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nine The Function of Judgment in Inquiry Dewey urgently sought to renew his personal involvement in scienti¤c studies after a lapse of several decades following his direct involvement in the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. During these intervening years research in child development increased enormously. Although much new information had been acquired about child behavior from experimental studies with which he was familiar, including the Bureau of Educational Experiments, many conventional attitudes persisted about human development. In Dewey’s estimation, the scienti¤c evidence about normal development was mistakenly intertwined with ideas about moral development. Freud led parents to believe that any interference with a child’s natural physiological processes had delayed repercussions that presented moral predicaments in adult life. From Dewey’s perspective, however, the natural processes of growth had little to do with cultural beliefs. Growth processes affected the human potential for learning and the capacity to exercise judgment. He wanted to demonstrate that judgment was not primarily concerned with praise or blame, but had to do with the natural capacity to maintain balance and perspective—traits essential to scienti¤c inquiry and aesthetic appreciation, as well as moral conduct. Dewey’s philosophical ideas about growth and learning and the role of the brain, consciousness, and judgment in intelligent behavior posed methodological dif¤culties that did not lend themselves to conventional psychological analyses . The re®ex paradigm popularized by the behaviorist John Watson suggested that learning developed incrementally through stimulus and response and that complex human behaviors were acquired through a process of conditioning. Dewey rejected these notions, arguing instead that intelligence developed from the interaction of mind and body in response to uncertain situations that demanded ingenuity, resourcefulness, and sense of balance. However, Dewey had furnished no direct evidence to support his contention that the brain and mind evolved to meet the demands for coordinated action under conditions of uncertainty . As noted earlier, before the turn of the twentieth century Dewey and McLellan had speculated that the capabilities of comparison, measurement, inference , and generalization were traits that emerged with the development of consciousness. Consequently, Dewey sought to identify the circumstances that contributed to the need for judgment in the course of development, to isolate generic traits involved, and to show how they helped form the pattern of inquiry . Nor had Dewey demonstrated convincingly why ideas do not depend on the association of stimulus and response but originate indirectly from feelings rooted in organic processes of suggestion that prolong judgment and control over the direction of inquiry. Art as Experience marked the brilliant culmination of Dewey’s attempts to capture the evanescent but tangible role of suggestion in human aesthetic experience. Aesthetic perception is always reaching beyond nature, Dewey argued, to ¤nd new ways to depict the world and express human feeling. But Dewey had yet to advance a parallel argument that effective inquiry does not depend, as scienti¤c convention supposed, merely on the accumulation of con¤rming evidence through the repetition of existing operations . Instead, inquiry brings about the conscious modi¤cation of our attitudes and methods through developmental learning experiences that expands the scope of human judgment and understanding. Dewey also sought to justify his long-standing belief, ¤rst articulated in Studies in Logical Theory, that scienti¤c progress did not depend on conformity to canons of logical validity, but on whether science contributed to the continuous transformation of theories and methods of inquiry. He speculated that our capacity to transform nature and ourselves began with erect locomotion, in which stride and pace furnished rudimentary methods of measurement. However , he required more evidence to defend this assertion by demonstrating that, if judgment is intrinsic to the processes of both human development and science , then the value of the methods and constants we adopt will hinge on whether scienti¤c knowledge produces equivalent advances in human consciousness and understanding. Most Dewey scholars contend that his conception of inquiry underwent few changes before the publication of his mature work in 1938.1 Yet Dewey disclaimed that he could ever “write an account of [his] intellectual development without giving it a semblance of continuity it does not in fact own.”2 Moreover, Ernest Nagel, a former student who would have had an opportunity to question Dewey and get him to clarify his arguments, admitted years later that central themes and conceptions in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry remain “puzzling” and “essentially obscure.”3 Consequently, little headway has been made until recently in rendering the themes...

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