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John Dewey is regarded by some as the American philosopher. In the first half of the 20th century, he stood as the most prominent public intellectual whose influence reached into intellectual movements in China, Japan, and India. Although we hear less of Dewey nowadays, his pragmatic political philosophy has influenced the likes of Richard Rorty and other political thinkers. What were the basic ideas in his philosophy of democracy? Does America have a public sphere? If not, how might we recreate a public necessary for democracy? And does the rise of the internet and social media fit into Dewey’s ideal democracy? John and Ken idealize a conversation with Melvin Rogers from UCLA, author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy.

Listening Notes

John and Ken recognize that Dewey was the single most influential American philosopher in his lifetime. His influence in education was also transformational. Dewey thought of democracy as the ideal form of human social life. But talk of the ideal of anything implies perfection. Democracy is fine, but John doesn’t see how it’s perfect. John says no form of government was ideal. Ken mentions that Dewey believed the individual realized himself in social democratic activity.

Roving Philosophical Report  (Seek to 7:40): JD began his career as a high school teacher, and by the end of his life he had an impressive list of accomplishments under his belt. He was an early endorser of female suffrage and the NAACP. He was the president of APA (both of them). Dewey was a pragmatist who believed philosophers should have a real impact in the world. Dewey’s anti-capitalism did not help his reputation right after he died, during the Cold War.

John and Ken invite Melvin Rogers, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at UCLA and author of The Undiscovered Dewey . Rogers felt a lot of joy when he read Dewey, and he found both his religion and his church in Dewey’s philosophy. Dewey was excited about democracy because it provided the best means for people to avoid being dominated and a system through which they could experience the full flowering of their capacities and abilities. Dewey thought that how we actually become distinctly ourselves depends on our interactions with communities to which we belong, because they provide the resources we rely on to become who we are.

The individual cannot be atomistic, because the individual is always social in communities, even when individuals are pursuing individual interests. Democracy as an institution is different from democracy as an ethical ideal. If a minority is constantly a minority, then you don’t really live in a democracy. The international appeal of Dewey’s philosophy is evident in India and China.

Institutional democracy might not be the best institutional structure for Deweyan democracy. Dewey would see black lives matter as the vibrancy of democracy. What counts as real conversation and dialogue? Democracy requires a willingness to bear discomfort in conversation. Are new means of communication good for democratic communication? With all technologies the goodness or badness of them depends on the preexisting habits of those deploying the technologies.

60 Second Philosopher (Seek to 47:00): Ian Shoales looks at how the Hull House was started and John Dewey was friends with Jane Addams. They discussed the Pullman Strike, and Addams felt that people were unproductively antagonistic.

Ken Taylor Coming up on Philosophy Talk…

John Perry The life and thought of John Dewey

Ken Taylor Quintessentially American philosopher.

John Perry One of the founding fathers of American pragmatism.

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Melvin L. Rogers. The Undiscovered Dewey .

John Dewey. The Public and Its Problems .

John Dewey. Democracy and Education .

Randolph Bourne . The Radical Will .

Matthew Festenstein. “ Dewey’s Political Philosophy. ” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Scott London. “ Organic Democracy: The Political Philosophy of John Dewey .”

Michael S. Roth. “ John Dewey’s Vision of Learning as Freedom. ” The New York Times.

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Comments (6)

Sunday, May 5, 2019 -- 12:39 PM

Glad to see you are doing something more on Dewey. I had not read him in 2016, and my overall exposure to American philosophers was limited. I hope to read more of his work, time and energy permitting. In reading his How We Think, I was surprised that his efforts as an educator were probably as important to him as philosophy. That was, to me, significant. It seemed to cement his memory as great American. Was he the impetus for the eventual term, public intellectual? Or was that designation prominent, before his time? Public intellectuals may or may not be philosophers, seems to me, but in the broadest sense of the word (or even the narrowest?), all philosophers are.

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Tuesday, May 28, 2019 -- 12:12 PM

I do not know if Dewey was THE American philosopher, even though some may think so. I have several others whom I will not name---all of them fit into a schema; most of them are now deceased and some who are yet living are either revered, despised; summarily dismissed or all of the above. I'd rather 'joots it' and keep an open mind generally. I have found the pragmatists most interesting because they have a practical way of looking at how 'things' and 'hanging together' make up the foundation of the study of philosophy, in the broadest possible sense of the term. Some revered philosophers of the past are given more credit than they deserve, while some others, more-or-less forgotten, had important things to say and/or supported views not shared by their contemporaries. There is, I have claimed, a totality of circumstances to be considered when praising or condemning philosophical thought of one sort or another. Try Jumping Outside Of The Space. You need not tell anyone of your intentions---that way you may experiment, at-will, without feeling the need to explain yourself, to associates or anyone else for that matter. Have some fun, along the way---you only get to do this once. HGN.

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 -- 6:58 PM

In 1841, Charles Mackay wrote his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which inspired the most recent Armand Gamache mystery by Louise Penny, published in 2021.

In 1907 Francis Galton published a short article entitled Vox Populi in Nature used by James Surowiecki in his 2004 book The Wisdom of the Crowds.

In between these publications, John Dewey was born.

Dewey’s ideas of the crowd and Democracy, of god and nature, of any dualistic concept, changed in his early works to a holistic vision. I’m totally making this up, but it seems I detect a note of change when he reviews Francis Galton’s book Natural Inheritance in 1889. Maybe it started earlier. There Dewey makes a simple error (that no one seems to catch) reading a table pulled from Galton’s work. That error is excusable as modern statistics was in its first wave – there were three total in Dewey’s lifetime. Dewey spends most of the review talking about what now seem simple concepts of mean and distribution. But he makes a keen insight into the idea that statistics can determine natural kinds.

Galton took this insight into a eugenic social Darwinism that persists. On the other hand, Dewey would transform American politics and economy from a mainly capitalist program to a social democratic view culminating after his death in the civil rights movement.

The basic ideas of Dewey’s philosophy of Democracy were popular in his time. He came down on the wrong side of very few progressive movements in his lifetime. He championed or cheered on every liberal cause that eventually won the day based on the idea that Democracy creates an opportunity for broadspread flourishing.

Dewey’s democratic vision is a holistic and transactional experience (not the Trumpian transactional deal-making or Hobbesian social contract.) Democracy was a fundamental way of living for Dewey. Government is, at best, a tool to this view of everyday engagement.

That people don’t have public spheres today is not a loss because they rarely had them in Dewey’s day. Online social media allows one-to-many and many-to-many forums for Dewey’s ideal Democracy to materialize if we can get this right. Google has already shown the ability to predict flu outbreaks in internet traffic. Terrorist actions are monitored online. Crime can be caught early. The wisdom of the crowds is real.

But there is a flip side to Dewey’s idea of Democracy of equal importance to his vision, and that is freedom. That is a severe stumbling block, as not all action and many thoughts are harmful to others even as ones freedom to think and act are assured. Facebook’s incredulity points to actual harm as enacted by social media. Popular wars like the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan can be democratic nightmares, significantly when propaganda and false intelligence squander public goodwill.

The most promising solutions I see are the radical market strategies put forth by economic philosophers like Eric Posner and Glen Weyl in the PT show of that name. Ranked voting, engaged focus teams empowered to take action, and multiple publics engaged in deciding issue specifics that today are all but intractable to our current democratic systems.

The wisdom of the crowds is seemingly unharnessable when the public will is multimodal, and the winner takes all politics rule the day. Perhaps in a future setting, this will change. The issues at hand can’t wait for incremental solutions.

Thursday, October 7, 2021 -- 7:14 AM

I have admired Dewey's work for some time. And your blog posts on all things government. I live in the ubiquitous midwest...an area where the term 'world view' is all but ignored. Over the years, I have written to the local newspaper on various matters. It is a major daily, with statewide distribution. My submissions have been respectful and, occasionally, critical. Sometimes, I hope, thoughtful. But, after a time several years ago, we stopped our subscription. That did not go over well. They tried to offer us discounted rates. We declined because their news had too much spin for our taste. We live here for several reasons. Reading skewed news is not on the list. Anyway, I still write them, time to time. Just to stir the kettle. They do not respond. I wonder if it is thus everywhere in the heartland. I suspect as much. The paper is aimed at a majority. Non-members need not expect recognition. Particularly those who have a broader 'world view'. We are here. They would 'rather 'not notice.. Doubly so if one does not buy their paper. Or their ideology.

Wednesday, October 13, 2021 -- 8:00 AM

I feel you here. I read the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and our local daily (online only) and weekly papers.

I think what you are referring to is Dewey’s idea of multiple publics. Melvin Rogers is well-spoken on that point (I am very impressed with this guy.) We don’t have public spaces for Democracy or Philosophy, for that matter.

