Essays in Experimental Logic

by John Dewey

So far, however, there is no accomplished knowledge, but only knowledge coming to be—learning, in the classic Greek conception. Thinking gets no farther, as thinking, than a statement of elements constituting the difficulty at hand and a statement—a propounding, a proposition—of a method for resolving them. In fixing the framework of every reflective situation, this state of affairs also determines the further step which is needed if there is to be knowledge—knowledge in the eulogistic sense, as distinct from opinion, dogma, and guesswork, or from what casually passes current as knowledge. Overt action is demanded if the worth or validity of the reflective considerations is to be determined. Otherwise, we have, at most, only a hypothesis that the conditions of the difficulty are such and such, and that the way to go at them so as to get over or through them is thus and so. This way must be tried in action; it must be applied, physically, in the situation. By finding out what then happens, we test our intellectual findings—our logical terms or projected metes and bounds. If the required reorganization is effected, they are confirmed, and reflection (on that topic) ceases; if not, there is frustration, and inquiry continues. That all knowledge, as issuing from reflection, is experimental (in the literal physical sense of experimental) is then a constituent proposition of this doctrine.

Upon this view, thinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be. The reason it is not an armchair thing is that it is not an event going on exclusively within the cortex or the cortex and vocal organs. It involves the explorations by which relevant data are procured and the physical analyses by which they are refined and made precise; it comprises the readings by which information is got hold of, the words which are experimented with, and the calculations by which the significance of entertained conceptions or hypotheses is elaborated. Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes in the brain. Since these physical operations (including the cerebral events) and equipments are a part of thinking, thinking is mental, not because of a peculiar stuff which enters into it or of peculiar non-natural activities which constitute it, but because of what physical acts and appliances do: the distinctive purpose for which they are employed and the distinctive results which they accomplish.

That reflection terminates, through a definitive overt act,[3] in another non-reflectional situation, within which incompatible responses may again in time be aroused, and so another problem in reflection be set, goes without saying. Certain things about this situation, however, do not at the present time speak for themselves and need to be set forth. Let me in the first place call attention to an ambiguity in the term "knowledge." The statement that all knowledge involves reflection—or, more concretely, that it denotes an inference from evidence—gives offense to many; it seems a departure from fact as well as a wilful limitation of the word "knowledge." I have in this Introduction endeavored to mitigate the obnoxiousness of the doctrine by referring to "knowledge which is intellectual or logical in character." Lest this expression be regarded as a futile evasion of a real issue, I shall now be more explicit. (1) It may well be admitted that there is a real sense in which knowledge (as distinct from thinking or inquiring with a guess attached) does not come into existence till thinking has terminated in the experimental act which fulfils the specifications set forth in thinking. But what is also true is that the object thus determined is an object of knowledge only because of the thinking which has preceded it and to which it sets a happy term. To run against a hard and painful stone is not of itself, I should say, an act of knowing; but if running into a hard and painful thing is an outcome predicted after inspection of data and elaboration of a hypothesis, then the hardness and the painful bruise which define the thing as a stone also constitute it emphatically an object of knowledge. In short, the object of knowledge in the strict sense is its objective; and this objective is not constituted till it is reached. Now this conclusion—as the word denotes—is thinking brought to a close, done with. If the reader does not find this statement satisfactory, he may, pending further discussion, at least recognize that the doctrine set forth has no difficulty in connecting knowledge with inference, and at the same time admitting that knowledge in the emphatic sense does not exist till inference has ceased. Seen from this point of view, so-called immediate knowledge or simple apprehension or acquaintance-knowledge represents a critical skill, a certainty of response which has accrued in consequence of reflection. A like sureness of footing apart from prior investigations and testings is found in instinct and habit. I do not deny that these may be better than knowing, but I see no reason for complicating an already too confused situation by giving them the name "knowledge" with its usual intellectual implications. From this point of view, the subject-matter of knowledge is precisely that which we do not think of, or mentally refer to in any way, being that which is taken as matter of course, but it is nevertheless knowledge in virtue of the inquiry which has led up to it.

