American Pragmatism and John Dewey
General Characteristics
There are similarities between pragmatism and process philosophy. With that in mind, some general characteristics of American pragmatism.
The first is that it asserts the primacy of practical over theoretical, or the primacy of concrete experience over abstraction. For Dewey, James and Whitehead, the British empiricists are guilty of abstraction, so that appeal to the concrete is in a Hegelian sense where Hegel’s dialectic moves from the abstract to the concrete, the concrete experience as it is lived, rather than experience as it is theorized like Locke, Berkeley. Their concern is also about relationship of thinking and doing or theory and practice. Their concern is to see experience holistically, not just cognitive but also affective. So you find pragmatists objecting to intellectualism or spectator empiricism, or the quest for certainty in Descartes’ tradition. The quest for certainty is a misguided quest, all you need is practical certainty. Underlying all of this appeal to practical concrete experience is an underlying thesis that experience is reality. Human experience is our reality, meaning the thing as it is for me, the phenomenalism in the pragmatism. That’s the Hegelian tradition, because what Hegel tries to do was to look through the lens of self-consciousness of human experience and finding the dialectic unfolding and human experience of anything projecting that under the whole of reality. What you have in Dewey is another Hegelian converting Hegel to a naturalistic basis.
The second characteristic is the emphasis on organic relationships. To varying degrees, the pragmatists are all critical of the atomistic view of experience represented by John Locke’s simple ideas, ideas that come without any relationships to anything else, the relationships are purely external. James speaks of stream of consciousness and Dewey speaks of present experience looking forward to future experience. An idea for Dewey is an idea about what we do in the future. And for that reason they refuse any dualism between mind and body. They refuse separation of fact and value. Value emerge in the context of experience in relation to future experience.
The third characteristic is philosophical naturalism. Naturalism is used in the sense of methodological and metaphysical. Methodological naturalism is referring to the methodology of natural sciences, so the methodological naturalists universalizes the use of scientific method. Scientific method or experimental thinking is applied to every kind of enquiry. And you’ll find that in Dewey’s book “The Reconstruction of Philosophy”. The pragmatical view of truth is really you want experimental confirmation of hypothesis. Metaphysical naturalism is very explicitly in Dewey. All that there is is natural processes, natural processes that are amenable to evolutionary explanation.
C.S. Peirce
If pragmatism means to you relativism, then Peirce is not a relativist. Peirce refers to himself a pragmatistiest, he did believe the objectivity of truth. In 1877, he published an article called “The Fixation of Belief” and in 1878, another one called “How to make our ideas clear”. The first of these is dealing with the question of ensuring truth, the second with the question of meaning. In both regards the answer is the same: look at the practical consequences. If you want a belief to be fixed with confidence, there are various ways, he rejects three and advocates the fourth. The first the method of tenacity which says I’m not going to change my mind whatever you say. The second is the method of authority, the problem there is there are conflicting authorities. The third is the method of tradition. What he advocates is the scientific method, a method of confirmation with hypothesis. Why not the foundationalist approach of finding first principles then deducing from that. What Peirce doing basically is critiquing the Cartesian tradition.
Descartes distinguishes himself from scholasticism as follows: philosophy must begin with universal doubt, the ultimate test of certainty is found in the individual consciousness, the multiform argument of middle ages is replaced by a single thread of inference depending off and on inconspicuous premises. Scholasticism had its mysteries of faith, but undertook to explain all creative things while there are many facts that Cartesianism not only does not explain but renders absolutely inexplicable except to say God made it so. In sum, most of modern philosophers have been Cartesians and that’s essentially true after Kant. And his response follows, first we cannot begin with complete doubt, because we always miss something because we weren’t always aware of our assumptions and beliefs. Second the same formalism appears in the Cartesian criterion which amounts to whatever I’m clearly convinced of is true. If everybody was convinced there would be no further question but there is a great deal of difference between being convinced and something being true. His point is clarity and distinctness are criteria of meaningfulness rather than truth. Third, philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods and to trust the multitude and variety of those arguments rather than the conclusiveness of anyone. Number four any unidealistic supposes some absolutely inexplicable unanalyzable ultimate, in short something resulting from mediation itself not susceptible of mediation. Now that anything is thus inexplicable can only be known by reasoning from sign. The only justification of inference from signs is that conclusion explains the fact and to suppose the fact is inexplicable is not to explain it. And hence the supposition is never allowed and it repeats somethings written in opposition to Cartesianism saying we have no power of introspection, intuition, thinking without signs so we have no conception of what absolutely incognizable.