You speak to a need for these publics and falsely to the idea that we ever had them. We all need to budget our media diet. I don’t know what is best.

For years I would also write into the paper of my day, and still do to the ones above, but I find it unrewarding. The back and forth – which is what Philosophy and Democracy are all about, does not happen there. It is highly moderated and timed.

Social media, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Teams, Texts, and email are equally brain-numbing.

I have taken to writing to myself. That guy listens for the most part. If someone else chimes in, I dispatch them forthwith, but only on their terms. Our terms are too few and meaningless to fret about too much.

This space is one place for that kind of writing. It comes with the benefits of thought and quietude. Few people want to share their philosophy and reading honestly. It is enough.

Monday, November 20, 2023 -- 6:50 PM

You make reference to the necessity of these publics while making a misleading claim about their existence. Everybody needs to set aside money for their media intake. I'm not sure either is ideal.

I used to write in the newspaper of my day for years, and I still do, but I don't think it's that fulfilling. That is not where the back and forth takes place, which is the essence of democracy and philosophy. It is really timed and controlled.

Email, texts, Slack, Teams, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and social media are all equally mind-numbing doodle jump

I've started writing letters to myself. Most the time, that guy listens. If anyone else adds something, I immediately cut them off, but only under their conditions. We use much too few terms.

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• © 2014

Philosophical Perspectives on Democracy in the 21st Century

• Ann E. Cudd 0 ,
• Sally J. Scholz 1

Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA

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Department of Philosophy, Villanova University, Villanova, USA

• Considers reasons for the current political polarization in American politics, offering possible resolutions
• Orients the reader to contemporary issues in democratic theory and practice
• Deals with the effects of misinformation on social policy formation in democratic societies
• Debates the equally timely issue of economic inequality in democracy, considering principles and practical effects of capitalist property rights, taxation, and campaign finance law?
• Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice (AMIN, volume 5)

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Table of contents (17 chapters)

Front matter, philosophical perspectives on democracy in the twenty-first century: introduction.

• Ann E. Cudd, Sally J. Scholz

The Meaning of Democracy

Democracy: a paradox of rights.

• Emily R. Gill

Rights and the American Constitution: The Issue of Judicial Review and Its Compatibility with Democracy

Democracy as a social myth.

• Richard T. De George

The Current Polarization

Political polarization and the markets vs. government debate.

• Stephen Nathanson
• Two Visions of Democracy
• Richard Barron Parker

Proportional Representation, the Single Transferable Vote, and Electoral Pragmatism

• Richard Nunan

The Problem of Democracy in the Context of Polarization

• Imer B. Flores
• Democracy, Capitalism, and the Influence of Big Money

Is Justice Possible Under Welfare State Capitalism?

• Steven P. Lee

Rawls on Inequality, Social Segregation and Democracy

Mass democracy in a postfactual market society: citizens united and the role of corporate political speech.

• F. Patrick Hubbard

A Tsunami of Filthy Lucre: How the Decisions of the SCOTUS Imperil American Democracy

• Jonathan Schonsheck

Democracy and Economic Inequality

• Alistair M. Macleod

Democratic Decisions and the (Un)Informed Public

Epistocracy within public reason.

• Jason Brennan
• Journalists as Purveyors of Partial Truths
• Russell W. Waltz

This work offers a timely philosophical analysis of fundamental principles of democracy and the meaning of democracy today.  It explores the influence of big money and capitalism on democracy, the role of information and the media in democratic elections, and constitutional issues that challenge democracy in the wake of increased threats to privacy since 2001 and in light of the Citizens United decision of the US Supreme Court.

It juxtaposes alternate positions from experts in law and philosophy and examines the question of legitimacy, as well as questions about the access to information, the quality of information, the obligations to attain epistemic competence among the electorate, and the power of money.

Drawing together different political perspectives, as well as a variety of disciplines, this collection allows readers the opportunity to compare different and opposing moral and political solutions that both defend and transform democratic theory and practice.

• Conceptual Poverty as a Cause of Political Polarization
• Corporate Political Speech
• Democracy & Economic Inequality
• Democracy and the Information Problem
• Democracy as Social Myth
• Democracy in the 21st Century
• Democracy: A Paradox of Rights
• Democratic Decisions
• Distinctions in Democratic Equality
• Epistocracy
• Group Identification
• Is Justice under Welfare State Captitalism?
• Judicial Review and Its Compatibility with Democracy
• Mass Democracy in a Postfactual Market Society
• Meaning of Democracy
• Motivated Reasoning
• Pragmatic Democracy
• Precarious Democracy in the U.S.
• Representative Democracy
• Republics, Passions, & Protections
• Social Segregation, Complacency, & Democracy
• Spread of Democracy as a Manifestation of Progress
• Taxation in the American Republic

From the book reviews:

Ann E. Cudd

Sally J. Scholz

Book Title : Philosophical Perspectives on Democracy in the 21st Century

Editors : Ann E. Cudd, Sally J. Scholz

Series Title : AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02312-0

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Humanities, Social Sciences and Law , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-319-02311-3 Published: 18 December 2013

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-319-34518-5 Published: 27 August 2016

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-02312-0 Published: 03 December 2013

Series ISSN : 1873-877X

Series E-ISSN : 2351-9851

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : VIII, 246

Number of Illustrations : 2 b/w illustrations

Topics : Political Philosophy , Theories of Law, Philosophy of Law, Legal History , Political Science , Social Policy , Philosophy of Law , Communication Studies

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America's public philosopher: essays on social justice, economics, education, and the future of democracy

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Democracy: What’s It Good For?

Robert B. Talisse on value, politics, and a new problem for us as citizens

Democracy is hard to love. It’s noisy, frustrating, often irrational, and reliably inefficient. What’s more, it is a dubious moral proposal. Democracy is the proposition that you rightly can be forced to live according to rules that you oppose simply because they are favoured by others. But that’s not all. Democracy apportions equal political power to citizens regardless of their capacity to wield it wisely. Thus, democracy involves the claim that you rightly can be forced to live according to rules that are supported only by others who are demonstrably misinformed, foolish, irrational, or worse.

Yet we tend to embrace democracy enthusiastically. Why? Winston Churchill once proposed the following rationale: despite all of democracy’s flaws, every other form of government that has been tried is far worse. Although this rings true enough, there’s less to it than meets the eye. We ordinarily don’t regard democracy merely as the least bad among terrible options. We typically think that democracy is something to be cultivated, expanded, promoted, and fought for. Such sentiments suggest a far more favourable appraisal of democracy than Churchill’s reasoning permits. Hence our question reemerges.

Philosophers distinguish between things that are good because of what they can produce and things that are good because of what they are. Things of the former kind are instrumentally valuable, those of the latter are intrinsically valuable. The distinction has obvious merit. After all, it explains the intuitive difference between, say, money and happiness. Money is strictly a tool; it is valuable because it can be used to buy things. In the absence of purchasable things, money is worthless. Happiness is different. Happiness surely has instrumental benefits, but its value is not exhausted by them. Happiness is valuable “in itself”, all on its own.

In which way is democracy good? As was already noted, when viewed instrumentally, democracy is a mixed bag. It is wasteful and lumbering; it frequently makes costly errors that are hard to correct. Moreover, although Churchill may have been correct to say that democracy is superior to the alternatives that have been tried, there is no reason to restrict the comparison in that way. A compelling instrumental case for democracy would have to consider all of the available alternatives, not only those that have been tried. It is not difficult to envision untried systems of autocratic rule that would likely outperform democracy. On a strictly instrumental view of the value of political systems, then, we must conclude that some of these forms should be tried. Thus, a strictly instrumental case for democracy is bound to be flimsy.

Perhaps, then, democracy’s value is intrinsic. The difficulty here lies with the elusiveness of the idea of intrinsic value. Once one moves beyond the intuitive difference between goods like money and happiness, the concept gets murky. What does it mean for something to be valuable in itself ?

A response that goes back to Aristotle holds that whereas we desire money simply because we desire things that can be bought, we desire happiness full stop . Although this is commonly regarded as a satisfactory elucidation of the idea of intrinsic value, it ultimately does not accomplish much. For one thing, it prompts an immediate follow-up: what about happiness renders it a thing to be desired full stop? This question occasions a successor: does the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value amount only to a difference in our desires? Here Aristotle appears to get things backwards. It might have seemed that we desire happiness in itself because it is intrinsically valuable. But Aristotle’s view has it that happiness is intrinsically value due to our desire for it.

In any case, the notion of desiring something in this self-contained way occasions notorious philosophical difficulties. We can avert these by asking simply: Do we favour democracy full stop ? It’s not obvious that we do. Simply recall the most recent occasion on which your favoured candidate or policy lost in a crucial election. Our enthusiasm for democracy wanes when it produces what we regard as a flawed result. Accordingly, the idea that democracy’s value is intrinsic looks unpromising.