(2) Definiteness, depth, and variety of meaning attach to the objects of an experience just in the degree in which they have been previously thought about, even when present in an experience in which they do not evoke inferential procedures at all. Such terms as "meaning," "significance," "value," have a double sense. Sometimes they mean a function: the office of one thing representing another, or pointing to it as implied; the operation, in short, of serving as sign. In the word "symbol" this meaning is practically exhaustive. But the terms also sometimes mean an inherent quality, a quality intrinsically characterizing the thing experienced and making it worth while. The word "sense," as in the phrase "sense of a thing" (and non-sense) is devoted to this use as definitely as are the words "sign" and "symbol" to the other. In such a pair as "import" and "importance," the first tends to select the reference to another thing while the second names an intrinsic content. In reflection, the extrinsic reference is always primary. The height of the mercury means rain; the color of the flame means sodium; the form of the curve means factors distributed accidentally. In the situation which follows upon reflection, meanings are intrinsic; they have no instrumental or subservient office, because they have no office at all. They are as much qualities of the objects in the situation as are red and black, hard and soft, square and round. And every reflective experience adds new shades of such intrinsic qualifications. In other words, while reflective knowing is instrumental to gaining control in a troubled situation (and thus has a practical or utilitarian force), it is also instrumental to the enrichment of the immediate significance of subsequent experiences. And it may well be that this by-product, this gift of the gods, is incomparably more valuable for living a life than is the primary and intended result of control, essential as is that control to having a life to live. Words are treacherous in this field; there are no accepted criteria for assigning or measuring their meanings; but if one use the term "consciousness" to denote immediate values of objects, then it is certainly true that "consciousness is a lyric cry even in the midst of business." But it is equally true that if someone else understands by consciousness the function of effective reflection, then consciousness is a business—even in the midst of writing or singing lyrics. But the statement remains inadequate until we add that knowing as a business, inquiry and invention as enterprises, as practical acts, become themselves charged with the meaning of what they accomplish as their own immediate quality. There exists no disjunction between aesthetic qualities which are final yet idle, and acts which are practical or instrumental. The latter have their own delights and sorrows.

III

Speaking, then, from the standpoint of temporal order, we find reflection, or thought, occupying an intermediate and reconstructive position. It comes between a temporally prior situation (an organized interaction of factors) of active and appreciative experience, wherein some of the factors have become discordant and incompatible, and a later situation, which has been constituted out of the first situation by means of acting on the findings of reflective inquiry. This final situation therefore has a richness of meaning, as well as a controlled character lacking to its original. By it is fixed the logical validity or intellectual force of the terms and relations distinguished by reflection. Owing to the continuity of experience (the overlapping and recurrence of like problems), these logical fixations become of the greatest assistance to subsequent inquiries; they are its working means. In such further uses, they get further tested, defined, and elaborated, until the vast and refined systems of the technical objects and formulae of the sciences come into existence—a point to which we shall return later.

Owing to circumstances upon which it is unnecessary to dwell, the position thus sketched was not developed primarily upon its own independent account, but rather in the course of a criticism of another type of logic, the idealistic logic found in Lotze. It is obvious that the theory in question has critical bearings. According to it, reflection in its distinctions and processes can be understood only when placed in its intermediate pivotal temporal position—as a process of control, through reorganization, of material alogical in character. It intimates that thinking would not exist, and hence knowledge would not be found, in a world which presented no troubles or where there are no "problems of evil"; and on the other hand that a reflective method is the only sure way of dealing with these troubles. It intimates that while the results of reflection, because of the continuity of experience, may be of wider scope than the situation which calls out a particular inquiry and invention, reflection itself is always specific in origin and aim; it always has something special to cope with. For troubles are concretely specific. It intimates also that thinking and reflective knowledge are never an end-all, never their own purpose nor justification, but that they pass naturally into a more direct and vital type of experience, whether technological or appreciative or social. This doctrine implies, moreover, that logical theory in its usual sense is essentially a descriptive study; that it is an account of the processes and tools which have actually been found effective in inquiry, comprising in the term "inquiry" both deliberate discovery and deliberate invention.

