Dewey’s Experimentalism

Our analysis shows that the ways in which we believe and expect have a tremendous effect upon what we believe
and expect. We have discovered at last that these ways are set, almost abjectly so, by social factors, by tradition
and the influence of education. Thus we discover that we believe many things not because the things are so, but
because we have become habituated through the weight of authority, by imitation, prestige, instruction, the
unconscious effect of language, etc. We learn, in short, that qualities which we attribute to objects ought to be
imputed to our own ways of experiencing them, and that these in turn are due to the force of interaction and
custom. (LW 1:23)

The depersonalizing of the things of everyday practice becomes the chief agency of their repersonalizing in new
and more fruitful modes of practice. The paradox of theory and practice is that theory is with respect to all
modes of practice the most practical of all things, and the more impartial and impersonal it is, the more truly
practical it is. (MW 8:82)

C.J. Sentell
September 2007

Contemporary experience is marked by an open clash of beliefs, the force of which is

everywhere in evidence. Within our own communities and country, as well as between
nations, the conflicts of belief and the miseries they fashion stand as stark symbols of
historical amnesia, political myopia, and human fallibility. But whether it is a belief in an
omniscient Allah or a benevolent Christ, a belief in the inevitable emancipatory potential of
the free market, or a belief in the irreducible truth of science, it is by believing in things that
we understand the world and decide how to act within it. Beliefs matter precisely because
they are habits of action; they form our basic comportment to the world, and in the process
constitute our identities as discrete positions against which others are understood and
evaluated. As habits of action, beliefs transform the world; they are active, forceful, and
consequential by preparing the way for individuals to act in certain ways rather than others.
Just as a scaffold provides stable structure, a belief sets the stage for meaningful action.
Ideas, then, are the subjects of belief; they are the substance of that which is believed. There
are many ideas, no doubt, but one of the primary purposes of thinking is to interrogate those
ideas so as to determine which ones are worth believing and which ones are not. And while
there are as many determining criteria for belief as there are determinations of belief, it is the
exploration of ideas that establishes the borders of possible belief.

So, if ideas comprise the limits of potential belief, and if beliefs are the viaducts of
meaningful action, then together ideas and beliefs constitute the scope and substance of
understanding and action in a world that is always already unfolding before us. In spaces
public and private, in places political and spiritual, beliefs about the world in fact constitute
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the world. Beliefs orient experience toward particular ways of understanding, and are
reinforced to the extent that they order the world in more or less meaningful ways. This, in
turn, allows individuals to act within that world in more or less efficacious ways. That beliefs
and ideas form the bases of action and understanding, then, is commonplace. But it is the
consequences of those actions and understandings that redirect us to the question of the
nature of ideas and beliefs. If beliefs and ideas transform the world, if they possess coercive
force and consequential effect, then the relief their character casts against the screen of our
actions calls out for interrogation and critical thought.

With such conflicts raging around and within us, Dewey proposes to radically reconstruct the
way beliefs and ideas function within our lives and societies. Dewey’s account of experience
and inquiry, in particular, presents a substantially different framework through which beliefs
and ideas stand to be understood. Instead of ideas being representations of a static and given
reality, Dewey proposes that ideas be understood as works of art, as theories for action that
hold means and ends together in a simultaneous continuum of thought. Instead of beliefs
being things to which one ascribes and holds tight against all comers, Dewey argues that
beliefs be understood as prospective hypotheses to be taken up and tried within experience
and evaluated in light of the consequences they produce. When beliefs and ideas are taken
this way, the dogmatism and fundamentalism that so often accompanies them recedes against
the spread of practices intelligently reconstructed. For Dewey, the central lesson concerning
ideas and beliefs is not what one thinks or believes, but how one believes or thinks it. The
comportment to one’s own thoughts and beliefs, then, constitutes the most important feature
about those thoughts and beliefs. In this way, it is not so much the content of the belief but
the way one believes it that matters most. For if one believes in strict, literal, and
fundamental ways, one’s actions will be characterized by a concomitant level of dogmatism,
arrogance, and infallibility. But if one believes in hypothetical, dynamic, and open-ended
ways, one’s actions will be tempered by a respective degree of experimentalism, humility,
and fallibility. The consequences of such a reconstruction of ideas and beliefs stands to
significantly transform the way individuals go about the processes of living together and
deciding upon the ways to organize collective life.

It is precisely this experimental comportment to beliefs and ideas that I examine in this essay.
Because Dewey’s philosophies of experience and inquiry provide the most direct and
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complete articulation of this experimental attitude, in this essay I show how the two are
related through an underlying conception of experimentalism. In the first section of this
essay, then, I analyze Dewey’s conception of experience, while in the second I analyze his
conception of inquiry. Between these accounts emerges a thoroughgoing experimentalism,
the consequences of which stand to dramatically transform the comportment one takes
toward beliefs and ideas. In the final section, therefore, I analyze Dewey’s conception of the
nature of ideas so as to highlight these consequences and point toward the ways of believing
that remain be reconstructed in contemporary life.

The Experience of Life

For Dewey, Darwin’s theory of evolution marks a watershed moment in human history. This
is because Darwin dissolves the rigid, ontological distinction between human life and
experience, on the one hand, and other forms of natural life and experience on the other, by
situating them within a single explanatory framework. Dewey argues the upshots of
Darwin’s conception of nature, life, and experience have failed to be fully appreciated by
philosophers and integrated into their philosophizing. For Dewey, these upshots were two-
fold. First, any philosophy after Darwin must account for the way in which transition and
change are fundamental characters of the world. The search for the immutable, eternal, and
essential characters of nature and reality have been the traditional characteristic features of
philosophic inquiry. But after Darwin, Dewey argues, the motivation for such a search loses
force precisely because nature is in motion from one given state to another, thus obviating the
search for any essence nature may possess outside of time and place. The influence of
Darwin upon philosophy, Dewey says,
resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition,
and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life. When he
said of species what Galileo had said of the earth, e pur se muove, he emancipated,
once for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and
looking for explanations. (MW 4:8)
Because “mind and morals and life” are in transition as constituent features of nature, the
experimental ideas used to inquire into nature are just as equally applicable to them as they
are to nature. In other words, the possibility of extrapolating this experimental logic of
inquiry outside the scope of strictly scientific inquiry, and into and as the operative logic of
social, moral, and political inquiry, is one of the central arguments of Dewey’s philosophy.
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Second, any philosophy after Darwin must account for the way in which human life and
experience are necessarily situated within the natural world. Dewey says that a “belief in
organic evolution which does not extend unreservedly to the way in which the subject of
experience is thought of, and which does not strive to bring the entire theory of experience
and knowing into line with biological and social facts, is hardly more than Pickwickian”
(MW 10:25). By taking experience to be constitutively natural, Dewey argues for a
thoroughgoing and irreducible continuity between the biological and the experiential. Dewey
says that “any account of experience must now fit into the consideration that experiencing
means living; and that living goes on in and because of an environing medium, not in a
vacuum. Where there is experience, there is a living being. Where there is life, there is a
double connection maintained with the environment” (MW 10:7). Because experience and
life are coextensive within nature, human experience is but one part of experience more
broadly construed. Any account of experience, then, must incorporate the way in which it is
situated on a continuum of natural existence. So if nature is in motion, and if experience is
entirely a part of nature, then the nature of experience too is in motion and changing over
time. Philosophy, Dewey claims, has failed to take the reality of this continuum seriously to
the extent that it has persisted to treat experience as though it were something outside of or
beyond nature.

