JOHN DEWEY (1859–1952)

Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey were the great American pragmatists. The youngest of the three, John Dewey, was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont. His father, Archibald Dewey, was a successful grocer. Dewey's mother, Lucina Artemisia Rich Dewey, was deeply involved in philanthropic work, through which Dewey and his brother came into contact with the poor. The New England traditions of hard work, modesty, and honesty and the American belief in democracy combined with his family's concern for social justice to create Dewey's unique persona.

Following an adequate but unexceptional career in the local schools, Dewey attended the University of Vermont, after which he taught classics, algebra, and science at a high school in Pennsylvania. After two years of teaching, he returned to Burlington to continue his studies in philosophy. Encouraged by his former philosophy professor and by the editor of a philosophy journal, he borrowed $500 and enrolled in graduate school at the newly formed Johns Hopkins University. Peirce was one of his teachers, though at the time Dewey was more influenced by the Hegelian idealism of G.S. Morris.

After completing his dissertation on Kant's psychology and receiving a Ph.D. in 1884, Dewey joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. During his ten years there, Dewey began to move in more practical directions. For example, he began to work with the education department on issues in teacher training, and he wrote books on psychology, including Psychology (1887) and The Psychology of Number and Its Application to Methods of Teaching Arithmetic (1895). At Michigan, Dewey met and married one of his students, Alice Chipman, and together they had five children and adopted a sixth.

In 1894, Dewey moved to the University of Chicago to become the head of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy—his three major interests by this time. In this position, he set up a laboratory school, the "Dewey School," in which his theories of education and teacher training were tested and refined. The school was student-centered and emphasized learning by doing—rather than by rote memory—and it had a profound effect on American education. Dewey's most influential books, School and Society (1900) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902), came out of his work at the laboratory school. In Chicago, Dewey was also involved in a number of social causes, including Jane Addams's Hull House, where he worked with those affected by urbanization.

In 1904, Dewey became embroiled in a dispute with the administration of the University of Chicago over the appointment of Alice Dewey as principal of the Dewey School. The Deweys left Chicago and John Dewey, by now acknowledged as one of the leading educators in the country, accepted a position at Columbia University, where, for the next twenty-five years, he taught and wrote, and from which he traveled extensively. He lectured on education in Japan, China, and the Soviet Union. Throughout his Columbia period and even after his retirement in 1929, Dewey continued his involvement with social issues. He was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Professors. Dewey also wrote prolifically (the bibliography of his works is over 150 pages long) in philosophy and education and on a variety of social issues.

BASIC THOUGHT

Whereas Husserl called for a return to the disinterested rationality of the Greeks, Dewey called all such spectator knowledge disastrous. Whereas Husserl condemned "naturalism," Dewey called on philosophers to adapt the method of the natural sciences to resolve practical problems, particularly the problem of human values. In fact, Dewey saw his philosophy, which he called "instrumentalism," as a bridge between science and ethics.

According to Dewey, genuine inquiry begins with an "indeterminate situation"—with confusion or perplexity. Articulating the nature of the problem is the first stage of inquiry: "To see that a situation requires inquiry is the initial step in inquiry." Next, one creates hypotheses to resolve the difficulty. These hypothetical solutions are then clarified and refined still further by reasoning and clarifying meanings. These stages of hypothesis-creation and meaning-clarification will use concepts or "instruments" (hence the name "instrumentalism") as their tools. Finally, one is ready for the final stage of testing the reasoned solution. If successful, the inquiry will result in "a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation at the close." In such a cleared-up situation, the original elements of the problem will be converted into a "unified whole."

The knowledge gained by a successful inquiry is expressed in propositions that are "warrantedly assertible." Dewey purposely avoided the word "true" in order to eliminate the false notion of "truth" as a metaphysical absolute. He used the word "truth" only to refer to those "processes of change so directed that they achieve an intended consummation."

Dewey's minimalist definition of truth flies in the face of the Western philosophy inherited from the Greeks, which is one long search for a larger truth. In Quest for Certainty (1929), for example, Dewey explains that "man has a fundamental urge to seek security"; and it is this "insecurity [that] generates the quest for certainty." The Greeks sought to overcome this insecurity by exalting pure intellect over practical issues. Knowledge became the office by which one "uncovers the antecedently real"—a conception that endured long after the Greeks.

In "Construction of the Good" from Quest for Certainty, Dewey explains how this Greek conception of knowledge and certainty led to a bifurcation between science and values, and he offers instead a way to reintegrate the two realities. After reviewing Western philosophy's decline, Dewey presents his main thesis concerning values:

Judgments about values are judgments about the conditions and the results of experienced objects; judgments about that which should regulate the formation of our desires, affections and enjoyments.

By making values a type of judgment—"value judgments"—Dewey puts values back into philosophy. The instrumental method used successfully in science can be used with values as well. Such value-inquiry begins with a problem—what ought I to do?—and then uses the instruments of concepts to lead to solutions—to value judgments. Such a value inquiry would require understanding the nature of an experienced object in order to know if that object will naturally and repeatedly yield satisfaction, that is, if it is capable of being valued. But like all judgments in science, value judgments too will never be final. Just as initial judgments about physical objects may later prove deceptive, so also our initial enjoyment of an object may later be regretted. This view removes values from the domain of absolute truth, on the one hand, but it also removes them from the subjective realm of mere emotion.