Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
make up the definition of the form. His induction involves a gathering
of individuals rather than of data. Thus analysis in the theoretical,
the natural, the practical, and the productive sciences, leads back to
universals. This is quite consistent with Aristotle's metaphysical
position that since the matter of natural objects has reality through
its realization in the form, whatever appears without such meaning can
be accounted for only as the expression of the resistance which matter
offers to this realization. This is the field of a blind necessity, not
that of a constructive science.
Continuous advance in science has been possible only when analysis of
the object of knowledge has supplied not elements of meanings as the
objects have been conceived but elements abstracted from those meanings.
That is, scientific advance implies a willingness to remain on terms of
tolerant acceptance of the reality of what cannot be stated in the
accepted doctrine of the time, but what must be stated in the form of
contradiction with these accepted doctrines. The domain of what is
usually connoted by the term facts or data belongs to the field lying
between the old doctrine and the new. This field is not inhabited by the
Aristotelian individual, for the individual is but the realization of
the form or universal essence. When the new theory has displaced the
old, the new individual appears in the place of its predecessor, but
during the period within which the old theory is being dislodged and the
new is arising, a consciously growing science finds itself occupied with
what is on the one hand the debris of the old and on the other the
building material of the new. Obviously, this must find its immediate
_raison d'etre_ in something other than the meaning that is gone or the
meaning that is not yet here. It is true that the barest facts do not
lack meaning, though a meaning which has been theirs in the past is
lost. The meaning, however, that is still theirs is confessedly
inadequate, otherwise there would be no scientific problem to be solved.
Thus, when older theories of the spread of infectious diseases lost
their validity because of instances where these explanations could not
be applied, the diagnoses and accounts which could still be given of the
cases of the sickness themselves were no explanation of the spread of
the infection. The facts of the spread of the infection could be brought
neither under a doctrine of contagion which was shattered by actual
events nor under a doctrine of the germ theory of disease, which was as
yet unborn. The logical import of the dependence of these facts upon
observation, and hence upon the individual experience of the scientist,
I shall have occasion to discuss later; what I am referring to here is
that the conscious growth of science is accompanied by the appearance of
this sort of material.
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