Thus, for Dewey, Darwin stands as a historical marker for a fundamental unification of the
method used to inquire into the natural world and the content of a naturalized experience
within that natural world. At the level of method, the experimentalism of the sciences is
joined to the experimentalism of nature, and this unification liberates that logic for
application into other realms of inquiry. At the level of content, philosophy must account for
the way in which human experience is part and parcel of the natural world; experience is not
separate from nature, but rather is itself a natural phenomenon, subject to all the conditions
and influences of other natural phenomenon. Dewey speaks with Darwin and Aristotle by
affirming that nothing exists outside of nature. It is this experimentalism that philosophy
itself must adopt and work to more thoroughly integrate into the various facets of human life.
So it is not simply that Darwin showed that humans and their experience exist on a
continuum with the rest of the natural world, and that the experimental method of inquiry is
applicable across this entire continuum. Rather, Dewey suggests that the real insight to be
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gleaned from Darwin is that experience and nature are themselves experimental. The
unification of method and content that Darwin’s revolution brings about is, in other words, a
unification that occurs by way of integrating the experimentalism that is a constitutive feature
of both into a single framework of experience, nature, and inquiry. But even though Dewey
argues for a fundamental unification of method and content by way of Darwin, Dewey speaks
of the commitment to experience as a commitment to a certain method, namely, the empirical
method.

The empirical method is, above all, a commitment to experience, a commitment to

recognizing experience as the starting place for all inquiry, whether that inquiry is
philosophical or banal, political or personal. As is well-known, Dewey goes on to develop a
deeply robust conception of the nature of experience, of what experience is and what
experience finds, the fullest articulation of which is Experience and Nature. But the
important point to note is that the content of this account comes after the commitment to
experience. And while this leads Dewey down a provocative path to describing some of the
general features of existence, there is nothing in the commitment to experience itself that
commits one to finding and accepting the certain elements of experience Dewey himself
finds. If Dewey’s account is right, of course, one would find such elements to the extent that
one recognized such features within one’s own experience. But the empirical method’s
insistence on returning to experience the products of experience, its commitment to
experience as both the source of reflection and the means by which experience is changed, is
a relatively thin set of commitments. Dewey recognizes this much when he says that “[i]f the
empirical method were universally or even generally adopted in philosophizing, there would
be no need of referring to experience” (LW 1:14). Once the empirical method is employed,
in other words, the question of the method of experience in and of itself ceases to be an issue.
Rather, the focus shifts to those things that are experienced, i.e., to the contents of
experiences.

So the empirical method is simply a commitment to experience, not to what experience finds.
Indeed, the content of experience is always an open question; the general features of
existence as they are experienced are always changing precisely because the world is
changing. In this perpetual state of change that is nature, then, the substance of experience is
never fixed. Experience finds itself forever in medias res. Because experience always begins
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where it begins, not from some originary beginning but from where it is, its primary
orientation is toward further experience. He say that the “problems to which empirical
method gives rise afford, in a word, opportunities for more investigations yielding fruit in
new and enriched experiences. But the problems to which non-empirical method gives rise
in philosophy are blocks to inquiry, blind alleys; they are puzzles rather than problems…”
(LW 1:17). Experience, in this way, is ineluctably future-oriented; it aims to integrate the
contents of experience into the structure of experience so as to modify future experience in
light of past experience. Dewey suggests that, insofar as a position closes off areas or
subjects of future inquiry, insofar as an idea stifles the possibility of future experience, it is
not in accord with the empirical method.

On Dewey’s account, “things – anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of

the term ‘thing’ – are what they are experienced as” (MW 3:158). Conceptually, then,
experience is an existential claim: without experience there would be nothing about which to
speak or think or act. The commitment to experience, Dewey says, “does not mean some
grandiose, remote affair that is cast like a net around a succession of fleeting experiences; [it]
does not mean an indefinite total, comprehensive experience which somehow engirdles an
endless flux; [it] means that things are what they are experienced to be, and that every
experience is some thing” (MW 3:165). And again, because Dewey’s account of experience
is situated within a thoroughly naturalistic framework, because experience and life are
coextensive features of nature, experience is always located in “organic centres of
experience” (MW 10:26). Experience emanates from life; it is “an affair of the intercourse of
a living being with its physical and social environment” (MW 10:6). Experience as the
intercourse of organism and environment, Dewey says,
is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of standing something; of suffering
and passion, of affection, in the literal sense of these words….Experience is no
slipping along in a path fixed by inner consciousness. Private consciousness is an
incidental outcome of experience of a vital objective sort; it is not its source.
Undergoing…is never mere passivity. (MW 10:8)
So while experience may at times be an affair that is passively undergone, an affair
characterized by the unconscious or disengaged or unresponsive interaction of organism and
environment, it is not primarily so. For Dewey, experience is primarily an active, engaged
relation which comports an organism to the events that are always already unfolding within
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their environment. The activity of experience turns upon the way in which the organism
attends to experience and modifies its actions according to the objects and events experienced
in the course of living.

Experience, however, always involves selective emphasis: we see some things and not others
according to the interests at work during the experience. And interests are always at work.
“Interests” here does not denote anything diabolical or insidious, but rather points to the way
experience becomes meaningful by distinguishing certain features within the experiential
field to the necessary neglect of other features. Objects of emphasis may change, for sure,
but emphasis and selection are nonetheless always present. To experience particular things is
to have some things brought to the foreground at the expense of others. Recognizing this
necessary feature of experience opens the way to experiencing those emphases in new ways,
thereby creating the critical space through which both the efficacy of the emphasis and the
motivation behind the selection can be challenged. Dewey says that the commitment to
experience involves the commitment to stating “when and where and why the act of selection
took place, and thus enable others to repeat it and test its worth” (LW 1:34). In this way, the
recognition of the emphases operative within any given experience allows those very features
to be identified by others so that those emphases may be controlled and checked against the
experience of others. This conjunction of the recognition of the necessity of selective
emphasis with the repeatability of the conditions present in route to testing the validity of the
emphasis constitutes one of the central claims of Dewey’s conception of experience.

The crucial upshot of this conception is a dissolution of the strict ontological bifurcation
between organism and environment, on the one hand, and the associated epistemological
bifurcation between subject and object on the other. It is not that the organism as subject
experiences the environment as object; rather than an organism merely reacting to
environmental stimuli, Dewey suggests that experience is the happening of the interaction
that joins the two in “a continuous stretch of existence” (MW 10:24). This happening of the
interaction along a continuous plane of existence is not unidirectional and reactionary, but
reciprocal and dialectical. The interaction and undergoing that is experience “is a circuit; not
an arc or broken segment of a circle. This circuit is more truly termed organic than reflex,
because the motor response determines the stimulus, just as truly as sensory stimulus
determines movement. Indeed, the movement is only for the sake of determining the
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stimulus, of fixing what kind of stimulus it is, of interpreting it” (EW 5:102). This reciprocal
relation between stimulus and response constitutes experience, and is a circuit or a circle that
constantly reinforces itself and develops dialectically between the temporal poles of prior and
present experience. Dewey says that experience “is primarily what is undergone in
connection with activities whose import lies in the objective consequences – their bearing
upon future experiences. Organic functions deal with things as things in course, in operation,
in a state of affairs not yet given or completed” (MW 10:15). This dialectical movement of
experience between past and present, then, is always oriented toward the future precisely
because nature is not yet complete, never resting in its inexorable march into the future.

