Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
But whatever the difference among the representatives of analytical
logic all seem agreed at the outset on two fundamental reforms which the
"new logic" makes. These are: first, that analytic logic gets rid
entirely of the _act_ of knowing, the retention of which has been the
bane of all other logics; second, in its discovery of "terms and
relations," "sense-data and universals" as the simple elements not only
of logic but of the world, it furnishes science at last with the simple
neutral elements at large which it is supposed science so long has
sought, and "mourned because it found them not."
Taking these in order, we are told that "realism frees logic as a study
of objective fact from all accounts of the states and operations of
mind." ... "Logic and mathematics are sciences which can be pursued
quite independently of the study of knowing."[20] "The new logic
believes that it deals with no such entities as thoughts, ideas, or
minds, but with entities that merely are."[20]
The motive for the banishment of the act of knowing from logic is that
as an _act_ knowing is "mental," "psychological," and "subjective."[21]
All other logics have indeed realized this subjective character of the
_act_ of knowing, but have neither dared completely to discard it nor
been able sufficiently to counteract its effects even with such agencies
as the objective universal to prevent it from infecting logic with its
subjectivity. Because logic has tolerated and attempted to compromise
with this subjective act of knowing, say these reformers, it has been
forced constantly into epistemology and has become a hybrid science. Had
logic possessed the courage long ago to throw overboard this subjective
Jonah it would have been spared the storms of epistemology and the reefs
of metaphysics.
Analytic logic is the first attempt in the history of modern logical
theory at a deliberate, sophisticated exclusion of the act of knowing
from logic. Other logics, to be sure, have tried to neutralize the
effects of its presence, but none has had the temerity to cast it bodily
overboard. The experiment, therefore, is highly interesting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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