Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
earlier situation are still recognized as reliable, for there are no
scientific data without meanings. There could be no history of science
on any other basis. No history of science goes back to ultimate elements
or sense-data, or to any combination of bare data on one hand and
logical elements on the other. The world of the scientist is always
there as one in which reconstruction is taking place with continual
shifting of problems, but as a real world within which the problems
arise. The errors of the past and present appear as untenable hypotheses
which could not bear the test of experiment if the experience were
sufficiently enlarged and interpreted. But they are not mere errors to
be thrown into the scrap heap. They become a part of a different phase
of reality which a fuller history of the past records or a fuller
account of the present interprets, giving them thereby their proper
place in a real world.[36]
The completion of this program, however, awaits the solution of the
scientific problem of the relation of the psychical and the physical
with the attendant problem of the meaning of the so-called origin of
consciousness in the history of the world. My own feeling is that these
problems must be attacked from the standpoint of the social nature of
so-called consciousness. The clear indications of this I find in the
reference of our logical constants to the structure of thought as a
means of communication, in the explanation of errors in the history of
science by their social determination, and in the interpretation of the
inner field of experience as the importation of social intercourse into
the conscious conduct of the individual. But whatever may be the
solution of these problems, it must carry with it such a treatment of
the experience of the individual that the latter will never be regarded
merely as a subjective state, however inadequate it may have proved
itself as a scientific hypothesis. This seems to me to be involved in
the conception of psychology as a natural science and in any legitimate
carrying out of the Hegelian program of giving reality and creative
import to individual experience. The experience of the individual in its
exceptional character is the growing-point of science, first of all in
the recognition of data upon which the older theories break, and second
in the hypothesis which arises in the individual and is tested by the
experiment which reconstructs the world. A scientific history and a
scientific psychology from which epistemology has been banished must
place these observations and hypotheses together with erroneous
conceptions and mistaken observations _within_ the real world in such a
fashion that their reference to the experience of the individual and to
the world to which he belongs will be comprehensible. As I have
indicated, the scientific theory of the physical and conscious
individual in the world implied in this problem has still to be
adequately developed.
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