Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude — John Shaqi
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
A further point and the present phase of discussion terminates. Treating
knowledge as a presentative relation between the knower and object makes
it necessary to regard the mechanism of _presentation_ as constituting
the act of knowing. Since things may be presented in sense-perception,
in recollection, in imagination and in conception, and since the
mechanism in every one of these four styles of presentation is
sensory-cerebral the problem of knowing becomes a mind-body problem.[12]
The psychological, or physiological, mechanism of presentation involved
in seeing a chair, remembering what I ate yesterday for luncheon,
imagining the moon the size of a cart wheel, conceiving a mathematical
continuum is identified with the operation of knowing. The evil
consequences are twofold. The problem of the relation of mind and body
has become a part of the problem of the possibility of knowledge in
general, to the further complication of a matter already hopelessly
constrained. Meantime the actual process of knowing, namely, operations
of controlled observation, inference, reasoning, and testing, the only
process with _intellectual_ import, is dismissed as irrelevant to the
theory of knowing. The methods of knowing practised in daily life and
science are excluded from consideration in the philosophical theory of
knowing. Hence the constructions of the latter become more and more
elaborately artificial because there is no definite check upon them. It
would be easy to quote from epistemological writers statements to the
effect that these processes (which supply the only empirically
verifiable facts of knowing) are _merely_ inductive in character, or
even that they are of purely psychological significance. It would be
difficult to find a more complete inversion of the facts than in the
latter statement, since presentation constitutes in fact the
psychological affair. A confusion of logic with physiological physiology
has bred hybrid epistemology, with the amazing result that the technique
of effective inquiry is rendered irrelevant to the theory of knowing,
and those physical events involved in the occurrence of data for knowing
are treated as if they constituted the act of knowing.
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