Abstract
This chapter is preliminary. My aim is to frame Dewey’s philosophy of science in the wider context of his notion of experience. Dewey’s account of experience has posed serious difficulties to his interpreters. My proposal is irenic: I take Dewey’s experience to be a function performed by living beings who have the capacity to master the use of language. I focus on the metaphilosophical use that Dewey makes of the notion of experience thus understood, showing that such notion is introduced to account for the plurality of activities or life-behaviors in which human beings are engaged.
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Notes
- 1.
Not surprisingly, Rorty’s interpretation of Dewey has been as widely discussed as strongly criticized. For a detailed reconstruction of Rorty’s different readings of the Deweyan (kindred) notions of experience and metaphysics see Stuhr (1992). For a criticism of Rorty’s account of Dewey’s concept of experience, see, among the others, Margolis (2002, 2014). For a ‘pragmatist’ criticism of Rorty’s reading of pragmatism, see Saatkamp (1995). For a comprehensive account of the way in which Dewey’s concept of experience has been read and assessed by the so-called neopragmatists, see Hildebrand (2003, 2018).
- 2.
This is one of the reasons for which I have decided, in this chapter, to keep to a minimum any reference to the writings of other pragmatists, in the belief that Peirce and James’ accounts of experience do not help shed light on Dewey’s one. Clearly, this cautionary assumption does not hold in general; for instance, it is highly reasonable to argue that Peirce’s theory of inquiry is explanatory of at least some aspects of Dewey’s logic. But I believe that the notion of experience should be treated differently, and more carefully. I do not want to enter into details here, since a satisfactory analysis of this issue would lead us far beyond the limits of the present discussion, but I think that the differences in the understanding of experience are largely due to the different philosophical upbringings of Peirce, James, and Dewey. As is well known, Dewey was much more influenced by Hegel than Peirce and James were, to the extent that, in a well-known autobiographical sketch written in 1930, he remarked that a permanent Hegelian deposit was still acting on his thought (LW5, 154). As said, I will not tackle the controversial issue of Dewey’s Hegelianism will since it would lead us astray. Consequently, I will not take a stance on Dewey’s faithfulness to Hegel, nor will I attempt to identify the sources of his Hegelianism, which should be traced back to his critical appropriation of the British idealist tradition. More radically, I will not even try to assess whether or not Dewey’s philosophy of experience can be labeled as idealistic. This is material for a different kind of work; indeed, all those issues have been extensively debated in recent time: see, among the others, Shook (2000), Good (2006), Shook and Good (2010), Morse (2011), and, for my criticisms of these interpretations, see and Gronda (2011, 2013). However, this particular aspect of Dewey’s thought should be always borne in mind while reflecting on his theory of experience.
- 3.
Dewey’s metaphysics is a highly debated and highly problematic issue. For a comprehensive overview of Dewey’s metaphysical project, see Boisvert (1988). For a more recent presentation, see Garrison (2005), Fesmire (2014, chapter 2), Myers (2017) and Alexander (2018). See also Gale (2002) and Myers and Pappas (2004), which is a response to Gale’s article. For an analysis of the relation between metaphysics and logic, see Sleeper (2001), in particular Chapter 3 and 5. For a more general discussion about the aims and functions of pragmatist metaphysics, see Pihlstrom (2009) and the two articles Seigfried (2001) and Myers (2004).
- 4.
A clarification here is needed. It has been said that Dewey agrees with James on the double-barrelledness of experience; nonetheless, Dewey’s version of James’s thesis is more naturalistic oriented and more functionalist. As a consequence of that, I think Dewey’s account of the double-barrelled character of experience is heuristically richer than that of James. On the one hand, contrary to James, Dewey provides a simple and satisfactory explanation of the necessary conditions for a given undivided portion of experience to be taken in two different contexts. The functionalist account of the ‘division’ of experience in different contexts is provided by Dewey’s logic of inquiry. On the other hand, Dewey’s approach is more naturalistic since Dewey takes the conceptual couples subject/object and consciousness/objective content to be less fundamental than the couple organism/environment. Consequently, from Dewey’s perspective, the notion of experience is double-barrelled in the sense that it encompasses both the organism and its environment, while subject and object are two possible configurations that the organism and the environment may take when the organism adopts a logical standpoint. In so doing, the language of epistemology is not taken as a primitive, but contextualized and explained from a genetic and functional point of view.
