Dewey's Logical Theory: New Studies and Interpretations

2. Logic and Judgments of Practice

27 2 LogicandJudgmentsof Practice Jennifer Welchman I ”The Logic of Judgments of Practice,” first published in 1915 and then reprinted as the concluding essay of Dewey’s 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic, has been recognized as an important statement of Dewey’s developing naturalistic moral epistemology. It expands upon discussions to be found in earlier texts, such as “The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality” (1902), “The Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality” (1903), and the 1908 Ethics by Dewey and Tufts, and it clears the ground for later treatments of values and value judgments in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), and The Quest for Certainty (1929). Less widely recognized is its importance in the development of Dewey’s pragmatic theory of logic. Commentators have found the paper instructive for its explication of Dewey’s position on contemporary debates about valuation. But in 1916 Dewey was entering into those debates primarily in order to critique neorealist logic. In a 1919 review of Essays in Experimental Logic, Bertrand Russell remarked that “in the sense in which I use the word, there is hardly any ‘logic’ in the book except the suggestion that judgments of practice yield a special form—a suggestion which belongs to logic in my sense, though I do not accept it as a valid one” (5–6). Had Russell thought through the implications of the essay to which he refers, he would have had to concede that most of the essays are devoted to logic. The question that “The Logic of Judgments of Practice” takes up is the adequacy of neorealist thinking about propositions, propositional forms, and propositional attitudes. Dewey not only criticizes neorealist notions about propositions as incomplete. He also argues that neorealists radically misunderstand what propositions and their constituents are. And since the positions taken in “The Logic of Judgments of Practice” are those to which the preceding essays point, Essays in Experi- 28 Jennifer Welchman mental Logic is about what Russell himself would call the philosophy of logic. This argument anticipates the view taken in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), namely, that “declarative propositions, whether of facts or of conceptions (principles and laws), are intermediary means or instruments (respectively material and procedural) of effecting that controlled transformation of subject-matter which is the end-in-view (and final goal) of all declarative affirmations and negations” (LW12:162). But the earlier essay is primarily critical rather than constructive. Dewey’s objective is to challenge the neorealists’ narrowing of logic from the study of inference to the study of implication. Because he believed that this faulty approach to logic was due largely to their commitment to realism and to a correspondence theory of truth, Dewey’s essay is devoted more to critically dismantling the neorealist view of propositions (practical and scientific) and their verification than to construction and elucidation of a pragmatic alternative. Nevertheless , the essay clearly suggests the lines along which Dewey’s construction would go. Thus it represents an important stage in the development of Dewey’s distinctive theories of inference, implication, and propositional form. To understand the essay, the issues it addresses, and why Dewey addressed them as he did, we must first understand the contemporary debates to which it was directed. II Before 1916, the chief objections to Dewey’s attempts to reconcile practical and scientific reasoning had come from idealists who argued that such attempts inevitably reduced principles and judgments of value and obligation to assertions about desires and the means and opportunities of their fulfillment. Consequently, in defense of his pragmatic approach to values, Dewey had sought to establish that an empirical approach was not inherently reductionist; that is, it need not reduce propositions about how we ought to act or what we ought to believe to propositions about how we do act or what we do believe. After all, Dewey argues, science is a practice, and like any other practice, it has its own rules, its own normative principles . It is in virtue of these that scientists determine how they ought to pursue their inquiries, what they may count as evidence, and what they are entitled to believe in specific situations. To say that practical reasoning operates in fundamentally the same way as scientific reasoning is not to say that moral philosophers can or should henceforth behave like descriptive anthropologists, cataloging human desires and the means of their sat- Logic and...