John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology

Epilogue: Responsible Technology

Epilogue: Responsible Technology What empirical method exacts of philosophy is two things: First, that refined methods and products be traced back to their origin in primary experience, in all its heterogeneity and fullness; so that the needs and problems out of which they arise and which they have to satisfy be acknowledged. Secondly, that the secondary methods and conclusions be brought back to the things of ordinary experience, in all their coarseness and crudity, for verification. In this way, the methods of analytic reflection yield material which form the ingredients of a method of designation, denotation, in philosophy. (LW1 :39;EN:33) Just as there is no ontological dualism within the self, classically known as body and soul, so too there is no ontological dualism between the self and the world. Now the startling consequence of this view . . . is that if man and the world are made of the same reality and only function differently, then the things of reality as made by man are ontologically similar. Artifacts, then, are human versions of the world acting as transactional mediations, representing human endeavor in relational accordance with the resistance and possibility endemic to both nature and culture.-John J. McDermott1 In a paper presented in 1959, at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Dewey's birth, Edwin A. Burtt suggested that if he had to pick a single word to typify Dewey's philosophical work, it would be "responsibility." Burtt was quick to point out that he did not intend the term in the limited sense that it has had in law, or even in the sense that it has usually had in ethics, but "in the meaning it might convey when applied by a reflective moralist to all philosophical issues."2 Burtt suggested that sometime around 1890 the idea must have occurred to Dewey that "all human action, including thinking as an important part of action, has consequences; and that the vital difference which men in Epilogue 197 general and philosophers especially are concerned about is whether responsibility for those consequences is accepted or not. "3 I have pointed out that Dewey was the only major figure of the classic period of American philosophy who took it as his responsibility to enter into the rough-and-tumble of public affairs. I have also indicated some of the ways in which his work was influenced by the concrete social difficulties that he experienced firsthand. In the 1890s he was already constructing an account of personal responsibility that reflected his sensitivities to the problems of labor practices, immigration, and education, to name just a few. "Responsibility," he wrote in The Study of Ethics, "is a name for the fact that we are, and are something definite and concrete-specific individuals. I am myself, I am conscious of myself in my deeds (self-conscious), I am responsible, name not three facts, but one fact" (EW4:342). And further, "Every bad man is (in the substantial sense) irresponsible; he cannot be counted upon in action, he is not certain, reliable, trustworthy. He does not respond to his duties, to his functions. His impulses and habits are not co-ordinated, and hence do not answer properly to the stimuli, to the demands made. The vicious man is not socially responsible" (EW4:343). But even those who might have been expected to be among Dewey's natural allies have not always understood his position with respect to these matters. It must have been a matter of considerable disappointment to Dewey, for example, that the response of C. S. Peirce to his 1903 Studies in Logical Theory was to chastise him for being irresponsible, for engaging in a "debauch of loose reasoning,"4 and to suggest that Dewey's life in Chicago-a city that, as Peirce put it, "hasn't the reputation of being a moral place"-had apparently weakened his sense of dyads such as right and wrong, true and false.5 Dewey has fared little better among some of our contemporaries who claim to be sympathetic to his views. Richard Rorty, for example, misreads pragmatism as viewing "science as one genre of literatureor , put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus [pragmatism] sees ethics as neither more 'relative' or 'subjective' than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made 'scientific.' "6 If I have made my case in chapters 3 and 5, it should be clear not only that Dewey held no...