Essays in Experimental Logic

by John Dewey

III

If we exclude acting upon the idea, no conceivable amount or kind of intellectualistic procedure can confirm or refute an idea, or throw any light upon its validity. How does the non-pragmatic view consider that verification takes place? Does it suppose that we first look a long while at the facts and then a long time at the idea, until by some magical process the degree and kind of their agreement become visible? Unless there is some such conception as this, what conception of agreement is possible except the experimental or practical one? And if it be admitted that verification involves action, how can that action be relevant to the truth of an idea, unless the idea is itself already relevant to action? If by acting in accordance with the experimental definition of facts, viz., as obstacles and conditions, and the experimental definition of the end or intent, viz., as plan and method of action, a harmonized situation effectually presents itself, we have the adequate and the only conceivable verification of the intellectual factors. If the action indicated be carried out and the disordered or disturbed situation persists, then we have not merely confuted the tentative positions of intelligence, but we have in the very process of acting introduced new data and eliminated some of the old ones, and thus afforded an opportunity for the resurvey of the facts and the revision of the plan of action. By acting faithfully upon an inadequate reflective presentation, we have at least secured the elements for its improvement. This, of course, gives no absolute guaranty that the reflection will at any time be so performed as to prove its validity in fact. But the self-rectification of intellectual content through acting upon it in good faith is the "absolute" of knowledge, loyalty to which is the religion of intellect.

The intellectual definition or delimitation assigned to the "given" is thus as tentative and experimental as that ascribed to the idea. In form both are categorical, and in content both are hypothetical. Facts really exist just as facts, and meanings exist as meanings. One is no more superfluous, more subjective, or less necessitated than the other. In and of themselves as existences both are equally realistic and compulsive. But on the basis of existence, there is no element in either which may be strictly described as intellectual or cognitional. There is only a practical situation in its brute and unrationalized form. What is uncertain about the facts as given at any moment is whether the right exclusions and selections have been made. Since that is a question which can be decided finally only by the experimental issue, this ascription of character is itself tentative and experimental. If it works, the characterization and delineation are found to be proper ones; but every admission prior to inquiry, of unquestioned, categorical, rigid objectivity, compromises the probability that it will work. The character assigned to the datum must be taken as hypothetically as possible in order to preserve the elasticity needed for easy and prompt reconsideration. Any other procedure virtually insists that all facts and details anywhere happening to exist and happening to present themselves (all being equally real) must all be given equal status and equal weight, and that their outer ramifications and internal complexities must be indefinitely followed up. The worthlessness of this sheer accumulation of realities, its total irrelevancy, the lack of any way of judging the significance of the accumulations, are good proofs of the fallacy of any theory which ascribes objective logical content to facts wholly apart from the needs and possibilities of a situation.

The more stubbornly one maintains the full reality of either his facts or his ideas, just as they stand, the more accidental is the discovery of relevantly significant facts and of valid ideas—the more accidental, the less rational, is the issue of the knowledge situation. Due progress is reasonably probable in just the degree in which the meaning, categorical in its existing imperativeness, and the fact, equally categorical in its brute coerciveness, are assigned only a provisional and tentative nature with reference to control of the situation. That this surrender of a rigid and final character for the content of knowledge on the sides both of fact and of meaning, in favor of experimental and functioning estimations, is precisely the change which has marked the development of modern from mediaeval and Greek science, seems undoubted. To learn the lesson one has only to contrast the rigidity of phenomena and conceptions in Greek thought (Platonic ideas, Aristotelian forms) with the modern experimental selection and determining of facts and experimental employment of hypotheses. The former have ceased to be ultimate realities of a nondescript sort and have become provisional data; the latter have ceased to be eternal meanings and have become working theories. The fruitful application of mathematics and the evolution of a technique of experimental inquiry have coincided with this change. That realities exist independently of their use as intellectual data, and that meanings exist apart from their utilization as hypotheses, are the permanent truths of Greek realism as against the exaggerated subjectivism of modern philosophy; but the conception that this existence is to be defined in the same way as are contents of knowledge, so that perfect being is object of perfect knowledge and imperfect being object of imperfect knowledge, is the fallacy which Greek thought projected into modern. Science has advanced in its methods in just the degree in which it has ceased to assume that prior realities and prior meanings retain fixedly and finally, when entering into reflective situations, the characters they had prior to this entrance, and in which it has realized that their very presence within the knowledge situation signifies that they have to be redefined and revalued from the standpoint of the new situation.