Essays in Experimental Logic

by John Dewey

In all this, there is no difference of kind between the methods of science and those of the plain man. The difference is the greater control by science of the statement of the problem, and of the selection and use of relevant material, both sensible and conceptual. The two are related to each other just as the hit-or-miss, trial-and-error inventions of uncivilized man stand to the deliberate and consecutively persistent efforts of a modern inventor to produce a certain complicated device for doing a comprehensive piece of work. Neither the plain man nor the scientific inquirer is aware, as he engages in his reflective activity, of any transition from one sphere of existence to another. He knows no two fixed worlds—reality on one side and mere subjective ideas on the other; he is aware of no gulf to cross. He assumes uninterrupted, free, and fluid passage from ordinary experience to abstract thinking, from thought to fact, from things to theories and back again. Observation passes into development of hypothesis; deductive methods pass into use in description of the particular; inference passes into action, all with no sense of difficulty save those found in the particular task in question. The fundamental assumption is continuity.

This does not mean that fact is confused with idea, or observed datum with voluntary hypothesis, theory with doing, any more than a traveler confuses land and water when he journeys from one to the other. It simply means that each is placed and used with reference to service rendered the other, and with reference to the future use of the other.

Only the epistemological spectator of traditional controversies is aware of the fact that the everyday man and the scientific man in this free and easy intercourse are rashly assuming the right to glide over a cleft in the very structure of reality. This fact raises a query not favorable to the epistemologist. Why is it that the scientific man, who is constantly plying his venturous traffic of exchange of facts for ideas, of theories for laws, of real things for hypotheses, should be so wholly unaware of the radical and generic (as distinct from specific) difficulty of the undertakings in which he is engaged? We thus come afresh to our inquiry: Does not the epistemological logician unwittingly transfer the specific difficulty which always faces the scientific man—the difficulty in detail of correct and adequate translation back and forth of this set of facts and this group of reflective consideration—into a totally different problem of the wholesale relation of thought at large to reality in general? If such be the case, it is clear that the very way in which the epistemological type of logic states the problem of thinking, in relation both to empirical antecedents and to objective truth, makes that problem insoluble. Working terms, terms which as working are flexible and historic, relative and methodological, are transformed into absolute, fixed, and predetermined properties of being.

We come a little closer to the problem when we recognize that every scientific inquiry passes historically through at least four stages. (a) The first of these stages is, if I may be allowed the bull, that in which scientific inquiry does not take place at all, because no problem or difficulty in the quality of the experience presents itself to provoke reflection. We have only to cast our eye back from the existing status of any science, or back from the status of any particular topic in any science, to discover a time when no reflective or critical thinking busied itself with the matter—when the facts and relations were taken for granted and thus were lost and absorbed in the net meaning which accrued from the experience. (b) After the dawning of the problem there comes a period of occupation with relatively crude and unorganized facts—hunting for, locating, and collecting raw material. This is the empiric stage, which no existing science, however proud in its attained rationality, can disavow as its own progenitor. (c) Then there is also a speculative stage: a period of guessing, of making hypotheses, of framing ideas which later on are labeled and condemned as only ideas. There is a period of distinction-making and classification-making which later on is regarded as only mentally gymnastic in character. And no science, however proud in its present security of experimental assurance, can disavow a scholastic ancestor. (d) Finally, there comes a period of fruitful interaction between the mere ideas and the mere facts: a period when observation is determined by experimental conditions depending upon the use of certain guiding conceptions; when reflection is directed and checked at every point by the use of experimental data, and by the necessity of finding such a form for itself as will enable it to serve in a deduction leading to evolution of new meanings, and ultimately to experimental inquiry which brings to light new facts. In the emerging of a more orderly and significant region of fact, and of a more coherent and self-luminous system of meaning, we have the natural limit of evolution of the logic of a given science.