- 5.
See, for instance, the following passage from Experience and Nature: “Objects are precisely what we are aware of. For objects are events with meanings; tables, the milky way, chairs, stars, cats, dogs, electrons, ghosts, centaurs, historic epochs and all the infinitely multifarious subject-matter of discourse designable by common nouns, verbs and their qualifiers” (LW, 240).
- 6.
Please note that I do not say that Dewey’s idea of the double-barrelledness of experience consists in, or is reducible to, what I have called the semantic identity of concept and object. Rather the contrary, I acknowledge that that idea has many other features that are not semantic – in the sense in which I use this notion. So, for instance, a relevant problem that Dewey addresses in Experience and Nature concerns the place of experience in a world of events – which is a distinctively metaphysical issue. My point is more modest: I hold that the semantic identity of concept and object provides a viable starting point for reconstructing Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of science, and that it can be separated – without loss of relevant information – from the other notions with which it is connected in his concept of experience.
- 7.
A word of clarification is in order. In this chapter I will not distinguish between meaning and significance, and I will use meaning to encompass both the notions, which – starting at least from the Logic – Dewey treats as functionally different. This terminological choice is clearly problematic – I concede it – but, in so doing, I conform to the way in which Dewey uses that notion in Experience and Nature, as well as in the majority of his works. In any case, a most accurate and fine-grained account of Dewey’s notion of meaning is provided in the following chapter, which is devoted to his philosophy of language. I am confident that, taken together, the two chapters succeed in correcting the possible confusions due to the unilaterality of the present exposition.
- 8.
As we will see, Dewey has a strong argument to support this view, namely the distinction between primary and reflective experience (see below, Sect. 1.5). However, its plausibility is not dependent on that argument: it is the irreducibility of existence to meaning that warrants the possibility of a sound conception of error and discovery. At the same time, their irreducibility is not understood by Dewey in dualistic terms: if this were so, he would be compelled to embrace the idea of a thing in itself – which is a move that Dewey is not willing to make.
- 9.
See also what Dewey writes in his early The Study of Ethics (1894). “It is the nature of every function to include within itself both organ and environment. The act of respiration is a co-ordination of lungs as organ and air as environment […]. Function is not the exercise of a predetermined organ upon an external environment, nor is it the adjustment of an organ to a predetermined environment. The nature of the function determines both the organ and the environment. Two animals in whom the function of nutrition is differently performed have, in virtue of that fact, different environments as well as different organs” (EW4, 232–233). The distinction between world and environment is central to Dewey’s philosophy. I will deal with it extensively in Chap. 3.
- 10.
Here is how Dewey and Bentley understand the notion of transaction, as well as the differences between transaction and interaction: “[o]ur position is that the traditional language currently used about knowings and knowns (and most other language about behaviors, as well) shatters the subjectmatter into fragments in advance of inquiry and thus destroys instead of furthering comprehensive observation for it […]. Our own procedure is the transactional, in which is asserted the right to see together, extensionally and durationally, much that is talked about conventionally as if it were composed of irreconcilable separates” (LW16, 67). A few pages later they add that it is possible to distinguish “three levels of the organization and presentation of inquiry”, respectively, Self-Action, Interaction, and Transaction. “These levels,” they remark, “are all human behaviors in and with respect to the world, and they are all presentations of the world itself as men report it”. Those three levels are defined as follows: (1) “Self-action: where things are viewed as acting under their own powers”; (2) “Inter-action: where thing is balanced against thing in causal interconnection; (3) “Trans-action: where systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and phases of action, without final attribution to ‘elements’ or other presumptively detachable or independent ‘entities,’ ‘essences,’ or ‘realities,’ and without isolation of presumptively detachable ‘relations’ from such detachable ‘elements’ (LW16, 100–101).