So, what’s so great about democracy? Perhaps the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value is too coarse. Consider that sometimes it is part of the nature of a valuable thing to produce other good things. In such cases, a thing might be good largely because of the goods it produces, but it is nonetheless not merely a tool for producing them. To capture this idea, let’s introduce the idea of something’s value being bound up with what it is good for .

It might initially strike us that talk of something’s being good for securing other good things is merely a roundabout way of talking about instrumental value. We have already said that money is good for buying things; this is simply to note that money is instrumentally valuable. Still, there are more complex ways in which a thing’s value can reside in what it is good for.

For example, observe that both physical fitness and walking sticks are good for hiking. But fitness is good for hiking in a way that differs from the way in which the stick is good. Unlike the stick, fitness is not merely a tool for hiking; instead, it enables hiking in a way that contributes to the goodness of the hike. Fitness not only makes hiking possible; it also makes hikes invigorating and enjoyable. Notice also that hiking in turn contributes to fitness. We might say that the goods of fitness and of hiking reinforce one another. It is by means of fitness that we hike well; and hiking well enhances our fitness.

Turn now to the stick. Hiking does not enhance the stick, and in the absence of hiking, the stick is simply a piece of wood. The stick is hence strictly a tool for hiking. By contrast, fitness is partly constitutive of the goodness of hiking. We could say that hiking and fitness are bound up with one another; they are correlative goods.

Hiking and fitness are not unique in this respect. Friendship and enrichment provide another example. Friendship enables persons to enjoy certain kinds of enriching experiences; it is good for that kind of edification. Moreover, sharing such experiences among friends fortifies their bonds, deepening their friendship. This is part of the reason why friends often try new things together; they grow with one another. It moreover explains why friendships turn stale when they become rote; they stagnate, they can get “stuck”. Still, it would be an error to say that the value of friendship lies strictly in its being a tool for personal growth. Indeed, conceiving of one’s friendships instrumentally dissolves them.

These considerations suggest that a thing’s value can lie in its capacity to enable something else of value, which in turn reciprocates. This third way of being valuable – being “good for” other goods – strikes a middle path between instrumental and intrinsic value. Although it recognises that something can be good in more than a strictly instrumental sense, it does not make use of the idea of something’s good being self-contained. When a thing’s value lies in its being good for something else, its good lies with the contribution it makes to other things of value. This contribution distinguishes being “good for” from being merely an instrument.

Perhaps democracy’s value lies in what it is good for. On such a view, democracy’s value resides in its capacity to foster important correlative goods. What are these correlative goods?

Let’s start by thinking about what democracy is. We typically define democracy in terms of its institutions and procedures – elections, votes, majoritarianism, representative bodies, and the like. However, it is difficult to make sense of these without appeal to an underlying moral ideal that they serve. To be specific, democracy is the fundamental moral ideal of self-government among social equals. Democracy proposes that a stable and relatively just social order is possible in the absence of dictators and kings. It is the claim that through processes of political representation and accountability, citizens can rule themselves as equals. Democracy thus is more than a form of government; it is a kind of society in which no one is another’s master, but each an equal author of a shared political order.

This is why even though in a democracy we sometimes must accept political decisions that we regard as misguided, none of us is ever required to submit simply to political power. Even after the votes are counted, those who find themselves on the losing side are entitled to continue objecting, criticising, and calling government to account. Even in the face of electoral defeat, we therefore remain equals.

At any rate, that’s the ideal of democracy. We all know how far from ideal existing democracies tend to be. Nevertheless, ideals are important because they provide a potent basis for social aspiration and critique, a public stance from which one can object to existing conditions as inadequately egalitarian and thus insufficiently democratic. Accordingly, to be more precise, we can say that a democracy is a society organised around the working aspiration for self-government among political equals.

The crucial point at present is that by creating a political order in which equals rule themselves by way of representative and accountable government, democracy sets the conditions under which we can pursue other valuable things. In freeing us from the dominating gaze of omni-present politics which characterises authoritarian orders, democracy supplies social conditions in which we can devote our individual and collective lives, at least in part, to projects and ambitions other than politics. In other words, because we are political equals, we can build relationships beyond our political roles and see one another as something in addition to political actors. As equal authors of a shared political order, we can exercise authorship of our nonpolitical lives by cultivating valuable relationships with others – relationships of creativity, support, fidelity, love, and care that have little if anything to do with politics. It might seem odd, but democracy’s value lies in its being good for enabling valuable relationships beyond politics. We could go so far as to say that the importance we place on democracy is explained, at least in part, by its ability to secure the political and social conditions under which we can flourish together not only as citizens, but as human beings.

Importantly, the good of such nonpolitical relationships reciprocates; democracy is enriched when it is conducted against their background. To explain, in a democracy, there will be ongoing disagreement over the proper understanding of the most important values, including justice, liberty, autonomy, and dignity. Among democratic citizens, disagreements over these matters remain disputes among equals. Consequently, citizens must stand up vigilantly for their political commitments while also recognising that, within a broad spectrum of opinion, citizens championing competing views will sometimes legitimately get their way. Put in these terms, we see that democratic citizenship involves a demanding civic ethos according to which being right about even the most important values does not by itself entitle one to get one’s way in the political arena.

In order to sustain the stance required by this ethos , citizens must be able to see one another as something more than political rivals and allies. They must view one another as also persons striving to live valuable lives according to their own best lights. Valuable social relationships beyond the travails of democratic politics enable citizens to maintain their commitment to the equality of those with whom they are politically opposed. Put differently, unless democracy is conducted within a broader environment of valuable nonpolitical relationships, when the political chips are down, we will find ourselves unable to regard our rivals as nonetheless our equals. The civic ethos of democracy dissolves. Under such conditions, democracy devolves into a kind of cold civil war. Hence, in order to perform well as democratic citizens, we must cooperate together in contexts beyond the travails of politics; we must be able to regard our fellow citizens as more than merely citizens.

I have been arguing that democracy’s value lies in its being good for fostering valuable human relationships organised around ideals and aspirations that are themselves not political in nature. I have suggested further that the good of such relationships is correlative with democracy; relationships of that kind make a distinctive and essential contribution to democracy’s flourishing. Hence our initial question finds its answer. We value democracy because the equality that it embodies is a constituent of the aspiration to live valuable lives.

If this account is correct, a surprising implication follows. In my recent book, Overdoing Democracy , I document trends by which our social environments have been colonised by our partisan political identities. It is no stretch to say that in many contemporary democracies, individuals’ entire lifestyles – everything from where they live and shop, how they get to work, the kind of work they do, where they spend their holidays and weekends, and how they decorate their homes – now tightly reflect their politics. This has led to a condition where the social spaces citizens inhabit in their day-to-day lives are increasingly likely to put them in contact only with others who share their politics. What this means is that individuals are more and more behaving in ways that publicly express their political allegiances, but under conditions that are politically homogeneous. As the horizon of social interaction shrinks in this way, we begin to regard those who hold political ideas that differ from our own as increasingly alien, inscrutable, irrational, and dangerous. In short, we lose sight of what our political rivals are nevertheless our equals; thus, the capacities that we need in order to uphold the democratic civic ethos deteriorate. In short, when the whole of our social life is organised around democratic politics, we undermine our ability to perform well as citizens.

The ubiquity of democratic politics is democratically degenerative. Hence the surprising upshot: if we want to contribute to the flourishing of democracy, we need to acknowledge that, even in a democracy, we cannot live well by politics alone. We need occasionally to step back from democratic politics and together attend to other things.

Robert B. Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and author of Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Political in its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019).

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Deliberative Democracy : Essays on Reason and Politics

James Bohman is Danforth Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books.

William Rehg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He is the translator of Jürgen Habermas's Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996) and the coeditor of Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics and Pluralism (1997) and The Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory (2001), all published by the MIT Press.

Ideals of democratic participation and rational self-government have long informed modern political theory. As a recent elaboration of these ideals, the concept of deliberative democracy is based on the principle that legitimate democracy issues from the public deliberation of citizens. This remarkably fruitful concept has spawned investigations along a number of lines. Areas of inquiry include the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements.The anthology opens with four key essays—by Jon Elster, Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, and John Rawls—that helped establish the current inquiry into deliberative models of democracy. The nine essays that follow represent the latest efforts of leading democratic theorists to tackle various problems of deliberative democracy. All the contributions address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens. Although the authors approach the topic of deliberation from different perspectives, they all aim to provide a theoretical basis for a more robust democratic practice.

