Dewey, John

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Born in Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, John Dewey (1859–1952) lived a long and productive life as a psychologist, social activist, public intellectual, educator, and philosopher. Educated at the University of Vermont and Johns Hopkins, Dewey taught philosophy at the universities of Michigan, Minnesota, and Chicago, and Columbia University. He initiated the progressivelaboratory school at the University of Chicago, where his reforms in methods of education could be put into practice. He was instrumental in founding the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and was active in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Dewey remained active until shortly before his death in New York City on June 1.

Dewey's philosophical pragmatism, which he called "instrumentalism," is both an extended argument for and an application of intelligence-in-action. Intelligence-in-action, human reasoning understood as fallible and revisable, aims to ameliorate existing problems (ethical, scientific, technical, social, aesthetic, and so on). It is rooted in the insights and methodologies of modern science and technology.

At Vermont, Dewey studied the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and evolutionary theory, from which he learned the inadequacy of static models of nature, and the importance of focusing on the interaction between an organism and its environment. For Darwin, living organisms are products of a natural, temporal process in which lineages of organisms adapt to their environments. These environments are significantly determined by the organisms that occupy them. At Johns Hopkins, Dewey studied the organic model of nature in German idealism, the power of scientific methodology, and, with Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the notion that the methods and values of the natural sciences and technology (technosciences) should serve as a model for all human inquiry. Strongly influenced also by William James (1842–1910), Dewey became a proponent of philosophical naturalism. For Dewey, knowledge and inquiry develop as adaptive human responses to environing conditions which aim at reshaping those conditions.

Along with Peirce and James, Dewey took the open, experimental, and practical nature of technoscientific inquiry to be the paradigmatic example of all inquiry. For Dewey, all inquiry is similar in form to technoscientific inquiry in that it is fallibilistic, resolves in practice some initial question through an experimental method, but provides no final absolute answer. In Studies in Logical Theory (1903), Dewey identifies four phases in the process of inquiry. It begins with the problematic situation, a situation in which one's instinctive or habitual responses to the environment are inadequate to fulfill needs and desires. Dewey stresses throughout his work that the uncertainty of the problematic situation is not inherently cognitive, but also practical and existential. The second phase of the process requires the formulation of a question that captures the problem and thus defines the boundaries within which the resolution of the initial problematic situation must be addressed. In the third, reflective phase of the process, the cognitive elements of inquiry, such as ideas and theories, are evaluated as possible solutions. Fourth, these solutions are tested in action. If the new resulting situation resolves the initial problem in a manner conducive to productive activity, then the solution will become part of the habits of living and thus a part of the existential circumstances of human life.

This method of inquiry works because, as Dewey points out in Experience and Nature (1925), human experience of the world includes both the stable, patterned regularity that allows for prediction and intervention and the transitory and contingent aspects of things. Hence, although for Dewey people know the world in terms of causal laws and mathematical relationships, such instrumental value of understanding and controlling their situations should not blind them to the sensuous characteristics of everyday life. Thus, not surprisingly, the value of technoscientific understanding and practice is most significantly realized when humans have sufficient and consistent control over their circumstances that they can live well.

Dewey rejects the distinction between moral and nonmoral knowledge because all knowledge has possibilities for transforming life, and arises through inquiry into a problematic situation. Thus, all knowledge has moral dimensions. Throughout his more explicitly aesthetic, ethical, and social writings, Dewey stresses the need for open-ended, flexible, and experimental approaches to problems, approaches that strive to identify means for pursuing identifiable human goods ("ends-in-view") and that include a critical examination of the consequences of these means.

For Dewey, people live well when they cultivate the habits of thinking and living most conducive to a full flourishing life. In Ethics (1932) he describes the flourishing life as one in which individuals cultivate interests in goods that recommend themselves in the light of calm reflection. In works such as Human Nature and Conduct (1922) and Art as Experience (1934), he argues that a good life is one characterized by (a) the resolution of conflicts of habit and interest within the individual and within society; (b) the release from rote activity in favor of enjoying variety and creative action; and (c) the enriched appreciation of human culture and the world at large. Pursuing these ends constitutes the central issue of individual ethical concern. The paramount goal of public policy is nurturing the collective means for their realization. Achieving these goals requires intelligence in action, best cultivated through democratic habits in everyday life, and education and practice in technoscientific modes of inquiry.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Dewey's ideas have had increasing influence in areas of applied philosophy such as philosophy of technology, bioethics, and environmental ethics. Nonetheless, Dewey has often been criticized as a mere apologist for the status quo and for a narrow straight-line instrumentalism that leaves no room for reflection on, or critical evaluation of, ends. Others criticize his work by noting that technoscience has unleashed great horrors on the world (such as nuclear weapons and environmental degradation), and increased the possibilities of social control and manipulation (Taylorism, mass media, surveillance, and so on). Dewey does not deny that technoscience has sometimes failed, but this has not been due to something intrinsic to science and technology. Failures in the use of science and technology are rather failures to consistently employ intelligence-in-action; failures of inquiry, failures to be sufficiently experimental, reflective, and open.

Among the influential interpreters of Dewey's work, especially as it applies to science, technology, and ethics, are Paul Durbin (b. 1933) and Larry A. Hickman. For some years Durbin has argued what has come to be known as the "social worker thesis," that philosophers dealing with science, engineering, and medicine have obligations similar to social workers not simply to analyze problems but to become socially and politically engaged in their solution. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale), argues that Dewey's pragmatism offers the best account of how to develop moral intelligence and then bring it to bear in the context of an advancing technoscientific culture.

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Campbell, James. (1995). Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence. Chicago: Open Court.

Dewey, John. (1967–1991). The Collected Works of John Dewey, 37 volumes, ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, John. (1981). The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, John. (1998). The Essential Dewey, 2 vols., ed. Thomas M. Alexander and Larry A. Hickman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Durbin, Paul T. (1992). Social Responsibility in Science, Technology, and Medicine. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press.

Eldridge, Michael. (1998). Transforming Experience: John Dewey's Cultural Instrumentalism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Hickman, Larry A. (1990). John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hickman, Larry A. (2001). Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hickman, Larry A., ed. (1998). Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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