Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
With the act of knowing stripped of its technique and left a bare,
unique, indescribable act or relation, the foundations for
epistemological and metaphysical logic were laid. That Greek logic
escaped the ravages of epistemology was due to the saving materialism in
its metaphysical conception of mind and to the steadfastness of the
aristocratic regime. But when medieval theology and Cartesian
metaphysics had destroyed the last remnant of metaphysical connection
between the knowing mind and nature, and when revolutions had torn the
individual from his social moorings, the stage for epistemological logic
was fully set. I do not mean to identify the epistemological situation
with the Cartesian disjunction. That disjunction was but the
metaphysical expression of the one which constitutes the real foundation
of epistemology--the disjunction, namely, between the act of knowing and
other acts.
From this point logic has followed one of two general courses. It has
sought continuity by attempting to reduce non-logical things and
operations to terms of logical operations, i.e., to sensations or
universals or both; or it has attempted to exclude entirely the act of
knowing from logic and to transfer logical distinctions and operations,
and even the attributes of truth and error to objects which,
significantly enough, are still composed of these same hypostatized
logical processes. The first course results in an epistemological logic
of some form of the idealistic tradition, rationalism, sensationalism,
or transcendentalism, depending upon whether universals, or sensations,
or a combination of both, is made fundamental in the constitution of the
object. The second course yields an epistemological logic of the
realistic type,--again, sensational or rationalistic (mathematical), or
a combination of the two--a sort of realistic transcendentalism. Each
type has essentially the same difficulties with the processes of
inference, with the problem of change, with truth and error, and, on the
ethical side, with good and evil.
With the processes of knowing converted into objects, and with the act
of knowing reduced to a unique and external relation between the
despoiled knower and the objects made from its own hypostatized
processes, all knowing becomes in the end immediate. All attempts at an
inference that is anything more than an elaborated and often confused
restatement of non-logical operations break down. The associational
inference of empiricism, the subsumptive inference of rationalism, the
transcendental inference of objective idealism, the analytical
inference of neo-realism--all alike face the dilemma of an inference
that is trifling or miraculous, tautologous or false. Where the knower
and its object are so constituted that the only relation in which the
latter can stand to the former is that of presence or absence, and if to
be present is to be known, how, as Plato asked, can there be any false
knowing?
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