experience direct, primary, or had. *Had* experience
is barely regulated or reflected upon, whereas other experience is
characterized by "knowing" or mediation-by-reflection;
Dewey labels such experiences "indirect",
"secondary", or "known". *Known*
experience abstracts away from *had* (or direct) experience in
purposeful and selective ways; knowing isolates certain relations or
connections. Dewey's *The Quest for Certainty* provides a
cogent description:



> 
> 
> [E]xperienced situations come about in two ways and are of two
> distinct types. Some take place with only a minimum of regulation,
> with little foresight, preparation and intent. Others occur because,
> in part, of the prior occurrence of intelligent action. Both kinds are
> *had*; they are undergone, enjoyed or suffered. The first are
> not known; they are not understood; they are dispensations of fortune
> or providence. The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that
> present the funded outcome of operations that substitute definite
> continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the fragmentary
> quality due to isolation. (*QC*, LW4:
>  194)[12]
> 
> 
> 



Dewey's had/known distinction is a way of describing existence
without presupposing a dualism between appearance/reality. Much in
experience is unknown to us without being illusory or merely apparent;
we are not trapped in a cave full of illusions with only rational
dialectic to yank us upwards. Rather, we engage and cope with a world
which is not completely meaningful. We strive to make the world more
meaningful, but while some of the meanings devised assist in
prediction and control of circumstances, others are simply
enjoyed--but that does not make them less *real*.



Third, experience was also considered a "method". This
requires some unpacking.



Dewey's distinction between experience "had" and
"known" was more than just a phenomenological observation;
it was a metaphilosophical directive regarding how philosophy, itself,
should be done. For experience is not just "stuff"
presented to or witnessed by consciousness; rather, experience is
activity, engagement with life. Philosophy, too, is a form of
activity--which means that we need to *do* philosophy
differently; we need pay attention to where and how we start; in this
sense, experience is a
 *method*.[13]



One might sensibly ask, 



> 
> 
> If Dewey says that *experience* happens in *both*
> primary (felt, had) and secondary (reflective, known) ways, why not
> start with theory? Is that not experience, too? 
> 
> 
> 



Dewey's reply would be that while theory is one kind of
experiencing, it is not where we start; theory is an intermediate
phase of inquiry. As we live our lives, we confront problems which
invoke the need for inquiry and, often, there is a need to devise a
tool of explanation and amelioration. Theory is that tool, generated
by these encounters; it does not come first. "The vine of
pendant theory", Dewey wrote, "is attached at both ends to
the pillars of observed subject-matter" (*EN*, LW1: 11;
see also 386).



As did James and Peirce before him, Dewey challenged not only the
theories of previous philosophers, but the assumptions informing their
methods. For generations, philosophers *started* their
philosophical examinations with various theoretical
conceptions--"substances", "mind vs.
body", "pleasure as natural aim", and so on. In his
philosophical work, Dewey criticized any number of these
presuppositions, but here his point is metaphilosophical--how
these conceptions enter into the practice of philosophy as
presuppositions. Too often philosophy puts the (theoretical) cart
before the (practical) horse. We simply cannot know--and should
not assume--which terms and theories are *necessary* for
an analysis of a novel situation. Nevertheless, much philosophy has
assumed such necessities. We may call this the assumption of a
"theoretical starting point". It has produced endless
dialectical exchanges; it has caricatured and hollowed out many
complex and changeable subject matters. Overall, it has isolated
philosophy from a more thoroughgoing empiricism which could engage
with humanity's most important problems.



Dewey's suggestion of "experience as method" method,
then, is both a warning and a positive recommendation. It warns
philosophers to recognize that while intellectual terms may
*seem* "original, primitive and simple" they should
be understood as the historically and normatively situated
"products of discrimination and classification"
(*EN*, LW1: 386; see also 371-372, 375).
"Knowing" is not an activity standing somehow beyond
experience or nature; it is an activity with its own standpoint and
qualitative character. Intellectual products come, then, from earlier
inquiries, which possessed their own parameters and purposes.
*Whatever* theory is eventually devised for a new
situation--and Dewey is not against theory, to be very
clear--it must be checked against ordinary experience
(*EN*, LW1: 26).



Dewey's proposed method--the experiential starting
point--is not just another philosophical "move", but
a radical attempt to philosophize from what Ortega y Gasset calls
"the shaken confines of our own life" and what Douglas
Browning calls "bedrock" (Ortega y Gasset 1957: 40;
Browning 1998:
 74).[14]
 Dewey wrote,



> 
> 
> The experiential or denotative method tells us that we must go behind
> the refinements and elaborations of reflective experience to the gross
> and compulsory things of our doings, enjoyments and
> sufferings--to the things that force us to labor, that satisfy
> needs, that surprise us with beauty, that compel obedience under
> penalty. (*EN*, LW1: 375-76)
> 
> 
> 



Such a method is truly *critical*, because it forces inquirers
to check previous interpretations and judgments against their live
encounters in a new situation (*EN*, LW1: 364). This entails
that *philosophy as a practice* impose upon itself a much more
radical and dynamic model of theorizing, one pressed into much closer
transactions with existing practices and problems. This imposition, in
turn, forces philosophy to engage with new subject matters (and
theories), beyond the traditional "problems of
philosophy", and to embrace the idea that "the starting
point is the actually *problematic*" (*EN*, LW1:
61).


### 3.4 Metaphysics



Much which is central to Dewey's metaphysics has been
discussed--the transactional organism-environment setting, mind,
consciousness, and experience. Accordingly, this section will focus on
the development of Dewey's conception of
"metaphysics", the main project in *Experience and
Nature*, how a so-called empirical metaphysics intended to
reconnect with the ancient idea of philosophy as wisdom, and finally
it will sketch some of the criticisms Dewey's metaphysics
received.


### 3.5 The Development of "Metaphysics"



Debate over a definite meaning for the term "metaphysics",
was just as alive in Dewey's day as in ours. From the beginning,
Dewey sought to critique and reconstruct metaphysical concepts (e.g.,
reality, self, consciousness, time, necessity, and individuality) and
systems (e.g., Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel). Like his fellow
pragmatists Peirce, James, and Mead, Dewey sought to transform not
eradicate metaphysics. As described earlier, Dewey's early
metaphysical views were closest to idealism, but engagements with
experimental science and instrumentalism convinced him to abandon
traditional metaphysics' project of giving an ultimate and
complete account of reality *uberhaupt*.