Thus, the dialectical, temporal space within which experience moves is a crucial aspect of
Dewey’s account of the experimental nature of experience. This intercourse-in-the-making
that is experience is “an undergoing of an environment and a striving for its control in new
directions [which are] pregnant with connexions” (MW 10:6). These connections are
experienced as events, as objective things within the given field of experiential relations. In
this way, Dewey claims, “experience in its vital form is experimental, an effort to change the
given; it is characterized by projection, by reaching forward into the unknown; connection
with a future is its salient trait” (MW 10:6, emphasis added). The projective character of
experience, the way in which it reaches into the future so as to connect present experience to
possible future experience, “is a matter of simultaneous doings and sufferings” (MW 10:9).
The simultaneity of action and undergoing constitutes, then, the way in which our
experiences are “experiments in varying the course of events; our active tryings are tries and
tests of ourselves” (MW 10:9). The experimental character of experience is found in the way
in which “[e]xperience is an affair of facilitations and checks, of being sustained and
disrupted, being let alone, being helped and troubled, of good fortune and defeat in all the
countless qualitative modes which these words pallidly suggest” (MW 10:12). Thus,
according to Dewey, experience is characterized by an orientation to the future, to what will
come in light of the past as it is condensed in the present. Dewey says that “[t]o catch mind
in its connection with the entrance of the novel into the course of the world is to be on the
road to see that intelligence is itself the most promising of all novelties, the revelation of the
meaning of that transformation of past into future which is the reality of every present” (MW
10:47).
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In this way, experience is experimental and educative. In its active, projective state,
experience facilitates organisms gaining control of their environments. Through experience,
organisms test the objects of their environs so as to learn what is effectual and what is
ineffectual. This educative, experimental character of experience, then, necessarily involves
memory work, it involves inference and the capacity to integrate the past in the experience of
the present. Dewey says that “[t]here is, apparently, no conscious experience without
inference; reflection is native and constant” (MW 10:6). Inference, memory, and reflection,
on Dewey’s account, are not the unique features of human experience, but are rather features
of all experience, which are more or less pervasive. He says:
Inference, the use of what happens, to anticipate what will – or at least may – happen,
makes the difference between directed and undirected participation. And this
capacity for inferring is precisely the same as that use of natural occurrences for the
discovery and determination of consequences – the formation of new dynamic
connections – which constitutes knowledge. (MW 10:16)
The knowledge constituted by inference and the determination of consequences is, of course,
not the knowledge of traditional epistemology. Rather, Dewey’s knowledge is a capacity of
organisms to transform their environments and experiences in more or less effective ways.
Indeed, of natural organisms Dewey says that,
the changes in living things are orderly; they are cumulative; they tend constantly in
one direction; they do not, like other changes, destroy or consume, or pass fruitless
into wandering flux; they realize and fulfill. Each successive stage, no matter how
unlike its predecessor, preserves its net effect and also prepares the way for a fuller
activity on the part of its successor. (MW 4:5)
Thus the educative, experimental character of experience is immanent within the ways in
which organisms try, test, and project objects of experience into assimilated, possible futures.
Experience is educable and educative, and it accomplishes this for itself through
experimentation. Experience is experimental through the ongoing interactions and
movements of organisms and their concomitant environs. This is the sense in which Dewey
claims that end of education is growth, and that the true end of growth is more growth. That
is to say, the ends toward which experience aims is the enrichment and expansion of
experience itself, which is an always ongoing affair and never final.
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So if experience is experimental, and if experience is a particular aspect of nature, then the

experimental character of experience is part and parcel of the experimental character of
nature. In this way, the logic of experimentalism is itself a constitutive feature of both
experience and nature. Experience, on Dewey’s account, is experimental, and the structure
of experimentalism is built into the very structure of nature. And, as I will show in the next
section, because all inquiry begins from experience of actual existential situations, it is
correct to say that, for Dewey, the unity of method and content is grounded in the unity of
experience and nature. Nature itself is experimental, which is to say that it develops through
experimentation, through the ebbs and flows of the experimental process that is natural
selection. Nature, too, has a memory, the content of which is inscribed on material bodies
that persist through time. And the extent to which this method is consciously adopted and
employed in the service of more humane problems and inquiries is the extent to which we are
able to control our own evolution. “The only power the organism possesses to control its own
future,” Dewey says, “depends upon the way its present responses modify changes which are
taking place in its medium. A living being may be comparatively impotent, or comparatively
free. It is all a matter of the way in which its present reactions to things influence the future
reactions of things upon it” (MW 10:15). The impotence and freedom of organisms, then,
depends upon the more or less deliberate integration of experimentalism into all facets of
experienced life. This integration is what Dewey simply calls “intelligence,” and the
knowledge that constitutes this intelligence “is always a matter of the use that is made of
experienced natural events, a use in which given things are treated as indications of what will
be experienced under different conditions” and is a “way of employing empirical occurrences
with respect to increasing power to direct the consequences which flow from things” (MW
10:33 and 37).

Thus, Dewey’s philosophy of experience is one in which experience is educated through

experimentation with objects and events as they occur across time. In this way, Dewey
declares that “[p]ragmatism is content to take its stand with science; for science finds all such
events to be subject matter of description and inquiry....It also takes its stand with daily life,
which finds that such things really have to be reckoned with as they occur interwoven in the
texture of events” (MW 10:39). Experience is enriched and educated to the extent that it uses
the experienced features of life as the means by which indeterminate situations and
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experiences are transformed into effectual and determinate ones. This transformation is
affected through the process of experimental inquiry.

The Life of Inquiry

One potential misreading of Dewey would be to take him as a type positivist who advocates a
unified account of scientific inquiry and its reductive applicability to life beyond the sciences.
Accordingly, this misreading would then charge Dewey with making a fetish out of science
by glorifying it as having a privileged path to knowledge and truth that denigrates other paths
of knowing as falling short of the scientific ideal. And, while Dewey no doubt considers the
advent of modern science to mark a profound shift in the ability humans have to control the
environment and render more secure the uncertainties that permeate human experience, it
would be wrong to project Dewey’s reference to science into more contemporary
instantiations. In fact, it would be wrong to assume that he was referring to science qua
historical and material practice at all. This is because, on the one hand, and to the extent that
Dewey was referring to science qua historical and material practice at all, he was referring to
it as it existed then, at the close of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and at a time
when the depth of scientific ideas were opening up wide new vistas of meaning, the potential
applications of which stood to many as concrete symbols of hope and progress. But since
that time science has changed a great deal, and our understanding of it has changed equally as
much. For example, it is now fairly well-established that there is not one science, unified by
some common method or subject-matter, but that there are many sciences, and that these
sciences are distributed over an increasingly complex range of institutional and
epistemological spaces. Within these various spaces, moreover, the sciences are constituted
by a diverse set of material practices and concrete ends; science is not a homogenous,
ahistorical body of knowledge aiming at a complete and fixed truth apart from human
interests, but is always already entangled in the interests that motivate and guide its inquiries.
So, rather than reading Dewey as addressing any one of these particular claims about the
sciences as a set of historical and material practices, it is important to emphasize what he is
stressing in his discussions of “science,” namely, the genetic and experimental logic in
inquiry, of which the sciences stand as exemplary.

