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180 8 Dewey’sLogicalForms Hans Seigfried Without systematic formulation of ruling ideas, inquiry is kept in the domain of opinion and action in the realm of conflict. (Dewey 1938, LW12:501) With his 1938 Logic, Dewey presents a theory of directed and controlled experimental inquiry. He claims that the control of inquiry depends on what he calls logical forms. They are the conditions which all inquiry must satisfy . Only knowledge of these general, and as such formal, conditions can furnish axioms, or guiding principles, required for the control of inquiry, and criteria for recognizing patterns of successful inquiry.1 And yet, in the presentation of his theory there is no detailed account of the origin and nature of these axioms and principles. What is said about them is said in passing. In the preface, Dewey (LW12:5) says that his treatise is introductory and that he is well aware that in this form the presentation of his point of view and method of approach “does not have and could not have the finish and completeness that are theoretically possible.” But he is convinced, he adds, that his standpoint is “so thoroughly sound that those who are willing to entertain it will in coming years develop a theory of logic that is in thorough accord with all the best authenticated methods of attaining knowledge .” In this essay, I am willing to entertain his standpoint and try to clarify some puzzling aspects of Dewey’s idea of logical forms, and through comparison-contrast of his theory with the theories of Plato and Kant, I will bring out what is radically new and philosophically promising in his exceptional account of the forms and axioms of controlled inquiry. Dewey (LW12:21, 24f.) agrees with Plato and Kant that these formal conditions are a priori conditions, that is, “demands, requirements, postulates, to be fulfilled” by all inquiries, but he insists against them that these demands are only the empirically, temporally, and operationally a priori conditions of all inquiry. For understanding the possibility of controlled and Dewey’s Logical Forms 181 successful inquiry, it is not necessary to postulate that they are permanently and externally fixed, “fixed antecedently to inquiry and conditioning it ab extra” (LW12:19). Like Plato before him, Dewey (1929, LW4:231) contends, Kant was able to “assert the existence of his apparatus of forms and categories ” only on the basis of “an elaborate process of dialectical inference”; his forms are “as inaccessible to observation as were the occult forms and essences whose rejection was a prerequisite of development of modern science .” In contrast, Dewey sees in the logical forms of inquiry “formulations of conditions, discovered in the course of inquiry itself, which further inquiries must satisfy if they are to yield warranted assertibility as a consequence ” (1938, LW12:24). Kant still believed, says Dewey, that the understanding has rules and principles in itself that are logically prior and external to experience and inquiry. Against Kant Dewey claims that all such rules or logical forms of inquiry “arise within the operation of inquiry and are concerned with control of inquiry so that it may yield warranted assertions” (LW12:11). Any such rule, Dewey argues, is only empirically, temporally, and operationally a priori in the sense that “while it is derived from what is involved in inquiries that have been successful in the past, it imposes a condition to be satisfied in future inquiries, until the results of such inquiries show reason for modifying it” (LW12:25). I will try to answer three questions about Dewey’s peculiar understanding of the axioms of controlled inquiry. First, how is it possible to “derive” from past investigations of concrete subject-matters directives for future inquiries into all subject-matters? Dewey claims that certain directives “must be employed if assertibility is to be obtained as an end” (LW12:21, 23f.). How then can we justify the “imposition” of formal conditions to be satisfied in all inquiries? Second, how can abstract logical forms fruitfully direct investigations into concrete subject-matters? And third, what criteria must we use for determining that warranted assertibility has been obtained in a given case? The answer to the first question takes up the greater part of this essay; it makes replies to the other questions predictable, so they can be much briefer. In my development of the answers, I argue that Dewey’s understanding of logical forms is based on an alternative to the received epistemological understanding of knowledge as accurate representation of...

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