John Dewey's logical theory

by Delton Thomas Howard

From the study of the practical judgment, Dewey passes on to a consideration of judgments of value, proposing to maintain that "value judgments are a species of practical judgments."[263] There will be a distinct gain for moral and economic theory, he believes, in treating value as concerned with acts necessary to complete a given need-situation. There is no obvious reason why Dewey should pass to the pragmatic theory of value through the medium of the practical judgment, since it could be directly considered on its own account. At any rate, the discussion of value judgments which follows must stand on its own merits; it has no vital relation to what precedes.

It is, as usual, the psychological characteristics of the value judgment that attract Dewey's attention. Any process of judgment, according to his analysis, deals with a specific subject-matter, not from the standpoint of any objective quality it may possess, but with reference to its functional capacity. "Relative, or comparative, durability, cheapness, suitability, style, esthetic attractiveness [e. g., in a suit of clothes] constitute value traits. They are traits of objects not per se, but as entering into a possible and foreseen completing of the situation. Their value is their force in precisely this function."[264]

Attention should not be distracted from this interpretation of value, Dewey warns, through confusing the value sought with the price or market value of the goods. Price values, like the qualities and patterns of the goods, are data which must be considered in making the judgment, but they are not the values which the judgment seeks. The value to be determined is here, is specific, and must be established by reference to the specific or psychological situation as it presents itself.

It is true, as Dewey says, that in judgment a value is being established which has not been determined previously. But it must be insisted that this value is not estimated by reference to the specific situation in its limited aspects. The weight of the past bears against the moment; the act of judgment bases itself upon knowledge objective and substantial; the test of the value of the thing is its place and function, not in the here and now, but in the whole system of experience. Dewey has excluded the reference of the thing to objective, organized reality, by specifying that its value shall be decided upon with reference to a specific situation. This limitation of the judgment situation is imposed upon it from without, and from a special point of view,—that of functional psychology. Every object and every situation has its quality of uniqueness and particularity; but the judgment, as judgment, is not concerned with this aspect of things. Judgment seizes upon the generic aspect of objects; this kind of a suit of clothes is the kind that is appropriate to this type of situation. The movement of judgment is objective and universal, not subjective and psychological.

Dewey finds one alternative especially opposed to his 'specific' judgment of value; that is, the proposition that evaluation involves a comparison of the present object with some fixed standard. When the fixed standard is investigated, it is found to depend on something else, and this on something else again in an infinite regress. Finally, the Summum Bonum, as the absolute end term of such a regressus, turns out to be a fiction. Dewey is quite right in maintaining that value is not something eternally fixed. This does not, however, remove the possibility of 'real' value, as opposed to mere expediency.

Value as established, Dewey continues, must be taken into consideration in making a value judgment. At the same time, it will not do to accept the established value from mere force of habit. Ultimately, he finds, all genuine valuation implies a degree of revaluation. "To many," he observes, "it will appear to be a survival of an idealistic epistemology,"[265] presumably because it implies a real change in reality, as opposed to a fixed and rigid order of external reality. But practical judgments, Dewey says, as having reference to proposed acts, necessarily look toward some proposed change which the act is to effect. It is not in an epistemological, but in a practical sense, that judgment involves a change in values.

The outcome of the discussion so far, Dewey believes, is to show, first of all, that "the passage of a proposition into action is not a miracle, but the realization of its own character—its own meaning as logical,"[266] and, in the second place, to suggest that all judgments, not merely practical ones, may have their import in reference to some difference to be brought about through action.

In the third part of the essay, Dewey's discussion leads him back to sense perceptions as forms of practical judgment. There is no doubt, in his mind, that many perceptions do have an import for action. Not merely sign-posts, and familiar symbols of the kind, but many perceptions lacking this obvious reference, have a significance for conduct. It must not, of course, be supposed that all perception, at any one time, has cognitive properties; for some of the perceptions have esthetic, and other non-cognitive properties. Only certain elements of a situation have the function of cognition.

Dewey goes on to say that care must be taken in the use made of these sign-functions in connection with inference. "There is a great difference between saying that the perception of a shape affords an indication of how to act and saying that the perception of shape is itself an inference."[267] No judgment, Dewey seems to imply, is involved in responding to the motor cue furnished by a familiar object. Again, the common idea that present perception consists of sensations as immediate, plus inferred images, implies that every perception involves inference. But the merging of sensations and images in perception can be explained naturally, by the fusion of nervous processes, and no supplementary (transcendental) act of mind is needed to explain the integrity of experience.

The tendency to take perception as the object of knowledge, Dewey continues, instead of as simply cognitive, a term in knowledge, is due to two chief causes. The first is that in practical judgments the pointing of the thing towards action is so universal a trait as to be overlooked, and the second is that signs, because of their importance, become objects of study on their own account, and in this condition cease to function directly as cognitive. Dewey means, apparently, that because the cognitive aspect of things is never attended to except when they are 'known,' or treated as objects of judgment, there is a tendency to suppose that they always have the character that pertains to them as 'known' things.