Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy (review)

In a philosophical landscape where hyper-specialization is the norm, where philosophy is often conceived as an assortment of disconnected sub-disciplines, James Scott Johnston's Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy is an unconventional attempt at synthesis. Glancing at its title, one might justifiably question whether a book concerned only with the philosophy of John Dewey escapes the label "over-specialized." And Inquiry and Education is, indeed, a book about Dewey. However, Johnston's decidedly Deweyan project is one of integration; he seeks to begin a dialogue between epistemologists, metaphysicians, political philosophers, and philosophers of education. His central thesis is that there has been a decided lack of collaboration internal to scholarship on Dewey's work. Specifically, Johnston claims that Deweyan educational theory has developed in isolation from the rest of the discussion of Dewey's thought—to the detriment of both.

Johnston's project seeks to integrate these disparate strands of thought, and he justifies this integration on Deweyan grounds. For Dewey believed that philosophy's task is to deal with the concrete "problems of men"—problems that Johnston describes as most noticeably arising in the dynamic relationship between individuals, communities, and the various educational institutions (broadly-construed) that link them together. Thus, on Johnston's view, if we are to deal with concrete problems, which are stubbornly multi-faceted, we must find a way to converse across our disciplinary (and sub-disciplinary) boundaries.

Johnston's core insight is that education is a core concern for Dewey, one that serves as the backdrop for his discussions of epistemology, logic, aesthetics, politics, and metaphysics. According to Johnston, Dewey's critics and supporters have, through their lack of attention to the centrality of education in his thought, misconstrued and misunderstood the strengths and the weaknesses of Dewey's philosophical contributions. Accordingly, much of Johnston's text consists of exposition of various readings of Dewey's thought, followed by analysis that critiques the narrowness of each interpretation.

Johnston organizes the book thematically, drawing on Dewey's own work and that of his commentators to discuss the philosophical importance of pedagogical concerns in Dewey's theories of inquiry, experience, community, and democracy. Each of the four substantive chapters of the book examines one aspect of Dewey's thought in turn, thereby allowing Johnston to build an interpretation of Dewey's work that synthesizes his epistemology, his metaphysics of experience, and his political philosophy, integrating these disparate philosophical foci by exploring their connections to Dewey's philosophy of education.

Following Chapter One's lucid introduction and overview, Chapter Two discusses debates regarding the theory of inquiry in Dewey's work. There Johnston lays out the positions of past and contemporary commentators concerned with the primacy of scientific methods in Dewey's notion of inquiry. Specifically, Johnston addresses the work of Morris Cohen, Morton White, and Israel Scheffler, who charge Dewey with scientism, reductionism, and positivism; and philosophers of education such as Christine McCarthy and Leonard Waks, who welcome and embrace such labels. Johnston admits that one can easily find passages where Dewey seems to over-privilege science. He quickly points out, however, that one can just as easily find passages where Dewey displays skepticism with regard to the promises of scientific inquiry. This textual move is an important one, and one that Johnston repeats throughout his book. Reminiscent of Charlene Haddock Seigfried's claim that one cannot read William James's work for very long before finding a contradiction, Johnston's point is that we both are and are not beholden to the texts. On the one hand, they are published (and thus presumably well-thought-out) and are, after all, all we have to go on in Dewey's absence. On the other hand, these texts are artifacts—they hold a place in a much larger context. Johnston proposes that we should understand Dewey's theory of inquiry not through this or that...