His dormant interest in metaphysics was revivified at Columbia by his
colleague F. J. E. Woodbridge, who illustrated how metaphysics might
be done in a "descriptive" rather than an extra-physical
way ("Biography of John Dewey", in Schilpp 1939: 36).
While many of Dewey's most important writings on metaphysics
were also about experience (discussed above), special attention should
be paid to "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (1905,
*PIE*, MW3), "The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical
Inquiry" (1915, MW8), and his "Introduction" to
*Essays in Experimental Logic* (1916c, MW10)--all vital
steps toward his magnum opus, *Experience and
 Nature*.[15]
*EN*'s final chapters, dealing with art and consummatory
experience, are developed in *Art as Experience* (1934b, LW10),
another source of significant metaphysical discussions.



While labels tend to obscure Dewey's innovations, it is safe say
that Dewey had a realist, naturalistic, non-reductive, emergentist,
process
 metaphysics.[16]
 He sought to describe the most general features ("generic
traits") of nature in a way which did empirical justice to the
world as encountered, and which could be useful toward future attempts
to describe and change the world for the better. Unlike other
metaphysics, Dewey explicitly said that metaphysics served something
*further*--criticism. In the end, Dewey wound up
describing his efforts both as a "metaphysics" and as a
"system", that is, "the hanging together of various
problems and various hypotheses in a perspective" ("Nature
in Experience", LW14: 141-142). He described his
enterprise as both informed by "a definite point of view"
and by the contemporary, human world ("Half-hearted
Naturalism", LW3: 75-76 ).


### 3.6 The Project of *Experience and Nature*



*Experience and Nature* provides both extended criticism of
past metaphysical approaches, especially their quest for certainty and
assumption of an Appearance/Reality framework, and a positive, general
theory regarding how human existence is situated in nature. It is
proffered as empirical, descriptive, and hypothetical; it eschews
claims of special access beyond "experience in unsophisticated
forms", which, Dewey argued, give us "evidence of a
different world and points to a different metaphysics"
(*EN*, LW1: 47). *EN* looks to existing characteristics
of human culture, anthropologically, to see what they reveal, more
generally, about nature. The isolation, analysis, and description of
the "generic traits of existence" and their relations to
one another, is one significant outcome.



While this entry lacks space for even a bare summary, it is worth
noting that *EN* begins with an extensive discussion of method
and experience as a new starting point for philosophy. An extensive
presentation of the generic traits follows, which, in due course,
evokes and informs discussions regarding science, technology, body,
mind, language, art, and value. While the traits are not presented
systematically (a la other metaphysicians such as Spinoza or
Whitehead) there is a progression moving from the more basic to the
more
 complex.[17]


### 3.7 Empirical Metaphysics and Wisdom



Since Dewey is a pragmatist and meliorist, it is worth asking: How can
metaphysics contribute to the world beyond academic philosophy?
Dewey's larger ambition was to return philosophy to an older,
ancient mission--the pursuit of wisdom. And while Dewey describes
philosophy as inherently critical, a "criticism of
criticisms", where does that leave even an empirical,
hypothetical, naturalistic metaphysics? (*EN*, LW1: 298) Dewey
raises the issue, prophylactically: 



> 
> 
> As a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all
> kinds without regard to their differentiation into physical and
> mental, [metaphysics] seems to have nothing to do with criticism and
> choice, with an effective love of wisdom. (*EN*, LW1: 308)
> 
> 
> 



Dewey answers his own question with his account of the generic traits,
one which purportedly provides "a ground-map of the province of
criticism, establishing base lines to be employed in more intricate
triangulations" (*EN*, LW1:
 308).[18]
 New maps, new ways of looking at existence can defang old
truisms--e.g., men are rational, women are emotional, humans are
intelligent, animals are dumb, etc.--and facilitate the creation
of new meanings. Many of philosophy's conceptual tools (kinds,
categories, dualisms, aims, and values) were entrenched; a
reconsideration of the "what" and "how" of
existents promised a basis for a new start.



The activity of metaphysical map-making fits in with the more engaged
role Dewey envisioned for philosophers. The philosopher would serve as
what Dewey called a "liaison officer", a kind of semantic
intermediator able to help those speaking at cross purposes (or in
different jargons) to communicate more effectively (*EN*, LW1:
306). Metaphysical maps draw from contemporary circumstances and
purposes, so they would not promise certainty or permanency. Indeed,
the general traits "are actually so intimately intermixed that
all important issues are concerned with their degrees and the ratios
they sustain to one another" (*EN*, LW1: 309). Just as
physical maps must be redrawn based on changing needs and purposes, so
would metaphysical maps; in the meantime, hopefully, criticism is
sharpened and value is more effectively secured.


### 3.8 Criticisms of Dewey's Metaphysics



Dewey received and responded to many criticisms of his metaphysical
views, from 1905's "Postulate of Immediate
Empiricism" and on. Critics often overlooked that his position
was aiming to undercut prevailing metaphysical genres; often, his view
was just aligned with one or another existing position. (He was taken,
variously, as in league with realism, idealism, relativism,
subjectivism, etc. See Hildebrand 2003.) One recurrent criticism was
that the view advanced in *PIE* (that "things are what
they are experienced as") could not possibly yield a metaphysics
because it merely bespoke the kind of subjective, immediate experience
inimical to a more mediated and objective account. Similar reactions
arrived twenty years late to *EN* from critics attacking the
contrast there between "experience" and
 "nature".[19]



Subsequent criticisms honed in on a supposed tension between two foci
of Dewey's: "qualities" vs. "relations".
Qualities are immediate, while relations are mediate; how could both
coexist in the same item of experience? There seemed to be a
contradiction within Dewey's
 view.[20]
 Richard Bernstein (1961) seized on this issue, and claimed that Dewey
harbored two irreconcilable strains, a "metaphysical
strain" and a "phenomenological strain", but failed
to sufficiently account for them with his "principle of
continuity". One response to this argued that such critiques are
vitiated by their unwitting reproduction of the very spectatorial
standpoint Dewey's experiential starting point was designed to
 prevent.[21]



In recent years, some specialists in pragmatism and American
philosophy have debated whether Dewey should have engaged in
metaphysics at all. Some, such as Richard Rorty and Charlene Haddock
Seigfried, have argued that Dewey's critique of traditional
metaphysics was the most he should have done; going further diverted
him from more important ethical work (Seigfried 2001a, 2004) or
plunged him into foundationalist projects he had previously disavowed
("Dewey's Metaphysics" in Rorty 1977). Others have
argued that Dewey invented a genuinely new approach to metaphysics
which avoided old problems while contributing something salutary to
culture at large (Myers forthcoming, Garrison 2005, Boisvert 1998a,
Alexander forthcoming).


