Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
What are these simple elements into which the mathematician and logician
are to analyze the crude elements of the laboratory? And how are these
elements to be put into operation in the laboratory? Let us picture an
analytic logician meeting a physical scientist at a moment when the
latter is distressed over the unmanageable complexity of his elements.
Will the logician say to the scientist: "Your difficulty is that you are
trusting too much to your mundane apparatus. The kingdom of truth cometh
not with such things. Forsake your microscopes, test tubes, refractors
and resonators, and follow me, and you shall behold the truly simple
elements of which you have dreamed."? And when the moment of revelation
arrives and the expectant scientist is solemnly told that the "simple
elements" which he has sought so long are "terms and propositions,"
sense-data and universals, is it surprising that he does not seem
impressed? Will he not ask: "What am I to do with these in the specific
difficulties of my laboratory? Shall I say to the crude and complex
elements of my laboratory operations: 'Be ye resolved into terms and
propositions, sense-data and universals'; and will they forthwith obey
this incantation and fall apart so that I may locate and remove the
hidden source of my difficulty? Are you not mocking me and deceiving
yourself with the old ontological argument? Your 'simple' elements--are
they anything but the hypostatized process by which elements may be
found?"[30]
The expounders as well as the critics of analytic logic have agreed that
it reaches its most critical junction when it faces the problem of truth
and error. There is no doubt that the logic of objective idealism, in
other respects so similar to analytic logic, has at this point an
advantage; for it retains just enough of the finite operation of
knowing--an "infinitesimal" part will answer--to furnish the culture
germs of error. But analytic logic having completely sterilized itself
against this source of infection is in serious difficulty.
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