Contributors James Bohman, Thomas Christiano, Joshua Cohen, Jon Elster, David Estlund, Gerald F. Gaus, Jürgen Habermas, James Johnson, Jack Knight, Frank I. Michelman, John Rawls, Henry S. Richardson, Iris Marion Young

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Deliberative Democracy : Essays on Reason and Politics Edited by: James Bohman, William Rehg https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.001.0001 ISBN (electronic): 9780262268936 Publisher: The MIT Press Published: 1997

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Table of Contents

• [ Front Matter ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0020 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Front Matter ] in another window
• Acknowledgments Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0001 Open the PDF Link PDF for Acknowledgments in another window
• Introduction Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0002 Open the PDF Link PDF for Introduction in another window
• 1: The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory By Jon Elster Jon Elster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0004 Open the PDF Link PDF for 1: The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory in another window
• 2: Popular Sovereignty as Procedure By Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0005 Open the PDF Link PDF for 2: Popular Sovereignty as Procedure in another window
• 3: Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy By Joshua Cohen Joshua Cohen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0006 Open the PDF Link PDF for 3: Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy in another window
• 4: The Idea of Public Reason By John Rawls John Rawls Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0007 Open the PDF Link PDF for 4: The Idea of Public Reason in another window
• 5: How Can the People Ever Make the Laws? A Critique of Deliberative Democracy By Frank I. Michelman Frank I. Michelman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0009 Open the PDF Link PDF for 5: How Can the People Ever Make the Laws? A Critique of Deliberative Democracy in another window
• 6: Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority By David Estlund David Estlund Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0010 Open the PDF Link PDF for 6: Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority in another window
• 7: Reason, Justification, and Consensus: Why Democracy Can’t Have It All By Gerald F. Gaus Gerald F. Gaus Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0011 Open the PDF Link PDF for 7: Reason, Justification, and Consensus: Why Democracy Can’t Have It All in another window
• 8: The Significance of Public Deliberation By Thomas Christiano Thomas Christiano Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0012 Open the PDF Link PDF for 8: The Significance of Public Deliberation in another window
• 9: What Sort of Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require? By Jack Knight , Jack Knight Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar James Johnson James Johnson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0013 Open the PDF Link PDF for 9: What Sort of Equality Does Deliberative Democracy Require? in another window
• 10: Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources, and Opportunities By James Bohman James Bohman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0014 Open the PDF Link PDF for 10: Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources, and Opportunities in another window
• 11: Democratic Intentions By Henry S. Richardson Henry S. Richardson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0015 Open the PDF Link PDF for 11: Democratic Intentions in another window
• 12: Difference as a Resource for Democratic Communication By Iris Marion Young Iris Marion Young Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0016 Open the PDF Link PDF for 12: Difference as a Resource for Democratic Communication in another window
• 13: Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy By Joshua Cohen Joshua Cohen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0017 Open the PDF Link PDF for 13: Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy in another window
• Contributors Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0018 Open the PDF Link PDF for Contributors in another window
• Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2324.003.0019 Open the PDF Link PDF for Index in another window
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Understanding Liberal Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Understanding Liberal Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy , Terence Cuneo (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2012, 385pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199558957.

Reviewed by Kelly Sorensen, Ursinus College

Public reason liberalism -- the form of liberalism defended by Rawls, Larmore, Audi, Gaus, Rorty, Nussbaum, and to some degree Habermas -- usually requires citizens to publicly discuss and vote based on only those reasons that pass some sort of test that sifts away religious and comprehensive non-religious reasons. In the public sphere, those with such views are required by the role of citizenship to shape up or shut up -- "shape up" in the sense of offering instead reasons that can or could be shared by all other citizens. Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that public reason liberalism is a dead end, and defends instead what he takes to be a more defensible form of liberalism ("equal political voice liberalism"). His book is fresh and compelling, and an important contribution to political philosophy.

This is a collection of mostly new essays: nine appear for the first time. The remaining six are lightly edited for coherence with the new material. Ten concern public reason liberalism. The rest take up the nature of rights (extending the account that Wolterstorff has been developing in his recent books  Justice: Rights and Wrongs  and  Justice in Love ), the nature and source of citizens' political obligations to the state, and other issues in political philosophy.

What motivates public reason liberalism's restrictions on the reasons citizens can express and vote on? One factor is fairness, a second pluralism, and a third a certain kind of realism about pluralism's persistence. Rawls says that we can expect "a pluralism of comprehensive doctrines, including both religious and nonreligious doctrines . . . as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free institutions". This pluralism is "not seen as a disaster" (Political Liberalism (​PL), xxiv), but it does raise concerns regarding a fourth factor, the stability of a liberal polity over time. Public reason liberalism sees religious comprehensive views in particular as "not admitting of compromise" and "expansionist" (Rawls), and even "conversation-stopping" and "dangerous" (Rorty). Because of these factors, public reason liberalism says, when it comes to publicly advocating for coercive legislation and voting, a citizen should restrict herself to reasons that she believes all capable adult fellow citizens do endorse or would endorse if they were (variously) better informed, more rational, drawing on a shared fund of premises that are freestanding and neutral with respect to controversial elements of comprehensive views, and so on.

Among Wolterstorff's arguments against public reason liberalism are the following. First, public reason liberalism actually is not realistic enough. One's capable adult fellow citizens clearly do not universally endorse the same reasons. So public reason liberalism has to idealize -- it has to imagine what reasons capable adult fellow citizens  would  endorse if they met certain hypothetical conditions, with the presumption that a consensus or convergence about these reasons would emerge. The hypothetical conditions vary from one brand of public reason liberalism to another. Suppose the conditions are full information and full rationality. Realistically, why think public reason liberalism is in a position to confidently say what reasons emerge from that idealization, and to say that there would be a consensus about them? Why think disagreement about these reasons will disappear under idealization? We can ask the same of Rawlsian idealization, which is laxer but still unrealistically strong: why think there would be consensus about what processes -- processes of rationally arriving at a set of judgments -- are themselves reasonable? So public reason liberalism is not realistic enough: we are stuck with pluralism, and we cannot idealize our way out of it.

Second, public reason liberalism is paternalistic and patronizing, despite its lip service to respect. Suppose Jones favors some policy on religious reasons that do not qualify as public reasons. Smith, a fan of public reason liberalism, is stuck with telling Jones, "You shouldn't express your reasons in public discussion, and you shouldn't vote on them. Here instead are the kinds of reasons that count -- reasons you would endorse if you were not under-informed and rationally impaired." Jones will of course find this condescending and patronizing. Even if Smith chooses more diplomatic words, public reason liberalism still entails a paternalistic and patronizing view of Jones. It's no surprise if Jones resents such an entailment about his reasons and whether he should express them and vote on them, and that resentment is a problem for the stability that Smith and public reason liberals ostensibly treasure.

A third argument from Wolterstorff is that public reason liberalism cannot consistently get what it wants anyway. Suppose Jones has a religious conviction that he should base his political views  on  his religious convictions. Jones listens to the arguments and objections of others with different views, but is unconvinced. He is like a Kantian listening to consequentialist arguments: he refuses to think that way. On the one hand, public reason liberals might seem to tell Jones to refrain from public discussion and voting. But on the other hand, that is "not what they should say, given their position as a whole" (100). Public reason liberalism gives citizens a  prima facie  duty to restrict themselves to public reasons, but in Jones's case that duty is outweighed by what he takes to be an " ultima  facie " duty to appeal to his religious reasons. Public reason liberals will have to accept that Jones should reject their "public reason imperative." So public reason liberalism seems to leave Jones free to publicly debate and to vote based on his religious convictions after all  -- the very result that most public reason liberals were attempting to avoid! So it is not possible for public reason liberals, on their own terms, to declare religious reasons inappropriate for public political discourse. There is a tension internal to the theory here.

A related fourth argument concludes that public reason liberalism asks too much of some religious believers. It entails that a piece of coercive legislation's legitimacy depends on Jones having, or counterfactually having, reasons in favor of the legislation that are good and  decisive for  Jones, the coerced subject. For at least some public reason liberals, it is not enough that Jones  knows of  public reasons that support the same legislation as his religious reasons; rather, the public reasons must be those  on the basis of which  Jones actually speaks and votes (36, 80, and 282). But this asks too much, Wolterstorff says. It asks Jones to let non-religious reasons trump his religious reasons when he speaks publicly and goes to the polls.

Fifth, public reason liberalism may caricature religious believers, insofar as it implies that believers are unwilling to go beyond the claim that "God told me that it's wrong so it's wrong." Interestingly, Wolterstorff turns here to qualitative empirical data. In the public discussion in Oregon in the 1990s about a physician-assisted suicide initiative, a leading account reports no such appeals by religious believers. Instead, public discussion in Oregon was characterized by a plurality of more substantive and contentful religious reasons, and also importantly, a plurality of secular reasons (not the supposed universal counterfactual shared premises that public reason liberalism inevitably resorts to).

