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xi Editors’Introduction Dewey’s First and Last Love In 1938, John Dewey completed the mammoth volume Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, which some would consider the “crowning work” of his career (e.g., Edman 1938, 5). Although Dewey had published dozens of articles in the philosophy of logic, some of the most important of which were assembled in the 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic, the Logic of 1938 features a unity of expression and fullness of vision lacking in his earlier treatments. In many ways, the Logic marks the consummation of Dewey’s lifelong occupation with logical theory, confessedly his “first and last love.”1 The product of the effort of “over forty years” (LW12:5), Dewey’s Logic is a systematic and comprehensive exposition of his experimentalist philosophy . Accordingly, one finds within its pages discussions of standard logical themes as well as treatments of topics in epistemology, metaphysics , the philosophy of science, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of law, and social philosophy. The scope and depth of its ambitions combined with the notoriously taxing style characteristic of Dewey’s writing make the Logic a difficult and at times exhausting treatise. It consequently enjoys the curious distinction of being at once among the most highly regarded of Dewey’s mature works and the least commonly studied. Despite the challenges it presents, Dewey’s Logic merits close attention. In fact, one could plausibly argue that the theory of inquiry developed in the book constitutes the fulcrum of Dewey’s philosophy as a whole. A rejection of traditional ways of philosophizing and the problems to which they give rise and a subsequent effort to “reconstruct” philosophy lie at the heart of Dewey’s project, evidenced as early as his four essays in Studies in Logical Theory (1903). Dewey contends that our inherited philosophical traditions arose out of and have failed to advance beyond assumptions and habits of a prescientific worldview. Principal among these presuppositions is a “spectator theory of knowledge,” a view according to which knowl- xii Editors’ Introduction edge is the passive beholding by an extranatural or “internal” mind of a complete and fixed “external” world. This makes knowledge a mystery insofar as it presumes that the knower and the known belong to two distinct metaphysical realms which in some inexplicable way must come together in the act of knowing. This predicament consequently gives rise to all of the textbook “problems of philosophy”: the problem of skepticism, the problem of the external world, the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, the problem of induction, and so forth. Dewey’s response to these problems, prominent in his work as early as the 1890s, is well known. He contends that many of the concerns central to traditional philosophy should be regarded not as problems in a strict sense but rather as “puzzles” arising from the vocabulary and presuppositions of philosophy itself (1925, LW1:17). Dewey would recommend that we “not solve” these puzzles but rather that we “get over them” (1909, MW4:14). We need a new, reconstructed conceptual vocabulary, which we may obtain by subjecting traditional assumptions and categories to philosophical criticism informed by a scientific worldview. The insight driving Dewey’s reconstructive program is that the spectator theory of knowledge is untenable in the light of the successes of modern science. As even the most cursory examination will show, scientific inquiry is premised on the idea that knowing and acting are intimately related. The practice of pursuing knowledge by means of deliberate experimentation, a mode of directed and controlled action, constitutes a rejection of the spectator conception. On the scientific model, a knower as such is an agent within the world that is known, not a ghostly beholder of an antecedent and alien Reality. Dewey’s reconstruction of philosophy therefore stands the traditional conception of the relation of philosophy to natural science on its head. Previous thinkers have taken the job of philosophy to be that of grounding or justifying the practices and results of science, treating philosophical inquiry as if it were logically and epistemically prior to science. Dewey, by contrast , contends that philosophy must begin with the methods of scientific inquiry, deriving its content and modeling its own practices upon them. Hence, his reconstructed philosophy is fundamentally an experimentalist philosophy. The project of developing such a position requires, therefore, a careful examination of methods employed in the sciences, with regard to both their successes and their failures. From this examination, a...

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