The last phase of Dewey’s philosophy has received relatively little attention from the interpreters, plausibly because of the difficulties in assessing Dewey’s specific contribution to the composition of Knowing and the Known. One remarkable exception is Frank Ryan who has devoted many of his writings to reconstruct Dewey’s late philosophy. See, in particular, Ryan (1997a,b), and, for a comprehensive reconstruction of Dewey’s later thought, Ryan (2011).
- 11.
I use the notion of substantive primacy as a placeholder. Intuitively, the opposite of ‘explanatory’ should be ‘ontological’ or ‘metaphysical’; the idea is that something can have a primacy for us or in itself. This insight I want to preserve. However, Dewey’s argument is clearly not ontological in the usual sense in which that word is now used. Similarly, it is not, strictly speaking, metaphysical, even though it is likely that Dewey would have understood it so. Accordingly, I have decided to use the more neutral formula ‘substantive primacy’ in order to stress the in-itselfness of the primacy of the function over its component without casting over it an ontological aura that is at odds with Dewey’s argument, as well as with his overall approach.
- 12.
A caveat is needed. By focusing on the difference between the function of experience and that of respiration, one might argue that while explanatory primacy is clearly not enough in the case of respiration, it is sufficient in the case of experience since we are dealing here with a cognitive and epistemic phenomenon. An argument along this line, however, takes for granted something that Dewey openly rejects, namely the possibility of identifying experience with a cognitive phenomenon.
- 13.
As, for instance, in the following passage from the article ’Consciousness’ and Experience: “digestion, respiration, locomotion express functions, not observable ‘objects.’ But there is an object that may be described: lungs, stomach, leg-muscles, or whatever. Through the structure we present to ourselves the function; it appears laid out before us, spread forth in detail-objectified in a word. The anatomist who devotes himself to this detail may, if he please (and he probably does please to concentrate his devotion) ignore the function: to discover what is there, to analyze, to measure, to describe, gives him outlet enough. But nevertheless it is the function that fixed the point of departure, that prescribed the problem and that set the limits, physical as well as intellectual, of subsequent investigation. Reference to function makes the details discovered other than a jumble of incoherent trivialities” (MW1, 118–119). See also, on this point, (MW13 381).
- 14.
The distinction between an explanatory and a properly ontological level has not been adequately emphasized by Gale, who had nonetheless the merit of calling attention to this issue. Discussing Dewey’s account of breathing, he rightly remarks that Dewey makes “the relation between organic activities, such as breathing, and its environment mutually internal” (Gale 2010, 64); but see also (Gale 2002, 510). However, he jumps to the conclusion that “Dewey’s claim of a mutual dependency between lungs and air, and, more generally, between an organism and its natural environment, is dubious”, on the ground that “the air can exist without there being lungs to breathe it and a natural environment can survive the demise of all organisms” (Gale 2010, 65). I think Gale’s conclusion is legitimate, but his reconstruction of Dewey’s argument is a little bit too easy.
- 15.
I part company here with Eames’ reconstruction of Dewey’s argument (Eames 1964, 25ff.). I think Eames is right in stressing the importance of the idea of continuity for Dewey’s philosophy, as well as in focusing on the intrinsic relation between continuity and emergence. However, I believe that he does not pay enough attention to the semantic nature of Dewey’s argument, thus blurring the difference between the semantic and the metaphysical – in Dewey’s sense – level of analysis.
- 16.
See, as an illustration of this point, what Dewey states in the chapter 10 of Knowing and the Known. While laying out his notion of transaction, he writes: “[t]his transaction [a trade, which Dewey takes as a good example of what transaction is] determines one participant to be a buyer and the other a seller. No one exists as buyer or seller save in and because of a transaction in which each is engaged. Nor is that all; specific things become goods or commodities because they are engaged in the transaction. There is no commercial transaction without things which only are goods, utilities, commodities, in and because of a transaction. Moreover, because of the exchange or transfer, both parties (the idiomatic name for participants) undergo change; and the goods undergo at the very least a change of locus by which they gain and lose certain connective relations or ‘capacities” previously possessed” (LW16, 242).
- 17.
