Studies in Logical Theory

by John Dewey

In answering this amended form of the objection it is entirely unnecessary to discuss the issue of fact which it has raised as to whether or not complete description of a physical object or event is a practical or theoretical possibility. It need only be pointed out that at best such complete description can only be successful in its purpose on condition that the individual upon whom the experiment is tried be willing to attend and have the requisite "apperceptive background." The accuracy with which another person's knowledge shall copy the knowledge which I endeavor to impart to him must manifestly depend upon these two leading conditions, not to mention also the measure of my own pedagogical and literary skill. Any consideration of such a purely psychological problem as is here suggested would be entirely out of place in a discussion the purpose of which is not that of analyzing the process of judgment, but that of interpreting its meaning aspects. Let us grant the entire psychological possibility of making socially current in the manner here suggested the most highly individual and concrete cognition of an object one may please, and let us grant, moreover, that this possibility has been actually realized. This concurrent testimony of the witness will doubtless confirm one's impression of the accuracy of the process of observation and inference whereby the knowledge which has been imparted was first gained, but we must deny that it can do more than this. For indeed, apart from some independent self-reliant conviction of the objective validity of the knowledge in question, how should another's assent be taken as confirmation and not rather as evidence of one's own mere skill in suggestion and of the other's susceptibility thereto? We must deny that even in the improved form the criterion of social currency is a valid one. In a word, the social currency of knowledge to the extent to which it can exist requires as its condition, and is evidence of, the equal social currency of certain interests, purposes, or points of view for predication; and if it be possible to make socially current an item of concrete knowledge, with all its concrete fulness of detail, then a fortiori it must be possible to make socially current the concrete individual purpose with reference to which this item of knowledge first of all took form. Whether such a thing be psychologically possible at all the reader may decide; but if it be possible in the sphere of knowledge of fact, then it must be possible in the sphere of valuation. In short, judgment in either field, in definition of a certain object or commodity or moral act as, for the agent, an objective fact possessing certain characters, involves the tacit assumption of social verifiability as a matter of course; but it does not rest upon this assumption, nor is this assumption the essence of its meaning. To say that my judgment is socially verifiable, that my concrete object of perception or of valuation would be seen as I see it by any person in precisely my place, is merely a tautological way of formally announcing that I have made the judgment and have now a definite object which to me has a certain definite functional meaning.

Thus, instead of drawing a distinction between the realms of fact and value, as between what is or can be common to all intelligent beings and what must be unique for each individual one, we must hold that the two realms are coextensive. The socially current object answers to a certain general type of conscious purpose or interest active in the individual and so to a general habit of valuation, and the concrete object to a special determination of this type of purpose with reference to others in the recognized working system of life. The agent's final attitude, on the conclusion of the judgment-process, may be expressed in either sort of judgment—in a judgment of the value of commodity or moral purpose, or in a judgment of concrete fact setting forth the "external" conditions which warrant the purpose to the "energetic" self. Throughout the judgment-process there is a correlation between the movement whereby the socially current object develops into the adapted means and that whereby the socially current type of conduct develops into the defined and valued purpose.[152]

At this point, however, a second general objection presents itself. However individual the content of my knowledge of physical fact may be, and however irrelevant, from the logical point of view, to my confidence in its objective validity may be the possibility of sharing it with other persons, nevertheless it refers to an object which is in some sense permanent, and therein differs from my valuations. In economic valuation I reach a definition of a certain commodity and am confirmed in it by all the conditions that enter into my final survey of the situation. But my desire for the new sort of consumption may fail, and so expose my valuation to easy attack from any new desire that may arise; or my supply of the commodity in question may be suddenly increased or diminished, and my valuation of the unit quantity thereby changed. Likewise my ethical valuation may have to be reversed (as Mr. Taylor has insisted) by reason of a change of disposition or particular desire which makes impossible, except in obedience to some other and inclusive valuation, further adherence to it. And these changes take place without any accompanying sense of their doing violence to objective fact or, on the other hand, any judgment of their being in the nature of corrections of previous errors in valuation, and so more closely in accordance with the truth. Moreover, a new valuation, taking the place of an old, does not supplement its predecessor as one set of judgments about a physical object may supplement another, made from a different point of view, but does literally take its place, and this without necessarily condemning it as having been erroneous.

This general objection rests upon a number of fairly obvious misconceptions, and its strength is apparent only. In the first place, the question of the objectivity of any type of judgment must in the end, as we have seen, reduce itself to a question of the judgment's import to the agent. However the agent's valuations may shift from time to time, each several one will be sanctioned to the agent by the changed conditions exhibited in the inventory which the agent takes at the close of judgment which has formed it. The conditions have changed, and the valuation of the earlier purpose has likewise changed; but the new purpose is sanctioned by the new conditions, and the test of the presumed validity of the new valuation can only be in the manner already discussed[153] the test of actual execution of the purpose. In the change, as the agent interprets the situation, there is no violation of the former purpose nor a nearer approach to truth. Each valuation is true for the situation to which it corresponds. We are obviously not here considering the case of error. An error in valuation is evidenced to the agent, not by the need of a new valuation answering to changed conditions, but by the failure of a given valuation to make good its promise, although to all appearance conditions have remained unchanged. If the conditions have changed, then the purpose and the conditions must be redetermined, if the expansion of the "energetic" self is to continue; but the former valuation does not thereby become untrue.

