Abstract
This chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the temporal pattern of inquiry. This chapter is mainly metaphilosophical: its thesis is that the import of Dewey’s idea of inquiry should be ‘cashed out’ at a metaphilosophical level, in terms of the language that we should use to describe the structure of scientific activities. I argue that Dewey’s naturalism, together with his emphasis on the metaphilosophical primacy of the category of activity, puts a number of relevant constraints on what counts as a good philosophical explanation of the different phases that make up scientific inquiries. I offer a detailed reconstruction of Dewey’s concepts of situation and tertiary quality, as well as a new account of his notion of warranted assertibility.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The same point can be formulated in naturalistic terms. From this perspective, the process of inquiry is defined as follows: inquiry is that process through which organisms complex enough to master the use of language change their habits of conduct, and, in so doing, acquire new and better ways of coping with their environment. As a consequence of that, their behavior becomes more attuned to the specific features of the situations they have to face, and purports to be equally successful in dealing with future cases. As Dewey remarks, “[w]hat the organism learns during this process produces new powers that make new demands upon the environment” (LW12, 42).
- 3.
To my knowledge, it is Brown who first clearly distinguishes between two different dimensions of Dewey’s theory of inquiry in Brown (2012, 280). A similar point has been made by Frega, who insists on the distinction that Dewey draws between “distinction between” and “distinction within” in the Studies in Logical Theory (Frega 2006, 46). Brown uses the distinction between the two dimensions of inquiry to criticize what may be called the unitary reading of Dewey’s theory of inquiry. An example of this kind of reading is Thayer (1952, 50ff.) According to the unitary reading, the antecedent and the consequent conditions of inquiry are to be listed among the phases of inquiry; in so doing, the temporal and the functional accounts of inquiry are merged together. As Brown has noticed, there are both textual and theoretical reasons to resist this reading. He suggests, therefore, keeping the sequence of inquiry (indeterminate situation-inquiry-reconstructed situation/judgment) well distinguished from the pattern of inquiry (observation-problem-suggestion-reasoning-experiment). I think Brown is right on this point, and I will follow his suggestion here.
- 4.
The distinction between external and internal conditions of inquiry is implicitly confirmed by the very structure of Dewey’s argument. Indeed, it is not by chance that the first two sections of the Logic are dedicated to analyzing what Dewey calls the existential matrixes of inquiry. It is an essential feature of Dewey’s naturalism that inquiry, as a complex form of behavior, is rooted in – and emerges from – simpler patterns of agency. From Dewey’s naturalistic perspective, inquiry is to be understood as a refinement of the life-behaviors made possible by the biological endowment of an organism complex enough to master the use of language. Since language is, in its turn, the realization of biological potentialities – namely, those potentialities that make it possible for human beings to cooperate in a single course of action – the analysis of the biological endowment of human organisms stands out as the starting point of any sound naturalistic account of inquiry.
- 5.
Incidentally, it is worth noting that, in the case of logic, the matter is made more complicated by the fact that logical properties are, properly speaking, only implicitly embodied in inquiry, and they are made explicit by a second-level process of reflection which takes as its subject-matter the forms of lower-level inquiries – which are object-oriented inquiries.
- 6.
Dewey’s commitment to emergentism has been acknowledged by many interpreters. See, for instance, Boisvert (1988, 128ff.) and Alexander (1987, 94ff.). See also, for a broader analysis, El-Hani and Pihlström (2002). For a more theoretical approach to the issue, which puts the notion of emergence in relation with the metaphilosophical primacy of the notion of scientific practices, see Pihlström (1999).
- 7.
It goes without saying that Dewey is not making a case for the reduction of temporal qualities to spatial ones; neither is he attempting to establish a logical connection between the two. The argument puts forth in the second chapter of the Logic is directed to highlight the internal relation existing between them in the context of the organism-environment integration that foreshadows linguistic experience. The thesis is therefore not metaphysical, but is an analysis of the biological conditions by which spatial and temporal relations become existentially relevant (directly or indirectly) to an organism.
- 8.
Much has been written on Dewey’s concept of reflex arc. For an accurate analysis of this notion, see Tiles (1990, 45ff.). More recently, Santarelli has provided a detailed reconstruction of the various explanatory functions that the notion of reflex arc performs in Dewey’s thought (Santarelli 2016).
- 9.