For Dewey, the most significant contribution of science to culture was not any specific
discovery or invention, but the formulation and refinement of the experimental method of
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inquiry. Like with the empirical method, by the experimental method Dewey does not intend
to denote a method in the strict sense; it is not a codified method, applied in a uniform
manner, across a range of contexts; it is not a calculus or formula through which observations
are passed and conclusions produced. It refers, rather, to the general, historically contingent,
methodological comportment that has been the guiding impetus of modern science since the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This method consists of taking ideas, utilizing
them in actual contexts, and evaluating their efficacy based upon consequences. Dewey
characterizes it as a “method of knowing that is self-corrective in operation; that learns from
failures as from successes” (MW 12:259). It is a method wherein “discovery and inquiry are
synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the
immutable” (MW 12:263). In other words, the goal of inquiry is not to find a final solution,
but to find a solution that satisfies a particular problematic situation and thereby allows the
inquirer to move on to other problems. Dewey notes that “[t]heory in fact – that is, in the
conduct of scientific inquiry – has lost ultimacy. Theories have passed into hypotheses”
(MW 12:276). So Dewey holds scientific inquiry to be a hypothetical, ongoing process that
orients itself to human needs and interests which change over time. Science is a process not a
product, and because the ends of this process are constantly changing according to the
problems of experienced life, so too do its constitutive objects change accordingly.

But that the sciences are the central historical location of the emergence of experimental
inquiry actually belies an ironic historical fact that the sciences have also been the location of
a reemergence of new type of essentialist epistemology and ontology. Just as with Dewey’s
account of the objects of experience, Dewey’s account of scientific objects attempts to shift
the grounds of reference of away from denoting the character of the real to an understanding
of those references as the conditions for controlling events as they are experienced now and
in the future. To accomplish this shift Dewey distinguishes between the objects of the world
and their ideational status within particular frameworks of understanding, which in this case
is the framework of the natural sciences. As such, the objects of the sciences are objects of
abstraction that function within a closed systems of meanings so as to regulate experience in
the service of understanding. Dewey says that the “depersonalizing and de-socializing of
some objects, to be henceforth the objects of physical science, was a necessary precondition
of the ability to regulate experience by directing the attitudes and objects that enter into it”
(LW 1:23). In other words, Dewey is not denying that there are real objects in the world and
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that science is concerned with these objects, but rather that the objects qua ideas function in a
different way. This function is not necessarily a referential one, whereby scientific objects
correspond to the objects of the world as such. Rather, they function as place holders in a
larger conceptual system aimed at understanding, explanation, and control.

Against various versions of realism, then, Dewey’s account is not one wherein the objects of
scientific inquiry and discourse capture or reflect the way the world really is. But, against
various versions of anti-realism as well, Dewey’s account does not deny the reality of the
objects as they are experienced in the course of inquiry. So, while Dewey does deny that the
objects of science get at some more fundamental epistemological and ontological level of
reality, he also denies that they do not get at some such reality. Again, this is because Dewey
is working reconstruct our understanding of knowledge and experience in a unified
framework of reality and nature. The distinctions of realism and anti-realism remain caught
in system of binary oppositions that, on the one hand, pits appearances against realities, and,
on the other hand, pit scientific theories against technological practices. With respect to the
first set of binaries, Dewey argues that “the proper objects of science are nature in its
instrumental characters. Any immediate object then becomes for inquiry, as something to be
known, an appearance. To call it ‘appearance’ denotes a functional status, not a kind of
existence” (LW 1:111). He goes on to say that
in the total situation in which [scientific objects] function, they are means to weaving
together otherwise disconnected beginnings and endings into a consecutive history.
Underlying ‘reality’ and ‘surface appearance’ in this connection have a meaning
fixed by the function of inquiry, not an intrinsic metaphysical meaning. (LW 1:112)
In other words, qua object of inquiry, the objects of the sciences are appearances only insofar
as they connect other objects and events together in a continuous series such that inquiry can
proceed in a more or less controlled and directed fashion. So to call an object an
“appearance” does not imply that there is some more fundamental reality laying behind the
object, but rather points to the way in which the appearance qua sign operates in a given
context of inquiry. The objects of science are instruments; they are mediate signs that “stand
for” events and make possible their control toward directed ends.

This position, in turn, points to the second set of binaries of which Dewey wishes to dispose,
namely, that between science and technology. Traditionally, the distinction between science
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and technology is one in which science is a self-contained and self-justifying activity aiming
at knowledge and truth, while technology is the instrumental application of basic scientific
knowledge toward the realization of particular ends. Accordingly, the sciences are
considered ends unto themselves, while technologies concern mere means in their
subservience to ulterior ends. On Dewey’s account, however, the objects of science are
themselves technological in that they are able to effect changes in the world.
By its nature technology is concerned with things and acts in their instrumentalities,
not in their immediacies. Objects and events figure in work not as fulfillments,
realizations, but in behalf of other things of which they are means and predictive
signs. A tool is a particular thing, since it is a thing in which a connection, a
sequential bond of nature is embodied. It possesses an objective relation as its own
defining property….A tool denotes a perception and acknowledgment of sequential
bonds in nature. (LW 1:101)
In this way, the objects of science are not strictly scientific, but are technological as well
insofar as they are means in route to particular ends. Such a status does not reduce their
importance within the scientific enterprise, nor does it denigrate the ends in the service of
which they are employed. As Dewey says, the “reduction of natural existences to the status
of means thus presents nothing inherently adverse to possessed and appreciated ends, but
rather renders the latter a more secure and extensive affair” (LW1:108). The status Dewey
accords to the objects of the sciences, then, are not adverse to ends precisely because it takes
these ends into account in the formation of the objects as means. In this way, the objects of
the sciences are formative and trans-formative; they both constitute the scope and substance
of scientific inquiry and transform that inquiry according to the consequences that result from
using those objects in particular ways.

Thus, the objects of the sciences are instrumental. They are neither “objects” in the sense of
a representational correlation between ideas and objects, nor do they aim at matching up
reality to its corresponding intellectual characters. Rather, their status as objects depends
upon what they make possible. Dewey says,
A thing is more significantly what it makes possible than which it immediately is.
The very conception of cognitive meaning, intellectual significance, is that things in
their immediacy are subordinated to what they portend and give evidence of. An
intellectual sign denotes that a thing is not taken immediately but is referred to
 15

