Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
Such an interpretation of experience, moreover, opens the way for a
proper valuation of the psychologist's procedure. The concept of
sensation is methodology pure and simple. Granted that focus and margin
are such as was indicated a moment ago, how are they to be described,
unless we resort to some _Hilfsbegriff_ such as sensations? James's
description of the effort to recall a forgotten name is not description
at all in a scientific sense, since the "wraith of the name" that we are
trying to recover is of too unearthly a fabric to be weighed and
measured by accepted scientific standards. It makes us "tingle," it lets
us "sink back," but such portrayal is literature rather than science.
Our first step must be to resolve our material into components. These
components we identify with genuine elements if we can, with pious
fictions if we must; but until this is done there can be no exact
description. There can be no precision in our statement of the facts and
no formulation of the laws that govern their changes.
This view undeniably has a certain plausibility. As long as the results
are attained which the psychologist sets out to reach, we need not be
hypersensitive on the score of methods. In the field of natural science,
at all events, this Jesuitical principle is not incompatible with
respectability. If it be true, however, that sensation is but a tool or
artifact, a means to an end, what is the end that is to be attained by
this device? It is at this point that we come to the parting of the
ways. According to the view previously elaborated, the anticipations of
the future have to do with the results of our possible acts, and
sensations are simply symbols for the various elements in our complex
motor responses. In the case of Bergson and James, however, the clue
that is furnished by response is discarded. The reference to the future,
being dissociated from behavior, is taken as evidence of an abstract or
metaphysical duration, so that experience is somehow other than it
seems; and sensation is regarded as the translation of duration into
the language of space. Associationism is justified in its belief that
reality is different from its appearance in our experience, but is
criticized for attempting to interpret the real in terms of space rather
than time. In both cases the lead of the subject-matter is abandoned in
favor of an explanation that is derived from a fourth-dimensional plane
of existence.
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