Dewey’s insistence on the difference between existence and function is due to the fact that the quotation is drawn from the early essay The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology; however, the very same idea can be easily accommodated within his mature naturalistic framework, and formulated in terms of the different possible forms of behavioral response to environmental stimuli (see above, Sect. 2.2).
- 10.
In the Logic Dewey reformulates this insight in terms of the distinction between stimulus-response, on the one hand, and excitation-reaction, on the other. Here, the couple excitation-reaction refers to the mechanical response to an organic state of imbalance, and its distinctive feature is that of being isolated and complete in itself. On the contrary, the couple stimulus-response indicates the complete organic circuit of reciprocal co-determination (LW12, 36).
- 11.
In recent times, an attempt has been made to translate many Deweyan – and, more in general, pragmatist – theses into the language of contemporary cognitive sciences and neurosciences. Among the most notable examples of this approach, see Solymosi and Shook (2014), Shook and Solymosi (2014), Schulkin (2015), and Madzia and Jung (2016).
- 12.
A terminological remark is in order here. In Dewey’s vocabulary, ‘logical’ is used to refer to the property that a certain element possesses in so far as it has the capacity to contribute to the successful solution of the problem that prompted the inquiry. It has nothing to do with the standard, contemporary meaning of the term. In this text, ‘logical’ is used in the Deweyan sense: a logical element is anything that performs a function within inquiry.
- 13.
“In astronomy, for example, we cannot introduce variation into remote heavenly bodies. But we can deliberately alter the conditions under which we observe them, which is the same thing in principle of logical procedure. By special instruments, the use of lens and prism, by telescopes, spectroscopes, interferometers, etc., we modify observed data. Observations are taken from widely different points in space and at successive times. By such means interconnected variations are observed. In physical and chemical matters closer at hand and capable of more direct manipulation, changes introduced affect the things under inquiry. Appliances and re-agents for bringing about variations in the things studied are employed. The progress of inquiry is identical with advance in the invention and construction of physical instrumentalities for producing, registering and measuring changes.” (LW4, 68).
- 14.
For an accurate analysis of Dewey’s epistemological anti-representationalism, which focuses on Dewey’s theory of representation, as well as on his rejection of the idea that knowledge is representation, see Godfrey-Smith (2019).
- 15.
As should be evident, this view is intrinsically related to Dewey’s externalism, to the effect that the content of a mental state is determined by its being part of the situation in which the agent having that state happens to find herself involved. It is with this idea in mind, for instance, that it is easy to draw a distinction between a genuine state of happiness, which is causally related and dependent on the objective features of the environment, and a pharmacologically induced state of euphoria which is phenomenologically indistinguishable from the former (see, in this regard, LW10, 48). And it should not be difficult to see that that conclusion follows directly from the thesis that an organism is not, properly speaking, in an environment, but lives through and by the environment which supports its activities. It is the transactional whole within which the organism and its environment are included that provides the conditions for the fixation of the content of its mental states.
- 16.
This aspect of Dewey’s philosophy of science has been lucidly pointed out by Levi, who has also stressed the difference between Peirce and Dewey’s conceptions of inquiry, and has openly argued for the theoretical superiority of the former over the latter. This should come as no surprise. Indeed, while Peirce’s theory of inquiry can be easily formulated within the framework of Levi’s logic of belief-revision, such translation is not possible in the case of Dewey’s account: “Inquiry according to Dewey ‘is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.’ I prefer Peirce’s assertion that the aim of inquiry is the removal of doubt. This is not merely predilection for one style of formulation over another. Peirce’s characterization can readily be rephrased as involving a transformation of an initial state of doubt into a state in which the doubt is removed. This suggests that the transformation is of one state of belief by another (or more generally of one point of view by another if it is important to take into account attitudes other than full belief such as states of probability judgment and value judgment). Dewey explicitly resisted formulations of this kind” (Levi 2010, 83). Levi is certainly right on this point: it is beyond doubt that Dewey’s approach is not easily and immediately translatable into the language of belief-revision theory. Nonetheless, I think that it is not impossible to make room for the logic of belief-revision within Dewey’s philosophical framework. The key move here is to understand the language of doubt and belief – the one that is needed in order to formulate the concepts of ‘state of full belief’, ‘doxastic commitment’ or ‘belief-change’ which lie at the ground of Levi’s analysis of the process of belief-revision – as a kind of abstraction from a more fundamental phenomenon, namely, inquiry as the controlled transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate one. Clearly, Dewey is suspicious of philosophical abstraction, but is not suspicious of philosophical abstraction. A context has to be provided that makes it clear that, when using the language of doubt and belief, we are handling a set of highly refined conceptual tools.
