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vii Foreword There is probably no better measure of the resurgence of interest in John Dewey’s version of pragmatism than the book you now hold in your hand. Even as recently as a decade ago, it hardly seemed possible that a volume of thirteen original essays—fourteen, counting the excellent introduction— could be dedicated to his work on logic. The issue of commercial viability aside, there simply did not appear to be enough expertise or interest among a sufficient number of Dewey scholars to produce such a collection. With the exception of the ideas he put forth in Knowing and the Known, which was published in 1949 as a result of his collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley, Dewey’s essays and books on logic have perhaps elicited less understanding and provided more occasion for offense than any other area of his thought. Apart from some remarkable exceptions, which include studies by H. S. Thayer, Gail Kennedy, Ralph Sleeper, and Thomas Burke, responses to Dewey’s instrumentalist logic have tended to range from studied indifference, to wincing incomprehension, to unvarnished hostility. Along the way there has also been a fair amount of damning with faint praise. The response of fellow pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce to Dewey’s 1903 Studies in Logical Theory provides an interesting case in point. In an acerbic letter dated June 9, 1904, Peirce accused Dewey of having yielded to a “debauch of loose reasoning.” As if that were not enough to clarify his position, he then went on to intimate that Dewey’s moral fiber had been weakened by having lived in Chicago for too long—that is, that he had lost his sense of dyads such as true and false, right and wrong. To his great credit, however, the normally pugnacious Peirce appears to have had second thoughts about posting his incendiary remarks. There is evidence that his letter is a draft of one that he never mailed. Dewey’s 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic was greeted with charges that he had mangled not only the history of logic but its present as well. In an essay published in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Meth- viii Foreword ods, for example, Daniel Sommer Robinson issued a sharp response to chapter 14, “Logic of Judgments of Practice.” He charged Dewey with having misunderstood the logical works of both Aristotle and Hegel, having embraced a version of psychologism, and, even worse, having engaged in a “loose use of the term judgment.” The term loose seems to have been a favorite among Dewey’s critics. In his own now-famous review of the 1916 Essays, Bertrand Russell raised the stakes to a level that could hardly be surpassed. After a brief complaint that philosophical discussions had become too “eristic,” or polemical , he continued by asserting that “what he [Dewey] calls ‘logic’ does not seem to me to be a part of logic at all; I should call it part of psychology .” Apparently afraid that his readers might have missed his point, he added that “in the sense in which I use the word, there is hardly any ‘logic’ in the book.” Given the reputation of psychologism among the adherents of Russell’s logicist program, this was, of course, tantamount to charging that Dewey had exhibited loose reasoning. Dewey’s ideas fared little better in the hands of those who attempted to respond to his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. May Broadbeck, for example, writing in the Journal of Philosophy, was determined to expose what she termed “Dewey’s empiricist orthodoxy” by demonstrating that his views were covertly Hegelian and thus “fundamentally rationalistic.” Then, rising to a kind of critical crescendo, she charged Dewey with holding that laws of nature are “‘analytic’ in the full Kantian sense of the word.” Ernest Nagel, writing the introduction to the critical edition of the 1938 Logic some years later, may have had Broadbeck’s remarks in mind when he argued that “no analytic proposition, in the contemporary technical sense, would be tested in the way frequently proposed by Dewey for his universals” (LW12:xviii). Given the long line of interpretive essays such as the ones I have just described, in which the main points of Dewey’s innovative treatment of logic have for the most part been either misunderstood or ignored, the material presented in this volume reflects a kind of sea change in Dewey studies . It is not so much that these essays are uniformly positive or uncritical, for...

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