Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
In a conception of inference in which both data and hypothesis are
regarded as the tentative, experimental results of the processes of
perception, memory, and constructive imagination engaged in the special
task of removing conflict, ambiguity, and inhibition, and in which these
processes are not conceived as the functions of a private mind nor of an
equally private brain and nervous system, but as functions of
interacting beings,--in such a conception there is no ground for anxiety
concerning the simplicity of data, nor the objectivity of hypotheses.
Simplicity and objectivity do not have to be secured through elaborate
and labored metaphysical construction. The data are simple and the
hypothesis objective in so far as they accomplish the work
where unto they are called--the removal of conflict, ambiguity, and
inhibition in conduct and affection.
In the experimental conception of inference it is clear that the
principles of formal logic must play their role wholly inside the course
of logical operations. They do not apply to relations _between_ these
operations and "reality"; nor to "reality" itself. Formal identity and
non-contradiction signify, in experimental logic, the complete
correlativity of data and hypothesis. They mean that _in_ the logical
procedure data must not be shifted without a corresponding change in the
hypothesis and conversely. The doctrine that "theoretically" there may
be any number of hypotheses for "the same facts" is, when these multiple
hypotheses are anything more than different names or symbols, nothing
less than the very essence of formal contradiction. It doubtless makes
little difference whether a disease be attributed to big or little,
black or red, demons or whether the cause be represented by a, b, or c,
etc. But where data and hypotheses are such as are capable of
verification, i.e., of mutually checking up each other, a change in one
without a corresponding modification of the other is the principle of
all formal fallacies.[18]
With this conception of the origin, nature, and functions of logical
operations little remains to be said of their truth and falsity. If the
whole enterprise of logical operation, of the construction and
verification of hypothesis, is in the interest of the removal of
ambiguity, and inhibition in conduct, the only relevant truth or falsity
they can possess must be determined by their success or failure in that
undertaking. The acceptance of this view of truth and error, be it said
again, depends on holding steadfastly to the conception of the
operations of knowing as _real acts_, which, though having a distinct
character and function, are yet in closest continuity with other acts of
which indeed they are but modifications and adaptations in order to meet
the logical demand.
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