Since the doctrine was propounded in an intellectual environment where such statements were not commonplaces, where in fact a logic was reigning which challenged these convictions at every point, it is not surprising that it was put forth with a controversial coloring, being directed particularly at the dominant idealistic logic. The point of contact and hence the point of conflict between the logic set forth and the idealistic logic are not far to seek. The logic based on idealism had, as a matter of fact, treated knowledge from the standpoint of an account of thought—of thought in the sense of conception, judgment, and inferential reasoning. But while it had inherited this view from the older rationalism, it had also learned from Hume, via Kant, that direct sense or perceptual material must be taken into account. Hence it had, in effect, formulated the problem of logic as the problem of the connection of logical thought with sense-material, and had attempted to set forth a metaphysics of reality based upon various ascending stages of the completeness of the rationalization or idealization of given, brute, fragmentary sense material by synthetic activity of thought. While considerations of a much less formal kind were chiefly influential in bringing idealism to its modern vogue, such as the conciliation of a scientific with a religious and moral point of view and the need of rationalizing social and historic institutions so as to explain their cultural effect, yet this logic constituted the technique of idealism—its strictly intellectual claim for acceptance.

The point of contact, and hence of conflict, between it and such a doctrine of logic and reflective thought as is set forth above is, I repeat, fairly obvious. Both fix upon thinking as the key to the situation. I still believe (what I believed when I wrote the essays) that under the influence of idealism valuable analyses and formulations of the work of reflective thought, in its relation to securing knowledge of objects, were executed. But—and the but is one of exceptional gravity—the idealistic logic started from the distinction between immediate plural data and unifying, rationalizing meanings as a distinction ready-made in experience, and it set up as the goal of knowledge (and hence as the definition of true reality) a complete, exhaustive, comprehensive, and eternal system in which plural and immediate data are forever woven into a fabric and pattern of self-luminous meaning. In short, it ignored the temporally intermediate and instrumental place of reflection; and because it ignored and denied this place, it overlooked its essential feature: control of the environment in behalf of human progress and well-being, the effort at control being stimulated by the needs, the defects, the troubles, which accrue when the environment coerces and suppresses man or when man endeavors in ignorance to override the environment. Hence it misconstrued the criterion of the work of intelligence; it set up as its criterion an Absolute and Non-temporal reality at large, instead of using the criterion of specific temporal achievement of consequences through a control supplied by reflection. And with this outcome, it proved faithless to the cause which had generated it and given it its reason for being: the magnification of the work of intelligence in our actual physical and social world. For a theory which ends by declaring that everything is, really and eternally, thoroughly ideal and rational, cuts the nerve of the specific demand and work of intelligence.

From this general statement, let me descend to the technical point upon which turns the criticism of idealistic logic by the essays. Grant, for a moment, as a hypothesis, that thinking starts neither from an implicit force of rationality desiring to realize itself completely in and through and against the limitations which are imposed upon it by the conditions of our human experience (as all idealisms have taught), nor from the fact that in each human being is a "mind" whose business it is just to "know"—to theorize in the Aristotelian sense; but, rather, that it starts from an effort to get out of some trouble, actual or menacing. It is quite clear that the human race has tried many another way out besides reflective inquiry. Its favorite resort has been a combination of magic and poetry, the former to get the needed relief and control; the latter to import into imagination, and hence into emotional consummation, the realizations denied in fact. But as far as reflection does emerge and gets a working foothold, the nature of its job is set for it. On the one hand, it must discover, it must find out, it must detect; it must inventory what is there. All this, or else it will never know what the matter is; the human being will not find out what "struck him," and hence will have no idea of where to seek for a remedy—for the needed control. On the other hand, it must invent, it must project, it must bring to bear upon the given situation what is not, as it exists, given as a part of it.