Dewey's Library Intention with Respect to Philosophy - Essay Example

PART I LESSON 9 (chapters 1 & 2) 1.Dewey has a “libratory” intention with respect to philosophy. He wants to liberate observation from what, and change it to what? (300 Words) The differences between theoretical and experimental volumes are misleading. They rarely lead to the rejection of false belief. Based on these experimental results, several stages in the process of conceptual change are proposed. Experimental evidences suggest that, to some limited extent, we see what we believe. Indeed, in some fields, researchers often intentionally try to protect their observations and measurements from the biasing influence of preconceived notions. John Dewey says "Thinking takes its departure from specific conflicts in experience that occasion perplexity and trouble. Men do not, in their natural estate, think when they have no troubles to cope with, no difficulties to overcome" (Dewey139). We now believe the new theory and it guides our actions. This process is forever stagnating in many cases at the first stage. In others, this process may go on faster than the evidence presented here suggests. Although the transition takes place instantly in some cases, but sometimes it proceeds, perhaps unconsciously. Many scholars insist on the centrality of conceptual change in the process of learning. It is said that, learning, according to this view, is not an additive process. But It can be said safely that learning arises from the interaction between current experience and prior conceptions. We can explain it by giving example of the metaphor of embryological development, not by that of the stepwise construction of brick walls. The experiments suggest such strategies, as well as the conceptual change view of learning and understanding. The experimental procedure can also help in recognizing the central role of conceptual shift in learning, acquiring additional insights. Thus we can say confidently that John Dewey was right in saying that one should learn by doing. The experiment should replace mere observation. 2. Discuss why Dewey thinks it is not helpful to try to restore traditional beliefs in our time (with regard to the regulating of society and morality), Is he arguing that we should have no moral problems? (300 Words) Dewey feels that the value and importance of the philosophical tradition is not exhausted by the assumptions it has transmitted that need altering. It would be much more to the point to single out that basic element in Dewey's thought which makes constant concern with the great intellectual traditions of our civilization not only compatible with his experimentalism, but actually an essential and integral component of it. Despite all his analysis of the procedure of the natural sciences, Dewey's experimentalism is not primarily based on the methods of the laboratory. It is at once the experimentalism of practical common sense, and the coming to self-awareness of the best and most critical techniques and concepts of the social sciences. In the broadest sense, it is the experimentalism of the anthropologist, of the student of human institutions and cultures, impressed by the fundamental role of habit in men and societies and by the manner in which those habits are altered and changed. Like any honest social scientist, he finds the presence and the influence of natural science in Western culture today both its distinctive trait and its greatest achievement. But for him that science is primarily a cultural phenomenon: it is an institutionalized habit of thinking and acting, a way whereby that culture conducts many of its tasks and operations. It is essentially a social method of doing and changing things, a complex technique that has proved both extraordinarily successful and extraordinarily disruptive of the older pattern of life. It is a method of inquiry, of criticizing traditional beliefs and instituting newer and better warranted ones. It is the best intellectual method our culture, or any culture, has constructed; and as such it must furnish the basis on which any philosophy LESSON 10 (chapters 3 & 4), PART II 1. How does Dewey think that a libratory philosophy can help give us a new sense of purpose in life? (300 Words) Dewey's philosophy of experience has too much respect for the findings of experience to slight the struggles and achievements of the past; it also has too much respect for experience as a present on-going affair to want to make devotion to the past a mode of escape from the problems and the possibilities of the present. The conception of education as a social process contributes an indispensable orientation for educational thought and practice, but it remains abstract and formal until factors of time and place are taken into account. Human beings act for different and conflicting ends, and the consequences of these differences in social purpose are critically important in education. For example, totalitarian, authoritarian, liberal-democratic, and laissez-faire-individualistic forms of group-life, all alike are social. Each of these types of human association, moreover, contains its distinctive patterns for the education of the young. Hence an expression of preference for some definite form of social life is inherent in every educational program. Dewey has emphasized this point: "The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind." His own philosophy of education is grounded in the democratic conception. Dewey believes that his preference for the democratic way of life is not arbitrary, and not merely due to the fact that he happens to be a member of a society which calls itself democratic, and which taught him in his early years "that democracy is the best of all social institutions." Note what a change this point of view entails in the traditional notions of experience. Experience becomes an affair primarily of doing. The organism does not stand about, waiting for something to turn up. It does not wait passive and inert for something to impress itself upon it from without. The organism acts according to its own structure and also in reaction to its surroundings. As a result the changes produced in the environment react upon the organism and its activities. The living creature faces the result of its own behavior. This close connection between doing and suffering or undergoing forms what we call experience. Disconnected doing and disconnected suffering are neither of them experiences. 