Essays in Experimental Logic
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 3 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 562 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Dewey. (n.d.). Essays in Experimental Logic. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/essays-in-experimental-logic
- MLAJohn Dewey. "Essays in Experimental Logic." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/essays-in-experimental-logic.
- ChicagoJohn Dewey. Essays in Experimental Logic. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/essays-in-experimental-logic.
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.
The key to understanding the doctrine of the essays which are herewith reprinted lies in the passages regarding the temporal development of experience. Setting out from a conviction (more current at the time when the essays were written than it now is) that knowledge implies judgment (and hence, thinking) the essays try to show (1) that such terms as "thinking," "reflection," "judgment" denote inquiries or the results of inquiry, and (2) that inquiry occupies an intermediate and mediating place in the development of an experience. If this be granted, it follows at once that a philosophical discussion of the distinctions and relations which figure most largely in logical theories depends upon a proper placing of them in their temporal context; and that in default of such placing we are prone to transfer the traits of the subject-matter of one phase to that of another--with a confusing outcome. I 1. An intermediary stage for knowledge (that is, for knowledge comprising reflection and having a distinctively intellectual quality) implies a prior stage of a different kind, a kind variously characterized in the essays as social, affectional, technological, aesthetic, etc. It may most easily be described from a negative point of view: it is a type of experience which cannot be called a knowledge experience without doing violence to the term "knowledge" and to experience. It may contain knowledge resulting from prior inquiries; it may include thinking within itself; but not so that they dominate the situation and give it its peculiar flavor. Positively, anyone recognizes the difference between an experience of quenching thirst where the perception of water is a mere incident, and an experience of water where knowledge of what water is, is the controlling interest; or between the enjoyment of social converse among friends and a study deliberately made of the character of one of the participants; between aesthetic appreciation of a