Dewey employs the descriptive method chiefly as a means for substantiating his special interpretation of the judgment process. His use of the method in this connection is well illustrated by an article called "The Experimental Theory of Knowledge"[217] (1906), in which he attempts "to find out what sort of an experience knowing is" through an appeal to immediate experience. "It should be possible," he says, "to discern and describe a knowing as one identifies any object, concern, or event.... What we want is just something which takes itself as knowledge, rightly or wrongly."[218] The difficulty lies not in finding a case of knowing, but in describing it when found. Dewey selects a case to be described, and, as usual, chooses a simple one.
"This means," he says, "a specific case, a sample.... Our recourse is to an example so simple, so much on its face as to be as innocent as may be of assumptions.... Let us suppose a smell, just a floating odor."[219] The level at which this illustration is taken is significant. Is it possible to suppose that anything so complex, varied, myriad-sided as that something we call knowledge, can be discovered and described within the limits of so simple an instance?
Dewey employs the smell in three situations, the first representing the 'non-cognitional,' the second the 'cognitive,' and the third the genuinely 'cognitional' situation. The first, or 'non-cognitional' situation is described as follows: "But, let us say, the smell is not the smell of the rose; the resulting change of the organism is not a sense of walking and reaching; the delicious finale is not the fulfilment of the movement, and, through that, of the original smell; 'is not,' in each case meaning is 'not experienced as' such. We may take, in short, these experiences in a brutely serial fashion. The smell, S, is replaced (and displaced) by a felt movement, K, this is replaced by the gratification, G. Viewed from without, as we are now regarding it, there is S-K-G. But from within, for itself, it is now S, now K, now G, and so on to the end of the chapter. Nowhere is there looking before and after; memory and anticipation are not born. Such an experience neither is, in whole or in part, a knowledge, nor does it exercise a cognitive function."[220]
It will be seen at once that this is not a description of an actual human experience, but a schematic story designed to illustrate a comparatively simple point. In this situation the person concerned does not deliberately and consciously recognize the smell as the smell of a rose; he is not aware of any symbolic character in the smell, it does not enter as a middle term into a process of inference. In such a situation, Dewey believes, it would be wrong to read into the smell a cognitive property which it does not, as experienced, possess.
In the second, or 'cognitive' situation, the smell as originally experienced does not involve the function of knowing, but turns out after the event, as reflected upon, to have had a significance. "In saying that the smell is finally experienced as meaning gratification ... we retrospectively attribute intellectual force and function to the smell—and this is what is signified by 'cognitive.' Yet the smell is not cognitional, because it did not knowingly intend to mean this; but is found, after the event, to have meant it."[221] The moral is, as usual, that the findings of reflection must not be read back into the former unreflective experience.
In the truly 'cognitional' experience the smell is then and there experienced as meaning or symbolizing the rose. "An experience is a knowledge, if in its quale there is an experienced distinction and connection of two elements of the following sort: one means or intends the presence of the other in the same fashion in which itself is already present, while the other is that which, while not present in the same fashion, must become so present if the meaning or intention of its companion or yoke-fellow is to be fulfilled through the operation it sets up."[222] In the 'cognitional' situation, the smell is then and there experienced as signifying the presence of a rose in the vicinity, and the rose must be experienced as a present fact, before the meaning of the smell is completely fulfilled and verified.
It will be seen at once that this description of knowing follows the lines laid down by James in his chapter on "Reasoning" in the Principles of Psychology. In the process of reasoning the situation is analyzed; some particular feature of it is abstracted and made the middle term in an inference. The smell, as thus abstracted, is said to have the function of knowing, or meaning, the rose whose reality it evidences.
Dewey's treatment of knowledge, however, is far too simple. The function of meaning, symbolizing, or 'pointing' does not reside in the abstracted element as such; for the context in which the judgment occurs determines the choosing of the 'middle term,' as well as the direction in which it shall point. The situation as a whole has a rationality which resides in the distinctions, identities, phases of emphasis, and discriminations of the total experience. Rationality expresses itself in the organized system of experience, not in particular elements and their 'pointings.' Taken in this sense, rationality is present in all experience. The smell, in Dewey's first situation, is not 'cognitional' because the situation as a whole does not permit it to be, if such an expression may be used. The intellectual drift of the moment drives the smell away from the centre of attention at one time, just as at another it selects it to serve as an element in judgment. It is only with reference to a system of some kind that things can be regarded as symbols at all. Things do not represent one another at haphazard, but definitely and concretely; they imply an organization of elements having mutual implications. One thing implies another because both are elements in a whole which determines their mutual reference. This organization is present in all experience, not in the form of 'established habits,' but in the form of will and purpose.
In the course of his further discussion, which need not be followed in detail, Dewey passes on to a consideration of truth. Truth is concerned with the worth or validity of ideas. But, before their validity can be determined, there must be a 'cognitional' experience of the type described above. "Before the category of confirmation or refutation can be introduced, there must be something which means to mean something and which therefore can be guaranteed or nullified by the issue."[223] Ideas, or meanings, as directly experienced, are neither true nor false, but are made so by the results in which they issue. Even then, the outcome must be reflected upon, before they can be designated true or false. "Truth and falsity present themselves as significant facts only in situations in which specific meanings and their already experienced fulfilments and non-fulfilments are intentionally compared and contrasted with reference to the question of the worth, as to reliability of meaning, of the given meaning or class of meanings."[224] This makes the whole problem of truth a relatively simple affair. The symbol and its 'pointing' are taken as a single, objective fact, to be tested, and, if verified, labelled 'true.' Meanings, after all, are not so simple as this scheme would imply.
As the intellectual life of man is more subtle and universal than Dewey represents it to be, so is truth, as that which thought seeks to establish, something deeper-lying and more comprehensive. Ideas are not simple and isolated facts; their truth is not strictly their own, but is reflected into them from the objective order to which they pertain. The possibility of making observations and experiments, and of having ideas, rests upon the presence in and through experience of that directing influence which we call valid knowledge, or truth. An idea, to be true, must fit in with this general body of truth. Not correspondence with its single object, but correspondence with the whole organized body of knowledge, is the test of the truth of an idea. The attempt to describe knowledge as a particular occurrence, fact, or function, is foredoomed to failure. It should be noted also that Dewey's 'description,' throughout this essay, is anything but a direct, empirical examination of thought. He presents a schematized picture of reality which, like an engineer's diagram, leaves out the cloying details of the object it is supposed to represent.