Sixth, public reason liberalism may also caricature other varieties of liberal democratic engagement. Suppose we turn for a moment from policy deliberation and decision, the favored turf of public reason liberalism, to real-world grassroots organizing. In Maywood, California, city council members instituted an unusually onerous penalty for car drivers without a license: $1200 and a 30-day impound for the car. Towing companies were large donors to the city councilors' campaign funds. The law hit undocumented workers especially hard. Community members and community organizers attempted to use reasons -- public reasons -- to persuade the city council to change the law. That failed. Public reason liberalism seems stuck with the view that people in Maywood at that point should have backed off and shut up. Instead, acting under a plurality of reasons and emotions, including moral outrage, they ran a media campaign to call attention to the city council's corruption, and they registered more voters, until finally the city council members were voted out of office. Public reason liberalism is ill-equipped to theorize about real, non-well-ordered societies like, usually, our own.

These are only brief samples of Wolterstorff's arguments. He offers more sophisticated and detailed versions of these and other arguments when he engages with the specifics of individual theories of Rawls, Rorty, Gaus, Audi, Habermas, and others.

Wolterstorff calls his alternative form of liberal democracy "equal political voice liberalism," and he thinks it better accounts for the "governing idea" found in the longer historical tradition of liberalism, before public reason liberalism seized the spotlight in recent decades. There are two key aspects of equal political voice liberalism. First, citizens speak and vote within a constitutional context -- a context of classic civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religious exercise, and freedom of association. Certain fundamental changes in law are appropriately "off the table" in this context of constitutional limits. Second, citizens are to speak and vote with an equal political voice. Intimidation and bullying are out; but otherwise, Wolterstorff's view puts no restrictions on the kinds of reasons to which citizens can appeal in public discussion and voting. That's it: we talk, using whatever reasons we want, religious and non-religious, comprehensive or otherwise, and then we vote. Anyone who wants to persuade others will, as a practical matter, find herself quoting reasons that will appeal to her opponents; but there is no requirement that she restrict herself to some special set of reasons. After the vote, there will be winners and losers. The losers will experience the winners' legislation as coercive. But to have expected otherwise is utopian. And Wolterstorff claims to have uncovered a variety of ways that public reason liberalism leans toward the utopian, despite its putative acceptance of pluralism, realism, and worries about stability.

As to the six issues above, Wolterstorff claims that equal political voice liberalism comes off better. First, it makes no unrealistic claim that, counterfactually, citizens' views on legislation would match some imagined consensus or convergence. Second, it is more respectful and less patronizing to citizens, because it does not tell them that their own reasons are epistemically inadequate. Third, it lets citizens speak and act on their own reasons without internal tension in the theory; and fourth, it does not demand that alien reasons be substituted and decisive. Fifth, the view does not caricature the reasons that people with comprehensive views tend to offer. Sixth, it is not myopic about varieties of democratic engagement -- there is policy deliberation and decision, but there is also broad-based organizing, movement organizing, and protest. Equal political voice liberalism better accounts for what happened in Oregon and in Maywood.

Wolterstorff's equal political voice liberalism does issue some "shape up" talk of its own. While designed to make broader room for religious reasons in the public square, it is not compatible with  every  religious perspective. Wolterstorff's liberalism does ask thinkers like Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb to endorse the constitutional context of liberal democracy and its commitment to not favoring any particular religious tradition. For Wolterstorff, "to affirm the liberal democratic polity is to put the shape of our life together at the mercy of votes in which the infidel has an equal voice with the believer" (295).

A mood of non-utopianism hangs over the book, but Wolterstorff is neither resigned nor pessimistic. Unlike dour critics such as MacIntyre, he loves liberal democracy. He agrees with public reason liberals that pluralism is ineradicable, but claims that there is more respect, more stability, and more positive endorsement of the system, when citizens speak and vote with an equal voice in a context of fundamental constitutional limits.

Equal political voice liberalism seems straightforward and simple, and it certainly has many attractions. Wolterstorff not only puts public reason liberals on the hot seat, but also sketches an alternative that captures important planks of the liberal democratic tradition. But consider a few concerns.

First, equal political voice liberalism seems to assume that after discussing and voting and grassroots organizing, there will be winners and losers, but that often enough the winners will be losers on other matters and the losers will in turn be winners (294). I take it this claim is supposed to address familiar concerns about stability. But it would be utopian to think that this happens often enough. It is easy to imagine places where the losers are very often  repeat  losers, because a majority persists there that sees little need to engage minority interlocutors. Depending on the place, the repeat losers could either be secular minorities or religious minorities. Wolterstorff will claim otherwise, but the best form of public reason liberalism might have more resources to address this worry than equal political voice liberalism.

Second, the book does not make clear whether Wolterstorff would consider an issue like state-authorized gay marriage to be part of the constitutional context, properly understood, and so part of the basic civil liberties that are "off the table" for democratic alteration by vote, or instead to be up for public discussion and a vote. From his discussion of the Oregon physician-assisted suicide case, we might think Wolterstorff would go for the latter, but personal correspondence indicates that he believes the former. In any case, even more specificity about what is off the table and what is on would be good.

Third, maybe things are not so bleak for public reason liberals, if they up their game and amend certain claims. Consider what we might call  aspirational  public reason liberalism. This theory is "aspirational" in three distinct ways. First, aspirational public reason liberalism asks citizens to aspire to offer reasons that are more general and broadly held than their own particular comprehensive-view-based reasons. But unlike the forms of liberalism that Wolterstorff's first argument addresses, it does not rely on the idea of a universal consensus or convergence about public reasons. Second, aspirational public reason liberalism does not require or demand  that citizens restrict themselves to these more general public reasons, but it does ask them to aspire to offer them. Citizens do nothing forbidden or wrongful if they articulate religious or other comprehensive view reasons, but they fulfill the role of citizen well if they also offer more general reasons -- reasons that speak to a broader swath of fellow citizens. A third aspiration concerns the place of these more general reasons among the citizen's individual motives: aspirational public reason liberalism says that these more general reasons need not be  decisive for the citizen  when she speaks and votes. We might also add a Rawlsian scope restriction: these aspirations apply to "most cases of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice" (PL, xxi), not necessarily to all matters of public discussion.

I believe this form of public reason liberalism survives most of Wolterstorff's objections. It leaves room for many of his key points, including realism about the nature of lived citizenship and public activism, and also openness to religious comprehensive views as historically a fecund source of generalizable moral insight. It preserves many of the attractions of public reason liberalism as well, including an ideal of the role of citizen and the role's coercive power that encourages robust respect for other members of the polity. Consider Rawls's claim that "Public reason sees the office of citizen with its duty of civility as analogous to that of judgeship with its duty of deciding cases" (PL, liii). The citizen who fulfills her office well will aspire to articulate reasons that go beyond her personal reasons -- a good citizen will do this not, as Wolterstorff's equal political voice liberalism says, on a mere practical and rhetorical basis; and a good citizen will do this even when she is part of a repeat-winner majority, when on Wolterstorff's view there is no practical reason for her to do so. [1]  The judge/citizen analogy may not be as tight as Rawls seems to think: the role of judge comes with heavy demands of neutrality, while citizens face less onerous aspirations. In any case, it's worth noting, as Wolterstorff does, that in the 1995 introduction to the paperback edition of PL, Rawls does begin to soften. He says there that he now believes that reasons based on comprehensive doctrines "may be introduced in public reason at any time, provided that in due course public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception, are presented sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are introduced to support" (PL, xlix). This isn't yet aspirational public reason liberalism, but it begins to point in that direction.

Whether or not public reason liberalism can be patched up in this or other ways, Wolterstorff's essays certainly reveal important undigested entailments in the standard view. This really is an excellent book.

Nearly half the book takes up other topics, and I regret that I have not managed to discuss them. For instance, Wolterstorff's discussion of privacy rights is particularly important. Take the case of J. Edgar Hoover's spying on Martin Luther King, Jr. Hoover secretly taped King's personal conversations and sex life. Suppose for a moment that King never knew of the privacy invasions, and so made no decisions in light them; suppose Hoover made the recordings for his own prurient enjoyment. (In fact, the FBI did try to blackmail King with these materials, as David Garrow's biography of King indicates. Wolterstorff notes this in one place (223), but not in another (326).) Standard accounts usually try to explain rights violations in terms of constriction of the rights holder's normative agency, or of his freedom of opinion and action. But in the imagined case, King's normative agency was not so affected. Still, his rights clearly were violated. Standard accounts of rights cannot adequately explain the wrongfulness of privacy violation, or the depth of the wrongness of rape, and are accordingly deficient.

