[211] Decennial Publication of the University of Chicago, First Series, Vol. III, p. 127.
CHAPTER VII THE POLEMICAL PERIOD
After the publication of the Studies in Logical Theory, Dewey entered upon what may be called the polemical period of his career. He joined forces with James and Schiller in the promotion of the new movement called 'Pragmatism.' The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, instituted at Columbia University in 1904, the same year in which Dewey accepted a professorship in that institution, became a convenient medium for the expression of his views, and every volume of this periodical will be found to contain notes, discussions, and articles by Dewey and his followers, bearing on current controversy. He also published many articles in other journals, technical and popular. In 1910, the most important of these essays were collected into a volume, published under the title, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and Other Essays. For purposes of discussion, these essays may be divided into two classes: those of a more constructive character, setting forth Dewey's own standpoint, and those which are mainly polemical, directed against opposing standpoints, chiefly the idealistic. The constructive writings will be given first consideration.
The essay on "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism," first published in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, in July, 1905, and later reprinted in the volume of collected essays, offers a convenient point of departure. Dewey observes that many of the difficulties in current controversy can be traced to presuppositions tacitly held by thinkers as to what experience means. Dewey attempts to make his own presuppositions explicit, with the object of clearing up this confusion.
"Immediate empiricism," he says, "postulates that things—anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the term 'thing'—are what they are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being."[212] The idealists, on the contrary, hold "that things (or, ultimately, Reality, Being) are only and just what they are known to be or that things are, or Reality is, what it is for a conscious knower—whether the knower be conceived primarily as a perceiver or as a thinker being a further, and secondary, question. This is the root-paralogism of all idealisms, whether subjective or objective, psychological or epistemological."[213] Knowing is merely one mode of experiencing, and things may be experienced in other ways, as, for instance, aesthetically, morally, technologically, or economically. This follows Dewey's familiar division of the processes of experience into separate 'functions' or activities. It becomes the duty of the philosopher, following this scheme, to find out "what sort of an experience knowing is—or, concretely how things are experienced when they are experienced as known things."[214]
Dewey fails, in this essay, to draw a distinction which is highly important, between knowledge as awareness and knowledge as reflection. This results in some confusion. For the present, he is concerned with knowledge as awareness. He employs an illustration to make his meaning clear; the experience of fright at a noise, which turns out, when examined and known, to be the tapping of a window shade. What is originally experienced is a frightful noise. If, after examination, the 'frightfulness' is classified as 'psychical,' while the 'real' fact is said to be harmless, there is no warrant for reading this distinction back into the original experience. The argument is directed against that mode of explaining the difference between the psychical and the physical which employs a subjective mind or 'knower' as the container of the merely subjective aspects of reality. Dewey would hold that mind, used in this sense, is a fiction, having a small explanatory value, and creating more problems than it solves. The difference between psychical and physical is relative, not absolute. The frightful noise first heard was neither psychical nor physical; it was what it was experienced as, and the experience contained no such distinction, nor did it contain a 'knower.' The noise as known, after the intervention of an act of judgment, contained these elements (except the 'knower'), but the thing is not merely what it is known as. There is no warrant for reading the distinctions made by judgment back into a situation where judgment was not operative. The original fact was precisely what it was experienced as.
Dewey's purpose, though not well stated, seems to be the complete rejection of the notion of knowledge as awareness, or of the subjective knower. He discovers at the same time an opportunity to substantiate his own descriptive account of knowing (or reflection) as an occasional function. The two enterprises, however, should be kept distinct. Granting that the subjective knower of the older epistemology should be dismissed from philosophy, it does not follow that Dewey's special interpretation of the function of reflection is the only substitute.
The principle of immediate empiricism, Dewey says, furnishes no positive truth. It is simply a method. Not a single philosophical proposition can be deduced from it. The application of the method is indicated in the following proposition: "If you wish to find out what subjective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic, psychic, cause, substance, purpose, activity, evil, being, quality—any philosophic term, in short—means, go to experience and see what the thing is experienced as."[215] This recipe cannot be taken literally. Dewey probably means that each concept has, or should have, a positive empirical reference, and is significant only in that reference. He is a firm believer, however, in the descriptive method. In a note, he remarks that he would employ in philosophy "the direct descriptive method that has now made its way in all the natural sciences, with such modifications, of course, as the subject itself entails."[216] This remark calls for closer examination than can be made here. It may be said in passing, however, that 'scientific description' is by no means so simple a method of procedure as Dewey would seem to indicate. 'Scientific description,' as actually employed, is a highly elaborated and specialized method of dealing with experience. The whole subject, indeed, is involved, and requires cautious treatment. Dewey's somewhat ingenuous hope, that the identification of his method with the methods of science will add to its impressiveness, is in danger, unfortunately, of being vitiated through the suspicion that he is, after all, not in close touch with the methods of science.