Abstract
John Dewey’s famous early twentieth-century account of the relationship between education as growth and democratic societies, presented in Democracy and Education, was later rejected by him, because it failed to properly identify the role of societal structures in growth and experience. In the later Ethics, Dewey attempts to correct that omission, and adumbrates the argument required to reconstruct his theory, which is an appeal to the role of institutions in individual growth and experience. It is the contention of this paper that the inadequacy Dewey finds in his early account is more comprehensively explained by means of recent analyses in philosophy of society, especially John Searle’s ontological analysis. Following in Dewey’s direction, a more complete analysis of the role of society in the theory of growth is presented in terms of the deontological analysis of institutions. It is suggested that the current analyses in philosophy of society provide the means for the completion of Dewey’s views of both growth and experience, making Dewey’s account more useful today than it was a century ago.
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Notes
Dewey (1930).
Searle (2010).
Searle cites Donald Davidson and Michael Drummett as examples. Ibid. p. 61.
Ibid. p. 69.
Dewey (1916).
Ibid. p. 88.
Ibid. pp. 88–89.
Ibid. p. 89.
Ibid. p. 93.
See note no. 1.
Dewey (1989a).
Ibid., p. 299.
Ibid., p. 300.
Ibid.
Dewey (1988).
Dewey (1989b). “Prose is set forth in propositions. The logic of poetry is super-propositional even when it uses what are, grammatically speaking, propositions.”
Searle, op. cit., p. 161.
Searle, op. cit. pp. 126–132.
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References
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The middle works, 1899–1924 (Vol. 9, pp. 82–83). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1930). From absolutism to experimentalism. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1929–1930 (Vol. 5, p. 156). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1988). The public and its problems (1927). In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1927 (Vol. 2, p. 330). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1989a). Ethics (1932). In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 7, pp. 298–299). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1989b). Art as experience (1934). In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1934 (Vol. 10, p. 91). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the social world: The structure of human civilization (p. 62). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Popp, J.A. John Dewey’s Theory of Growth and the Ontological View of Society. Stud Philos Educ 34, 45–62 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-014-9425-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-014-9425-4