John (1859–1952), American philosopher, social critic, and theorist of education. During an era when philosophy was becoming thoroughly professionalized, Dewey remained a public philosopher having a profound international influence on politics and education. His career began inauspiciously in his student days at the University of Vermont and then as a high school teacher before he went on to study philosophy at the newly formed Johns Hopkins University. There he studied with Peirce, G. S. Hall, and G. S. Morris, and was profoundly influenced by the version of Hegelian idealism propounded by Morris. After receiving his doctorate in 1884, Dewey moved to the University of Michigan where he rejoined Morris, who had relocated there. At Michigan he had as a colleague the young social psychologist G. H. Mead, and during this period Dewey himself concentrated his writing in the general area of psychology. In 1894 he accepted an appointment as chair of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education at the University of Chicago, bringing Mead with him. At Chicago Dewey was instrumental in founding the famous laboratory school, and some of his most important writings on education grew out of his work in that experimental school. In 1904 he left Chicago for Columbia University, where he joined F. J. E. Woodbridge, founder of The Journal of Philosophy. He retired from Columbia in 1930 but remained active in both philosophy and public affairs until his death in 1952. Over his long career he was a prolific speaker and writer, as evidenced by a literary output of forty books and over seven hundred articles. Philosophy. At the highest level of generality Dewey’s philosophical orientation can be characterized as a kind of naturalistic empiricism, and the two most fundamental notions in his philosophy can be gleaned from the title of his most substantial book, Experience and Nature (1925). His concept of experience had its origin in his Hegelian background, but Dewey divested it of most of its speculative excesses. He clearly conceived of himself as an empiricist but was careful to distinguish his notion of experience both from that of the idealist tradition and from the empiricism of the classical British variety. The idealists had so stressed the cognitive dimension of experience that they overlooked the non-cognitive, whereas he saw the British variety as inappropriately atomistic and subjectivist. In contrast to these Dewey fashioned a notion of experience wherein action, enjoyment, and what he called ‘undergoing’ were integrated and equally fundamental. The felt immediacy of experience (what he generally characterized as its aesthetic quality) was basic and irreducible. He then situated cognitive experience against this broader background as arising from and conditioned by this more basic experience. Cognitive experience was the result of inquiry, which was viewed as a process arising from a felt difficulty within our experience, proceeding through the stage of conceptual elaboration of possible resolutions, to a final reconstruction of the experience wherein the initial fragmented situation is transformed into a unified whole. Cognitive inquiry is this mediating process from experience to experience, and knowledge is what makes possible the final more integrated experience, which Dewey termed a ‘consummation.’ On this view knowing is a kind of doing, and the criterion of knowledge is ‘warranted assertability.’ On the first point, Dewey felt that one of the cardinal errors of philosophy from Plato to the modern period was what he called ‘the spectator theory of knowledge.’ Knowledge had been viewed as a kind of passive recording of facts in the world and success was seen as a matter of the correspondence of our beliefs to these antecedent facts. To the contrary, Dewey viewed knowing as a constructive conceptual activity that anticipated and guided our adjustment to future experiential interactions with our environment. It was with this constructive and purposive view of thinking in mind that Dewey dubbed his general philosophical orientation instrumentalism. Concepts are instruments for dealing with our experienced world. The fundamental categories of knowledge are to be functionally understood, and the classical dualisms of philosophy (mind–body, means–end, fact– value) are ultimately to be overcome.
The purpose of knowing is to effect some alteration in the experiential situation, and for this purpose some cognitive proposals are more effective than others. This is the context in which ‘truth’ is normally invoked, and in its stead Dewey proposed ‘warranted assertability.’ He eschewed the notion of truth (even in its less dangerous adjectival and adverbial forms, ‘true’ and ‘truly’) because he saw it as too suggestive of a static and finalized correspondence between two separate orders. Successful cognition was really a more dynamic matter of a present resolution of a problematic situation resulting in a reconstructed experience or consummation. ‘Warranted assertability’ was the success characterization, having the appropriately normative connotation without the excess metaphysical baggage.
