Dewey's Studies in Logical Theory

Dewey's Studies in Logical Theory B. M. HUMPHRIES THE FOUR ESSAYSthat Dewey published in 1903 under the title Studies in Logical Theory 1 have been said 2 to constitute Dewey's first statement of his new philosophy . Dewey there gives a unified discussion of two important issues which are now often approached separately: the roles of thought and experience as sources of knowledge and tests of truth; and the nature of significance or intentionality. The essays are obscure, even by Deweyan standards, but they are historically important both for their place in the development of Dewey's thought and for their status as one of the last serious American considerations of the continental philosophical tradition; for these reasons I venture an exposition of Dewey's views of the first of the two topics mentioned above. A one-sentence summary of Dewey's message in the Studies would run, "A common theory, exemplified in Lotze's Logic, 3 can be shown to be unacceptable by the fact that it implies that thought is either futile or falsifying, but I have a new theory which avoids this absurd result." What had Lotze said? As part of his attack on Hegelianism, Lotze had maintained that the operations of thought have a purely formal significance; by this he meant, in part, that we cannot infer that anything in reality corresponds to those features of knowledge for which thought is responsible.4 The operations of thought need have no "real significance" so long as the goal of arriving at true results is achieved. In Lotze's terms, the purpose of thinking is to distinguish those combinations of ideas which are coherent (correct or justified) from those which are merely coincident (accidental combinations which belong together only in the sense of occupying their inevitable place in a causal sequence).5 Several operations of thought are singled out in the opening chapter; the first and most important is objectification,6 which transforms impres1 An anthology edited by Dewey and published by the University of Chicago. Dewey's contributions, slightly revised, were reprinted in his Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago, 1916); my notes refer to the Dover edition of this work. 2 By Morton White in The Origins of Dewey's lnstrumentalism (New York: Columbia, 1943), p. 134. 3 Translated by B. Bosanquet (Oxford: 1888). 4 H. Lotze, Logic, Introduction (v. 1) and Book III, Chapter 4 (v. 2) especially p. 280. Ibid., Introduction. Ibid., pp. 13 ft. [485] 486 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY sions (the data on which knowledge is based) into ideas (the "logical building stones" or significant units of knowledge). That which takes place in us immediately under the influence of an external stimulus, the sensation or feeling, is in itself nothing but a state of our consciousness, a mood of ourselves.... When we name something we have separated something before unseparated , our sensitive act from the sensible matter to which it refers. This matter we now present to ourselves no longer as a condition which we undergo, but as something which has its being and meaning in itseff.7 However, Thought does not stand fronting the impressions as they arrive with a bundle of logical forms in its hand, uncertain which form can be fitted to which impression.... It is the relations themselves, already subsisting between impressions when we become conscious of them, by which the action of thought, which is never anything but reaction, is attracted; and this action consists merely in interpreting relation, which we find existing between our passive impressions, into aspects of the matter of the impressions,s Further operations ensue: ideas are compared and universals abstracted, judgments are formed, and the transformations known as inference take place. Nevertheless, in conformity with the last quotation, we are not to view thought as making any substantive contribution to knowledge: "Thought can make no difference where it finds none." 9 Hegelians such as Jones to attacked this theory, using an argument familiar from T. H. Green's critique of the British empiricists 11 and many of Dewey's arguments are variations on this theme.12 The pattern is: "If you begin with raw data uncontaminated by thought, there is so far no...