Dewey's Logical Theory

F. Thomas Burke, D. Micah Hester, And Robert B. Talisse

Description

Despite the resurgence of interest in the philosophy of John Dewey, his work on logical theory has received relatively little attention. Ironically, Dewey's logic was his "first and last love." The essays in this collection pay tribute to that love by addressing Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his logical thought in the 1938 volume, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. All the essays are original to this volume and are written by leading Dewey scholars. Ranging from discussions of propositional theory to logic's social and ethical implications, these essays clarify often misunderstood or misrepresented aspects of Dewey's work, while emphasizing the seminal role of logic to Dewey's philosophical endeavors.

This collection breaks new ground in its relevance to contemporary philosophy of logic and epistemology and pays special attention to applications in ethics and moral philosophy.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826591371
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Dewey’s F. Thomas Burke, Edited by Logical D. Micah Hester, and Robert B. Talisse With a Foreword by Theory Larry A. Hickman

New Studies and Interpretations

Dewey’s Logical Theory

THE VANDERBILT LIBRARY OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY offers interpretive perspectives on the historical roots of American philosophy and on present innovative developments in American thought, including studies of values, naturalism, social philosophy, cultural criticism, and applied ethics.

Series Editors Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., General Editor (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis) Cornelis de Waal, Associate Editor (Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis)

Editorial Advisory Board Kwame Anthony Appiah (Harvard) Larry Hickman (Southern Illinois University) John Lachs (Vanderbilt) John J. McDermott (Texas A&M) Joel Porte (Cornell) Hilary Putnam (Harvard) Ruth Anna Putnam (Wellesley) Beth J. Singer (Brooklyn College) John J. Stuhr (Pennsylvania State)

Dewey’s LogicalTheory

New Studies and Interpretations

Edited by F. Thomas Burke, D. Micah Hester, and Robert B. Talisse

Foreword by Larry A. Hickman

Vanderbilt University Press Nashville

© 2002 Vanderbilt University Press All rights reserved First Edition 2002

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dewey's logical theory : new studies and interpretations / edited by F. Thomas Burke, D. Micah Hester, and Robert B. Talisse ; foreword by Larry Hickman. p. cm. — (The Vanderbilt library of American philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8265-1368-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8265-1394-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Dewey, John, 1859–1952—Logic. I. Burke, F. Thomas, 1950– II. Hester, D. Micah. III. Talisse, Robert B. IV. Series. B945.D44 D496 2002 160'.92—dc21 2001005614

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The Logical Reconstruction of Experience: Dewey and Lewis 72 Sandra Rosenthal

Experimental Logic: Normative Theory or Natural History? Vincent Colapietro

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The Aesthetics of Reality: The Development of Dewey’s Ecological Theory of Experience Thomas Alexander

Logic and Judgments of Practice Jennifer Welchman

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Dewey and Quine on the Logic of What There Is John Shook

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Contents

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Part I Situations, Experience, and Knowing

Part II Logical Theory and Forms

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Foreword by Larry Hickman Editors’ Introduction xi

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Prospects for Mathematizing Dewey’s Logical Theory Tom Burke

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Part III Values and Social Inquiry

Dewey’s Logical Forms Hans Seigfried

The Role of Measurement in Inquiry Jayne Tristan

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Power/Inquiry: The Logic of Pragmatism John Stuhr

The Teachers Union Fight and the Scope of Dewey’s Logic 262 Michael Eldridge

Achieving Pluralism (Why AIDS Activists Are Different from Creationists) 239 John Capps

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Qualities, Universals, Kinds, and the New Riddle of Induction Tom Burke

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Designation, Characterization, and Theory in Dewey’s Logic 160 Douglas Browning