This remark is slightly but substantially different from the one made by Kirby in his discussion of Gale’s panpsychistic account of Dewey. Kirby states: “just as respiration transforms the object of air chemically, physically, and volumetrically, so an organism transforms its environment. That the natural environment would survive the demise of organism (albeit in a significantly diminished capacity), or the existence of air would continue without lungs, does not negate that the changes made by these respective involvements is not constitutive” (Kirby 2014, 68). Kirby rightly stresses the creativity of the process of adaptation, which entails the production of new objective conditions. On the contrary, my argument is more distinctively semantic, and is concerned with the new properties – and, consequently, the new meanings – that objects acquire as a consequence of their entering into new and original relations with other parts of the environment.
- 18.
In slightly different terms, Richard Gale has concisely summed up Dewey’s argument in favor of what I have called substantive primacy by saying that “it is not only that the lungs require air, but the air that requires lungs” (Gale 2010, 64–65). That statement has a too strong idealistic flavor to be palatable to a realist mind. But it is evident that, when read in terms of meaning rather than existence, it looses great part of its awkwardness. It is far less problematic – and in some ways almost platitudinous, in an emergentist framework as the one which Dewey endorses – to say that air requires lungs in order to acquire the properties related to the functions of respiration and phonation.
- 19.
It might be replied that, before and independently of the function of respiration, the air has in itself the potentiality to become part of that function. I think that Dewey is sympathetic to the idea of objects as bundle of potentialities that are actualized in and through the different courses of activity in which they can enter. I will discuss Dewey’s notion of potentiality in Chap. 4.
- 20.
I read in this way what Dewey says at the beginning of his famous article The Postulate of Immediate Experience. Dewey states that immediate empiricism “postulates that things – anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the term ‘thing’ – are what they are experienced as”, so that “if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being”. And it is quite clear from the article that what Dewey has in mind is that what a certain object means depends on the ways in which the agent (or experiencer) takes it to be. Here is what he says in this regard: “[i]f it is a horse which is to be described, or the equus which is to be defined, then must the horse-trader, or the jockey, or the timid family man who wants a ‘safe driver,’ or the zoologist or the paleontologist tell us what the horse is which is experienced. If these accounts turn out different in some respects, as well as congruous in others, this is no reason for assuming the content of one to be exclusively ‘real,’ and that of others to be ‘phenomenal’; for each account of what is experienced will manifest that it is the account of the horse-dealer, or of the zoologist, etc., and hence will give the conditions requisite for understanding the differences as well as the agreements of the various accounts. And the principle varies not a whit if we bring in the psychologist’s horse, the logician’s horse or the metaphysician’s horse” (MW3, 158–159).
- 21.
The relation between existence and meaning is metaphysical, and is accounted for by Dewey’s ontological emergentism. To my knowledge, the best formulation of this position is provided in Reality as Experience, where Dewey introduces the notion of qualitative-transformation-towards. After reporting the quite obvious objection that “science makes known a chronological period in which the world managed to lead a respectable existence in spite of not including conscious organisms”, so that “there was no experience, yet there was reality”, Dewey writes that those conditions that antecede experience are “already in transition towards the state of affairs in which they are experience” (MW3, 101). As said I do not want to deal with Dewey’s metaphysics in this book; my goal was simply that of stressing the fact that Dewey himself is careful to avoid the strict identification of meaning with existence.
- 22.
To my knowledge, the following passage is Dewey’s best statement of this fundamental insight. I quote the passage in its entirety: “[l]anguage is a natural function of human association; and its consequences react upon other events, physical and human, giving them meaning or significance. Events that are objects or significant exist in a context where they acquire new ways of operation and new properties. Words are spoken of as coins and money. Now gold, silver, and instrumentalities of credit are first of all, prior to being money, physical things with their own immediate and final qualities. But as money they are substitutes, representations, and surrogates, which embody relationships. As a substitute, money not merely facilitates exchange of such commodities as existed prior to its use, but it revolutionizes as well production and consumption of all commodities, because it brings into being new transactions, forming new histories and affairs. Exchange is not an event that can be isolated. It marks the emergence of production and consumption into a new medium and context wherein they acquire new properties. Language is similarly not a mere agency for economizing energy in the interaction of human beings. It is a release and amplification of energies that enter into it, conferring upon them the added quality of meaning. The quality of meaning thus introduced is extended and transferred, actually and potentially, from sounds, gestures and marks, to all other things in nature. Natural events become messages to be enjoyed and administered, precisely as are song, fiction, oratory, the giving of advice and instruction. Thus events come to possess characters; they are demarcated, and noted. For character is general and distinguished” (LW1, 137–138).