something that may come in consequence of it. Intellectual meanings may

themselves be appropriated, enjoyed and appreciated; but the character of intellectual
meaning is instrumental. (LW 1:105)
Meaning and reference, on Dewey’s account, are significant insofar as they make possible
the regulation of events in controlled and coordinated ways. Events and objects in their
immediacy are not the events and objects of the sciences. Rather, at the level of inquiry,
events and objects are abstracted from their contexts of immediacy so as to achieve a more
generalized orientation to other similar events and objects as they may enter experience into
the future. Citing the way in which the Greeks prepared the way for understanding the
objects of the sciences in this way, Dewey says that,
For if Greek thinkers did not achieve science, they achieved the idea of
science….Subject-matter underwent a certain distortion when it was lifted out of [its
local and particular] context, and placed in a realm of eternal forms….Thinking was
uncovered as an enterprise having its own objects and procedures; and the discovery
of thought as method of methods in all arts added a new dimension to all subsequent
experience. (LW 1:103)
So the abstraction from the particular is, on Dewey’s view, a necessary precondition to
achieving a system of understanding that is as widely applicable as the sciences. It is,
moreover, precisely this abstraction that makes the objects of the sciences useful in concrete
situations. “Empirically, individualized objects, unique affairs, exist,” Dewey says,
But they are evanescent, unstable. They tremble on the verge of disappearance as
soon as they appear….Timeless laws, taken by themselves, like all universals, express
dialectic intent, not any matter-of-fact existence. But their ultimate implication is
application; they are methods, and when applied as methods they regulate the
precarious flow of unique situations. (LW 1:119)
The objects of the sciences, then, constitute the means by which inquiry proceeds and the
ends toward which it aims. It is, moreover, the reflective awareness of the ends that are
operative within inquiry that renders the means more efficacious when they are reintegrated
and utilized within future inquiries. Obviously, the identification of the ends operative within
inquiry is structurally analogous to the identification of selective emphases operative within
experience. In both cases, things and objects are means or signs that stand for an experienced
aspect of nature. Scientific objects, in other words, are the symbolic manifestations of
experienced natural sequences that function as means for controlling and adjusting
 16

experience toward more effective relations in the future. Just as the temporal character of
experience is the condition of possibility for its education through experiment, so too the
temporal character of nature is the condition of possibility for scientific objects to become
means for more intelligent ends.

It is important to note that Dewey’s view of science, like his view of philosophy more
generally, is one of continuity with everyday experience. Science and philosophy, for
Dewey, are not areas of inquiry that are different in kind from everyday, common sense ways
of experience and inquiry (LW 12:66). Rather, they are different only insofar as they
represent different levels of abstraction from the concrete immediacies of experience; they
are emergent from and continuous with the immediacies of ordinary experience. So, because
the instrumental character of scientific objects is defined by the extent to which it makes
possible the direction and anticipation of future features of experience, the “character of the
object is like that of a tool, say a lever; it is an order of determination of sequential changes
terminating in a foreseen consequence” (LW 1:121). The reality of the tool, then, is
coextensive with its efficacy in inquiry. Dewey says,
When things are defined as instruments, their value and validity reside in what
proceeds from them; consequences not antecedents supply meaning and verity.
Truths already possessed may have practical or moral certainty, but logically they
never lose a hypothetical quality. They are true if; if certain other things eventually
present themselves; and when these latter things occur they in turn suggest further
possibilities; the operation of doubt-inquiry-finding recurs. (LW 1:123)
In this way, the hypothetical quality of the objects of inquiry constitutes one of the most
important features of Dewey’s experimentalism. It attributes to the objects of the sciences a
thoroughgoing instrumentality that privileges consequences over antecedents and efficacy
over representation. Through this instrumentalism, the objects of experience and inquiry gain
traction precisely because they facilitate a wider experimentalism of thought.

The structure of this conception of inquiry, then, is grounded in an experimentalism that

seeks to coordinate ends and means in the service of solving problems experienced in the
course of life. For Dewey, all inquiry arises within the context of a problematic situation and
aims to resolve that situation by transforming it into an unproblematic one (LW 12:109). Just
as with experience, within this framework all inquiry has an existential basis; all genuine
 17

problems have their source in actual problematic experiences. Accordingly, Dewey identifies
two “existential matrices of inquiry” – the biological (LW 12:30) and the cultural (LW 12:48)
– that form the necessary background conditions against which all inquiry arises. Inquiry,
then, is not a free-floating process that rational beings engage in when and whence they
choose, but is a direct consequence of an organism’s interaction with its environment.
Dewey claims that the logical structure of inquiry is based upon, and transformed by, the
existential material being inquired about. He says that “formal [logical] conceptions arise out
of the ordinary transactions; they are not imposed upon them from on high or from any
external and a priori source. But when they are formed they are also formative; they regulate
the proper conduct of the activities out of which they develop” (LW 12:106). Dewey
illustrates this by using the example of our common sense notions of legality and how, once
these notions are put through legislative processes and formally codified, they become the
structures by which further notions of legality (typically) develop. In this way, logical forms
are taken to be both the products of inquiry, as well as its constitutive forms. They are
products, which, when taken and re-integrated within inquiry, become part of the very
structure of future inquiry. Inquiry is thus formative and trans-formative: it is formative in
that, through its very processes, it determines a scheme for ordering further discourse, and
trans-formative in that it reconditions experience such that the problematic situation is
transformed through its solution, i.e. it is no longer problematic.

Given these characteristics, the contours of Dewey’s conception of experimental inquiry can
be summarized as follows: First, inquiry is an ongoing, hypothetical process, which is
guided by the experimental attitude to the extent that it takes various hypotheses and judges
their validity according to applied consequences. While the short-term goal of inquiry is the
resolution of immediate problematic situations, the nature of inquiry necessitates that inquiry
itself remain dynamic and ongoing in the search for new ways of understanding and
explanation. Second, the problematic contents of inquiry originate from the experiences of
immediate interactions with the surrounding environment, which include the cultural milieu
into which we are thrown. The objects and substances that form the contents of inquiry are
themselves hypothetical in nature and are modified according to the degree to which they fit
into, and function within, a problematic situation, or system of such situations. They are not
based upon essences or intrinsic natures, but are the operational correlatives of the structural
forms of inquiry. Finally, the structure of inquiry is formed in conjunction with the contents
 18

of inquiry, thus placing structural and material elements in a reciprocal relationship that
shapes the way inquiry is conducted in the future. This makes logical forms functional and
instrumental, rather than structural and a priori. When all these features are taken together
and utilized within an actual situation of inquiry, they constitute “active intelligence.”

In this way, Dewey’s conception of inquiry can be understood as the schematization of the
experimentalism that is characteristic of experience. To the extent that experience seeks its
own enrichment and education by reintegrating the consequences of past experiences into its
comportment toward future experience, to the extent that experience seeks to solve the
problems of understanding that arise in its own course, Dewey’s account of inquiry can be
seen as simply a formalization of his account of experience. This is because the underlying
descriptive structure of both inquiry and experience are analogous by way of the
experimentalism that unifies, on the one hand, the contents of nature and experience, and, on
the other hand, the methods of experience and inquiry.

The Consequences of Experimentalism

The primary consequence of understanding Dewey’s experimentalism as the central and
underlying trope of his conceptions of experience and inquiry is, then, that it reconstructs the
nature of ideas and beliefs such that they are not things to cling to and possess because they
contain a intrinsic reference or connection with some independent reality. By situating
experience within a fully naturalistic context, Dewey argues that the things of experience –
including ideas and beliefs as to the nature of those things – are the means by which an
organism gains a greater or lesser degree of control over its environment. Moreover,
Dewey’s account of inquiry works to address and transform the nature of ideas and beliefs as
they operate within the sciences, working against the tendency in those areas of inquiry to
hypostasize the objects of their inquiry as either having greater or lesser degrees of
correspondence to the truth or a value based in mere utility. From both levels of
consideration, Dewey argues that ideas and beliefs – both as they are experienced and as they
are employed within inquiry – function as the means for transforming a world into which we
always already find ourselves thrown. At work within both experience and inquiry is an
experimentalism that goes beyond a set of basic methodological commitments and makes the
objects, ideas, and beliefs of experience and inquiry themselves experimental. In this way,
ideas and beliefs stand for the things of experience and the objects of inquiry; they become
 19

the means for predicting, controlling, and modifying experience and inquiry as it proceeds
into the future. But that ideas and beliefs are the means by which this control is rendered
omits Dewey’s account of the ends that are always operative within both experience and
inquiry. Thus, in final section of the essay I will outline Dewey’s conception of ideas (and,
by extension, beliefs) in light of the foregoing discussion of experience and inquiry.