## 4. Inquiry and Knowledge


### 4.1 The Organic Roots of Instrumentalism



The interactional, organic model Dewey developed in his psychology
informed his theories of learning and knowledge. Given this new
ecological framework, a range of traditional epistemological proposals
and puzzles (premised on metaphysical divisions such as
appearance/reality, mind/world) lost credibility. "So far as the
question of the relation of the self to known objects is
concerned", Dewey wrote, "knowing is but one special case
of the agent-patient, of the behaver-enjoyer-sufferer situation"
("Brief Studies in Realism", MW6: 120). As we have already
seen in psychology, Dewey's wholesale repudiation of the
tradition's basic metaphysical framework required extensive
reconstructions in every other area; one popular name for
Dewey's reconstruction of epistemology (or "theory of
inquiry", as Dewey preferred to call it) was
 "instrumentalism".[22]



As did his earlier psychological functionalism, instrumentalism
utilized a Darwinian starting point to criticize and dissolve
entrenched divisions between, for example, realism/idealism,
science/religion, and empiricism/rationalism. Seen from this
standpoint, change and transformation are natural features of the
actual world, and knowledge and logic are ways to adapt, survive, and
thrive. The vitality of the world in which we reason, its dynamic and
biological basis, is more informative about knowledge and truth than
the paradigms of physics or mathematics, historically celebrated by
philosophy. While instrumentalism acknowledges sensation's
contributions, it also insists upon the constructive power of
 reasoning.[23]



Early statements of instrumentalism (and definitive breaks by Dewey
with Hegelian logic) may be seen in "Some Stages of Logical
Thought" (Dewey 1900 [1916], MW1); that essay follows Peirce
 (entry on Peirce section on pragmatism, pragmaticism, and the scientific method],[24]
 especially the well known 1877-78 articles championing the
larger framework of scientific thinking, namely the
"doubt-inquiry process" (MW1: 173; see also Peirce 1877,
1878). This account is developed in *Studies in Logical Theory*
(Dewey 1903b, MW2), by Dewey and his collaborators at Chicago. In the
work, Dewey acknowledges a "preeminent obligation" to
 James (Perry 1935: 308-309).[25]



*Studies* criticizes transcendentalist logic extensively,
concluding that logic should not assume either thought or
reality's existence *in general* but should rest content
with the function or use of ideas *in experience*: 



> 
> 
> The test of validity of [an] idea is its functional or instrumental
> use in effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting
> experience to a relatively integrated one. (*Studies*, MW2:
> 359) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, instrumentalism abandons all psycho-physical dualisms and all
correspondentist theories of knowing. Dewey wrote, 



> 
> 
> In the logical process the datum is not just external existence, and
> the idea mere psychical existence. Both are modes of
> existence--one of *given* existence, the other of
> *possible*, of inferred existence....In other words, datum
> and ideatum are divisions of labor, cooperative instrumentalities, for
> economical dealing with the problem of the maintenance of the
> integrity of experience. (*Studies*, MW2: 339-340)
> 
> 
> 


### 4.2 Beyond Empiricism, Rationalism, and Kant



So far, we have seen that Dewey's instrumentalism is of a piece
with his system's other components. But it was also responding
to dialectic within philosophy's epistemological positions,
particularly the tension between British empiricism, rationalism (see
entry on
 rationalism vs. empiricism),
 and the Kantian synthesis. A brief account will suffice to introduce
Dewey's response.



Classical empiricists insisted that the origins of knowledge lay in
sensory experience. They were motivated, in part, by the concern that
rationalistic accounts, seeking to trace knowledge to thought alone
(rather than particular, independent sense stimuli), were too
unchecked. Without the limits imposed by sense experience, philosophy
would continue to produce wild and divergent dogmatisms. There was in
classical empiricism, as in Dewey, a genuine interest in scientific
progress; for science to advance, it needed to escape unfettered
speculation. The account developed, then, by figures such as Locke,
Berkeley, and Hume claimed that (in Locke's version) the world
writes on a receptive blank slate, the mind, in the language of ideas.
By the faculties of memory, association, and imagination, knowledge is
generated; further elaborations of what is known must, on the
empiricists' account, be checkable against its origins in sense
experience.



Rationalists, in contrast, argued that knowledge was by nature both
abstract and deductively certain. Consider, for a moment, your sensory
experiences: they are fluid, individualized, and permeated by the
relativity borne of innumerable external conditions. How could a
philosophical account of *genuine* knowledge--necessarily
certain, self-evident, and unchanging--be derived using a method
so besotted with sensorial flux? Knowledge must derive, rather, from
inner concepts, which could be certain. Knowledge, then, is produced
by an immaterial entity, mind, with a power to reason which is innate,
and which stands logically independent of practical ends and the
contingencies of one's physical body.



Kant responded to the empiricist-rationalist tension by reigning in
their overweening ambitions; he argued that philosophy must stop
attempting to transcend the limits of thought and experience.
Philosophy's proper aspiration is more modest--to discover
what is possible to know in the phenomenal world. Kant, then, refused
an originary role to either percepts or concepts, arguing instead that
sense and reason are co-constitutive of knowledge. More important,
Kant argued that what epistemology requires is an account of the mind
as a systematic and constructive force.



Dewey's response to this three-way epistemological conflict was
foreshadowed in the earlier discussion of the "Reflex Arc"
paper, with its account of natural constituent of the sensori-motor
circuit. Any proposal premised on a disconnected mind and
body--or upon one assuming that stimuli (be they causes or
impressions or whatever) were atomic and in need of
synthesis--was a non-starter for
 Dewey.[26]



While he accepted some of Kant's criticisms of rationalism and
empiricism, he rejected Kant's propagation of several
significant but unjustified assumptions. Chief among these assumptions
was the idea that knowledge must be certain; that nature and intellect
were categorically distinct; and that a noumenal realm
(things-in-themselves) was a justified posit. In addition, Dewey
questioned Kant's claim that the sensations which supply
knowledge are inchoate, initially--this claim being merely
another posit driven by Kant's architectonic. Methodologically,
and perhaps more significantly, Dewey followed James in criticizing
Kant's overall standpoint as, still, too spectatorial. From the
pragmatic, Jamesean, "radical empiricist" standpoint, one
may accept as real (though not necessarily as known) a variety of
phenomenon, whether such are clear, vague, felt, remembered,
anticipated, etc.