- 23.
Dewey’s example is ambiguous, however, in that it seems to entail the possibility of having an experience independently of the capacity of the child to use the language of the community in which he is raised – a possibility that Dewey explicitly denies in the long passage quoted above, drawn from Experience and Nature. I think there is no contradiction here, and that in Reconstruction in Philosophy, in which that example is formulated, he simply oversimplifies the argument for explanatory purposes. Indeed, it is clear from the vast majority of his later works, in which an articulated account of meaning is provided, that Dewey is committed to a ‘linguistic’ conception of meaning. Chapter 2 is entirely devoted to that issue. For the moment, what can be ‘cashed out’ from the example is the idea that the behavior of an organism dramatically changes when the latter acquires the ability to respond not simply to physical stimuli, but to full-fledged meanings. In doing so, the pattern of behavior of the organism reaches a level of complexity higher than that of a non-linguistic being since it becomes responsive to different and more numerous aspects of the environment.
- 24.
“Noting things only as if they were objects – that is, objects of knowledge – continuity is rendered a mystery; qualitative, pervasive unity is too often regarded as a subjective state injected into an object which does not possess it, as a mental ‘construct,’ or else as a trait of being to be attained to only by recourse to some curious organ of knowledge termed intuition” (MW10, 323). I will get back to this point later in Chap. 3, in which I will discuss at length Dewey’s notion of situation – which is an infinite or zero word too, as Dewey openly acknowledges (MW10, 324) – and his qualitative account of the normativity of inquiry.
- 25.
See, in this regard, what Dewey writes in Knowing and the Known, that is, in a text written more than 30 years after the Essays in Experimental Logic: “thing […] is so far from being the metaphysical substance or logical entity of philosophy that is external and presumably physical, that it is ‘that with which one is concerned in action, speech, or thought’: – three words whose scope not only places things in the setting of transactions having human beings as partners, but which […] cover[s] the whole range of human activity” (LW16, 247).
- 26.
The idea of the indefinite scope of experience was criticized and rejected by Russell, who took that idea as a sign of Dewey’s idealistically influenced holism, which he deemed as untenable. For a detailed reconstruction of this aspect of Dewey’s thought, see Burke (1994).
- 27.
I will discuss this point in some detail in the next chapter, Sect. 2.6. For now I simply ask the reader to stick to the common-sense insight that two persons can see, speak and refer to the same object no matter how different their knowledge of it can be.
- 28.
See, in this regard, what Dewey writes in The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism: “For example, I start and am flustered by a noise heard. Empirically, that noise is fearsome; it really is, not merely phenomenally or subjectively so. That is what it is experienced as being. But, when I experience the noise as a known thing, I find it to be innocent of harm. It is the tapping of a shade against the window, owing to movements of the wind. The experience has changed; that is, the thing experienced has changed – not that an unreality has given place to a reality, nor that some transcendental (unexperienced) Reality has changed, not that truth has changed, but just and only the concrete reality experienced has changed” (MW3, 160).
- 29.
- 30.
For the sake of honesty, it has to be said that Dewey’s argument is slightly different from the one that I have just presented. His argument, as formulated in the first chapter of the 1925 edition of Experience and Nature, centers on philosophical rather than on scientific experience. Here is what Dewey writes in this regard: “ “[t]he objection is that experience is then made so inclusive and varied as to be useless for philosophic purposes. Experience, as we are here told to conceive it, includes just everything and anything, actual or potential, that we think of and talk about […]. [T]he whole wide universe of fact and dream, of event, act, desire, fancy and meanings, valid or invalid, can be set in contrast to nothing. And if what has bees said is taken literally, ‘experience’ denotes just this wide universe (LW1, 371)”. I do not think that it makes any substantial difference to the theoretical soundness of the argument as I have presented it. The only difference that I can detect is that, in the case of philosophical experience, the conclusion of the argument is even more paradoxical. Indeed, it implies that the burden to provide a theory of everything is up to philosophy, which means to deny the cognitive autonomy of natural sciences.