But consider what has happened in this historic record. Unanalyzed experience has broken up into distinctions of facts and ideas; the factual side has been developed by indefinite and almost miscellaneous descriptions and cumulative listings; the conceptual side has been developed by unchecked and speculative elaboration of definitions, classifications, etc. Then there has been a relegation of accepted meanings to the limbo of mere ideas; there has been a passage of some of the accepted facts into the region of mere hypothesis and opinion. Conversely, there has been a continued issuing of ideas from the region of hypotheses and theories into that of facts, of accepted objective and meaningful objects. Out of a world of only seeming facts, and of only doubtful ideas, there emerges a world continually growing in definiteness, order, and luminosity.

This progress, verified in every record of science, is an absolute monstrosity from the standpoint of the epistemology which assumes a thought in general, on one side, and a reality in general, on the other. The reason that it does not present itself as such a monster and miracle to those actually concerned with it is because continuity of reference and of use controls all diversities in the modes of existence specified and the types of significance assigned. The distinction of meaning and fact is treated in the growth of a science, or of any particular scientific problem, as an induced and intentional practical division of labor; as assignments of relative position with reference to performance of a task; as deliberate distribution of forces at command for their more economic use. The absorption of bald fact and hypothetical idea into the formation of a single world of scientific apprehension and comprehension is but the successful achieving of the aim on account of which the distinctions in question were instituted.

Thus we come back to the problem of logical theory. To take the distinctions of thought and fact, etc., as ontological, as inherently fixed in the makeup of the structure of being, results in treating the actual technique of scientific inquiry and scientific control as a mere subsidiary topic—ultimately of only utilitarian worth. It also states the terms upon which thought and being transact business in a way so totally alien to concrete experience that it creates a problem which can be discussed only in terms of itself—not in terms of the conduct of life. As against this, the logic which aligns itself with the origin and employ of reflective thought in everyday life and critical science follows the natural history of thinking as a life-process having its own generating antecedents and stimuli, its own states and career, and its own specific objective or limit.

This point of view makes it possible for logical theory to come to terms with psychology. When logic is considered as having to do with the wholesale activity of thought per se, the question of the historic process by which this or that particular thought came to be, of how its object happens to present itself as sensory, or perceptual, or conceptual, is quite irrelevant. These things are mere temporal accidents. The psychologist (not lifting his gaze from the realm of the changeable) may find in them matters of interest. His whole industry is just with natural history—to trace events as they mutually excite and inhibit one another. But the logician, we are told, has a deeper problem and an outlook of more unbounded horizon. He deals with the question of the eternal nature of thought and its eternal validity in relation to an eternal reality. He is concerned, not with genesis, but with value, not with a historic cycle, but with absolute entities and relations.

Still the query haunts us: Is this so in truth? Or has the logician of a certain type arbitrarily made it so by taking his terms apart from reference to the specific occasions in which they arise and situations in which they function? If the latter, then the very denial of historic relationship, the denial of the significance of historic method, is indicative of the unreal character of his own abstraction. It means in effect that the affairs under consideration have been isolated from the conditions in which alone they have determinable meaning and assignable worth. It is astonishing that, in the face of the advance of the evolutionary method in natural science, any logician can persist in the assertion of a rigid difference between the problem of origin and of nature; between genesis and analysis; between history and validity. Such assertion simply reiterates as final a distinction which grew up and had meaning in pre-evolutionary science. It asserts, against the most marked advance which scientific method has yet made, a survival of a crude period of logical scientific procedure. We have no choice save either to conceive of thinking as a response to a specific stimulus, or else to regard it as something "in itself," having just in and of itself certain traits, elements, and laws. If we give up the last view, we must take the former. In this case it will still possess distinctive traits, but they will be traits of a specific response to a specific stimulus.

The significance of the evolutionary method in biology and social history is that every distinct organ, structure, or formation, every grouping of cells or elements, is to be treated as an instrument of adjustment or adaptation to a particular environing situation. Its meaning, its character, its force, is known when, and only when, it is considered as an arrangement for meeting the conditions involved in some specific situation. This analysis is carried out by tracing successive stages of development—by endeavoring to locate the particular situation in which each structure has its origin, and by tracing the successive modifications through which, in response to changing media, it has reached its present conformation.[12] To persist in condemning natural history from the standpoint of what natural history meant before it identified itself with an evolutionary process is not so much to exclude the natural-history standpoint from philosophic consideration as it is to evince ignorance of what it signifies.