Dewey’s account of ideas as artistic constitutes a dramatic shift in thinking about the nature
of ideas. In the accounts of experience and inquiry above, I emphasized the way in which
each is dependent upon an underlying conception of experimentalism, whether that
experimentalism be the experimentalism of experience and nature, or whether it was the
experimentalism of a formalized account of the inquiries exemplary of the sciences. At the
center of this experimentalism is the suggestion that when method and content are seen as
mutually constitutive, means and ends cease to stand in strict oppositional tension. When the
rigid oppositions between experience and nature, subject and object, appearance and reality,
and science and technology are made functional rather than ontological, instrumental rather
than essential, the relationship between means and ends is radically transformed. And for
Dewey, in what should now be somewhat predictable, this transformation actually amounts to
a unification. For Dewey, “any activity that is simultaneously both [means and consequence,
process and product, the instrumental and consummatory], rather than in alternation and
displacement, is art….For arts that are merely useful are not arts but routines; and arts that
are merely final are not arts but passive amusements and distractions...” (LW 1:271). While
Dewey’s definition of art is no doubt unorthodox, on close examination it is entirely
consistent with the reconstructive projects at which he takes aim.

The underlying dualism between nature and art are, from Dewey’s point of view, wholly
untenable precisely because they hold as separate classes the things of the natural world and
things of the human world. Traditionally, art is contrasted with nature. To be an art is to be
artificial; in its making, art contains at least a degree of difference (if not a difference in kind)
from the conditions that exist naturally. To be artificial, then, is to be an artifact of human
making; as artifacts, they are made not found. This making is a kind of masking as well,
taking art to artifact to artifice. When the dualism between art and nature is overcome,
Dewey argues,
 20

all the intelligent activities of men, no matter whether expressed in science, fine arts,
or social relationships, [will] have for their task the conversion of causal bonds,
relations of succession, into a connection of means-consequences, into meanings.
When the task is achieved the result is art: and in art everything is common between
means and ends. (LW 1:277)
Ideas, then, insofar as they embody the union of means and ends, are works of art. Art is
accomplished on Dewey’s view when these dualisms cease to find expression in our thinking
about thinking and affirm the efficacy of ideas by employing them in the realization of more
effective modes of practice.

Art, then, among other things, is the simultaneous holding of means and ends in a single
thought; it is the transformation of the means-ends dualism into a means-ends continuum.
This continuum, moreover, is not one in which means are situated at one extreme and ends at
the other extreme. Neither is the means-ends continuum a merely temporal continuum.
While thinking is indeed an active process that is “strung out temporally,” at each stage there
is “a deposit…entering cumulatively and constitutively into the outcome” (LW 1:276). “A
genuine instrumentality for is always an organ of an end,” Dewey goes on to say, because “it
confers continued efficacy upon the object in which it is embodied” (LW 1:276). Thus, this
continuum is a continuum of thought wherein means and ends are held together in mutual
reciprocity and mutual dependence. Of this continuum, Dewey says,
The end is then an end-in-view and is in constant and cumulative reenactment at each
state of forward movement. It is no longer a terminal point, external to the conditions
that have led up to it; it is the continually developing meaning of present tendencies –
the very things which as directed we call ‘means’. The process is art and its product,
no matter at what stage it be taken, is a work of art. (LW 1:280)
Thus ideas, when they are taken experimentally and as the union of means and ends within
inquiry and experience, are works of art. The earlier definition of experience as both
experimental and educative is now augmented by artistic. Similarly, when inquiry is
understood as the effective transformation of an indeterminate situation into one whose
prevailing character is determinate and stable – that is, successful – inquiry too is properly
considered a work of art.
 21

Because the objects of the sciences embody this union of means and ends, the sciences too
are manifestations of artistic accomplishment. This is because science, like any other work
of art, “confers upon things traits and potentialities which did not previously belong to
them….It adds them by means of engaging them in new modes of interaction, having a new
orders of consequences” (LW 1:285-6). But the way in which the objects of the sciences add
meaning to experience, and transform the subject-matter of experience in the process, does
not set the sciences apart from other areas of inquiry. On the contrary. Dewey understands
“the history of human experience” to be just the “history of the development of arts,” and
“the history of science in its distinct emergence from religious, ceremonial and poetic arts is
the record of a differentiation of arts, not a record of separation from art” (LW 1:290). So
while Dewey may privilege the sciences within human experience by emphasizing the
importance of its experimental logic of inquiry, this “unique position only places it the more
securely as an art; it does not set its product, knowledge, apart from other works of art” (LW
1:284). The sciences, then, should not be understood as the application of a methodological
calculus to phenomena that aims at fixed truth and certain knowledge. Rather, when the
sciences are understood in their full experimental import, we see 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…is the complete culmination of nature, and that ‘science’ is properly a
handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue. Thus would disappear
the separations that trouble present thinking: division of everything into nature and
experience, of experience into practice and theory, art and science, of art into useful
and fine, menial and free. (LW 1:269)
The artistic character of science, then, is found in the way in which it joins means and ends in
a single continuum that renders experience more meaningful and more intelligent. The
integration of means and ends, however, is always “progressive and experimental, not
momentarily accomplished. Thus every creative effort is temporal, subject to risk and
deflection” (LW 1:281). This risk and deflection is precisely the experimental, projective,
and educative character of experience; it is the trying out of some ideas rather than others and
basing one’s acceptance upon their efficacy and consequences in practice. The scientific
character of art, moreover, “is peculiarly instrumental in quality. It is a devise in
 22

experimentation carried on for the sake of education. It exists for the sake of specialized use,
use being a new training of modes of perception” (LW 1:293). In this way, one of the
primary purposes of the arts is to facilitate new experiences, to train experience in novel ways
of seeing the world. And to the extent that the objects of scientific inquiry are artistic in this
way, they serve as an “education of the organs of perception in new modes of consummatory
objects; they enlarge and enrich the world of human vision” (LW 1:293).

Thus, for Dewey, ideas are works of art in that they augment experience by opening up
possibilities for thinking that were theretofore absent. He says, “the idea is, in short, art and a
work of art. As a work of art, it directly liberates subsequent action and makes it more
fruitful in the creation of more meanings and more perceptions” (LW 1:278). Like ideas,
beliefs function in our experience as means to achieving a more secure and stable ends. They
are, to cite James, habits of action, the characters of which are desirable to the extent that
they are conducive to guiding inquiry in the ongoing experience of the world. In this way,
ideas and beliefs are the constitutive features of thinking, and for Dewey
[t]hinking is preeminently an art; knowledge and propositions which are the products
of thinking, are works of art, as much so as statuary and symphonies. Every
successive stage of thinking is a conclusion in which the meaning of what has
produced it is condensed…The antecedents of a conclusion are as causal and
existential as those of a building. They are not logical or dialectical, or an affair of
ideas. (LW 1:283)
For Dewey, of course, thinking includes both experience and inquiry. And when the ideas
and beliefs that are constitutive of these endeavors are seen as works of art, the experimental
character of both experience and the things of experience, of both inquiry and the objects
inquiry, comes into sharp relief.