Thus, for Dewey, Kant cannot achieve the philosophical perspective
necessary for a dynamic synthesis of perception and conception, nature
and reason, practice and theory. While Kant's model of an active
and structuring mind was a clear advance over more passive systems, it
maintained the retrograde depiction of knowledge as faithful mirror of
reality. The missing insight was *knowledge as dynamic
instrument*, consisting in managing (predicting, controlling,
guiding) *future* experience. Within this framework,
determining "knowledge" is akin to judging the value of an
eye or hand; one asks how they affect the organism's ability to
cope: 



> 
> 
> What measures [knowledge's] value, its correctness and truth, is
> the degree of its availability for conducting to a successful issue
> the activities of living beings. ("The Bearings of Pragmatism
> Upon Education", in MW4: 180) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, Dewey replaced Kant's mind-centered system with one
centered upon experience-nature transactions--"a
reversal", Dewey wrote, "comparable to a Copernican
revolution" (*QC*, LW4: 232).


### 4.3 Inquiry, Knowledge, and Truth



In the context of instrumentalism, what do "logic" and
"epistemology" amount to? Dewey remains focused on these
subject matters but insisted on a more empirical approach. How, he
asked, does reasoning and learning actually
 happen?[27]
 Dewey addresses the nature of logic in his major 1938 study,
*Logic: The Theory of Inquiry* (*LTI*, LW12); his term
for logic is the "inquiry into inquiry". *LTI*
undertakes the systematic process of collecting, organizing, and
explicating the actual conditions of different kinds of inquiry; the
aim of this reconstructed logic, as outlined in the 1917 "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy", is pragmatic and ameliorative: to provide an
"important aid in proper guidance of further attempts at
knowing" (MW10: 23).



Throughout his career, Dewey described processes and patterns evident
in active problem solving. Here, we consider three: inquiry,
knowledge, and truth. There is, Dewey argued, a "pattern of
inquiry" which prevails in problem solving. In "Analysis
of Reflective Thinking" (1933, LW8) and *LTI* (LW12) it
has five phases. Explicitly disavowing categorical divisions between
emotion and reason, the initial phase of inquiry begins (1) with a
*feeling* of something amiss, a unique and particular
doubtfulness; this feeling endures as a pervasive quality imbued in
inquiry and serves as a kind of "guide" to subsequent
phases. Next, because what is initially present is indeterminate, (2)
a *problem* must be specifically formulated; problems do not
preexist inquiry, as typically
 assumed.[28]
 Next, (3) a *hypothesis* is constructed, one which
imaginatively utilizes both theoretical ideas and perceptual facts to
forecast the possible consequences of various operations. Next, in
phase (4), one *reasons through* the meanings involved in the
hypothesis, sizing up the implications or possible contradictions
involved; frequently, what is discovered here requires a return to an
earlier phase (to reformulate the hypothesis or even the
 problem).[29]
 Finally, inquiry comes to a close with phase (5), acting to evaluate
and test the hypothesis; here, it is revealed whether a proposed
solution solves the problem, or to put it *LTI*'s
terminology, whether inquiry has converted an "indeterminate
situation" into a "determinate one".



The inquiry pattern Dewey sketched is schematic; he noted that actual
cases of reasoning often do not show such discreteness or linearity.
Thus, the pattern is not a summary of how people *always* think
but rather how exemplary cases of inquirential thinking unfold (e.g.,
in the empirical sciences).



Knowledge, as viewed by Dewey's transactional model of inquiry,
departs from tradition; in effect, it is brought to earth.
"Knowledge, as an abstract term", Dewey wrote, 



> 
> 
> is a name for the product of competent inquiries. Apart from this
> relation, its meaning is so empty that any content or filling may be
> arbitrarily poured in. (*LTI*, LW12: 16) 
> 
> 
> 



To understand a product, one must understand the process; this is what
Dewey does. Denying the importance of knowledge, *qua* isolable
product, is effectively denying a metaphysical account of reality that
makes mind-the-substance separate from everything else. It *does
not depreciate knowing as an activity*, and Dewey strongly
maintained that "intelligence" is a crucial mediator of
individual and societal
 conflict.[30]



Truth, too, is radically reevaluated. For too long, truth connoted an
ideal--an epistemic fixity (a correspondence, a coherence) which
could terminate all further inquiry. As this is not the actual
situation human beings (or philosophy) inhabits, the ideal should be
set aside. Still, Dewey was ever the (re)constructivist; in
"Experience, Knowledge, and Value" (1939c) he provided an
account of truth; it no longer pointed toward some transcendental
thing, but toward the *process* of inquiry ("Experience,
Knowledge, and Value", LW14: 56-57). To label a
proposition "true" is to say it offers some reliability as
a resource in further inquiry: 



> 
> 
> In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled,
> or to be knowledge, is being so settled that it is available as a
> resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to
> be subject to revision in further inquiry. (*LTI*, LW12: 16)
> 
> 
> 
> 



Truth does not stand outside of experience, but is an experienced
relation, particularly one which is socially shared. In *How We
Think*, Dewey wrote, 



> 
> 
> Truth, in final analysis, is the statement of things "as they
> are," not as they are in the inane and desolate void of
> isolation from human concern, but as they are in a shared and
> progressive experience....Truth, truthfulness, transparent and
> brave publicity of intercourse, are the source and the reward of
> friendship. Truth is having things in common. (*HWT*, MW6: 67;
> see also "The Experimental Theory of Knowledge", 1910b,
> MW3: 118)
> 
> 
> 



In Dewey's instrumentalism, then, knowledge and truth are
adjectival not nominative, they describe a process which, as Peirce
tells us, can go on as long as we do. "There is no belief so
settled as not to be exposed to further inquiry" (LTI, LW12:
16). To understand why words like "knowledge" and
"truth" deserve to be honorifics, one must understand
their historic value as tools that have aided past inquiries and
helped secure experiences of value.


