Essays in Experimental Logic
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 3 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 562 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Dewey. (n.d.). Essays in Experimental Logic. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/essays-in-experimental-logic
- MLAJohn Dewey. Essays in Experimental Logic. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/essays-in-experimental-logic.
- ChicagoJohn Dewey. Essays in Experimental Logic. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/essays-in-experimental-logic.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The 1916 volume in which Dewey gathers and extends his theory of inquiry, with the long introduction answering the objections that had been made to him.
Context and history
It reprints his four essays from the 1903 'Studies in Logical Theory', also in the corpus, and adds new ones. The thesis is the same and is worked out further here: thinking is an activity that begins when a situation becomes problematic and ends when it is workable again, and 'ideas' are hypotheses, that is plans of action, not pictures of anything. Hence his restatement of what truth is and of what an object of knowledge is. The introduction is worth reading on its own: he answers Russell and others there, and it is where Dewey explains best why he thinks classical epistemology put the question wrongly. It is among his more technical books.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
thought-world, and that the sense-world, the commonsense-world, the world of actual and historic experience, is simply a phenomenal world presenting a fragmentary manifestation of that thought which the process of human thinking makes progressively explicit and articulate. This perception of the intellectual superiority of objects which are constituted at the conclusion of thinking over those which formed its data may fairly be termed the empirical factor in the idealistic logic. The essence of the realistic reaction, on its logical side, is exceedingly simple. It starts from those objects with which science, approved science, ends. Since they are the objects which are _known_, which are true, they are the real objects. That they are also objects for intervening thinking is an interesting enough historical and psychological fact, but one quite irrelevant to their natures, which are precisely what knowledge finds them to be. In the biography of human beings it may hold good that apprehension of objects is arrived at only through certain wanderings, endeavors, exercises, experiments; possibly acts called sensation, memory, reflection may be needed by men in reaching a grasp of the objects. But such things denote facts about the history of the knower, not about the nature of the known object. Analysis will show, moreover, that any intelligible account of this history, any verified statement of the psychology of knowing