- 31.
This point is made clear by Dewey in the final chapter of his incomplete book Modern Philosophy and Unmodern Philosophy. In that chapter, significantly entitled Experience as Life-Function, Dewey lists four postulates that will guide his philosophical investigation. I quote the entire passage, which recapitulates much of what has been said thus far: “[t]he first postulate to be set forth is that, for the purpose of the discussion, experience is taken as a synonym for living or occurrence of life-functions. The second of the postulates is that living and life-functions, as the words are here used, stand for events whose nature is most clearly and fully presented in human living, a fact which is equivalent in general to recognition of the socio-cultural nature of the phenomena dealt with. The third postulate is that psychological theory or doctrine is concerned with the analysis and description of just these phenomena, which may also, taken collectively, be named behavior (with “human” tacitly prefixed). The fourth postulate, underlying and giving point to the discussion as a whole, is that a correct theory of experience in the sense just defined is a necessary means or agency for systematic criticism of the activities, including beliefs, which at the present time constitute any existing form of living (with, be it remembered, sociocultural understood or taken for granted) and for constructive projection of the general aims and policies of such living. That critical and constructive effort of this kind constitutes philosophy is not so much a separate postulate as it is the focal point of the four postulates just set down” (Dewey 2012, 315–316). It is clear from this quotation that Dewey is well aware that philosophical reflection is ultimately grounded in an act of free choice which is informed and responsible to data, but is not necessarily implied by them. “The meaning of postulates,” he remarks, “is to be gathered mainly from the consequences flowing from their use; these consequences also furnish the test of their value.” And even more explicitly, while stressing the structural difference between philosophical and mathematical postulates, he states that “[b]ecause of the subject matter with which they are concerned they [philosophical postulates] are matters of the method of exposition of a point of view rather than of a method of demonstration” (Dewey 2012, 315).
- 32.
This should not look particularly controversial; it is a methodological restatement of a general principle that holds for every science. For instance, not every chemical reaction is said to have biological significance, since only those reactions that take place in cells constitute the subject-matter of biochemistry. Similarly, not every biological activity has sociological or ethnological significance, even though, after Darwin, nobody would deny that human beings are biological organisms. Simply, every perspective establishes its ‘domains of objectivity’ – i.e., those objects, properties and events which form the subject-matter of inquiry – where such establishment is not a priori but empirical, and it is therefore constitutively open to further revision.
- 33.
The expression that Dewey gives to the tendency, characteristic of traditional philosophies, to lose sight of the reflective context in which objects of knowledge are constituted is ‘philosophic fallacy’. Philosophic fallacy is defined by Dewey as the “conversion of eventual functions into antecedent existence”, that is, the transformation of the results of a reflective process of inquiry into autonomous and independent elements of reality (LW1, 34). As is well known, the expression ‘philosophic fallacy’ is a loan from William James’s Principles of Psychology. In chapter 7, entitled The Methods and Snares of Psychology, James remarks that “[t]he great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report,” and that this should be acknowledged as “the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ par excellence” (James 2007, 196). Partially because of the language they employ, which is likely to cause confusion, psychologists are prone to substitute their theoretical explanations for the mental facts that they are investigating, thus projecting on the latter the refined distinctions that are characteristic of the former. Take, for instance, a case of knowledge – and, clearly, the example is not chosen by chance. James writes: “[t]he psychologist […] stands outside of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its object are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state (percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other way of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-same object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in which he knows it, although this is often very far from being the case. The most fictitious puzzles have been introduced into our science by this means” (James 2007, 196). Dewey’s line of reasoning is an extension of James’s one. Not only the psychologist, but also the philosopher is at risk of believing that the features of reality that she aims at explaining possess the same features of the thoughts or concepts (i.e., the results of reflective activity) through which she reaches the explanation of the phenomena. In so doing, the properties of a highly refined set of objects are objectified and transformed in real and ultimate qualities of reality.
- 34.