## 5. Philosophy of Education



It is probably fair to say that, around the world, Dewey remains as
well know for his educational theories (see
 entry on philosophy of education, section Rousseau, Dewey, and the progressive movement)
 as for his philosophical ones. However, a closer look at
Dewey's body of work shows how often these theories align. Dewey
recognized this, reflecting that his 1916 magnum opus in education,
*Democracy and Education* (*DE*, MW9) "was for
many years that [work] in which my philosophy, such as it is, was most
fully expounded" (*FAE*, LW5: 156). *DE* argued
that philosophy itself could be understood as "the general
theory of education". In lieu of philosophy's increasing
tendencies to become hyper-specialized and technical, he urged a
greater investment in the problems affecting everyday life. In effect
this was a call to see philosophy from the standpoint of education.
Dewey wrote,



> 
> 
> Education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the
> human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic
> discussions....The educational point of view enables one to
> envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where
> they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference
> in practice. If we are willing to conceive education as the process of
> forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward
> nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined *as the
> general theory of education*. (*DE*, MW9: 338)
> 
> 
> 



Dewey was active in education his entire life. Besides high school and
college teaching, he devised curricula, established, reviewed and
administered schools and departments of education, participated in
collective organizing, consulted and lectured internationally, and
wrote extensively on many facets of education. He established the
University of Chicago's Laboratory School as an experimental
site for theories in instrumental logic and psychological
functionalism. This school also became a site for democratic
expression by the local community.


### 5.1 Experiential Learning and Teaching



Dewey's "Reflex Arc" paper applied functionalism to
education. "Reflex" argued that human experience is not a
disjointed sequence of fits and starts, but a developing circuit of
activities. Learning deserves to be framed in this way: as a
cumulative, progressive process where inquirers move from the
dissatisfying phase of doubt toward another marked by the satisfying
resolution of a problem. "Reflex" also shows that the
subject of a stimulus (e.g., the pupil) is not a passive recipient of,
say, a sensation but an agent who *takes* it amidst other
ongoing activities in a larger environmental field.



Cognizance of such fundamental facts entailed, Dewey argued, that
educators discard pedagogies based on the "blank slate"
model of curriculum. Rather, in *The School and Society*, Dewey
wrote, "the question of education is the question of taking hold
of [children's] activities, of giving them direction"
(MW1: 25). Dewey's *How We Think* (1910c, MW6) was
intended, primarily, to instruct teachers how to apply
instrumentalism; education's intellectual goals could be
advanced by acquainting children with the general intellectual habits
of scientific inquiry. 



> 
> 
> The native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent
> curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is
> near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind.
> (*HWT*, MW6: 179)
> 
> 
> 



Given Dewey's different approach to psychology, teaching roles
would need revision. While teachers still had to know their subject
matter, they also needed to understand the student's cultural
and personal backgrounds. Learning as an activity which incorporated
actual problems necessitated a careful integration of lessons with
specific learners. Traditional motivational strategies, too, had to
change; rather than relying on rewards or punishments, Deweyan
teachers were called to reimagine the whole learning environment; they
must merge the school's preexisting curricular goals with their
pupils' present interests. One way to do this was by identifying
specific problems able to bridge curriculum and student and then
create situations in which students have to work them
 out.[31]
 The problem-centered approach demanded a lot from teachers, as it
required training in subject matters, child psychology, and various
pedagogies capable of interweaving these
 together.[32]


### 5.2 Traditionalists, Romantics, and Dewey



Dewey's educational philosophy emerged amidst a fierce
1890's debate between educational "romantics" and
"traditionalists". *Romantics* (also called
"New" or "Progressive" education by Dewey),
urged a "child-centered" approach; they claimed that the
child's natural impulses provided education's proper
starting point. As active and creative beings, education should not
fetter growth--even instruction should be subordinated to content
if necessary. *Traditionalists* (called "Old"
education by Dewey) pressed for a "curriculum-centered"
approach. Children were empty cabinets which curriculum fills with
civilization's lessons. Content was supreme, and instruction
should discipline children to ensure they are receptive.



In many articles and books ("My Pedagogic Creed", 1897b,
EW5; *The School and Society*, 1899, MW1; *Democracy and
Education*, 1916b, MW9; *Experience and Education*, 1938b,
LW13, etc.) Dewey developed an interactional model to move beyond that
debate. He refused to privilege either child or society. While
Romantics correctly identified the child (replete with instincts,
powers, habits, and histories) as an indispensable starting point for
pedagogy, Dewey argued that the child cannot be the *only*
starting point. Larger social groups (family, community, nation) also
have a legitimate stake in passing along extant interests, needs, and
values as part of an educational synthesis.



Still, of these two approaches, Dewey tilted more strongly against the
high value placed by traditionalists on discipline and memorization.
While recognizing the legitimacy of conveying content (facts, values),
Dewey thought it paramount for schools to eschew indoctrination.
Educating meant *incorporating*, with a wide berth for personal
freedom, unique individuals into a changing society which--this
had to remain clear--would soon be under *their* dominion.
This is why *who the child was* mattered so very much.
Following colleague and lifelong friend G.H. Mead, Dewey argued that
any child's "self" was an emerging construct of
social and personal experiences, so no child's deeds, words, or
interests could be isolated from *their* social context.
Insofar as these were facts of social psychology, schools had to
become micro-communities to best reflect children's growing
interests and needs. "The school cannot be a preparation for
social life excepting as it reproduces, within itself, the typical
conditions of social life" ("Ethical Principles Underlying
Education", 1897a, EW5:
 61-62).[33]


### 5.3 Democracy Through Education



Dewey's efforts to connect child, school, and society were
motivated by more than just a desire for better pedagogical methods.
Because character, rights, and duties are informed by and contribute
to the social realm, schools were critical sites to learn and
experiment with democracy. Democratic life consists not only in civic
and economic conduct, but more crucially in habits of problem solving,
compassionate imagination, creative expression, and civic
self-governance. The full range of roles a child might assume in life
is vast; once this is appreciated, it is incumbent upon society to
make education its highest political and economic priority. During
WWII, Dewey wrote, 



> 
> 
> There will be almost a revolution in school education when study and
> learning are treated not as acquisition of what others know but as
> development of capital to be invested in eager alertness in observing
> and judging the conditions under which one lives. Yet until this
> happens, we shall be ill-prepared to deal with a world whose
> outstanding trait is change. ("Between Two Worlds", 1944,
> LW17: 463)
> 
> 
> 



Democracy, on Dewey's view, was much more comprehensive than a
form of government. "Democracy", Dewey wrote, "is
not an alternative to other principles of associated life [but] the
idea of community life itself" (*PP*, LW2: 328).
Individuals exist in communities; as their lives change, needs and
conflicts emerge that require intelligent management; we must make
sense out of new experiences. Education 



> 
> 
> is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to
> the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the
> course of subsequent experience. (*DE*, MW9: 82) 
> 
> 
> 