- 17.
See, for instance, what Dewey writes in Experience and Nature: “‘Thought’, reason, intelligence, whatever word we choose to use, is existentially an adjective (or better an adverb), not a noun. It is a disposition of activity, a quality of that conduct which foresees consequences of existing events, and which uses what is foreseen as a plan and method of administering affairs” (LW1, 126). A similar point is formulated in Reconstruction of Philosophy in regard to the concept of truth: “The adverb ‘truly’ is more fundamental than either the adjective, true, or the noun, truth. An adverb expresses a way, a mode of acting. Now an idea or conception is a claim or injunction or plan to act in a certain way as the way to arrive at the clearing up of a specific situation. When the claim or pretension or plan is acted upon it guides us truly or falsely; it leads us to our end or away from it. Its active, dynamic function is the all-important thing about it, and in the quality of activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity. The hypothesis that works is the true one; and truth is an abstract noun applied to the collection of cases, actual, foreseen and desired, that receive confirmation in their works and consequences” (MW12, 169–170).
- 18.
For the sake of completeness, I report here the whole quotation: “[n]o one doubts that thought, at least reflective, as distinct from what is sometimes called constitutive, thought, is derivative and secondary. It comes after something and out of something, and for the sake of something. No one doubts that the thinking of everyday practical life and of science is of this reflective type. We think about; we reflect over. If we ask what it is which is primary and radical to thought; if we ask what is the final objective for the sake of which thought intervenes; if we ask in what sense we are to understand thought as a derived procedure, we are plunging ourselves into the very heart of the logical problem: the relation of thought to its empirical antecedents and to its consequent, truth, and the relation of truth to reality”. A point is worth making. The quotation may be read as implying that the logical problem consists of three different issues, (a) the relation of thought to its empirical antecedents and consequent, (b) truth, and (c) the relation between truth and reality. As I read Dewey’s position, this interpretation is incorrect. I suggest seeing the three questions as three different yet converging ways of formulating and understanding the very same point, i.e., the intermediate character of knowledge.
- 19.
The idealistic argument, at least as Dewey presents it, goes as follows. It is made up of two premises. The first one is a strong philosophical assumption: idealists hold that the activity of thought is a necessary condition for meaning – meaning in general, without further qualification – to be given. Clearly, this is a controversial assumption, but it has some prima facie plausibility. At the end of the day, it is not a priori implausible that meaning ultimately depends on our capacity of drawing connections between different aspects of different objects. The second premise is uncontroversial: it is a fact that the greatest part of the meanings with which we are acquainted is given unreflectively – i.e., it is given previously and independently of an act of reflection. Furthermore, this premise is also a necessary presupposition of Dewey’s theory of inquiry as an intermediate and derivative phase of experience. In Dewey’s terminology, objects are experienced as significant within the context of a certain direct activity, and inquiry arises only in those cases in which the significances of the objects of a situation – which is now experienced as indeterminate – are either too vague or in contradiction one with the others. Stated in more technical terms, both the antecedent and consequent conditions of inquiry are phases of direct experience, that is, phases in which the objects that are experienced are immediately used and enjoyed. In those phases, the significances of objects are given, which means that habits of behavior are settled and continuously confirmed and supported by the responses of the environment. Or, put in semantic terms, this means that in those phases meanings and significances are well attuned. Inquiry, Dewey remarks, takes “some part of the universe of action, of affection, of social construction, under its special charge, and having busied itself therewith sufficiently to meet the special difficulty presented, thought releases that topic and enters upon further more direct experience” (MW2, 299). Accordingly, Dewey cannot but accept this premise of the argument. It follows from those two assumptions that the activity of thought that should account for the immediately experienced significances cannot be identified with deliberate reflection. From this consequence idealists draw the conclusion that there must be some sort of constitutive activity of thought which performs its function behind the curtain of empirical consciousness, so to say. The goal of reflective activity becomes that of reproducing the processes of the original, constitutive activity – a result that can be achieved by pruning off the limitations due to the empirical character of the inquirer. Incidentally, it is worth noting that the distinction between significance and meaning is, among the other things, a conceptual move that precludes the very possibility of formulating the idealistic argument.
- 20.