Dewey’s notion of experience is intimately tied to his notion of nature. He did not conceive of nature as ‘the-world-as-it-would-be-independent-of-human-experience’ but rather as a developing system of natural transactions admitting of a tripartite distinction between the physicochemical level, the psychophysical level, and the level of human experience with the understanding that this categorization was not to be construed as implying any sharp discontinuities. Experience itself, then, is one of the levels of transaction in nature and is not reducible to the other forms. The more austere, ‘scientific’ representations of nature as, e.g., a purely mechanical system, Dewey construed as merely useful conceptualizations for specific cognitive purposes. This enabled him to distinguish his ‘naturalism,’ which he saw as a kind of nonreductive empiricism, from ‘materialism,’ which he saw as a kind of reductive rationalism. Dewey and Santayana had an ongoing dialogue on precisely this point. Dewey’s view was also naturalistic to the degree that it advocated the universal scope of scientific method. Influenced in this regard by Peirce, he saw scientific method not as restricted to a specific sphere but simply as the way we ought to think. The structure of all reflective thought is future-oriented and involves a movement from the recognition and articulation of a felt difficulty, through the elaboration of hypotheses as possible resolutions of the difficulty, to the stage of verification or falsification. The specific sciences (physics, biology, psychology) investigate the different levels of transactions in nature, but the scientific manner of investigation is simply a generalized sophistication of the structure of common sense and has no intrinsic restriction. Dewey construed nature as an organic unity not marked by any radical discontinuities that would require the introduction of non-natural categories or new methodological strategies. The sharp dualisms of mind and body, the individual and the social, the secular and the religious, and most importantly, fact and value, he viewed as conceptual constructs that have far outlived their usefulness. The inherited dualisms had to be overcome, particularly the one between fact and value inasmuch as it functioned to block the use of reason as the guide for human action. On his view people naturally have values as well as beliefs. Given human nature, there are certain activities and states of affairs that we naturally prize, enjoy, and value. The human problem is that these are not always easy to come by nor are they always compatible. We are forced to deal with the problem of what we really want and what we ought to pursue. Dewey advocated the extension of scientific method to these domains. The deliberative process culminating in a practical judgment is not unlike the deliberative process culminating in factual belief. Both kinds of judgment can be responsible or irresponsible, right or wrong. This deliberative sense of evaluation as a process presupposes the more basic sense of evaluation concerning those dimensions of human experience we prize and find fulfilling. Here too there is a dimension of appropriateness, one grounded in the kind of beings we are, where the ‘we’ includes our social history and development. On this issue Dewey had a very Greek view, albeit one transposed into a modern evolutionary perspective. Fundamental questions of value and human fulfillment ultimately bear on our conception of the human community, and this in turn leads him to the issues of democracy and education.
Society and education. The ideal social order for Dewey is a structure that allows maximum selfdevelopment of all individuals. It fosters the free exchange of ideas and decides on policies in a manner that acknowledges each person’s capacity effectively to participate in and contribute to the direction of social life. The respect accorded to the dignity of each contributes to the common welfare of all. Dewey found the closest approximation to this ideal in democracy, but he did not identify contemporary democracies with this ideal. He was not content to employ old forms of democracy to deal with new problems. Consistent with instrumentalism, he maintained that we should be constantly rethinking and reworking our democratic institutions in order to make them ever more responsive to changing times. This constant rethinking placed a considerable premium on intelligence, and this underscored the importance of education for democracy.
Dewey is probably best known for his views on education, but the centrality of his theory of education to his overall philosophy is not always appreciated. The fundamental aim of education for him is not to convey information but to develop critical methods of thought. Education is future-oriented and the future is uncertain; hence, it is paramount to develop those habits of mind that enable us adequately to assess new situations and to formulate strategies for dealing with the problematic dimensions of them. This is not to suggest that we should turn our backs on the past, because what we as a people have already learned provides our