Abstract
This chapter explores some of the most interesting intersections between the philosophy of John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. Practical epistemological analysis (PEA), Situated Epistemic Relations (SER), and Situated Artistic Relations (SAR) examine learning primarily as a sociolinguistic practice. Since it is a sociolinguistic practice, much of both the product and the process of learning are plainly visible to sophisticated methodological observation. This chapter emphasizes the primacy of practice in comprehending linguistic meaning (i.e., forms of life, language-games, meaning as use, etc.), the rejection of a private language, antifoundationalism, and epistemological contextualism, action, and antirepresentationalism. It establishes the philosophical framework for our analytical method developed in Chap. 3 and assumed in Chap. 4.
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- 1.
Nowhere in this chapter has emphasis been added to any citation.
- 2.
Wittgenstein writes: “When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought” (PI §329). Linguistic behavior is irreducible to psychic mental functioning, although there are, no doubt, neurophysiological concomitants including linguistic habits.
- 3.
See Quine (1969, 28). He incorrectly cites the passage substituting “theory” for “thing” in the passage that starts “The characteristic thing….”
- 4.
William James coined the phrase “The psychologist’s fallacy” to describe this sort of confusion. According to Dewey, “it is to confuse the standpoint of the observer and explainer with that of the fact observed” (EW 4: 144).
- 5.
These methods and models will also allow us to describe and explain at least an important subset of artistically expressive linguistic experiences as well as artistically expressive and consummatory nonlinguistic experiences.
- 6.
According to Dewey, that meaning socially shared “alone condemns traditional nominalism” (LW 1: 145). Nonetheless, Dewey thinks the nominalist is right about “the status and function of a symbol” (LW 12: 261). Dewey also disagrees with conceptualism insofar as it assumes concept capture something “antecedently ‘common’ to a number of singulars” (LW 12: 261). What is common emerges within shared social practices, although he agrees with conceptualism that meanings (generals, universals, etc.) are “conceptual or ideational in nature” (LW 12: 261). Dewey is a unique kind of realist about meaning in that he agrees with their “interpretation of generals in affirming that ways of acting are as existential as are singular events and objects” (LW 12: 261). However, he thinks generality accrues when universals are used “as a controlling function, in the continuity of inquiry” (LW 12: 261). As he puts it elsewhere, “a universal, like any rule, is a formulation of an operation to be performed” (LW 11: 107). Meanings, concepts, universals, and so on are ideas that guide action whose warrant lies in their ability to coordinate social practices that engage a resistant world. When Dewey speaks of language or the self as a tool of tools, he is a realist about meaning, albeit, of a certain rather Wittgensteinian kind. We must also remember that language, and the self, are consummatory as well as instrumental.
- 7.
Dewey states:
The material and spiritual, the physical and the mental or psychological; body and mind; experience and reason; sense and intellect, appetitive desire and will; subjective and objective, individual and social; inner and outer; this last division underlying in a way all the others. (LW 16: 408)
- 8.
We will not explore it here, but the arguments of Dewey in The Quest for Certainty greatly resemble those in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. See Eodice (1990).
- 9.
For an argument against the mereological fallacy of reducing the mind to the brain that relies on Dewey while mentioning Wittgenstein, see Boyles and Garrison (2017).
- 10.
See Mead (1934/1967).
- 11.
Elsewhere, Wittgenstein writes: “If there did not exist an agreement in what we call ‘red’, etc. etc., language would stop” (R § 70).
- 12.
Chapter 2 of Dewey’s 1938 Logic is titled, “The Existential Matrix of Inquiry: Biological.” The next chapter is titled “The Existential Matrix of Inquiry: Cultural.” The later chapter contains some of his most refined remarks on language acquisition.
- 13.
Dewey distinguishes reflective from customary morality:
The intellectual distinction between customary and reflective morality is clearly marked. The former places the standard and rules of conduct in ancestral habit; the latter appeals to conscience, reason, or to some principle which includes thought. The distinction is as important as it is definite, for it shifts the centre of gravity in morality. (LW 7: 162)
The difference is relative not absolute, but reflective morality is critical and creative; it allows us to avoid dogmatic cultural reproduction.
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Andersson, J., Garrison, J., Östman, L. (2018). Dewey, Wittgenstein, and the Primacy of Practice. In: Empirical Philosophical Investigations in Education and Embodied Experience. The Cultural and Social Foundations of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74609-8_1
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