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Decrassifying Dewey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Arthur F. Bentley
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Extract

Most discussions of Dewey's Logic evade what I take to be its main characteristic. This is its crass display of our intellectual activity as a going process—as living inquiry—literally, biologically, as life. It is the blunt, forthright treatment of even our most formal logical procedures as events occurring within that new world of knowledge that Darwin opened up and that Peirce sketched in his fallibilism, his pragmaticism, and his late-life efforts to attain a functional logic. Lacking are the trailing clouds of logical and philosophical glory; present is only the bare body of inquiry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , April 1941 , pp. 147 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1941

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References

1 If recollection is correct, the three-day, many-sessioned celebration of Dewey's eightieth birthday in New York last year discussed all possible philosophical by-paths, but left wholly untouched the kernel of the Logic, which is his central life-work.

2 Logic, The theory of Inquiry (1938), pp. 21, 57, 106, 159, 525, 530. As early as 1896 Dewey displayed the “organic unity” of behavior as over against either “mentalist” or “reflex arc” stresses (Psychol. Rev., 3, 1896, p. 358), at the same time forecasting an application to “judgment” (Ibid, p. 370). In 1908 (J. Phil., Psychol., & Sci, Meth., 5, pp. 375 ff.) he displayed the influences which lead men without proper justification to treat “ideas” as “private” or “personal.” In Experience and Nature, 1925, p. 75, he made a plea for an interdict for a generation upon the use of words, mind, matter, and consciousness as nouns. Most philosophers regard such views as fancy-dress to be put on and off upon occasion. For Dewey they are his working clothes.

3 Logic, p. 55. This compact terminology was a late adoption: the fruit of fifty years of logical inquiry. It is so late that it is not rigorously employed (particularly in the case of “relation”) even in the earlier-written chapters of the Logic itself. It is, however, present in attitude and approach, if not in express phrasing, throughout the entire book, and the discrepancies of phrase can readily be allowed for.

4 Whereas Dewey's terms all indicate processes in time and space, and the same is true of Sisson's first term, probably of his third, and possibly of his fourth, it is precisely the restoration of the old timeless-spaceless mental essence at which his second term, Correspondence, is aimed. The word “correspondence” is directly reminiscent of the old “idea” or “image” in the private stream of consciousness reflecting “outer realities” with which it can never make actual contact.