Dewey’s criticism of what he calls the “epistemological industry” has drawn the attention of numerous scholars (MW1, 122). Dewey’s practical turn, together with his insistence on the fact that knowledge is an activity rather than a mental state, has been acknowledged as the ultimate source of his rejection of the epistemological program. For a clear exposition of the main features of Dewey’s theory of knowledge, see Putnam (2010). A defense of Dewey’s attempt to substitute epistemology with the theory of inquiry can be found in Thayer (1990) and in Hickman (2007). For an analysis of Dewey’s fundamental notion of judgment of practice, in which the practice-oriented approach is used to develop a consistent naturalistic ‘epistemology’ (in the pragmatist sense) that aims to reconcile moral and scientific reasoning, see Welchman (2002) and Frega (2010, 2012). For a broader analysis of the pragmatist approach to epistemology, see the collection of essays in Frega (2011).
- 21.
See in particular for this kind of metaphilosophical approach to the problem of perception Dewey’s essay The Naturalistic Theory of Perception by Senses (LW2, 44–54), as well as Dewey’s criticisms to Russell’s Our Knowledge of External World, formulated in The Existence of the World as a Logical Problem (MW8, 83–97).
- 22.
For a broad-brush description of the debates between pragmatists and realists, see Gronda (2018a, 290–94). For a more detailed reconstruction of Dewey’s relationships with his contemporary realists, see Hildebrand (2003). See also Shook (1995) for an accurate account of Dewey’s confrontation with the American realists in the first decade of the twentieth century.
- 23.
A word of clarification is in order here. I am aware that in the passage just quoted Brandom is dealing exclusively with the semantic import; so, properly speaking, his argument does not have any particular bearing on the epistemological questions under discussion here. Nonetheless, I believe that his remarks can be easily generalized. Obviously, Brandom cannot be held responsible for this kind of generalization.
- 24.
This way of speaking is likely to seem awkward. Intuitively, we feel that it is safe to say that an inquiry may go wrong. In addition, it sounds strange to say that we do not know whether or not something can legitimately count as an inquiry until it comes to an end. In this spirit, Burke has suggested slightly modifying Dewey’s definition of inquiry: inquiry should be defined not as “the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate […]” – as Dewey puts it – but rather as the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation toward one that is so determinate […]” (Burke 2009, 160). In doing so, he aims to make room for the possibility of inquiry to go wrong. In any case, as Browning has correctly put it, “the major problem for our […] purposes is that of determining whether the ‘definition’ [of inquiry] is proposed as introducing a systemic use of the term inquiry or as appealing to a presystematic use that is sharable by others” (Browning 2002, 169). I will get back to this issue in Sect. 3.5.
- 25.
A remark can be useful here. It might be objected that an inquiry can turn out to be unsuccessful not because of some kind of structural shortcomings, but rather because of a lack of responsibility on the part of the inquirer. For instance, she may decide that she is not really interested in solving the problem that has called out her reflection. So, thus the argument goes, even though that particular inquiry is structurally or potentially successful since its antecedents conditions are thus made and arranged to show the inquirer how fix the problem, the inquiry does not succeed in reconstructing the original problematic situation. This argument has some plausibility only because it restricts the scope of the notion of internal conditions. First of all, it is trivially true that the inquirer is an element and component of the situation; this means that her lack of responsibility counts as an impeding and negative (structural) feature of the whole situation. Secondly, it is important to remind that the consequences of inquiry are elements that contribute to that normative evaluation. In this sense, as Brown has correctly pointed out, “to end the process of inquiry before its proper conclusion would be to give up on the inquiry before it is complete”. And, in cases like this, I agree with Brown that “Dewey then would not say that the inquiry had terminated unsuccessfully, which implies a process came to an end, so much as merely ceased and dissolved prematurely” (Brown 2012, 276).
- 26.
In Knowing and the Known, the connection between situation and inquiry is explicitly stated. Situation is here defined as the “[e]vent as subjectmatter of inquiry, always transactionally viewed as the full subject-matter; never to be taken as detachable ‘environment’ over against object” (LW16, 71).
- 27.
