John Dewey's logical theory

by Delton Thomas Howard

Dewey next considers the relation of the evolutionary methods to empiricism. "Empiricism," he says, "is no more historic in character than is intuitionalism. Empiricism is concerned with the moral idea or belief as a grouping or association of various elementary feelings. It regards the idea simply as a complex state which is to be explained by resolving it into its elementary constituents. By its logic, both the complex and the elements are isolated from an historic context.... The empirical and the genetic methods thus imply a very different relationship between the moral state, idea, or belief, and objective reality.... The empirical theory holds that the idea arises as a reflex of some existing object or fact. Hence the test of its objectivity is the faithfulness with which it reproduces that object as copy. The genetic theory holds that the idea arises as a response, and that the test of its validity is found in its later career as manifested with reference to the needs of the situation that evoked it."[164]

Only a method that takes the world as a changing, historical thing, can deal with the adaptation of morality to new conditions. "Both empiricism and intuitionalism, though in very different ways, deny the continuity of the moralizing process. They set up timeless, and hence absolute and disconnected, ultimates; thereby they sever the problems and movements of the present from the past, rob the past, the sole object of calm, impartial, and genuinely objective study, of all instructing power, and leave our experience to form undirected, at the mercy of circumstance and arbitrariness, whether that of dogmatism or scepticism."[165]

In evaluating the article as a whole, it must be said that Dewey's study is not productive of definite results. The history of the past can undoubtedly offer to the student a mass of data that is interesting and instructive. The importance of this or that belief, or its value, can be gauged by the results which it is known to have produced. But when, in this day and age, the moralist sets out to find the principles which shall guide his own conduct, the history of morals is of no more importance than the observations of every day life, which reveal the consequences of conduct in the lives of men about him. But more particularly, it should be added, an estimate of present moral action depends, not upon truth uttered by the past, but upon truth discovered and interpreted by an intelligence which surveys the past and makes it meaningful. The past in itself is nothing; thought alone can create real history.

Another article, published by Dewey in the Philosophical Review in 1900, "Some Stages of Logical Thought," illustrates the employment of the genetic method in a more specific way.[166] In his introductory remarks, Dewey says: "I wish to show how a variety of modes of thinking, easily recognizable in the progress of both the race and the individual, may be identified and arranged as successive species of the relationship which doubting bears to assurance; as various ratios, so to speak, which the vigor of doubting bears to mere acquiescence. The presumption is that the function of questioning is one which has continually grown in intensity and range, that doubt is continually chased back, and, being cornered, fights more desperately, and thus clears the ground more thoroughly."[167] Dewey finds four stages of relationship between questioning and dogmatism: dogmatism, discussion, proof, and empirical science; and he seeks to show how each stage involves a higher degree of free inquiry. "Modern scientific procedure, as just set forth, seems to define the ideal or limit of this process. It is inquiry emancipated, universalized, whose sole aim and criterion is discovery, and hence it makes the terminus of our description. It is idle to conceal from ourselves, however, that this scientific procedure, as a practical undertaking, has not as yet reflected itself into any coherent and generally accepted theory of thinking...."[168]

It is not necessary to comment on Dewey's stages of thought. The similarity of this division to Comte's theological, metaphysical and scientific stages of explanation will be apparent. Dewey's remarks on the logic of the scientific stage, however, are interesting. "The simple fact of the case is," he says, "that there are at least three rival theories on the ground, each claiming to furnish the sole proper interpretation of the actual procedure of thought."[169] There is the Aristotelian logic, with its fixed forms; the empirical logic, which holds "that only particular facts are self-supporting, and that the authority allowed to general principles is derivative and second hand;"[170] and finally there is the transcendental logic, which claims, "by analysis of science and experience, to justify the conclusion that the universe itself is a construction of thought, giving evidence throughout of the pervasive and constitutive action of reason; and holds, consequently, that our logical processes are simply the reading off or coming to consciousness of the inherently rational structure already possessed by the universe in virtue of the presence within it of this pervasive and constitutive action of thought."[171]

None of these logics, Dewey finds, is capable of dealing with the actual procedure of science, because none of them treats thought as a doubt-inquiry process, but rather as something fixed and limited by conditions which determine its operations in advance. Dewey asks: "Does not an account or theory of thinking, basing itself on modern scientific procedure, demand a statement in which all the distinctions and terms of thought—judgment, concept, inference, subject, predicate and copula of judgment, etc. ad indefinitum—shall be interpreted simply and entirely as distinctive functions or divisions of labor within the doubt-inquiry process?"[172]

Seven years before, Dewey had been an ardent champion of the transcendental logic, on the ground that it was progressive, and he contrasted it most favorably with the formal logics which treat thought as a self-contained process. Now, however, he has a new insight. Logic must be reinterpreted in the light of the evolutionary or biological method. We shall see how this is accomplished in the next chapter.

To the student of the history of philosophy, Dewey's treatment of the genetic and historical methods must seem seriously inadequate. The idealist, moreover, will feel that Dewey should have taken note, in his criticism of the idealistic standpoint, of the fact that Hegelianism was from first to last a historical method; that the German idealists gave the impulse to modern historical research, and provoked a study of the historical method whose results are still felt. But in turning away from idealism, Dewey has no word of appreciation for this aspect of the Hegelian philosophy.

When the truth is boiled down, it appears that Dewey's historical method, in so far as he had one, was based on biological evolutionism. He had no interest in any other form of historical interpretation.