Another chapter concerns the nature and source of the political authority of the state -- the state's authority to issue binding directives to its citizens. This issue, long a mainstay in political philosophy, largely dropped out of discussion a few decades ago. Wolterstorff resurrects it and offers an interesting new account.

Wolterstorff's prose and thinking are clear. The book would work well in an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course on liberalism . [2]

[1]  In personal correspondence, Wolterstorff says that he does believe that citizens are under a moral demand to engage others, although a failure to so engage is not a violation of the governing idea of liberal democracy.

[2]  My thanks to Nick Wolterstorff and Apryl Martin for their feedback on an earlier version of this review.

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John Dewey (1859–1952) was one of American pragmatism’s early founders, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, and arguably the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s educational theories and experiments had global reach, his psychological theories influenced that growing science, and his writings about democratic theory and practice helped shape academic and practical debates for decades. Dewey developed extensive and often systematic views in ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Because Dewey’s approach was typically genealogical, couching his views within philosophy’s larger history, one finds in Dewey a fully developed metaphilosophy.

Dewey’s “cultural naturalism” (which he favored over “pragmatism” and “instrumentalism”) is a critique and reconstruction of philosophy within the ambit of a Darwinian worldview (Lamont 1961; MW4: 3). Following William James, Dewey thought philosophy had become overly technical and intellectualistic, divorced from assessing everyday social conditions and values ( FAE , LW5: 157–58). Philosophy, he believed, needed to be reconnected with education-for-living (philosophy as “the general theory of education”), viz., social criticism at the most general level, a “criticism of criticisms” ( EN , LW1: 298; see also DE , MW9: 338).

Understood within the Darwinian evolutionary arena, philosophy becomes an activity taken by interdependent organisms-in- environments. From this standpoint of active adaptation, Dewey criticized traditional philosophers’ tendency to abstract and reify concepts derived from living contexts. Along with other classical pragmatists, Dewey critiqued metaphysical and epistemological dualisms (e.g., mind/body, nature/culture, self/society, and reason/emotion) reconstructing their elements as parts of larger continuities. For example, human thinking is not a phenomenon categorically external from the world it seeks to know; indeed, such knowing is not a purely rational attempt to escape illusion and discover ultimate “reality” or “truth”. Rather, knowing is one among many ways organisms with evolved capacities for thought and language cope with problems. Minds, then, are not passive observers but are engines of active adaptation, experimentation, and innovation; ideas and theories are not rational fulcrums to transcend culture, but rather function within culture, adjudged on situated, pragmatic grounds. Knowing, then, is no “divine spark”, for while knowing (or inquiry , to use Dewey’s term) includes calculative or rational elements, these are agentially entangled with the body and emotions.

Beyond academia, Dewey was an active public intellectual, infusing contemporary issues with insights found in philosophy. He addressed topics of broad moral significance, such as human freedom, economic alienation, race relations, women’s suffrage, war and peace, and educational methods and goals. Typically, he integrated discoveries made via public inquiries back into his academic theories. This practice-theory-practice rhythm powered every area of Dewey’s intellectual enterprise, and perhaps explains the enduring usefulness of his philosophy in many academic and practical arenas. The fecundity of Dewey’s ideas continues to manifest in aesthetics, education, environmental policy, information theory, journalism, medicine, political theory, psychiatry, public administration, sociology, and philosophy, per se.

Short Chronology of the Life and Work of John Dewey

2.1 associationism, introspectionism, and physiological psychology, 2.2 the “reflex arc” and dewey’s reconstruction of psychology, 2.3 instincts/impulses, 2.4 perception/sensation, 2.5 acts and habits, 2.6 emotion, consciousness, 3.1 the development of “experience”, 3.2 traditional views of experience and dewey’s critique, 3.3 dewey’s positive account of experience, 3.4 metaphysics, 3.5 the development of “metaphysics”, 3.6 the project of experience and nature, 3.7 empirical metaphysics and wisdom, 3.8 criticisms of dewey’s metaphysics, 4.1 the organic roots of instrumentalism, 4.2 beyond empiricism, rationalism, and kant, 4.3 inquiry, knowledge, and truth, 5.1 experiential learning and teaching, 5.2 traditionalists, romantics, and dewey, 5.3 democracy through education, 7. political philosophy, 8. art and aesthetic experience, 9.1 dewey’s religious background, 9.2 aligning naturalism and religion, 9.3 “religion” vs. “religious”, 9.4 faith and god, 9.5 religion as social intelligence—a common faith, collections, abbreviations of dewey works frequently cited, individual works, b. secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries, 1. biographical sketch.

John Dewey lead an active and multifarious life. He is the subject of numerous biographies and an enormous literature interpreting and evaluating his extraordinary body of work: forty books and approximately seven hundred articles in over one hundred and forty journals.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859 to Archibald Dewey, a merchant, and Lucina Rich Dewey. Dewey was the third of four sons; the first, Dewey’s namesake, died in infancy. He grew up in Burlington, was raised in the Congregationalist Church, and attended public schools. After studying Latin and Greek in high school, Dewey entered the University of Vermont at fifteen and graduated in 1879 at nineteen. After college, Dewey taught high school for two years in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Subsequent time in Vermont studying philosophy with former professor H.A.P. Torrey, along with the encouragement of the editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy , W.T. Harris, helped Dewey decide to attend graduate school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1882. There, his study included logic with Charles S. Peirce (which Dewey found too “mathematical”, and did not pursue), the history of philosophy with George Sylvester Morris, and physiological and experimental psychology with Granville Stanley Hall (who trained with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and with William James at Harvard). [ 1 ]

Though Dewey later attributed important credit to Peirce’s pragmatism for his mature views, Peirce had no sizable impact during graduate school. There, his main influences—Neo-Hegelian idealism, Darwinian biology, and Wundtian experimental psychology— created a tension he fought to resolve. Was the world fundamentally biological, functional, and material or was it inherently creative and spiritual? In no small part, Dewey’s career was launched by his attempt to mediate and harmonize these views. While sharing the idea of “organism”, Dewey also saw in both — and rejected— any aspects he deemed overly abstract, atomizing, or reductionistic. His earliest attempts to create a “new psychology” (aimed at merging experimental psychology with idealism) sought a method to understand experience as integrated and whole. As a result, Dewey’s early approach modified English absolute idealism. In 1884, two years after matriculating, Dewey graduated with a dissertation criticizing Kant from an Idealist position (“The Psychology of Kant”); it remains lost.

While scholars still debate the degree to which Dewey’s mature philosophy retained early Hegelian influences, Hegel’s personal influence on Dewey was profound. New England’s religious culture, Dewey recalled, imparted an “isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, [and] of nature from God”, and he reacted with “an inward laceration” and “a painful oppression”. His study (with George Sylvester Morris) of British Idealist T.H. Green and G.W.F. Hegel afforded Dewey personal and intellectual healing:

Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was, however, no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel’s treatment of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special attraction for me. ( FAE , LW5: 153)

Philosophically, early encounters with Hegelianism informed Dewey’s career-long quest to integrate, as dynamic wholes, the various dimensions of experience (practical, imaginative, bodily, psychical) that philosophy and psychology had defined as discrete.

Dewey’s family, as well as his reputation as a philosopher and psychologist, grew while at various universities, including the University of Michigan (1886– 88, 1889–1894) and the University of Minnesota (1888–89). At Michigan, Dewey developed long-term professional relationships with James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead. In 1886, Dewey married Harriet Alice Chipman; they had six children and adopted one. Two of the boys died tragically young (two and eight). Chipman had a significant influence on Dewey’s advocacy for women and his shift away from religious orthodoxy. During this period, Dewey wrote articles critical of British idealists from a Hegelian perspective; he taught James’ Principles of Psychology (1890), and labeled his own view “experimental idealism” (1894a, The Study of Ethics , EW4: 264).

In 1894, at Tuft’s urging, President William Rainey Harper offered Dewey leadership of the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, which also included Psychology and Pedagogy. Motivated to put these disciplines into active collaboration, Dewey accepted and began building the department by hiring G.H. Mead from Michigan and J.R. Angell, a former student at Michigan (who also studied with James at Harvard). Dubbed the “Chicago School” by William James, Dewey, Tufts, Angell, Mead and several others developed “psychological functionalism”. He also published the seminal “Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896, EW5; hereafter RAC ), and broke from transcendental idealism and his church.

At Chicago, Dewey founded The Laboratory School, a site to test psychological and educational theories. Dewey’s wife Alice was the principal from 1896–1904. Dewey became active in Chicago’s social and political causes, including Jane Addams’ Hull House; Addams became a close personal friend of the Dewey’s. Dewey and his biographer, daughter Jane Dewey, credited Addams with helping him develop his views on democracy, education, and philosophy. The significance of Dewey’s intellectual debt to Addams is still being uncovered (“Biography of John Dewey”, Dewey 1939a; see also Seigfried 1999, Fischer 2013).