2. Provide an example out of your experience or observation in which a Dewey type of "learning by doing" was going on. Show how the steps of this process match Dewey's discussion of the learning process. Was/is this type of learning valuable, in your view? Give your reasons. (300 Words) At various places in his books Dewey gave the example of learning by doing. At one place in his book under discussion he gives the example of sailor and house wife. He says “The sailor is more likely to be given to what we now term superstitions than say the weaver, because his activity is more at the mercy of sudden change and unforeseen occurrence. But even the sailor while he may regard the wind as the uncontrollable expression of the caprice of a great spirit, will still have to become acquainted with some purely mechanical principles of adjustment of boat, sails and oar to the wind. Fire may be conceived as a supernatural dragon because some time or other a swift, bright and devouring flame called before the mind's eye the quick-moving and dangerous serpent. But the housewife who tends the fire and the pots wherein food cooks will still be compelled to observe certain mechanical facts of draft and replenishment, and passage from wood to ash. Still more will the worker in metals accumulate verifiable details about the conditions and consequences of the operation of heat. He may retain for special and ceremonial occasions traditional beliefs, but everyday familiar use will expel these conceptions for the greater part of the time, when fire will be to him of uniform and prosaic behavior, controllable by practical relations of cause and effect”. (Dewey 11) At another place he says “increased control may be illustrated by the contrast of savage with civilized man. Suppose the two are living in a wilderness. With the savage there is the maximum of accommodation to given conditions; the minimum of what we may call hitting back. The savage takes things "as they are," and by using caves and roots and occasional pools leads a meager and precarious existence. The civilized man goes to distant mountains and dams streams. He builds reservoirs, digs channels, and conducts the waters to what had been a desert. He searches the world to find plants and animals that will thrive.” All these examples show that every person believes what he experiences not merely observes. A sailor learns by experience the hazards of uncontrollable wind and thus becomes superstitious. In the same way a savage learns the importance of thing by using them by experiencing their benefits and harms. PART III LESSON 11 (chapters 5 & 6) 1.What desirable effects on the personality can result from the adoption of the old-style contemplative mind set (in Plato's sense)? Give a brief example each. (300 Words) Dewey was a very intelligent person his thinking and explanations were quite logical. In book under review he says, “The kind of knowing that concerns itself with this ultimate reality is philosophy. Philosophy is therefore the last and highest term in pure contemplation. It can be said that philosophy is self-enclosed type of knowledge. It has nothing to do beyond itself; it has no aim or purpose or function--except to be philosophy--that is, pure, self-sufficing beholding of ultimate reality. There is of course such a thing as philosophic study which falls short of this perfection. Where there is learning, there is change and becoming. But the function of study and learning of philosophy is, as Plato put it, to convert the eye of the soul from dwelling contentedly upon the images of things, upon the inferior realities that are born and that decay, and to lead it to the intuition of supernal and eternal Being. Thus the mind of the knower is transformed. It becomes assimilated to what it knows. He gives the examples of Neo-Platonism and St. Augustine, and says that these ideas found their way into Christian theology; and great scholastic thinkers taught that the end of man is to know True Being, Dewey feels that such ideas prevailed for centuries after the actual progress of science had demonstrated that knowledge is power to transform the world, and centuries after the practice of effective knowledge had adopted the method of experimentation. He further says that the conception of the measure of true knowledge and the nature of true philosophy to the existing practice of knowledge did not come abruptly. A modern man says a physicist or chemist, wants to know something, the last thing he does is merely to contemplate. He does not look in however earnest and prolonged way upon the object expecting that thereby he will detect its fixed and characteristic form. He does not expect any amount of such aloof scrutiny to reveal to him any secrets. He proceeds to do something, to bring some energy to bear upon the substance to see how it reacts; he places it under unusual conditions in order to induce some change. While the astronomer cannot change the remote stars, even he no longer merely gazes. If he cannot change the stars themselves, he can at least by lens and prism change their light as it reaches the earth; he can lay traps for discovering changes which would otherwise escape notice. Instead of taking an antagonistic attitude toward change and denying it to the stars because of their divinity and perfection, he is on constant and alert watch to find some change through which he can form an inference as to the formation of stars and systems of stars. 