It is precisely because both experience and inquiry are cumulative (or accumulative) that they
are able to project into the future and build into the successive stages of thinking the
consequences of previous thoughts. This ability is exactly what Dewey means by the term
“intelligence” or “active intelligence,” or when he speaks of “thought as the method of
methods”: it is simply the ability to employ actively the experience of the past in the service
of understanding in the present and future. But it is also because ideas and beliefs are as
“causal and existential” as any other material force that they demand reconstruction
 23

according to the consequences they produce. Again, and this is a striking point, Dewey
considers ideas and beliefs to be as active and efficacious in the world as any other material
thing. This, of course, relies on Dewey’s commitment to breakdown the dualism between
ideas and the material world, which is made in his characterization of experience and inquiry
as a direct response to an organism’s interactions with its environment. Put differently,
because nothing is outside of nature, experience and the things of experience, as well as
inquiry and the objects of inquiry, are natural and causal forces within the world.

In this essay I have shown that it is from Darwin that Dewey takes his project of unifying
experience and nature, which he accomplishes by unifying the method of the experimental
sciences with the content of a naturalized experience. In this way, for Dewey, the condition
of human experience is “just this predicament of the inextricable mixture of stability and
uncertainty [that] gives rise to philosophy, and that it is reflected in all its recurrent problems
and issues” (LW 1:46). That the human condition is characterized by this ineradicable
mixture of certainty and uncertainty, moreover, indicates a deeper point about the world,
namely, that “the world must actually be such as to generate ignorance and inquiry; doubt
and hypothesis, trial and temporal conclusions…The ultimate evidence of genuine hazard,
contingency, irregularity and indeterminateness in nature is thus found in the occurrence of
thinking” (LW 1:62). That thought occurs, in other words, is evidence of a fundamental
instability of experience. So by collapsing the distinction between nature and experience,
between the world and thought, Dewey is able to reconstruct philosophical inquiry as
responsive to the problems of contemporary life, which, in this essay I have taken to be a
problem about the way individuals and communities hold their ideas and beliefs.

More specifically, and as I have already mentioned, Dewey locates a crucial moment with the
advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. With Darwin, the experimental method that rose to
prominence in the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries was
joined with the substantive study of life-forms in their environment. What is more, Darwin’s
theory extends experimentalism into the constitution of nature itself. Thus, after Darwin,
thought “is compelled to take on reflective form, it involves doubt, inquiry and hypothesis,
because it sets out from a subject-matter conditioned by sense, a fact which proves that
thought, intellect, is not pure in man, but restricted by an animal organism that is but one part
linked with other parts, of nature” (LW 1:60). This reflective form, in short, constitutes
 24

Dewey’s experimentalism, which would be both unnecessary and impossible without the
insight and innovation of “the Darwinian genetic and experimental logic” (MW 4:13). It is
through this thoroughly naturalistic framework that Dewey constructs his account of
experience and inquiry which share a fundamental structural affinity through the concept of
experimentalism.

By emphasizing Dewey’s experimentalism, I mean to highlight the potential ways in which

his account stands to fundamentally change the way ideas and beliefs are understood to
function within human experience and inquiry. Moreover, by emphasizing Dewey’s
experimentalism I do not wish to contribute to the debate over the primacy of experience or
inquiry within Dewey’s philosophy. In many ways, that is too much a scholastic point, and
seems to miss Dewey’s by a wide margin. Rather, my intent is to illustrate the particular way
in which Dewey naturalizes experience and inquiry, and thereby changes the nature and
function of beliefs and ideas within experience and inquiry. Experience and inquiry are
mutually constitutive concepts in Dewey’s philosophy: Dewey’s account of experience is
modeled upon his conception of experimental inquiry, just as much as his account of inquiry
is dependent upon his conception of experimental experience. It is not as though experience
is first, either temporally or conceptually, and then comes inquiry as a sub-set of experience.
Rather, for Dewey, experience is a type of inquiry, and inquiry is a type of experience. Thus,
the experimentalism that sits at the heart of both is the underlying conceptual trope that
points to the way in which the beliefs and ideas that are found within experience and inquiry
can be reconstructed according to the problems of contemporary life.

One of these problems, it seems to me, consists in examining the consequences that stem
from the way people think and believe. I began this essay by commenting on the way in
which ideas and beliefs have a real force in contemporary life. Within the United States and
across the world, the clash of beliefs is currently causing a whole host of conflicts, with all
their told and untold stories of misery. The disputes that happen between peoples and
communities over what, exactly, is the right thing to think or believe have real consequences
for the life of those peoples and communities. But it appears that the disputes over what to
think or believe actually belies a deeper problem concerning the way in which they think or
believe. To the extent that individuals and communities are willing to give up a commitment
to experience and inquiry, to the extent that people are satisfied with a static plurality of
 25

mutually exclusive beliefs, is the extent to which their disputes are irreconcilable and seem to
be adjudicable only through coercion.

The way beliefs and ideas are held by various people and various communities constitutes
one of the primary problems of contemporary life. It seems, therefore, that philosophers
would do well to refocus their efforts on this problem by critically engaging the way people
hold their ideas and belief. By attempting such an engagement, philosophers can contribute
to a reconstruction of beliefs and ideas and thereby transform the consequences that come
from holding ideas and beliefs in rigid, representational, and dogmatic ways. Dewey’s work
on the nature of ideas and beliefs stands as a fruitful starting point for such an engagement,
and in this essay I have argued that by focusing on the experimentalism that sits at the bottom
of his accounts of experience and inquiry one is able to understand what a different
conception of ideas and beliefs may look like in the future. Dewey’s experimentalism points
to the importance of the comportment we take not only to our own experiences and inquiries,
but to the ideas and beliefs that constitute them. In short, it is not what one believes that is
important on Dewey’s account, but rather how one believes it. And this how is found in
Dewey’s thoroughgoing experimentalism. In the end, the difference this emphasis stands to
make in the conduct of an individual’s life is the difference between dogmatism and
experimentalism, which, when extrapolated into the socio-political realm, constitutes the
difference between fascism and totalitarianism, on the one hand, and democracy and
democratic ways of living on the other.

Postscript: Why Pragmatists Cannot Be Deweyans

In this essay I have attempted to show how experimentalism – rather than experience, or
inquiry, or democracy or some other substantive subject – is the central trope around which
Dewey’s philosophy is articulated. But what is the point of making such a claim?

I should say that my interest in advancing this argument is not scholastic, or at least not
primarily so. Rather, I would like to suggest that when experimentalism is taken as the
central theme of Dewey’s philosophy, the scholastic point becomes much beside the point.
This is to say that I view the concept of experimentalism as the crux of Dewey’s philosophy
because that is what I see him as doing in his own philosophy. In his writings, technically
philosophical and otherwise, Dewey himself was being experimental. In a wide variety of
 26

contexts and for a wide variety of reasons, Dewey was advancing ideas as hypotheses to be
taken up and tried, as experiments yet to be performed. Thus, when experimentalism is taken
as the central thematic point, one can read Dewey’s corpus as providing the type of
philosophy he argues for in his own philosophical writings. In other words, if one takes
Dewey to actually be doing the sort of philosophy that he argues for, then one can read
Dewey’s substantive views as a critical engagement of his experience with the social, moral,
and political problems of his own day. When so taken, the question of whether or in what
ways Dewey “got it right” is no longer really a question, or at least not the central one. This
is because his substantive views shift in their function so as to provide but one starting point
among many for conducting inquiry in the present. If one is inclined to accept Dewey’s
substantive views, in other words, they can serve merely as springboards into inquiries about
the conditions that actually obtain in the present, and provide but some of the means by
which a critical transformation of practices can be affected.