In 1904, conflicts related to the Laboratory School lead Dewey to resign his Chicago positions and move to the philosophy department at Columbia University in New York City. There, he established an affiliation with Columbia’s Teacher’s College. Important influences at Columbia included F.J.E. Woodbridge, Wendell T. Bush, W.P. Montague, Charles A. Beard (political theory) and Franz Boas (anthropology). Dewey retired from Columbia in 1930, going on to produce eleven more books.

In addition to many significant academic publications, Dewey wrote for various non-academic audiences, notably in the New Republic ; he was active in leading, supporting, or founding a number of important organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors, the American Philosophical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the New School for Social Research. Dewey spoke out to support progressive politics and social change. His renown as a philosopher and educator lead to numerous invitations; in 1922, he inaugurated the Paul Carus Lectures (revised and published as Experience and Nature , 1925), gave the 1928 Gifford Lectures (revised and published as The Quest for Certainty , 1929), and gave the 1933–34 Terry Lectures at Yale (published as A Common Faith , 1934a). He traveled for two years in Japan and China, and made notable trips to Turkey, Mexico, the Soviet Union, and South Africa.

In 1946, almost two decades after Alice Chipman Dewey died (1927), Dewey married Roberta Lowitz Grant. John Dewey died of pneumonia in his home in New York City on June 1, 1952.

Source: H&A 1998, xiv

• 1859 Oct. 20. Born in Burlington, Vermont
• 1879 Receives A.B. from the University of Vermont
• 1879–81 Teaches at high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania
• 1881–82 Teaches at Lake View Seminary, Charlotte, Vermont
• 1882–84 Attends graduate school at Johns Hopkins University
• 1884 Receives Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University
• 1884 Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
• 1886 Married to Alice Chipman
• 1888–89 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota
• 1889 Chair of Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
• 1894 Professor and Chair of Department of Philosophy (including psychology and pedagogy) at the University of Chicago
• 1897 Elected to Board of Trustees, Hull-House Association
• 1899 The School and Society
• 1889–1900 President of the American Psychological Association; Studies in Logical Theory
• 1904 Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University
• 1905–06 President of the American Philosophical Society
• 1908 Ethics
• 1910 How We Think
• 1916 The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, Democracy and Education, Essays in Experimental Logic
• 1919 Lectures in Japan
• 1919–21 Lectures in China
• 1920 Reconstruction in Philosophy
• 1922 Human Nature and Conduct
• 1924 Visits schools in Turkey
• 1925 Experience and Nature
• 1926 Visits schools in Mexico
• 1927 The Public and its Problems
• 1927 Death of Alice Chipman Dewey
• 1928 Visits schools in Soviet Russia
• 1929 The Quest for Certainty
• 1930 Individualism, Old and New
• 1930 Retires from position at Columbia University, appointed Professor Emeritus
• 1932 Ethics
• 1934 A Common Faith, Art as Experience
• 1935 Liberalism and Social Action
• 1937 Chair of the Trotsky Commission, Mexico City
• 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Experience and Education
• 1939 Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation
• 1946 Married to Roberta (Lowitz) Grant; Knowing and the Known
• 1952 June 1. Dies in New York City

2. Psychology

Dewey’s involvement with psychology began early. He hoped the emerging discipline would answer philosophy’s deepest questions. His initial approach resembled Hegelian Idealism, though it did not incorporate Hegel’s dialectical logic; instead he sought new methods in psychology (Alexander 2020). By overcoming longstanding divisions (between subject and object, matter and spirit, etc.) he would show how human experiences —physical, psychical, practical, and imaginative —all integrate in one, dynamic person ( FAE , LW5: 153). Dewey’s large ambitions for psychology (as the new science of self-consciousness), imagined it as the “completed method of philosophy” (“Psychology as Philosophic Method”, EW1: 157). Nominally a textbook, Psychology (1887 EW2) introduced psychology’s study of the self as ultimate reality.

Dewey developed his own psychological theories. Extant accounts of behavior were flawed, premised upon outdated and false philosophical assumptions. (He eventually judged that such larger questions about the meaning of human existence exceeded the resources of psychology.) Dewey’s work at this time reconstructed components of human conduct (instincts, perceptions, habits, acts, emotions, and conscious thought) and these proved integral to later, mature accounts of experience. They informed his lifelong contention that mind, contrary to long tradition, is not fundamentally subjective and isolated, but social and interactive, emerging in nature and culture.

Dewey’s entry into psychology coincided with two dominant trends: introspectionism (arising from associationism, a.k.a., “mentalism”) and the newer physiological psychology (imported from Germany). Earlier British empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, explained intelligent behavior with (1) internally inspected (“introspected”) entities, including perceptual experiences (e.g., “impressions”), and (2) thoughts or ideas (e.g., “images”). These accrue toward intelligence via an elaborate process of associative learning. Discovery-by-introspection was indispensable to many empiricists, and to physiological cum experimental psychologists (e.g., Wundt).

Dewey was deeply influenced by graduate study of physiological psychology with G. Stanley Hall, whose classes included theoretical, physiological, and experimental psychology. Dewey conducted laboratory experiments on attention. Unlike the introspectionists, Hall’s methods incorporated strict experimental controls, a biology-based approach which proffered Dewey an organic and holistic model of experience capable of overcoming the subjectivist dualisms plaguing the older, associationist models. [ 2 ] However, Dewey still found experience atomized and mechanistic in physiological psychology, stemming from a reliance upon “sense data”. From his Hegelian perspective, this psychology could never account for a wider, socio-cultural world. Briefly, for Dewey, “organism” entails “environment” and “environment” entails “culture”. A rigorously empirical psychology could restrict study to “the” mind but was bound to forge connections with other sciences. [ 3 ]

Dewey sought an account of psychological experience that respected experimental limits and culture’s pervasive influences. James’s tour de force, The Principles of Psychology (1890), modeled how to explain the conscious and intelligent self without appealing to a transcendental Absolute. The Principles’ emphatically biological conception of mind, Dewey recalled, gave his thinking “a new direction and quality” and “worked its way more and more into all my ideas and acted as a ferment to transform old beliefs” ( FAE , LW5: 157). Rather than measuring psychic phenomena against preexisting abstractions, it deployed a “radical empiricism” that starts from lived experience’s actual phases and elements and aims to understand its functional origins.

One expression of this Jamesean turn was Dewey’s seminal critique of the reflex arc concept (1896). The “reflex arc” model of behavior was an influential way to empirically and experimentally explain human behavior using stimulus-response (cause-effect) pairings. It sought to displace less observable and testable approaches relying upon “psychic entities” or “mental substance”. In the model, a passive organism encounters an external stimulus, causing a sensory and motor response — a child sees a candle (stimulus), grasps it (response), burns her hand (stimulus), and pulls her hand back (response). This makes explicit the event’s basic stimuli and responses, describing connections in mechanistic and physiological terms. No recourse to mysterious and unobservable entities is necessary.

Dewey criticized the reflex arc on several grounds. First, events (sensory stimulus, central response, and act) are artificially separated for purposes of analysis. “The reflex arc”, Dewey wrote, “is not a comprehensive, or organic unity, but a patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied processes” ( RAC , EW5: 97). Second, the model falsifies genuine interaction; organisms do not passively receive stimuli and then actively respond; rather, organisms continuously interact with environments in cumulative and modifying ways. The child encountering a candle is already actively exploring, anticipating; noticing a flame modifies ongoing actions. “The real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light” ( RAC , EW5: 97). Third, the model too rigidly designates certain events ( the stimulus, the response); it reifies them and ignores a wider, ongoing matrix of activity. Effectively, Dewey was pointing out the ironic fact that the reflex arc model — intending to shed metaphysical assumptions — was inadvertently creating new ones. We are seeking to discover, Dewey argued, “what stimulus or sensation, what movement and response mean ” and we are finding that “they mean distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence ” ( RAC , EW5: 102; emphasis mine). His suggestion is pragmatic; rather than an underlying reality ( pure stimulus, pure response), psychology should look to meanings. Pragmatically, then, terms such as stimulus, response, sensation, and movement “mean distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence” ( RAC , EW5: 102). Meanings of terms are understood once they are seen as functional acts in a dynamic context that includes aims and interests. [ 4 ]

Dewey’s critique and reconstruction of the reflex arc presaged other important developments in his pragmatism. The wider lesson was the need to pay greater attention to context and function, and he applied it over his career to science more broadly, and to logic and mathematics. This was a warning not to mistake analyses’ eventual outcomes as evidence for already-existing entities. [ 5 ] It was also a reminder that specific applications of theory earned salience by their value in a longer temporal context, checked both prospectively and retrospectively.

