Dewey, Foucault, Rabinow: Comments on the 2012 Coss Lecture

First, it is clearly a great honor to our society that Paul Rabinow has agreed to present the Coss Dialogue Lecture for 2012. His work in the field of what he has termed "the anthropology of the contemporary" has reached out to otherwise diverse traditions in anthropology and philosophy in order to incorporate their best elements into a novel approach to the logos of anthropos. His case-based studies have focused on the relations between the physical sciences and the human sciences, and especially between the efforts of scientists working in the fields of synthetic biology and the efforts of those working in the fields of the human sciences who take it as their task to evaluate the ethical and other diagnostic dimensions of the products of those physical sciences.

In his Coss Dialogue Lecture, "How to Submit to Inquiry: Dewey and Foucault," Rabinow has issued a call for an "anthropology of reason," and alternatively, for "fieldwork in philosophy," and "designing human practices." In order to jumpstart his project, he has drawn on the work of the two philosophers of his title. Regarding the work of Dewey, he has focused on Dewey's 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic. One of the more interesting features of that work is that its introduction includes what must be regarded as one of Dewey's best treatments of technology.

Why should there be a treatment of technology as a part of an introduction to essays on logic? Dewey is clear enough. Technology is about inquiry. It is about doing and making, formulating and resolving the problems that we encounter in our lifeworlds with the help of tools that we develop along the way. Technology is the logos of techne. It is about inquiry, not about epistemology, as that field has come to be defined by analytic philosophy (Dewey, Middle Works, Vol. 10).

Regarding the second figure of his title, Rabinow's remarks on Foucault's treatment of problematization will surely have had a familiar ring even to those readers of Dewey who have little acquaintance with the work of Foucault. Here, for your review, is the passage from Foucault that he has selected: problematization

[d]oes not mean the representation of a pre-existent object nor the creation through discourse of an object that did not exist. It is the ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something enter into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.).

(as cited in Rabinow, Anthropos 18)

In this brief passage Foucault advances themes that will be familiar to every careful reader of Dewey. First, when an indefinite situation importunes the formation of a problem is itself an affair of inquiry, even at the stage of preliminary affirmation. Problematization is itself an artifact, constituted (or constructed) from more basic and immediate experiences of indeterminacy.

Second, problematization does not depend on, and in fact avoids, simply mirroring or representing a pre-existent object. Problematization does not rest on a correspondence between idea and fact. For the naive realist, there could be no such account of problematization: for him or her, the world is ready-made, waiting to be discovered. Stated in terms of a leading metaphor of Essays in Experimental Logic, for the realist, pig iron already exists: it is not necessary to refine it from iron ore. For Dewey and Foucault, where raw materials and intermediate stock parts come into play, they become known—constituted—by being fitted to the work that is to be done.

Third, the objects of problematization are not made out of nothing. They arise from a thick skein of experiences of all sorts, and not simply through discourse. In his 1916 address to the Columbia philosophy club, speaking of a behavioral theory of knowing, Dewey argued that "knowing is literally something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behaving before facts and that active experimentation is essential for verification" (Dewey, Middle Works...