See, for instance, the following passage, in which Dewey refers, once again, to the function of breathing in order to formulate his views on the nature of experience: “[a]lthough breathing is in fact a function that includes both air and the operations of the lungs, we may detach the latter for study, even though we cannot separate it in fact. So while we always know, love, act for and against things, instead of experiencing ideas, emotions and mental intents, the attitudes themselves may be made a special object of attention, and thus come to form a distinctive subject-matter of reflective, although not of primary, experience” (LW1, 21).
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
The functional nature of some of those distinctions has been clearly acknowledged by Garrison. Commenting on Browning’s reading of the notion of experience as starting point of inquiry, he writes: “[t]he distinction between noncognitive, immediate, unreflective experience and cognitive, mediating, and reflective experience is a functional distinction between two phases or subfunctions of experience; neither is more ‘real”’ (Garrison 2005, 839). The interpretation that I articulate in the following pages is a refinement of that insight.
- 38.
’Practical’ is used by Dewey in a technical and specific sense, which is not coincident with its standard philosophical meaning. Here is what Dewey says about it: “[t]he concern of common sense knowing is ‘practical’ […]. But practical in the first case is not limited to the ‘utilitarian’ in the sense in which that word is disparagingly used. It includes all matters of direct enjoyment that occur in the course of living because of transformation wrought by the fine arts, by friendship, by recreation, by civic duties, etc.” (LW16, 253).
- 39.
And then he adds: “[q]uestions of food, shelter, protection, defense, etc., are questions of the use to be made of materials of the environment and of the attitudes to be taken practically towards members of the same group and to other groups taken as whole” (LW12, 69). The same point is formulated with almost the same words in Knowing and the Known: “[i]t is highly doubtful whether anything but matters with which actual living is directly concerned could command the attention, and control the speech usage of ‘mankind,’ or of an entire community. And we may also be reasonably sure that some features of life are so exigent that they impinge upon the feeling and wit of all mankind – such as need for food and means of acquiring it, the capacity of fire to give warmth and to burn, of weapons for hunting or war, and the need for common customs and rules if a group is to be kept in existence against threats from within and without” (LW16, 244–245). It seems safe to conclude from these quotations that Dewey grounds primary experience on the biological endowment of human beings, which then undergoes a process of cultural refinement and articulation that eventuates in the plurality of social forms of life. I have tried to elaborate on this Deweyan insight in Gronda (2015a).
- 40.
It would not be difficult to provide arguments in support of this thesis. However, since I believe that this point is of relatively little interest to the present discussion, I rest content with listing a few passages relating to the notions of common sense and science – all drawn from Knowing and the Known – which show that the identification of primary experience with common sense is corroborated by textual evidence. (1) “The words ‘occupied, engaged, concerned, busied,’ etc., repay consideration in connection with the distinctive subjectmatter of common sense. Matter is one of the and-so-forth expressions”; (2) “The words ‘concern,’ ‘affair,’. ‘care,’ ‘matter,’ ‘thing,’ etc., fuse in indissoluble unity senses which when discriminated are called emotional, intellectual, practical[…]. The supremacy of subjectmatters of concern, etc., over distinctions usually made in psychology and philosophy, cannot be denied by anyone who attends to the fact”; (3) “The other consideration is even more significant. What has been completely divided in philosophical discourse into man and the world, inner and outer, self and not-self, subject and object, individual and social, private and public, etc., are in actuality parties in life transactions” (LW16, 246–248). The notion of common sense is used here to play the same role – and to stress the very same points – that it is played by the notion of primary experience in the first chapter of Experience and Nature. See also what Dewey says in the chapter of the Logic entitled Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry: “(1) Scientific subject-matter and procedures grow out of the direct problems and methods of common sense, of practical use and enjoyments and (2) react into the latter in a way that enormously refines, expands, and liberates the contents and the agencies at the disposal of common sense[…]. When scientific subject-matter is seen to bear genetic and functional relation to the subject-matter of common sense, these problems disappear” (LW12, 71–72). Here it is the notion of scientific subject-matter that seems to be coincident with that of secondary experience, as employed in Experience and Nature.
- 41.
The fourth aspect – which concerns the difference in structure between scientific and common-sense concepts – will be discussed in the next chapter, Sect. 2.6.
- 42.
- 43.