In other words, the engine of America's political identity was
creative experimentation; in order to fulfill their eventual roles as
fully participating citizens, students needed education in the habits
(imaginative, empirical) which made the experimental sciences so
successful. Dewey called such attitudes and habits
 "intelligence".[34]



Informing all the spheres just discussed--science, education, and
democratic life--is Dewey's naturalism which places hope
not in what is immutable or ultimate (God, Nature, Reason, Ends) but
in the human capacity to learn from life. In "Creative
Democracy--The Task Before Us" (1939b) Dewey wrote,



> 
> 
> Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more
> important than any special result attained, so that special results
> achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and
> order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable
> of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in
> experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from
> the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate
> what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point
> the way to new and better experiences. ("Creative
> Democracy", LW14: 229)
> 
> 
> 



The success or failure of democracy rests on education. Education is
most determinative of whether citizens develop the habits needed to
investigate problematic beliefs and situations, to communicate openly,
throughout. While every culture aims to convey values and beliefs to
the coming generation, it is critical, Dewey thought, to distinguish
between education which inculcates collaborative and creative
hypothesizing and education which foments obeisance to parochialism
and dogma. And philosophy must apply this same standard to itself.


## 6. Ethics



Dewey wrote extensively on ethics throughout his career; some writings
were explicitly about ethics, but ethical analyses are present in
works with other
 foci.[35]
 As elsewhere, Dewey critiques then reconstructs traditional views; he
argued it is typical for traditional systems (e.g., teleological,
deontological, or virtue-based) to seek comprehensive and monocausal
accounts of, for example, ultimate aims, duties, or values. Such ideal
theory is obligated to explain morality's requirements for all
*individuals* actions or character.



Dewey, in contrast, argued for a more experimental approach. Rather
than a grand and final explanatory account of moral life, ethics
describes intelligent methods for dealing with novel and morally
perplexing situations. There are no stipulated, ultimate values, nor
should any be
 sought.[36]
 At best, the only value toward which he would gesture was
 "growth".[37]
 Ethics means inquiry into concrete, problematic conditions; such
inquiry may use theories to inform hypotheses tested in experience.
Reliable hypotheses may come to be called "knowledge", but
must, in the end, be considered fallible and revisable. Actual
resolutions to moral problems, Dewey observed, typically point toward
plural factors (aims, duties, virtues), rather than just one
(*TIF*, LW5). Moreover, actual conduct (including inquiry) is
undertaken not by isolated, rational actors but by
*fundamentally* social
 beings.[38]
 "Conduct", Dewey wrote, 



> 
> 
> is always shared; this is the difference between it and a
> physiological process. It is not an ethical "ought" that
> conduct *should* be social. It *is* social, whether bad
> or good. (*HNC*, MW14: 16)
> 
> 
> 



Dewey's ethical theory, like those in education and politics,
utilizes his transactional views of experience, habit, inquiry, and
the communicative, social self. It also exemplifies Dewey's
metaphysics of a world both precarious *and* stable, where
conflict is natural and quests to deny or permanently eradicate it are
 fantastical.[39]
 Conflict is a generic trait of life, not a defect; theories denying
this tend to be so reductive and absolutist that they divorce inquiry
from the essential details of concrete situations, cultures, and
persons. Such strategies tend to
 fail.[40]



Progress in ethical theory, then, means improvements that render
inquiry more discriminating, more revelatory of alternatives and
 consequences.[41]
 Improved deliberation is crucial to more effective inquiry; Dewey
argued this requires being open to contributions from many sources:
all sciences, social customs, jurisprudence, biographies, and, yes,
even moral systems of the
 past.[42]
 Deliberation especially benefits from what Dewey called
"dramatic rehearsal", where creative and dramatic
enactment adds to logical tools and helps illuminate the emotional
weight and color of potential ethical
 choices.[43]



For further details on Dewey's ethics, see the entry
 Dewey's moral philosophy
 by E. Anderson (2018). 


## 7. Political Philosophy



Dewey's political philosophy, like other areas, presumes that
that individuals subsist transactionally with their social
environment, and can use inquiry to solve problems in hypothetical and
experimental
 ways.[44]
 As elsewhere, theory is instrumental; concepts and systems are tools
initially devised to function in particular, practical circumstances.
While those proving valuable can be retained for reuse, all are
considered fallible and capable of reconstruction. Dewey rejected
approaches relying upon non-empirical, *a priori* assumptions
(e.g., about human nature, historical progress, etc.) or which propose
ultimate, often monocausal, explanations. Dewey criticized and
reconstructed core political concepts (individual, freedom, right,
community, public, state, and democracy) along naturalist and
experimentalist lines; besides numerous articles (for academic and lay
audiences), Dewey's political thought can be found in books such
as *The Public and Its Problems* (1927b, LW2),
*Individualism, Old and New* (1930f, LW5), *Liberalism and
Social Action* (1935, LW11), and *Freedom and Culture*
(1939d, LW13). Because *Democracy and Education* (1916b,
*DE*, MW9) emphasizes profound connections between education,
society, and democratic habits--it also merits study as a
"political" work.



Enormous changes took place during Dewey's lifetime, including
massive US population growth, the rise of industrial, scientific,
technological, and educational institutions, the American Civil War
and two world wars, and a global economic depression. These events
strained prevailing liberal theories, and Dewey labored to revise both
democracy and liberalism. "The frontier is moral, not
physical", Dewey urged, proposing that democracy was tantamount
to a "way of life", and required continual renewal to
 survive.[45]
 Beyond governmental machinery (universal suffrage, recurring
elections, political parties, trial by peers, etc.), democracy was
"primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated
experience" (*DE*, MW9: 93; see also, *PP*, LW2:
325). Such experience, expressed as collaborative inquiry, required
the intellectual and emotional competencies necessary to tackle shared
problems and negotiate value differences. Ultimately, democracy
requires faith in experience as a sufficient resource for future
solutions and that it is no longer necessary to place faith into
transcendent rules or
 aims.[46]



Dewey's analysis of individualism grew both from earlier
academic interests and from his sensitivity to contemporary economic
and technological
 pressures.[47]
 The older "atomic" individualism--where natural
egoists vie to maximize their standing--was now harming not
protecting individuals; such individualism, deployed as a rhetorical
pretext, was enabling the wealthy and powerful to undermine (for most)
the protections which justified liberalism,
 initially![48]



Dewey's counter-proposal was "renascent
 liberalism".[49]
 By reconstructing its core concept ("atomic" individuals
become "social"), Dewey also revised other key political
notions--e.g., "liberty", "freedom", and
"rights",--and placed them in an instrumentalist
framework (*LSA*, LW11: 35; *E*, MW5:
 394).[50]
 Also revised are concomitant notions of "community" and
"public". The Deweyan "public" forms around
problems; the aim is to conduct experimental inquiry and act for
redress (*PP*, LW2: 314). Dewey also expressed a grave concern,
still with us today, regarding "inchoate" publics. Such
publics consist of members lacking the critical education, time, and
attention necessary for inquiry. They present democracy with perhaps
its most significant and undermining condition (*PP*, LW2: 321,
317).