These brief remarks should suffice by way of answer, but it will serve advantageously to illustrate our general position if we pursue the objection somewhat farther. The physical object is, nevertheless, permanent, it will be said, and this surely distinguishes it from the object (now freely acknowledged as such) of the value-judgment. To one man gold may be soluble in aqua regia and to another worth so many pence an ounce, but different and individual as are these judgments and the standpoints they respectively imply, the gold is one, impartially admitting at the same time of both characterizations. On the other hand, one cannot judge an act good and bad at once. The purpose of deception that may be good is one controlled and shaped by ideals quite different from those which permit deception of the evil sort—is, in truth, taken as a total act, altogether different from the purpose of deception which one condemns, and not, like the "parcel of matter" in the two judgments about gold, the subject of both valuations.

A brief consideration of the meaning of this "parcel of matter" will easily expose the weakness of the plea. In the last analysis the "parcel of matter" must for the agent reduce itself, let us say, to certain controllable energies centering about certain closely contiguous points in space and capable, in their exercise, of setting free or checking other energies in the system of nature. Thus, put in aqua regia the gold will dissolve, but in the atmosphere it retains its brilliant color, and in the photographer's solution its energies have still a different mode of manifestation. And thus it would appear that the various predicates which are applied to "gold" imply, each one, a unique set of conditions. Gold is soluble in aqua regia, but not if it is to retain its yellow luster; which predicate is to be true of it depends upon the conditions under which the energies "resident in the gold" are to be set free, just as the moral character of an act depends upon the social conditions obtaining at the time of its performance—that is, upon the ideals with reference to which it has been shaped in judgment. How can one maintain that in a literal and concrete physical sense gold in process of solution is the "same" as gold entering into chemical combination? Surely the energy conditions which constitute the "gold" in the two processes are not the same—and can one nowadays hope to find sameness in unchangeable atoms?[154]

In a word, the permanent substance or "real essence" that admits of various mutually supplementary determinations corresponding to diverse points of view is, strictly speaking, a convenient abstraction, and not an existent fact in time—and we shall maintain that the same species of abstraction has its proper place, and in fact occurs, in the sphere of moral judgment. The type of moral conduct that in every actual case of its occurrence in the moral order is determined in some unique and special way by relation to other standards is precisely analogous to the "substance" that is now dissolved in aqua regia and now made to pass in the form of current coin, but cannot be treated in both ways at once. Both are abstractions. The "gold" is a name for the general possibility of attaining any one of a certain set of particular ends by appropriately co-ordinating certain energies, resident elsewhere in the physical system, with those at present stored in this particular "parcel of matter;" the result to be attained depends not alone upon the "parcel of matter," but also upon the particular energies brought to bear upon it from without. Now let us take a type of conduct which is sometimes judged good and sometimes bad. Deception, for example, is such a type—and as a type it simply stands for the general possibility of furtherance or detriment to the "energetic" self according as it is determined in the concrete instance by ideals of social well-being or by considerations of immediate personal advantage.

For the type-form of conduct—when considered, not as a type of mere physical performance, but as conduct in the technical sense of a possible purpose of the self—is, in the sense we have explained, a symbol for the general possibility of access or dissipation of spiritual energy—energy which must be set free by the bringing to bear of other energies upon it, and which furthers or works counter to the enlargement and development of the self according to the mode of its co-ordination with other energies which the self has already turned to its purposes.[155] But actual conduct is concrete always and never typical; and so likewise, we have sought to show, actual "substance," the objective thing referred to in the factual judgment, is always concrete and never an essence. It is not a fixed thing admitting of a simultaneous variety of conflicting determinations and practical uses, but absolutely unique and already determined to its unique character by the whole assemblage of physical conditions which affect it at the time and which it in turn reacts upon. In the moral as in the physical sphere the fundamental category would, on our present account, appear to be that of energy. The particular physical object given in judgment is a concrete realization, in the form of a particular means or instrument, of that general possibility of attaining ends which the concept of a fixed fund of energy, interpreted as a logical postulate or principle of inference, expresses. The particular moral or economic act is a particular way in which the energy of the self may be increased or diminished. In both spheres the reality presented in the finished judgment is objective as being a stimulus to the setting free of the energies for which it stands. Once more, then, our answer to the objection we have been considering must be that the object as the permanent substrate is merely an abstract symbol standing for the indeterminate means in general set over against the self. Corresponding to it we have, on the other side, the concept of the "energetic" self—the self that is purposive in general, expansive somehow or other.

The function of completed factual judgment in the development of experience is, we have held, that of warranting to the agent the completed purpose which his judgment of value expresses. This view calls for some further comment and illustration in closing the present division. In the first place the statement implies that the conditions which factual judgment presents in the "final survey" as sanctioning the purpose have not determined the purpose, since prior to the determination of the purpose the conditions were not, and could not be, so presented. The question, therefore, naturally arises whether our meaning is that in the formation of our purposes in valuation the recognition of existing conditions plays no part. Our answer can be indicated only in the barest outline as follows:

The agent must, of course, in an economic judgment-process, recognize and take account of such facts as the technical adaptability of the means he is proposing to use to the new purpose that is forming, as also of environing conditions which may affect the success which he may meet with in applying them. He must consider also his own physical strength and qualities of mind with a view to this same technical problem. And similarly in ethical valuation, as we have seen, the psychology of the "empirical ego" must play its part. But the conditions thus recognized are, as we might seek to show more in detail, explainable as the outcome of past factual judgment-processes, and on the occasion of their original definition in the form in which they now are known played the sanctioning part of which we have so often spoken. They therefore correspond to the agent's accepted practical ideals, so that the control which his past experience exercises over his present conduct may be stated equally well in either sort of terms—in terms of his prevailing recognized standards, or in terms of his present knowledge of the conditions which his new purpose must respect. Thus, in general, the concept of a physical order conditioning the conduct of all men and presented in a definite body of socially current knowledge is the logical correlate of the moral law conceived as a categorical imperative prescribing certain types of conduct.