This has the mark of another methodological revolution. Descartes represents some methodological revolution from Scholastic method, Bacon methodological revolution to inductive method, Kant to transcendental method, and now Pierce to experimental and scientific method. Pierce is a realist who believes there are universal laws of nature, there are objective realities.
William James
James calls pragmatism a method of settling philosophical disputes by anticipating the consequences of a belief and see if these consequences actually occur. However it’s important to see in James it’s not simply a matter of fixing belief, you have to watch the concept of experience. Here you see the difference from Locke, with his analysis of experience into simple ideas, passively received, that atomizing of experience. Instead of atomistic experience, what James is after is a more holistic, organic experience. The whole notion of an atomistic sense datum is a level of abstraction. Concrete experience does not separate primary and secondary qualities and does not atomized into simple ideas, it’s a continuum, a stream, a process. But with James, concrete experience is always psychological experience, it’s not a question of what are you thinking, but how are you feeling it. So the question in terms of fixing belief, in terms of understanding the meaning of a philosophical theory is what it means psychologically, so he defines materialism. Materialism means the denial that moral order is eternal and the cutting off of ultimate hopes. In contrast to materialism, what he called spiritualism means the affirming an eternal moral order and letting loose of hope. So the reference point in defining materialism against theism is the psychology of hope. To test for the truth, if it provides you with the experience of hope, that sort of satisfaction, then we say the theory has cache value, truth is workability. From the psychological cash value of a belief he backs up to a redefinition of truth and he can do this because of this pragmatic view that experience is our reality, so the reality we experience is the reality of hope or no hope. The tendency to look for empirical consequences comes out in his essay “The Will to Believe”. James is responding to “The Ethics of Believe” by Clifford, in which Clifford argued that if there is not a weight of evidence for one view rather than the other, then it’s morally irresponsible to make a decision, you should withold judgment. William James responded that witholding isn’t always possible. There’s some momentous choices that are forced on us in reality of life. So in the absence of that evidential demand, how are you going to decide? His point is that you ask yourself in terms of the consequences of the two beliefs for concrete experience.
John Dewey
Dewey is not only representative not only of pragmatism, which is basically a method of dealing with philosophical and other questions. But he’s also representative of evolutionary naturalism, that is to say, he’s philosophical naturalist, everything is explicable in terms of physical processes, the kind of naturalism he espouses is very much informed by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, this evolutionary naturalism of his is a step from evolutionary idealism, with the notion of historical process unfolding to a more and more complex forms of physical, social, cultural life. In this evolutionary naturalism of his, you’ll find three key concepts. First of all, his concept of experience, is close to the concept you find in Whitehead and James. Experience includes affective experience, the psychological, emotional and also includes social and cultural experience. In fact, if Whitehead is talking about the influence of natural science on philosophy, Dewey is talking about the influence of social change on philosophy. Fluid experience is interrupted by problem situations which demands thought. Experimenting ideas in order to resolve situations. Intelligence as problem solving in the course of habitual experience which leads to his functionalists psychology, which is the theory that all of our psychological processes are simply functions of biological need. So our desires are biologically based functions of organisms that’s trying to adjust to its environment. Reason is a function of organism reflecting on how to adjust to environment and sometimes that reason is involved in modifying desires in the light of what you find out about the problem situation. And growth is not a steady movement to a fixed goal, but an ongoing evolutionary process in which various experiences are being incorporated into the ongoing experience which is the self. And that is where you begin to see underlying all of this, the concept of experience and psychology, his theory of natural selection. He explicitly rejects any fixity of species because he recognizes traditional view of fixity of species is simply an extension of Aristotle’s fixed forms. He rejects in any real universals, and intrinsic final causes of a fixed sort, there are no fixed aims to pursue in ethics or anything else, there are no fixed law of thought, how we think is simply a tool for adjustment in a changing world. His point is then philosophy is not a pure theory, it arises in a practical context, it feeds back to a practical context.