2. How can a theory be misused to back up someone's preconceived purpose or prejudice in making observations, according to Dewey? Why it is important to avoid this? Give an example of such a misuse of theory (different from the example given in the study guide). (300 Words) We learn from Dewey ‘s philosophy that the first distinguishing characteristic of thinking then is facing the facts--inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation. Nothing has done greater harm to the successful conduct of the enterprise of thinking (and to the logics which reflect and formulate the undertaking) than the habit of treating observation as something outside of and prior to thinking, and thinking as something which can go on in the head without including observation of new facts as part of itself. Every approximation to such "thinking" is really an approach to the method of escape and self-delusion just referred to. It substitutes an emotionally agreeable and rationally self-consistent train of meanings for inquiry into the features of the situation which cause the trouble. It leads to that type of Idealism which has well been termed intellectual somnambulism. It creates a class of "thinkers" who are remote from practice and hence from testing their thought by application--a socially superior and irresponsible class. This is the condition causing the tragic division of theory and practice, and leading to an unreasonable exaltation of theory on one side and an unreasonable contempt for it on the other. It confirms current practice in its hard brutalities and dead routines just because it has transferred thinking and theory to a separate and nobler region. Thus has the idealist conspired with the materialist to keep actual life impoverished and inequitable. The isolation of thinking from confrontation with facts encourages that kind of observation which merely accumulates brute facts, which occupies itself laboriously with mere details, but never inquires into their meaning and consequences--a safe occupation, for it never contemplates any use to be made of the observed facts in determining a plan for changing the situation. Nevertheless, inquiry is free only when the interest in knowing is so developed that thinking carries with it something worth while for itself, something having its own esthetic and moral interest. Just because knowing is not self-enclosed and final but is instrumental to reconstruction of situations, there is always danger that it will be subordinated to maintaining some preconceived purpose or prejudice. For example in the order of empirical fact the sociologist should propose only theories which are subject to empirical verification and they must be thus verified before they may be accepted as factually true. There is a misuse of theory which has been all too common in the history of sociology. Theories have been proposed in such inexact and figurative language that they can be neither proved nor disproved empirically. Consider, for example, Small's assertion that all human acts can be explained by six elementary interests. It seems impossible to deduce from this assertion a series of concrete conclusions that can be examined empirically to prove or disprove it. It seems impossible to devise a crucial experiment or a crucial series of experiments by which Small's theory will stand or fall. In contrast, there are consequences of the theory of relativity that can be empirically investigated. PART IV LESSON 12 (chapters 7 & 8) 1.Discuss what sorts of moral Americans might get into if they think of economic prosperity as merely an instrumental good, from Dewey's perspective. How does the traditional Utilitarian theory in ethics fall into this sort of problem, in Dewey's view? (300 Words) The imaginative body of beliefs closely connected with the moral habits of a community group and with its emotional indulgences and consolations persists side by side with the growing body of matter of fact knowledge. In most cases, the two kinds of mental products are kept apart because they become the possession of separate social classes. The religious and poetic beliefs having acquired a definite social and political value and function are in the keeping of a higher class directly associated with the ruling elements in the society. The workers and craftsmen who possess the prosaic matter of fact knowledge John Dewey found the distinction between religion and morality in the integrative character of religious devotion. "The religious," he wrote, "is 'morality touched with emotion' only when the ends of moral conviction arouse emotions that are not only intense but are actuated and supported by ends so inclusive that they unify the self." And Dewey added that "this comprehensive attitude is much broader than anything indicated by 'moral' in its usual sense." The new economic order of capitalism that was superseding feudalism brought its own social evils with it, and some of these ills utilitarianism tended to cover up or defend. The emphasis upon acquisition and possession of enjoyments took on an untoward color in connection with the contemporary enormous desire for wealth and the enjoyments it makes possible. If utilitarianism did not actively promote the new economic materialism, it had no means of combating it. Its general spirit of subordinating productive activity to the bare product was indirectly favorable to the cause of an unadorned commercialism. In spite of its interest in a thoroughly social aim, utilitarianism fostered a new class interest, that of the capitalistic property-owning interests, provided only property was obtained through free competition and not by governmental favor. 