For further details on Dewey's political theory, see the entry
on
 Dewey's political philosophy
 by M. Festenstein (2014).


## 8. Art and Aesthetic Experience



In his magnum opus on aesthetics, *Art as Experience*
(*AE*, LW10: 31) Dewey stated that art, as a conscious idea, is
"the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of
humanity"
 (31).[51]
 Such high praise, especially from a philosopher with expertise in
(what remains) philosophy's "main" subjects (e.g.,
knowledge, ethics, science) deserves notice. Dewey began writing about
aesthetics from early in his career--on art's relevance to psychology (1887, EW2) and education (1897c, EW5), on why the distinction between 

"fine" and 

"practical" art should be rejected (1891, EW3: 310-311), and on Bosanquet (1893, EW4). His own theory emerged in
*Experience and Nature* (1925a, *EN*, LW1) and
flourished in *AE* (1934b), proposing that aesthetics is
central to philosophy's proper mission: to render everyday
experience more fulfilling and meaningful.



Dewey's aesthetics has, arguably, four main objectives. First,
it explicates art's ontology, the interrelated processes of
making and appreciation, and specifies the functions of interpretation
and
 criticism.[52]
 Second, it examines arts' social role in presenting,
reimagining, and projecting human identity. Third, it analyzes the
communicative functions of art, especially in education and political
life. Finally, it describes and analyzes the implications of
art's expression as experience; such experience is so vivified
and integrated as to be qualitatively distinct--experience as
 "consummatory".[53]
 Consummatory experience happens occasionally; sometimes it occurs not
in an "artistic" context (concert, museum, etc.) but in
unexpectedly quotidian circumstances. Nevertheless, it is also life at
its fullest. Determining how *more* of life's experiences
could become consummatory is the main purpose of Dewey's
aesthetics.



Thus, the main question *AE* poses is: How did a chasm arise
between the arts, artists and ordinary people? How have cultural
conditions and aesthetic theories (reinforced by institutions)
isolated "art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of
their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing"?
(*AE*, LW10: 16) *AE* makes explicit art's natural
continuities with everyday life, while seeking to prevent its
reduction to mere entertainment or "transient pleasurable
 excitations"[54]
 (*AE*, LW10: 16). Dewey criticizes traditional
aesthetics' spectatorial (or theoretical) starting point and
goes on to offer radically empirical accounts of art making,
appreciation, expression, form, and criticism. Because aesthetic
experience has organic roots, it can be recognized even in everyday
objects and
 events.[55]
 Again, the goal is to dissolve the dualisms between
"fine" and "useful" objects and to help
establish a greater "continuity of esthetic experience with
normal processes of living" (*AE*, LW10: 16).



For further details on Dewey's aesthetics, see entry on
 Dewey's aesthetics
 by T. Leddy (2016).


## 9. Religion, Religious Experience and *A Common Faith*



> 
> 
> The whole story of man shows that there are no objects that may not
> deeply stir engrossing emotion. One of the few experiments in the
> attachment of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of
> devotion, so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in
> social action. (*A Common Faith*,
> 1934a, LW9: 52-53) 
> 
> 
> 


### 9.1 Dewey's Religious Background



Dewey grew up in a religious family; his mother was especially devout
and pressured her sons to live up to a similar devotion. His family
church was Congregationalist; a bit later, including in college,
Liberal Evangelicalism proved to be a more acceptable form of
Christianity. At twenty-one, while living in Oil City, Pennsylvania,
Dewey had a "mystic experience" which he reported to
friend Max Eastman: 



> 
> 
> There was no vision, not even a definable emotion--just a
> supremely blissful feeling that his worries [about whether he prayed
> sufficiently in earnest] were over. (Dykhuizen 1973: 22) 
> 
> 
> 



Dewey belonged to congregations for about thirty-five years and turned
away circa 1894, as he left for a post in Chicago. From then on,
Dewey's deepest loyalties lay outside religion; he was, as John
J. McDermott put it, 



> 
> 
> an unregenerate philosophical naturalist, one for whom the human
> journey is constitutive of its own meaning and is not to be rescued by
> any transcendent explanations, principles of accountability, or
> posthumous salvation. (McDermott 2006, 50-51)
> 
> 
> 



Dewey returned to philosophical issues of religion in the
1930's. "What I Believe" (1930, LW5) argued for a
new kind of "faith", a "tendency toward
action". Such a faith would not be directed transcendentally,
but would signify that "experience itself is the sole ultimate
authority" ("What I Believe", LW5: 267). This is not
self-enclosed experience, of course, but comes from "the full
participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each
changing situation of experience its own full and unique
meaning" ("What I Believe", LW5: 272). In
1933-34, Dewey gave the Terry Lectures at Yale, later published
as *A Common Faith* (1934a, *ACF*, LW9), Dewey's
major statement on religion and religious experience.


### 9.2 Aligning Naturalism and Religion



The challenge *A Common Faith* took on seems, in retrospect,
insurmountable. He wished to reconstruct religion in a way which
harmonized it with his empiricism and naturalism, while showing how
the power of religious experience and belief could be transformed in
ways which supported and advanced a secular conception of democracy.
Religions vary, of course, but to a large degree they posit
transcendent, eternal, unobservable entities and reveal themselves in
ways which are not, shall we say, open to verification. Empirical
experience (regardless of its specific construal) is seen as
inferior--whether castigated as flux, illusion, uncertainty, or
confusion, it must be left behind. In short, Dewey had squared himself
against the metaphysics, epistemology, and seemingly the morality, of
major religions.