He talks of experimental thinking and naturalizing epistemology. He wants an epistemology which rather than prescribing how we should know but describe the nature of enquiry, its natural environment, which is practical demands of concrete experience. This means that epistemology is going to be descriptive of the way in which inquiry operates according to theory of natural selection.
Logic & Epistemology
Accordingly he embraces the operationalist view of scientific concepts. Operationalist view is that the meaning of a theoretical concept in science has to do with what is empirically observable when you perform certain operations. It’s a pragmatic theory of meaning, from William James. If you want to know what theoretical concept means, you ask what it’s practical consequences. Operationalism is simply an application of a pragmatic theory of meaning to philosophy of science. This is akin to the instrumentalist view of science, which says science is not telling us the nature of reality, it simply gives us useful knowledge that we can use for further enquiry or for developing applications. Scientific theories are simply useful instruments. Instrumentalism is regarded as a version of anti-realism in science, scientific realism is the view that science tells us about reality, scientific anti-realism is the view that science does not tell us about reality. But notice his reason for it: knowledge is a function of a biological organism adjusting to environment, in adjusting to an environment which poses problems you don’t need to know about the essence of reality, all you need is some ideas on how to resolve the problem. So rather than talking about traditional formal logic, he speaks of experimental logic. This is the way he talks about epistemology. He repudiates spectator empiricism and any subject object dualism because they all divorce thought from action, theory from practice, it is the utility of an idea that matters, truth is not some objective thing fixed for all time independent of the observer, truth i simply the utility and workability of an idea.
Philosophy of Mind
He is rejecting any substance theory of mind or soul, he sees no mind-body problem if mind is not a separate entity. All he prepares to talk about is various mental functions, that is to say certain biological functions that involves consciousness.
Value Theory
Here he says a number of important writings, “Theory of Valuation”, “Human Nature and Conduct”, here he regards values simply as ideas. Values are ideal outcomes that emerge in problem situations. Dewey is not interested in value in the sense of what is intrinsically and eternally valuable, he’s only interested in value in the sense of what is actively valued. In other words, values are ideas which give rise to other ideas about resolving the problem situation. There is no intrinsically good ends. What Dewey wants to insists on is a means-end continuum, that is to say, the end, the ideal involves in itself the means to the end, but when the end is achieved, that end itself is a means simply to further ends. There is nothing that is just an end, intrinsically end, fixed end. There’s never a period, it’s all process. So there are no moral absolutes, there is no supreme good. Values emerge with unsatisfied need, values are instruments for survival. Values are not moral goods, they’re non moral goods. Survival is a non moral thing yet it becomes loaded with value in certain problem situations. Ethics then has to do with how to solve problems and achieve what we desire. This is an instrumentalist ethic. Dewey’s work on ethics was one of the major factors that fed into development of situation ethics, which maintained that every moral situation has to be addressed individually, there are no general moral rules, no fixed guidelines, universal moral principles, each situation has to be resolved in a way that is satisfying to the persons involved.
Education
For education, you want to look at his book “Democracy and Education”. He sees the function of education is learning to live, to provide you with necessary instrumentalities for problem solving. Learning is not so that you have things to contemplate all your life, not attempt to instill fixed value, the heritage of values from the past, it’s rather a preparation for successful adjustment to environment, problem oriented rather than discipline oriented or just intellectual oriented. American education since Dewey has developed a combination of classical traditions and learning that provides life skills.