2.Discuss how you think you as individual (or someone you know well) has to some extent been "shaped" by the social institutions that you (or that someone) have grown up in. Do you detect any "social ills" as you reflect on this? (Keep in mind that "social institutions" do not refer to the unique sort of upbringing that you particular parents gave you; what is meant here is such things as the education system, social hierarchies, traditional nuclear family structure, traditional gender roles and ethic roles, roles religion of certain type, the economic structure of the society, etc...large social "structures" or institutions that affect large numbers of people similarly. (300 Words Modern states, are regarded less as divine, and more as human works than they used to be, less as necessary manifestations of some supreme and over-ruling principles and more as contrivances of men and women to realize their own desires. Accompanying this development was a contract theory of the state that, if not based on actual historical fact, Moral and religious individualism, Dewey pointed out, accompanied political individualism: the willingness of men to question received authority in science and philosophy and the development of the "Protestant concept of the personality of every human being as an end in himself." Movements in industry, politics, and religion, Dewey believed, gave impetus to three important developments. One was the "transfer of interest from the external and universal to what is changing and specific." The second was the "gradual decay of the authority of fixed institutions, and class distinctions and relations, and a growing belief in the power of the individual mind, guided by methods of observation, experiment and reflection, to attain the truth needed for the guidance of life." The third was the idea of progress: the view that "man is capable, if he will but exercise the required courage, intelligence and effort, of shaping his own fate." Specific and wide observation of concrete fact always, then, corresponds not only with a sense of a problem or difficulty, but with some vague sense of the meaning of the difficulty, that is, of what it imports or signifies in subsequent experience. It is a kind of anticipation or prediction of what is coming. We speak, very truly, of impending trouble, and in observing the signs of what the trouble is, we are at the same time expecting, forecasting--in short, framing an idea, becoming aware of meaning. When the trouble is not only impending but completely actual and present, we are overwhelmed. We do not think, but give way to depression. The kind of trouble that occasions thinking is that which is incomplete and developing, and where what is found already in existence can be employed as a sign from which to infer what is likely to come. When we intelligently observe, we are, as we say apprehensive, as well as apprehending. We are on the alert for something still to come. Curiosity, inquiry, investigation, are directed quite as truly into what is going to happen next as into what has happened. An intelligent interest in the latter is an interest in getting evidence, indications, and symptoms for inferring the former. Observation is diagnosis and diagnosis implies an interest in anticipation and preparation. It makes ready in advance an Works Cited Barrett, William, and Henry D. Aiken, eds. Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: An Anthology. 1st ed. Vol. 1. New York: Random House, 1962 Boisvert, Raymond D. John Dewey : Rethinking Our Time /. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998. Brameld, Theodore. Philosophies of Education in Cultural Perspective. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1955 Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1920. Eames, S. Morris. Pragmatic Naturalism: An Introduction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977. Frankel, Charles, ed. Golden Age of American Philosophy. New York: G. Braziller, 1960. Hoy, Terry. The Political Philosophy of John Dewey: Towards a Constructive Renewal. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998 Levinson, Henry Samuel. Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992 McCluskey, Neil Gerard. Public Schools and Moral Education: The Influence of Horace Mann, William Torrey Harris, and John Dewey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958 Irwin Edman. John Dewey: His Contribution to the American Tradition. 1st ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1995 Robinson, James Harvey. The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform. New York; London: Harper & brothers, 1921 Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Philosophy of John Dewey. 1st ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1939 Strauss, Leo, and Joseph Cropsey, eds. History of Political Philosophy. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963 Thut, I. N. The Story of Education: Philosophical and Historical Foundations. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957 Read More