About the Authors Name Index 291 Subject Index 293

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Foreword

There is probably no better measure of the resurgence of interest in John Dewey’s version of pragmatism than the book you now hold in your hand. Even as recently as a decade ago, it hardly seemed possible that a volume of thirteen original essays—fourteen, counting the excellent introduction— could be dedicated to his work on logic. The issue of commercial viability aside, there simply did not appear to be enough expertise or interest among a sufficient number of Dewey scholars to produce such a collection. With the exception of the ideas he put forth inKnowing and the Known, which was published in 1949 as a result of his collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley, Dewey’s essays and books on logic have perhaps elicited less un- derstanding and provided more occasion for offense than any other area of his thought. Apart from some remarkable exceptions, which include stud- ies by H. S. Thayer, Gail Kennedy, Ralph Sleeper, and Thomas Burke, re- sponses to Dewey’s instrumentalist logic have tended to range from stud- ied indifference, to wincing incomprehension, to unvarnished hostility. Along the way there has also been a fair amount of damning with faint praise. The response of fellow pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce to Dewey’s 1903Studies in Logical Theory provides an interesting case in point. In an acerbic letter dated June 9, 1904, Peirce accused Dewey of having yielded to a “debauch of loose reasoning.” As if that were not enough to clarify his position, he then went on to intimate that Dewey’s moral fiber had been weakened by having lived in Chicago for too long—that is, that he had lost his sense of dyads such as true and false, right and wrong. To his great credit, however, the normally pugnacious Peirce appears to have had sec- ond thoughts about posting his incendiary remarks. There is evidence that his letter is a draft of one that he never mailed. Dewey’s 1916Essays in Experimental Logicwas greeted with charges that he had mangled not only the history of logic but its present as well. In an essay published in theJournal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Meth-

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Foreword

ods, for example, Daniel Sommer Robinson issued a sharp response to chap- ter 14, “Logic of Judgments of Practice.” He charged Dewey with having misunderstood the logical works of both Aristotle and Hegel, having em- braced a version of psychologism, and, even worse, having engaged in a “loose use of the termjudgment.” The termlooseseems to have been a fa- vorite among Dewey’s critics. In his own now-famous review of the 1916Essays, Bertrand Russell raised the stakes to a level that could hardly be surpassed. After a brief complaint that philosophical discussions had become too “eristic,” or po- lemical, he continued by asserting that “what he [Dewey] calls ‘logic’ does not seem to me to be a part of logic at all; I should call it part of psychol- ogy.” Apparently afraid that his readers might have missed his point, he added that “in the sense in which I use the word, there is hardly any ‘logic’ in the book.” Given the reputation of psychologism among the adherents of Russell’s logicist program, this was, of course, tantamount to charging that Dewey had exhibited loose reasoning. Dewey’s ideas fared little better in the hands of those who attempted to respond to his 1938Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. May Broadbeck, for example, writing in theJournal of Philosophy, was determined to expose what she termed “Dewey’s empiricist orthodoxy” by demonstrating that his views were covertly Hegelian and thus “fundamentally rationalistic.” Then, ris- ing to a kind of critical crescendo, she charged Dewey with holding that laws of nature are “‘analytic’ in the full Kantian sense of the word.” Ernest Nagel, writing the introduction to the critical edition of the 1938Logicsome years later, may have had Broadbeck’s remarks in mind when he argued that “no analytic proposition, in the contemporary technical sense, would be tested in the way frequently proposed by Dewey for his universals” (LW12:xviii). Given the long line of interpretive essays such as the ones I have just described, in which the main points of Dewey’s innovative treatment of logic have for the most part been either misunderstood or ignored, the ma- terial presented in this volume reflects a kind of sea change in Dewey stud- ies. It is not so much that these essays are uniformly positive or uncritical, for they are certainly not that. Their importance lies rather in the fact that serious scholarship on Dewey’s logic, building on the solid advances won over the years by Thayer, Kennedy, Sleeper, Burke, and others, seems fi- nally to have reached a critical mass. Perhaps even more important, when taken together these essays establish an important way-marker along a road that Dewey hoped his students would follow. They seek to push Dewey’s ideas forward: to work out the consequences of his logic—his theory of in- quiry—for a living philosophy.

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In his introduction to the critical edition ofLogic: The Theory of Inquiry, Ernest Nagel proposed that Dewey had looked upon his logical theory “as a hypothesis, the detailed confirmation of which would have to be sup- plied by others in the future” (LW12:x). The publication of this volume pro- vides evidence that the future that Dewey envisioned, and hoped for, has now arrived.

—Larry A. Hickman