Browning has argued that inquiry should be viewed as “consisting of a changing succession or stream of situations” (Browning 2002, 171). Browning’s account has been critically analyzed by Burke. Though he acknowledges that there are passages in Dewey that support Browning’s reading, he remarks that “the fact that the character of the situation changes does not mean that the numerical identity of that situation changes”. And then he notices: “note the need on Browning’s part (2002, 171) to introduce some kind of ‘unique and relevance-guided quality’ pervading the alleged succession of situations in order to thread together what has just been sliced into parts. There will be no need to postulate this extra ‘mysterious tie’ if the required unique and relevance-guided quality is provided already by the one situation undergoing transformation” (Burke 2009, 164). The unity of the situation is internally composed of a variety of different phases. I wholly agree with Burke on this point.
- 28.
Dewey’s non-epistemic account of the indeterminate situation seems to entail the conclusion that a property, say, the property of hardness, happens to be embodied in a particular object only after that object is actually put to test – in this case, it is used to break the nut. That line of thought is reminiscent of Peirce’s first formulation of the pragmatic maxim – in How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) – and is extremely problematic in that it attempts a reduction of a bunch of interrelated normative notions (laws, concepts, success) to non-modal concepts such as concrete empirical verifiability. In other words, in order to avoid an epistemic account of situation, Dewey’s position seems to collapse into an extreme and untenable form of nominalism. In this regard, two points have to be noted. First of all, the distinction between environment and world can be used here to clarify the view that Dewey is struggling to outline. Dewey would be happy to concede that, at the level of existence, the object possesses a certain property independently of the process of inquiry through which the significance of the thing comes to be fixed (LW10, 110). This is rather obvious from a Deweyan perspective, since issues of existence are, by definition, different from issues of meaning (or significance). In so doing, the realistic insight that the possession of a property is an objective affair is preserved within Dewey’s conceptual framework, thus blocking any possibility to jump to idealistic conclusions. Secondly, the attribution of a property to an object is an example which supports strongly realistic insights, and, consequently, it rather naturally leads to a representationalist account of cognition. Accordingly, it is a bad example for the purpose of clarifying Dewey’s position. As said above, it would be absurd to call into question the fact that an object has the properties that it has, independently of the process of inquiry through and by which the inquirer comes to discover them. In cases of inquiry such as that of the nutcracker, the goal of inquiry is the acquisition of knowledge about some state of affairs. Hence the intrinsic plausibility of the epistemological approach: since things are completely determined in themselves, and since the goal of an act of inquiry is that of grasping the content of objective reality, inquiry is adequate or successful to the extent that it represents in a faithful way the state of affairs that it purports to depict. However, there are other examples in whose light that realistic insight loses its grip. Think, for instance, at all those cases in which inquiry requires an active manipulation of the elements of the situation for the purpose of changing the existential conditions that called out inquiry. In those cases, the goal of inquiry is not that of representing something which we take to be already out there, but rather that of bringing about new existential conditions. Here the realistic language of representation is misplaced.
- 29.
The idea that Dewey wants to convey can be clarified with a simple example. Imagine that you are presented with a series of pictures. You are sitting at your desk, and a person puts in front of you one picture after the other. Suppose that all these pictures portray a different aspect of a single, ordinary object. The pictures are presented in a fixed order, from left to right, and from top to bottom; moreover, the previous picture is not removed from the desk when the next one is presented. Now, it is very likely that, at a certain moment, you will recognize the object portrayed in the pictures. From that moment on, something changes: what was previously experienced as an obscure series of pictures acquires significance; in Dewey’s own words, things now hang together (LW12, 109). As a consequence of such transformation, the situation changes in its overall quality. It stops being an indeterminate situation in which you cannot understand how things are related one to the others, and become a harmonic whole in which any element is intrinsically connected to those that precede it, as well as to those that will follow or stem from it. Things are now experienced as being in their proper place, so to say. And yet nothing more is added to the series than the single picture which, so to say, ‘unlocks the significance’ of the whole situation.
- 30.
The same insight can be formulated by acknowledging that any situation is centered on a specific, individual inquirer who is engaged in a specific course of action, determined by her biological and cultural endowment – i.e. the meanings and significances to which she responds. From such an assumption a genuine plurality of individual and independent situations follows. Indeed, a situation is, by definition, a-situation-for-someone. This means that the very same objective conditions – say, a door close without the key in keyhole – may well have different significances for an agent A, who knows the trick to unlock the door, and for an agent B, who is actually trapped in the room, trying to get out. This conclusion is, once again, in agreement with Dewey’s idea of the theoretical and explanatory primacy of the category of activity over that of object: it is only within a situation that objects acquire their distinctive significance – their significance in light of the end-in-view which the agent aims to achieve. Consequently, the mere fact of the existence of the same environmental conditions does not entail that two agents facing them are engaged in the same activity. Rather the contrary, the situations with which they deal – even though it can be said that they share the same subject-matter – are essentially distinct and different.
