While the epistemological type of logic may, as we have seen, leave
(under the name of applied logic) a subsidiary place open for the
instrumental type, the type which deals with thinking as a specific
procedure relative to a specific antecedent occasion and to a
subsequent specific fulfilment is not able to reciprocate the favor.
From its point of view, an attempt to discuss the antecedents, data,
forms, and objectives of thought, apart from reference to particular
position occupied and particular part played in the growth of
experience, is to reach results which are not so much either true or
false as they are radically meaningless--because they are considered
apart from limits. Its results are not only abstractions (for all
theorizing ends in abstractions), but abstractions without possible
reference or bearing. From this point of view, the taking of something
(whether that something be a thinking activity, its empirical
stimulus, or its objective goal), apart from the limits of a historic
or developing situation, is the essence of _metaphysical_
procedure--in that sense of metaphysics which makes a gulf between it
and science.
As the reader has doubtless anticipated, it is the object of this
chapter to present the problem and industry of reflective thought from
the standpoint of naïve experience, using the term in a sense wide
enough to cover both practical procedure and concrete scientific
research. I resume by saying that this point of view knows no fixed
distinction between the empirical things and values of unreflective
life and the most abstract process of rational thought. It knows no
fixed gulf between the highest flight of theory and a control of the
details of practical construction and behavior. It passes, according
to the occasion and opportunity of the moment, from the attitude of
loving and struggling and doing to that of thinking and the reverse.
Its contents or material shift their values back and forth from
technological or utilitarian to aesthetic, ethical, or affectional. It
utilizes data of perception, of meaning or of discursive ideation as
need calls, just as an inventor now utilizes heat, now mechanical
strain, now electricity, according to the demands set by his aim.
Anything from past experience may be taken which appears to be an
element in either the statement or the solution of the present
problem. Thus we understand the coexistence, without contradiction, of
an indeterminate possible field and a limited actual field. The
undefined range of possible materials becomes specific through
reference to an end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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