A word of caution is in order here. One may advance an argument of this sort. Let’s assume that the theoretical entities postulated by philosophical investigations are not real “in and of themselves”, as Dewey suggests to do. Let’s also assume that philosophy and science are structurally identical, since they are both secondary experience. Accordingly, it follows that the objects postulated by our best science too are not real “in and of themselves”. If all these assumptions are true – and I believe they are – then, so the argument goes, the conclusion can be drawn that Dewey is a scientific anti-realist. No matter how sound the argument may seem, the conclusion is rash: Dewey strongly emphasizes that he is a scientific realist, and that he believes that scientific objects are real. See Chap. 5 for an in-depth analysis of Dewey’s scientific realism.
- 44.
Compared with genuine scientific problems, the artificiality of traditional philosophical problems is apparent. Dewey is clear about the difference between them. See, for instance, the following passage: “[t]he refined objects of reflection in the natural sciences, however, never end by rendering the subject-matter from which they are derived a problem; rather, when used to describe a path by which some goal in primary experience is designated or denoted, they solve perplexities to which that crude material gives rise but which it cannot resolve of itself. They become means of control, of enlarged use and enjoyment of ordinary things. They may generate new problems, but these are problems of the same sort, to be dealt with by further use of the same methods of inquiry and experimentation. The problems to which empirical method gives rise afford, in a word, opportunities for more investigations yielding fruit in new and enriched experiences” (LW1, 17).
- 45.
- 46.
What is usually considered Dewey’s most detailed analysis of this conceptual couple runs as follows: “But experienced situations come about in two ways and are of two distinct types. Some take place with only a minimum of regulation, with little foresight, preparation and intent. Others occur because, in part, of the prior occurrence of intelligent action. Both kinds are had; they are undergone, enjoyed or suffered. The first are not known; they are not understood; they are dispensations of fortune or providence. The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that present the funded outcome of operations that substitute definite continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the fragmentary quality due to isolation” (LW4,194).
- 47.
For the sake of simplicity I here use the notions of doubt and inquiry as substantially interchangeable, though I am aware they are by no means identical. Please see below, Sect. 3.1, for a discussion of their conceptual differences. At this stage and at the present level of analysis, however, distinguishing between the two would have yielded no further relevant information.
- 48.
As is well known, these two distinctions can be traced back, respectively, to Gilbert Ryle and Michael Polanyi. Though they are now treated as identical, these distinctions were introduced for different purposes. Ryle appeals to the notion of know-how in order to counteract the regress argument to the effect that any comprehension of a proposition presupposes a prior comprehension of another proposition (Ryle 1945). On the contrary, Polanyi uses the notion of tacit knowledge to highlight the importance of scientific tradition and practice in science (Polanyi 2009). In recent time, much has been written on those notions, as a consequence of the practical and contextualist turn both in epistemology and philosophy of language. For a broad-brush overview of how the concepts of know-how and tacit knowledge have been declined and developed within the pragmatist tradition, see the special issue on pragmatism and common sense in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, and in particular Hetherington (2017).
- 49.
In conclusion, a word of caution may be useful. It is worth reminding that I do not hold that the three conceptual couples that I have here sketched can be found clearly distinguished in Dewey’s writings. Rather the contrary, Dewey often uses those notions in quite a loose way. Take, for instance, the following passage from Experience and Nature: after affirming that intellectualism “goes contrary to the facts of what is primarily experienced”, Dewey states that “things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known”. And then he concisely summarizes this insight by saying that those things “are things had before they are things cognized” (LW1, 28). Here Dewey seems to somehow equate the notion of primary experience with that of experience had. I have quoted this passage as a proof of the fact that it is easy to find textual evidence supporting a different account of these notions. So, to name only one remarkable case, in his introduction to Dewey Fesmire identifies primary and immediate experience – see (Fesmire 2014, 62). All this notwithstanding, however, I think that it would be better to keep those conceptual couples separated since, in so doing, the explanatory power of Dewey’s conceptual apparatus gets enhanced. In any case, I am aware that my theoretical reconstruction of these Deweyan notions is strongly prescriptive.
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Gronda, R. (2020). Experience. In: Dewey's Philosophy of Science. Synthese Library, vol 421. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37562-1_1
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