- 31.
In Qualitative Thought Dewey resorts to the popular, unrefined notion of intuition to formulate this insight. He writes: “in its popular, as distinct from refined philosophic, usage [intuition] is closely connected with the single qualitativeness underlying all the details of explicit reasoning. Reflection and rational elaboration spring from and make explicit a prior intuition […]. Intuition, in short, signifies the realization of a pervasive quality such that it regulates the determination of relevant distinctions” (LW5, 249).
- 32.
In Pappas (2014, 2016) the author distinguishes between nine different functions of the qualitative in inquiry. I focus on three. The difference between the two lists is only superficial, however. Pappas’s distinctions are more fine-grained than mine – for instance, he clearly distinguishes between “The Qualitative as the Background that Unifies and Demarcates the Situation in which Thinking Occurs” and “The Qualitative as the Background that Gives Continuity to Thinking” (Pappas 2016, 446 and 449) – but there is no real disagreement between the two accounts about the general functions performed by tertiary qualities in inquiry.
- 33.
On the notion of articulation, applied to moral reasoning see Frega (2012).
- 34.
A similar view is formulated by Levine in his recent Pragmatism, Objectivity and Experience. Levine also highlights a structural similarity between truth and happiness. He writes: “for Dewey this logical conception does very little work in his thought. Dewey worried that focusing on it would divert our attention away from the methods by which our various inquiries actually fix belief and tempt us into reinstating a realist view of truth. But I think he had another worry. In his moral philosophy, Dewey argued that happiness is not “directly an end of desire and effort, in the sense of an end-in-view purposively sought for, but is rather an end-product, a necessary accompaniment, of the character which is interested in objects that are enduring and intrinsically related to an outgoing and expansive nature” (LW7, 198). To make happiness one’s direct end is the surest way to not achieve it, for then one does not cultivate a genuine and direct interest in the kinds of objects that will, in fact, make one happy. I think he has the same thought about truth: instead of focusing on truth itself, we should – in light of our cultivated interests and habits – directly plunge into the objects of our concern. It is this that will produce truth, but as a by-product of, or accompaniment to, an inquiry that looks into objects in the right way” (Levine 2019).
- 35.
Capps has distinguished among three different interpretations of Dewey’s theory of truth. The first one assumes that Dewey’s goal is to get rid of the notion of truth, and to replace it with the concept of warranted assertibility. The second interpretation holds that Dewey is interested in rejecting the words ‘true’ and ‘truth’, but that he does not want to get rid of the corresponding notion. The third interpretation – which is the one Capps favors – argues that Dewey is dissatisfied with the idea of a theory of truth, and that he aims to provide a pragmatic elucidation of the concept of truth (Capps 2018, 41–43).
- 36.
It is likely that the confusion is due to Russell, who in Meaning and Truth writes that “[t]he theory which substitutes ‘warranted assertibility’ for ‘truth’ […] is advocated by Dr. Dewey and his school” (Russell 1940, 289). See also Russell’s reconstruction of Dewey’s notion of truth in his contribution to the Schilpp volume on Dewey (Russell 1939). It is worth noting that in his more articulated reply to Russell’s criticisms, the 1941 article Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth, Dewey explicitly remarks that warranted assertibility is introduced to take the place of the word ‘knowledge’, not of truth: “Mr. Russell refers to my theory as one which “substitutes ‘warranted assertibility’ for truth”. Under certain conditions, I should have no cause to object to this reference. But the conditions are absent; and it is possible that this view of ‘substitution’ as distinct from and even opposed to definition, plays an important role in generating what I take to be misconceptions of my theory in some important specific matters. Hence, I begin by saying that my analysis of ‘warranted assertibility’ is offered as a definition of the nature of knowledge in the honorific sense according to which only true beliefs are knowledge. The place at which there is pertinency in the idea of ‘substitution’ has to do with words” (LW14, 168–169).
- 37.