Religion
Here an important by him is called “Common Faith”. If there are no fixed truth or values then religion is simply an attempt to transmit certain truth and values. It’s not about static ideals, religion is again a tool for life adjustment. He’s not so much interested in a religion or different religions as in the adjective religious, which refers to a quality in an attitude to life. A religious attitude is one of loyalty to the ideals of the community. Why? One reason is the etymology of the word religion, which is to retie or reunite. In other words, religion is important because of its instrumentality, not because of it’s true. In this context, the word God is not a name of a being, but is a symbol for the ideals that the community pursues. And he would argue that this is the lowest common denominator of all historical religions. What Dewey is saying about religion is really the essence of religious humanism and Dewey was one of the original signers of the humanist manifesto which in the 1930s declare that the universe is self existing, man is a part of nature as emerged as a result of continuous process, men’s religious culture is the product of a gradual development due to interaction with the natural environment, science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values, religious humanism considers the complete realization of human personality satisfaction and so forth to be the end of life. Religious humanism is naturalistic religion where God is a symbol for ideals. Very often you’ll find naturalistic humanism in unitarian circles. Unitarianism historically was a kind of theism as against trinitarianism, but increasingly unitarianism and the unity movement is simply naturalistic humanism with the espousal of certain values.
Dewey’s Reconstructive Philosophy
Dewey is consistent in carrying through the theme of the title all the way through the book. He talks about what philosophy classically has been and what he thinks it ought to be and the things with regards to each area of philosophical inquiry. It’s important to recognize underlying these disagreements with what philosophy has been is a very different view of human nature than in the classical tradition. Classical philosophy was substance rather than process in its metaphysics, that is to say a qualitatively unchanging entity. Human is a process, not a substance only. We have to think of human as a process of experience. Why experience? The answer is two fold. One is from empirical standpoint, how do we talk about personal identity if it is not as in the empiricist tradition in terms of the way in which memory of the past and the anticipations of the future are identifies with present experience. So it is the matter of experience by virtue of which we have any identity. That is the epistemological reason. The other reason is in this Hegelian tradition in which following Kant human consciousness is the lens through which everything is understood. The Hegelian tradition in which with its unfolding of consciousness in the process of history. How are you going to describe any evolutionary process. The process of evolutionary development is really an extensive process of experience. When you start approaching what is human nature in terms of experience then it’s understandable that he’s going to be saying that human beings are first and foremost creatures of desire rather than intellect, because concrete experience comes loaded with emotional orientation with affective attitudes towards past present and future. Add back to his functional psychologist thought, thought will be a function of biological organism in response to experience. Very different conception of human than that of a rational soul inhabiting in a body with some fixed essence to human nature. Philosophy for Dewey is more of an attitude than any set of doctrines.
The old view of knowledge is the attempt to find unchanging truth about unchanging essences. And you do this by abstracting from experience. The other kind of knowledge is what was introduced by Francis Bacon, with his classic dictum that knowledge is power, not contemplation of essences. The old want demonstration, proof, and the new want discovery. What Dewey envisions is the utility of knowledge. The problem solving capacity of knowledge can be applied to human condition to social problems, political issues.
He repudiates the theory of fixed forms that came to us from Plato and Aristotle, which translates to fixed species, fixed aims, what he calls a closed world, a universe with already defined potential. The modern version of Darwinian theory of natural selection is that there are no fixed species, no fixed forms, this is an open-ended evolutionary process. The ends are always situational ends emerging in the problem situation with room then for constant evolutionary change.
He points about the empiricism of Locke was disintegrated in intent. Dewey maintains that in concrete experience there are no isolated outs of experience, there is internal relatedness. Reason was supposed separate from experience, introducing us to a superior region of the universal truth. Reason as a Kantian faculty that introduces generality and regularity strikes as more and more superfluous. The unnecessary creation men addicted to traditional formalism and elaborate terminology.
