Instrumentalism
Ideas and theories are instruments for solving problems; their value lies in whether they transform an indeterminate situation into a determinate one.
The Twentieth Century to Today · 1859 – 1952
John Dewey
杜威
Completer of pragmatism and father of progressive education: knowledge is an instrument of inquiry, democracy a way of life, and the school a society in miniature. He lectured in China for two years.
PragmatismBirthplace: Burlington, Vermont
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
Source: attributed; cf. Democracy and Education, ch. 4
Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a grocer, studied at the University of Vermont, taught school for three years, and in 1882 entered Johns Hopkins, where he attended Peirce's logic and Morris's Hegel and took his doctorate in 1884. After ten years at Michigan he went in 1894 to the new University of Chicago to head philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, and founded the Laboratory School, where children learned through cooking, weaving and carpentry; his educational thought took shape there.
A dispute over the school's management led him to resign in 1904 for Columbia, and he lived in New York for the next forty-eight years. He was the most active philosopher in American public life: a founder of the American Association of University Professors, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, a supporter of women's suffrage, and in 1937 chairman of the commission in Mexico that examined the charges against Trotsky. From 1919 to 1921 he lectured in China for two years, travelling through eleven provinces with his student Hu Shih as interpreter, and deeply influenced Chinese thought in the May Fourth period.
His philosophy is a thoroughgoing naturalism: the human being is an organism in an environment, thinking is inquiry provoked by a problem, ideas are instruments for handling situations, and truth is 'warranted assertibility'. He rejected every dualism: mind and matter, theory and practice, fact and value, individual and society are ends of a continuum. Experience and Nature and The Quest for Certainty charge the whole Western tradition with inventing an eternal realm of reality to escape uncertainty.
Democracy and Education holds that democracy is not merely a form of government but 'a mode of associated living', that education is the continuous reconstruction of experience, and that the school should be a democratic community. The Public and Its Problems answers Lippmann's doubts about democracy by calling for a competent public formed through communication. He was still writing at his death at ninety-two. His reputation faded in the heyday of analytic philosophy, and Rorty, Putnam and Habermas brought him back to the centre in the 1980s.
Key Ideas
Inquiry
Thinking begins in perplexity and passes through defining the problem, forming hypotheses, reasoning and testing to the resolution of the problem. Scientific method is this process made self-conscious.
Experience
Experience is not passive sensation but the interaction of organism and environment, undergoing and doing together. Art is experience in its most complete form.
Democracy as a way of life
The heart of democracy is not voting but the number of shared interests and the freedom of interchange with other groups. It must be recreated in every generation.
Learning by doing
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. Children grow through activities that solve real problems.
Influenced by
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
A Hegelian in youth, he later said Hegel left 'a permanent deposit' in his thinking: totality, process, the refusal of dualisms.
- William James
The Principles of Psychology pulled him from Hegel's Absolute back to the interaction of organism and environment; he called it the turning point of his thought.
- Charles Sanders Peirce
He attended Peirce's logic course at Johns Hopkins without understanding it, and decades later developed Peirce's theory of inquiry into Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
- John Stuart Mill
Influenced
- W. V. O. Quine
In his Dewey Lectures of 1968 he traced his naturalism to Dewey: knowledge, mind and meaning are natural phenomena to be studied by scientific method.
- Hilary Putnam
- Jürgen Habermas
- Richard Rorty
He named Dewey, Wittgenstein and Heidegger the three most important philosophers of the century, and Dewey the one he most wished to follow, because Dewey made philosophy the servant of democracy.