For the sake of fairness, it has to be acknowledged that other interpreters have recognized that Dewey does not attempt to identify truth with warranted assertibility. So, for instance, Fesmire states that “Dewey aimed to incorporate the function of truth within the concept of warranted assertibility” (Fesmire 2014, 99). Similarly, Aikin and Talisse hold that, since from a pragmatic perspective there is no real difference between pursuing warranted beliefs and pursuing true ones, it follows that “the true is replaceable with the warranted”. It is not easy to assess the validity of Aikin and Talisse’s proposal, since it seems to imply that Dewey’s account of knowledge can be traced back to the traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. In any case, it is evident that Aikin and Talisse do not argue for the simple and direct identification of truth with warranted assertibility.
- 38.
A remark here is needed. It is worth noting that if we accept the view that inquiry is a success term, judgment cannot be, strictly speaking, false. Indeed, according to this reading, the term ‘inquiry’ is meant to refer to successful inquiries only, and judgment is “the settled outcome of inquiry” which “is concerned with the concluding objects that emerge from inquiry in their status of being conclusive” (LW12, 123).
- 39.
In some other situations, Dewey is willing to take a step further and explicitly identify true with verified, as, for instance, in the following passage from Reconstruction of Philosophy: “In physical matters men have slowly grown accustomed in all specific beliefs to identifying the true with the verified. But they still hesitate to recognize the implication of this identification and to derive the definition of truth from it […]. To generalize the recognition that the true means the verified and means nothing else places upon men the responsibility for surrendering political and moral dogmas, and subjecting to the test of consequences their most cherished prejudice” (MW12, 171). Clearly, from the standard epistemological point of view, warrant and verification – especially if verification is understood in experimental terms, as Dewey sometimes seems ready to acknowledged – are by no means synonyms. So, for instance, I am warranted in believing that yesterday Jones had toothache because I met him ten minutes ago and he told me so, even though I cannot verified it. In Dewey’s own terms, nonetheless, such identification seems less problematic: inquiry only ends when the plan of action through which the indeterminate situation is reconstructed is tested and proves effective in achieving the goal that it purports to accomplish. According to this reading, warranted assertion would coincide with verified assertion. I am not sure, however, about the theoretical legitimacy of using the notion of verification to clarify that of warranted assertion. In the Logic, for instance, Dewey never uses – at least, to my knowledge – the notion of verification to clarify that of warrant.
- 40.
I would like to thank David Hildebrand for helping me to clarify my thoughts on this point.
- 41.
A remark here is needed. Dewey’s theory of inquiry is rightly considered as one of the prototypical forms of fallibilism. Obviously, I agree with that, and my insistence on the unrevisability of judgment does not purport to challenge the standard interpretation of Dewey’s thought. As I read it, Dewey’s fallibilism hinges on the idea that propositions – both universal and existential – are always revisable: they can be checked and modified in the course of inquiry, as well as when they are transferred from one inquiry to another. If my reading is correct, it is possible to combine fallibilism (about propositions) and unrevisability (about judgment).
- 42.
Here is what Dewey writes in this regard. “The best definition of truth from the logical standpoint which is known to me is that by Peirce: ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.’ Op.cit., Vol. V, p. 268. A more complete (and more suggestive) statement is the following: ‘Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.’ (Ibid., pp. 394–5.)” (LW12, 343).
- 43.
As remarked in Chap. 1, this is a desideratum that Dewey believes a theory of inquiry should be able to satisfy. See, for instance, what he writes in the ninth chapter of Experience and Nature: “[i]t would then be seen that science is an art, that art is practice, and that the only distinction worth drawing is not between practice and theory, but between those modes of practice that are not intelligent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable, and those which are full of enjoyed meanings. When this perception dawns, it will be a commonplace that art – the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession – is the complete culmination of nature, and that ‘science’ is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue” (LW1, 268–269).
- 44.
More importantly, this seems to be Dewey’s position too. In a letter to Kaufmann, Dewey clarifies what he means with the notion of warranted assertibility. He writes: “‘warranted assertibility’ as I understand it is that of a grea[t] specifiable temporal-spatial situation – not absolute. It is enough, speaking practically, that we do the best we can with the resources at hand to direct inquiry– (or knowing–) effectively. The positive postulate is that in so doing the ‘methods’ will improve and its so that their conclusions will be better warranted from the standpoint of assertibility. The critical postulate is that isolation depends upon acceptance in use of some relic of supernaturalism” (1945.02.26, John Dewey to Felix Kaufman).
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Gronda, R. (2020). Inquiry. In: Dewey's Philosophy of Science. Synthese Library, vol 421. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37562-1_3
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