Dewey (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 465 disclaimer amounts to little more than a preludial cough and does not prepare the reader for the hyperbolic severity of the criticism that ensues. It is Bernstein himself, and not his reader, who needs the warning against exaggeration. KELLY DEAN JOLLEY UniversityofRochester J. E. Tiles. Dewey.The Arguments of the Philosophers. London: Routledge, 1988. Pp. xiv + 261. $39.5o. J. E. Tiles's interesting study of John Dewey's thought takes issue with recent accounts of Dewey's role in twentieth-century philosophy. The nominal subject of his opening remarks is Richard Rorty, but his criticisms are directed against any interpretation of Dewey's work as an attempt to undermine the legacy of modern Western philosophy and its analytic inheritors. In the preface and chapter 1, Tiles argues that the dispute between Dewey and his contemporaries was never whetherthe legacy of modern philosophy would be retained, but whichof its many legacies should be retained. Dewey's arguments did not carry the day but remain valuable because they suggest ways contemporary philosophy would have benefited from acceptance of "more of the legacy of the post-Kantian (or 'Hegelian ') philosophy of the nineteenth century" (xi). The legacy in question included the post-Kantian idealists' denial that anything external to consciousness can be known as well as their assertion that, since knowers participate in their experience, what is known cannot be independent of its being known. The presence of this legacy in Dewey's instrumentalism was and is a source of the analytic tradition's fundamental objections to Dewey's philosophy. Tiles's project is to explain and defend the use made of this legacy in Dewey's theories of mind, epistemology , meaning, and value. Chapters 2 through 4 survey key developments in Dewey's transition from an idealist to a functionalist theory of "philosophical psychology," culminating in the presentation of Dewey's emergent theory of mind as a revised Aristotelianism. For Dewey, mind is an organic unity of three classes of natural operations: the purely physical, the sentient, and the cognitive. The third class, the cognitive, appears in creatures whose sentient processes are so complex as to require an organ/capacity to resolve conflicts arising in their deliverances. Inquiry into problematic experience is the function of cognition, a service it performs by transforming features of senseexperience into signifiers (meanings) of consequences to be had from alternate patterns of response. In chapter 5, Dewey's insistence on the relevance of the "genesis" (later, "context") ofjudgments to their justification is defended as legitimate given Dewey's conceptions of cognition and inquiry. The products of cognitive inquiries,judgments, are implicitly conditional, i.e., their warrant rests in part on prior intersubjective agreement about the significance of features of agents' situations. Thus Dewey is wrongly charged with confusing questions of genesis and justification when he rejects his opponents' assump- 466 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:3 JULY 1990 tion of "the autonomy of factual discourse" (Tiles's phrase) from the context of inquiry . Correctly understood, Dewey is arguing the necessity of developing some theoretical account of the interrelation of observation and interpretation. Since it is the situation--a transaction between an organism and an environment-that is the subject matter of cognition, Dewey disallows traditional distinctions between subjective and objective qualities. All are equally real features of a situation: e.g., there is not a situation and an agent experiencing doubt, but an agent in a doubtful situation. Dewey's rejection of Lockean classifications of perceptual qualities and his common ascription of qualities to situations appear to have metaphysical implications incompatible with both common sense and Dewey's claim to be a realist. In chapter 6, Tiles studies some early exchanges on this topic, including Lovejoy'swell-known objection to Dewey's analysis of our knowledge of past events, in order to elucidate Dewey's own, sometimes tortured, attempts to distinguish instrumentalism from subjective idealism. Tiles's exposition of Dewey's positions in these chapters is detailed and clear, his defense of them spirited and cogent. The comparisons made with related positions of Aristotle, Benjamin Peirce, Bernard Williams, and Thomas Nagel are instructive. His exposition of some key features of Dewey...