To put this point slightly differently, when the experimental mode of thinking and living is
genuinely adopted, when Dewey’s conception of philosophy is actually employed, the aim
and importance of scholarship seems to be significantly transformed. To be more specific,
the kind of scholarship wherein certain interpretations of key texts are debated becomes an
odd philosophical project, and one that in many ways may be simply misguided, at least from
a pragmatic point of view. For contemporary pragmatists, the inappropriateness of this mode
of philosophizing should be evident by the fact that Dewey did so little of this type of writing
himself and, when he did, he was typically not engaged in the debate about other thinkers,
but about the views he was then advancing on his own terms with and between other thinkers.

So the arguments within the literature over the primacy of experience over inquiry or inquiry
over experience seem to miss a crucial aspect of Dewey’s own point. When experimentalism
is taken as the guiding attitude of philosophy, disputes over and between past thinkers take on
a decidedly diminished importance. To put this matter bluntly, and admitting only a limited
amount of hyperbole, to the extent that pragmatists continue to write books and articles over
the minutiae of Dewey interpretation, or even the relevance of Dewey’s views to
contemporary life, they have missed Dewey’s central point, namely, to stop obsessing over
the arguments of past philosophers and get on with the critical project of reconstructing the
practices of the present along more deliberate and intelligent paths. So, perhaps I should say
 27

that experimentalism could be the central theme of Dewey’s philosophy and that, when it is
so taken, it results in, among other things, a certain reconstruction of the current practices and
institutions of professional philosophy.

Allow me to approach this point from a different position. When I say that pragmatists ought
not consider themselves Deweyans, I mean that those who call themselves such seem to have
committed themselves to certain set of philosophical claims, much in the same way as those
who adopt Kant’s views as their own call themselves “Kantians” or those who follow the
teachings of Jesus call themselves “Christians”. My claim is that, internal to Dewey’s own
philosophy, such a position is both untenable and unavailable. It is unavailable precisely
because if you “accept” Dewey’s views about empirical method and the objects in of inquiry
and the nature of ideas, then you do not have beliefs that you ascribe to in the way a
“Kantian” ascribes to Kant’s views. It is untenable because ideas and beliefs, in short, are
simply not the kind of thing you believe in that way. Rather, they are tools employed toward
ends-in-view, they are habits for acting more or less intelligently in the world.

The pragmatist who has read Dewey and absorbed as central the lesson of experimentalism is
committed to carrying inquiry forward, to realizing philosophy as a critical engagement of
actual practices and pressing problems within existing communities. These practices and
these problems can, no doubt, be found within the contemporary confines of professional
academic philosophy. But this is not their only, nor even their primary, home. If the
pragmatist indeed believes that there is no proper subject matter for philosophy, and that, in
fact, philosophy’s subject matter is to be found within the content of lived experience, then
how can the pragmatist continue to philosophize in a way that presupposes and implies that
philosophy does actually have a subject matter proper to itself? If the pragmatist sincerely
believes that the reconstruction of current practices and institutions is one of the primary aims
of philosophical inquiry, then why do pragmatists continue to perpetuate these practices and
institutions through their very participation in them? To the extent that pragmatists do so,
they are complicit in the hypostatization of philosophy and its continuing irrelevance to
contemporary social problems.

I should be clear: I do not wish to advance any version of the “end of philosophy” thesis. I
do not think that philosophers need to stop doing philosophy, or that the academy should be
 28

abandoned wholesale as a place to think and write and teach. Hardly. There is no crisis here,
there is no conspiracy. The possibility for philosophy in the present is now, perhaps more
than ever, in need of actualization. The spread of intelligent practices through the critical
reconstruction of unintelligent ones remains a task to be accomplished. This task,
importantly, will not be accomplished through an internecine and scholastic struggle within
philosophy itself. Rather, it will be accomplished by individuals who work in the world to
bring about such a transformation, who labor and experience the problems of contemporary
life first-hand. What I would like to suggest, however, is that it might be useful to examine
the current institutions in which philosophy is currently being done so as to evaluate the
efficacy of those practices on pragmatic grounds. On the face of things, it does not appear as
though philosophers are contributing all that much to the reconstruction of actual practices or
widespread modes of thought. Of course, this could be wrong: philosophers could very well
be an integral part of the social and material machinations of culture. That is matter for
further inquiry. But this is at least not obviously clear, and it actually seems largely false.

When so-called Deweyans are writing books and articles that are read by only a few
specialists or enthusiasts, their contribution is relegated to a relatively small area. It
behooves contemporary pragmatists to remember that many of Dewey’s writings were aimed
at a non-technical audience. While he did write for his philosophical colleagues, he also
devoted many, many words to addressing a larger public. And he did not simply attempt to
address a wider audience, he was actually successful at doing so. This is because the written
word was not Dewey’s sole vehicle for philosophizing. Indeed, he was a socially engaged
intellectual that participated in concrete social and political experiments. It is not that I think
academic philosophy is pointless or useless – I do not. But I also do not think that academic
philosophy represents the only, let alone the best, way in which to “do philosophy”. Indeed,
if the claim that philosophy needs life and not the other way around is to be maintained, it is
not clear that pursuing philosophy as a profession makes any sense at all. In fact, from a
pragmatic point of view, it very well may be an oxymoron. In many ways I do not see a
career as a professional philosopher as the best way in which pragmatists can live and think
in they way they claim to want to live and think; indeed, the institutionalization of practice is
the quickest way to petrify the thoroughgoing experimentalism Dewey’s philosophy
commends.
 29

But, like everything else in a hypothetical, experimental comportment to experience and

inquiry, this conclusion remains to be seen, it remains open and inconclusive, because, as
Dewey says, “[t]he issue is one of choice, and choice is always a question of alternatives.
What the method of intelligence, thoughtful valuation will accomplish, if once it be tried, is
for the result of trial to determine” (LW 1:326). Let the trials begin.

C.J. Sentell
Nashville, TN
April 2007

Works Cited
Dewey, John. 1976-1983. “The Reflex-Arc Concept in Psychology,” in John Dewey: The Early Works,
1882-1898, Volume 5. Jo Ann Boydston (ed.). 5 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

----------. 1976-1983. “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-
1925, Volume 3. Jo Ann Boydston (ed.). 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

----------. 1976-1983. “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-
1925, Volume 4. Jo Ann Boydston (ed.). 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

----------. 1976-1983. “The Need for a Recovery in Philosophy,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-
1925, Volume 10. Jo Ann Boydston (ed.). 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

----------. 1976-1983. Reconstruction in Philosophy, in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1925,
Volume 12. Jo Ann Boydston (ed.). 15 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

----------. 1981-1990. Experience and Nature, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume 1. Jo
Ann Boydston (ed.). 17 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

----------. 1981-1990. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, Volume
12. Jo Ann Boydston (ed.). 17 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.