You can see with that change of conception of experience why his conception with education is different. Because you are not now trying to teach people the art of dialectic abstraction, which is needed for grasping eternal truth, universal principles. Rather what you are doing is trying to develop in people the kind of practical intelligence which can find something workable to do when some problem situation arises. Ideally the classroom is the situation in which as problem situation arise so people are free to explore the fund of ideas which may be in the books in the classroom, and come up with appropriate ways of handling the thing rather than the systematic kind of attempt to develop intellectual ability which can abstract and work logically from things which are abstracted. The value of the heritage of learning is in enriching the human fund of experience on which to draw in problem situations.
In chapter five, he’s rejecting Plato’s dichotomy of ideal and real. Dewey and Whitehead alike are very impatient with traditional dualisms. His point is there is no Platonic realms of transcendental ideals, ideals simply arise as problems occur. The ideal is the resolution of a problem. There’s a fact value continuum. Nature maybe in and of itself a value free universe, but our experience is not value free, it is primary of desires.
Chapter six talks about two views of logic, the old is deductive and the new logic is experimental, the scientific logic. The structure of thought is about ideas that are hypothesis rather than fixed conceptions, theoretical dogmas. Truth is not some fixed realm, it’s rather having to do satisfying desires.
His use of the term utility in talking about ideas may tempt you to say Dewey is a utilitarian, however it’s not. Utilitarianism is a product of the old empiricism and empiricism that build knowledge and decided what to do, it’s built on the basis of past empirical generalizations. So that you develop moral rules in terms of what past experience has taught you about maximizing whatever good it is for maximum number of people. The focus of the knowledge is the past even when you want to anticipate the future. For Dewey the focus is always the future, so that what you want is knowledge of the future, and you can only do that in the form of hypothesis. Granted funded experience for the past may propose the hypothesis, but every problem situation is going to be some what different from any other problem situation. He’s not speaking of general rules for the maximum number of people’s happiness. He’s addressing a new problem. The knowledge you want is not of empirical generalizations from which you deduce something, but rather a hypothesis that is suggested by funded experience from the past, but from the hypothesis you then can deduce what is likely to happen, but you don’t know if it’s true. First it’s oriented to the future rather than past. Second it’s oriented to a distinctive particular situation rather than to generalizations about a supreme good and third it’s not a morality of rules in any case. With Dewey values are situational and goods are situational, so in addressing a particular issue arising with regards in the future it’s without the degree of continuity from the past. The other thing in this chapter is a comment he makes on the problem of evil where he says the real problem of evil is not the theoretical one but the practical one, it’s not a logical problem, how can you make the existence of seemingly purposeless evil logically consistent with the existence of God who is altogether good wise and powerful, the real problem evil is what can we do about it. He’s not interested in theoretical debates and understanding, they’re irrelevant because of the pragmatic theory of meaning.
Pragmatism is a kind of post-modernism, a kind of anti-realism and that’s the direction which has subsequently been taken. My difficulties with pragmatism stems from its philosophical naturalism by virtue of which there is no intrinsic value to anything that exists. The locus of value is likely to be what individual values and Dewey refuses to talk about what is valuable but only talks of what is valued. If there are intrinsic values, then pragmatism which is only concerned with relative values is not enough and the relationship between theory and practice is going to be a blot more than pragmatic because of the intrinsic value. But that leads to the second difficulty. Pragmatism not only rejecting intrinsic values, but is accepting only situation value of a belief or an idea. So that every situation can be different. As if life is made up of a whole lot of discrete situations, and it fails to see the ordered-ness in human existence. There are universal kinds of existence, universal kinds of values. But if there are universal types of situation, universal human needs value then this is indicating some kind of a teleology that runs throughout human existence and nature. We have not just isolated problem situations but an overall situation, the overall project of life has to be addressed, the meaning of life in total, not just what is desired in particular situations.