It is worth noting who were *ACF*'s intended audience.
Dewey was *not* addressing believers contented with
supernatural religion, *nor* religious liberals seeking a
*via media* postulating discrete realms to scientific and
spiritual truths. Also, he was *not* addressing militant
atheists, whose dogmatism Dewey
 rejected.[56]
 Rather, *ACF* addressed those who, despite their abandonment
of supernaturalism, nevertheless believe themselves to be religious
("Experience, Knowledge, and Value", LW14: 79-80).
*ACF* was meant to salvage whatever made the religious attitude
experientially valuable while shedding both traditional religious
frameworks and supernaturalistic beliefs.


### 9.3 "Religion" vs. "Religious"



Dewey's strategy, then, was to pry "religious"
experience away from religion, to show how religious experience may be
framed within a natural and social
 context.[57]
 Because Dewey can find no clear, univocal meaning for
"religion", the alternative was to look more closely at
religious experience (*ACF*, LW9: 7). To mention just two
conclusions, Dewey found that whichever qualities exhibited by
religious experience (feelings of peace, wholeness, security, etc.),
none offered evidence for the supernatural. In other words, a
religious experience's *report* can no more count as a
judgment about causation than pointing to a book's description
can prove a physical law (*ACF*, LW9ff.).



A second conclusion was that religious experience is not hermetic,
unable to color or affect other experiences. Just a sunset may have an
"aesthetic" element or a linguistic remark may have a
"moral" tint, there may be a religious coloration of a
variety of experiences (*ACF*, LW9: 9.). Understood in this
sense, the "religious" character of experience is an
attitude, one lending "deep and enduring support to the
processes of living" (*ACF*, LW9: 15). Dewey analyzed
religiosity in this sense by comparing it with a certain kind of
coping. Consider three options: (1) one can *accommodate* an
obstacle by merely resigning to put up with the conditions they
impose; (2) one can *adapt* or modify the obstacle's
conditions to one's liking; finally, (3) one can *adjust*
to the obstacle in such a way that one *both* changes
one's attitude *and* alters the conditions. (Consider, as
*adjustment*, the case of of *becoming a parent* which
demands significant changes that encompass *both* self
*and* environment.) This last option (3) of *adjustment*
is characteristic of religious experience for it is "inclusive
and deep seated" and transformative of attitudes in
"generic and enduring" ways (*ACF*, LW9: 12,13). In
adjustment, imaginative possibilities are projected and then put into
action--both in oneself (wants, aims, ideals) and in surrounding
conditions--and the cumulative impact is an evolution of identity
(*ACF*, LW9:
 13).[58]


### 9.4 Faith and God



Dewey effort to naturalize religion (by shifting the focus toward a
non-transcendental understanding of "religious
experience") also required a reinterpretation of other
traditional notions--such as "faith" and
"God". Faith, typically, is juxtaposed with reason. Faith
requires neither empirical inquiry nor verification; one has faith in
the evidence of (transcendent, ultimate) things not seen. Also, faith
typically connotes intellectual acceptance, again without proof, of
religious propositions (such as "God exists and loves
mankind").



Dewey made at least two important criticisms of traditional faith.
First, faith is too closely identified with *intellectual*
acceptance, which eclipses its pragmatic side; *faith in a
cause*, for example, indicates a practical *willingness to
act* strong enough to modify present desires, purposes, and
conduct. By over-identifying the meaning of faith with intellectual
recognition, the traditional account attenuates inquiry and
constructive action. Second, traditional faith tends to reify its
objects (e.g., "sin", "evil", etc.) converting
them, in effect, to surds immune to inquiry and redescription. The
resulting creed is then deployed to "solve" problems with
formulaic appeals to absolutes. In Dewey's view, the better
approach is experimental--complicated, living problems are more
effectively address with experimental inquiry. Insofar as traditional
faith frustrates inquiry which could be ameliorative, it runs counter
to the aims of morality.



The faith Dewey *can* accept is "natural piety".
Natural piety is not grounded in unseen, supernatural powers but,
Dewey wrote, in a "just sense of nature as the whole of which we
are parts" and the recognition that as parts we are 



> 
> 
> marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by
> their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is
> humanly desirable. (ACF, LW9: 18) 
> 
> 
> 



Faith grounded in natural piety accepts the idea that (again)
"experience itself is the sole ultimate authority"
("What I Believe", LW5: 267).



Dewey's naturalism, of course, disallows a traditional
God--a single being responsible for the physical and moral
universe, and its inhabitants. Belief in God is neither warranted nor
advisable. Instead, Dewey offers a reconstruction of
"God". Very briefly, he asks that we think not of a
singular object but of the qualities to which God is
compared--goodness, wisdom, love. Such descriptions show that God
represents our highest ideals. Remove the idea of a *possessor*
of ideals and add in the way in which ideals *pull* from us the
means (imagination, calculation, action) to put make ideas actual
--and one begins to grasp Dewey's notion. 



> 
> 
> This idea of God, or of the divine is also connected with all the
> natural forces and conditions--including man and human
> association--that promote the growth of the ideal and that
> further its realization....It is this active relation between
> ideal and actual to which I would give the name "God".
> (*ACF*, LW9: 34; see also 29-30)
> 
> 
> 


### 9.5 Religion as Social Intelligence--a Common Faith



As a pragmatist, a meliorist, and a humane democrat, Dewey sought a
way to harness the undeniable power of religion and religious
experience toward an end beneficial to all. Religion, he understood,
provides people with a story about the larger universe and how they
fit within it. He knew it was not enough to criticize religion,
because this leaves powerful human needs unmet. Dewey did not propose
swapping out old religious institutions for new ones; he hoped,
rather, that the emancipation of religious experience from
institutional and ideological shackles might direct its energies
toward something like a "common faith", a passion for
imaginative intelligence pursuing moral goods. The methods of inquiry
and criticism are not mysteries; they are deeply familiar already. The
necessary turn would come when religious persons realize that inquiry
could be extended to enhance religious experience and values
(*ACF*, LW9: 23). If it could be appreciated how many
celebrated accomplishments were due not to God but to intelligent,
human collaboration, then perhaps the idea of *community* could
inspire a non-sectarian, common
 faith.[59]



Dewey's call for a common faith was, he thought, deeply
democratic. Why? Because the idea of the supernatural was, by
definition, suspicious of experience (as an adequate guide) and,
consequently, suspicious of empirical methods of inquiry. Unchecked by
lived experience or experiment, supernaturalism can produce especially
deep divisions. The approach of Dewey's common faith is, in
contrast, intertwined with experimental inquiry--drawing upon
lived experience and constantly renewed through open communication.
This is why Dewey's exhortation to trade traditional religious
faith for a common faith in empirical intelligence is of a piece with
his experimental ideal of democracy.