Rather than recount Dewey’s extensive reconstruction of the human self, here is a cursory review to illustrate how he developed some basic notions: instincts/impulses, perceptions, sensations, habits, emotions, sentiency, consciousness, and mind.

James had already attacked attempts to explain complex, developed behavior by reference to preexisting impulses and instincts (e.g., “Habit”, James 1890: chapter 4); Dewey continued the assault. Such explanations fail to consider instinct’s plastic and pliable character. Across a variety of individuals, instincts considered simple or basic are anything but—they blossom into many different habits and customs. [ 6 ] Also, instincts are not pushing an essentially passive creature, but are actively taken up in diverse circumstances, for diverse purposes. “Instinct”, like “stimulus”, has meaning depending upon contextual factors which may include biological and socio-linguistic responses. There is no psychology without social psychology, no plausible inquiry into pure, biological instincts (or other “natural” powers) without consideration of social and environmental factors, let alone the particularities of a given inquiry. As interactive phenomena-in-environment, instincts/impulses are better framed as transactions ( HNC , MW14: 66).

Dewey’s argument about instincts applied to perception and sensation as well — do not base an empirical science on unquestioned, metaphysical posits, and do not rely upon strictly analytical methods that use simple elements to build up complex behavior. Too often, such methods are inadequate to explain psychological phenomena. Accordingly, Dewey attacked the then-common view that a perception (1) was simply and externally caused, (2) completely occupied a mental state, and (3) was passively received into an empty mental space.

Such elements grow out of an erroneous “psychophysical dualism” that radically separates perceiver from world. Consider (1), perception as causation. Perception as simply and externally caused is contravened by the Darwinian, ecological model. There, organism-environment interactions include, but are not ontologically reducible to , “minds”, “bodies”, and their impingements— the so-called “impressions” and “ideas” of modern philosophy. We do encounter surprising, unbidden events but such occurrences do not justify leaping to metaphysical conclusions, that there is a world “out there” and a mind “in here”.

While experience is profoundly qualitative, qualities are never simply received nor are they contextless. This new view of qualities rejects the longstanding dualism between “objective” and “subjective”. A lemon’s “yellowness” or “tartness” are neither in a perceiver nor in a lemon; each quality emerges from complex interactions that can later be characterized ( as “tartness”) for reasons germane to the inquiry. Dewey wrote,

The qualities never were ‘in’ the organism; they always were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake. ( EN , LW1: 198–199)

Thus, as discriminated, perceptions and qualities are made in inquiry and language, not reports of ontological entities that are simple, discrete, or ultimate. “Perception”, then, is shorthand for more complicated interacting events. “Red” abstracts from a more complex experience (e.g., red-car-merging-into-my-lane), and the pragmatic question becomes, What is the function of this abstraction? How does it mediate thought or action for future experiences? (“A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception”, LW2: 51; EN , LW1: 198–199)

Regarding (2), perceptions pervading mental states, Dewey echoes James in “The Stream of Thought” (James 1890: chapter 9). While a perception may occupy mental focus, there is also an attendant “fringe” which contributes contrast and creates, in the wider situation, an “underlying qualitative character” (“Qualitative Thought”, LW5: 238 fn. 1). The aforementioned “tartness” of the lemon relies for its character upon a slew of “fringe” conditions (e.g., immediate past flavors, gustatory anticipations, etc.).

Finally, regarding passive reception (3), perception is already a “taking up” by organisms already functioning in situations; there is no instantaneous and passive apprehension of stimuli. Taking up always means selectivity, a process of adjustment that take some time. Perception is never naïve, never a confrontation with some “given” content already imbued with inherent meaning. Long before Wilfred Sellars (see entry on Sellars ) dismissed the passive-perception-encounter as modern empiricism’s “Myth of the Given”, Dewey had rebuked such claims. All seeing is seeing as —adjustments within larger acts. These habits of adjustment can change (subsequent selections and interpretations are modified), so what is perceived can shift ( DE , MW9: 346).

The 1896 “Reflex Arc” paper argued that simpler constituents are insufficient to explain complex behavior; Dewey found that the “act” provided a better starting point ( HNC , MW14: 105). Acts help organisms cope with their environment; they direct movement. Acts exhibit selectivity and express interest, which make things meaningful. Our ancestors’ selective acts to satisfy instinctive hunger resulted in choosing certain foods (safe) over others. Over time, more elaborate interest in food becomes social norms (dining, e.g.) and aesthetic expectations (cuisine).

Following James and Peirce, Dewey integrates “habit” deeply into his philosophy, using it to explain various dimensions of human experience (biological, ethical, political, and aesthetic) as manifested in complex and social behaviors—walking, talking, cooking, conversing. [ 7 ] Habits are complex, composed of acts which unfold in time. Acts may begin with instinct borne of need and muddle toward reintegration and satisfaction. To become a habit, an act-series changes gradually and cumulatively; one act leads to the next. “Habit” emerges when acts cumulatively link to structure experience. Habit, Dewey wrote, “is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts” ( HNC , MW14: 32). Such “ways” draw on past experiences, including social and linguistic interaction. Habits shared by groups are “customs”.

Dewey challenged assumptions about the routine nature of habits. Habits may become routine, but are not strictly automatic or insulated from conscious reformulation. Indeed, they cannot be literally automatic because every situation is somehow new. Thus, the same exact acts never repeat. Unlike machine routines, organic habits remain plastic, changeable. Habitually eating sweets is subject to contingency (toothache) and modification (restraint); thus, conscious reflection is the first stage of habits’ revision.

He also challenged the notion that habits were dormant powers, waiting to be invoked. Instead, habits are “energetic and dominating ways of acting” determining what we do and are: “All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self” ( HNC , MW14: 22, 21). Habits are not individual possessions or inner forces; rather, they are transactions between organisms and environments, functions making adaptation or reconstruction possible.

Habits enter into the constitution of the situation; they are in and of it, not, so far as it is concerned, something outside of it. (“Brief Studies in Realism”, MW6: 120)

Because situations are cultural as well as bio-physical, habits are ineliminably social. So-called “individual” habits emerge within the social world of friends, family, home, work, media, etc. Change of habit, then, is not a project of invoking sheer willpower, but rather one of intelligent inquiry into relevant, frequently wider and social, conditions (psychological, sociological, economic, etc.).

Dewey redescribed “emotion” as he did “habit” — a basic form of involvement in “coordinated circuits” of activity. But while habits are controlled responses to problematic situations, emotion is not predominantly controlled or organized; emotion is an organism’s “perturbation from clash or failure of habit” ( HNC , MW14: 54). As with the other psychological accounts, Dewey reconstructs emotion as transactional with other experiences (also typically analyzed as discrete — “rational,” “physical,” etc.).

Dewey’s account draws upon Darwin and James. Darwin argued that internal emotional states cause organic expressions which, depending on their survival value, may be subject to natural selection. James sought to decrease the distance between emotion and accompanying bodily expression. In cases of emotion, a perception excites a pre- organized physiological mechanism; recognizing such changes just is the emotional experience: “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike” (James 1890 [1981: 450]). Dewey’s “The Theory of Emotion” (1894b & 1895, EW4) pushed James’ point further, toward an integrated whole (feeling-and-expression). Being sad is not merely feeling sad or acting sad but is the purposive organism’s overall experience. In effect, Dewey is gently correcting James’ (1890) reiteration of mind-body dualism. To understand emotion, we must see that “the mode of behavior is the primary thing” (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 174). Like habits, emotions are not private possessions but emerge from the dynamic organism-environment complex; emotions are “called out by objects, physical and personal” as an intentional “response to an objective situation” ( EN , LW1: 292). As I encounter a strange dog, I am perplexed about how to react; usual habits are inhibited and there is emotion. (“The Theory of Emotion”, EW4: 182) We may say emotions are intentional insofar as they are “ to or from or about something objective, whether in fact or in idea” and not merely reactions “in the head” ( AE , LW10: 72).

Philosophically, emotion is a central feature of Dewey’s critique of traditional epistemology and metaphysics. By pursuing simple or pure rational access (to truth, reality) such systems misrepresent and castigate emotion as distraction, confused thought, or bodily interference; naturally, emotion becomes something needing to be suppressed, controlled, or bracketed. For Dewey, emotion is courses through individuals (reasoning, acting) and social groups (creating cultural meanings). He connects the traditional balkanization of emotion to non-philosophical motives, such as the segregation of leisure from labor and men from women. On Dewey’s reading, traditional rationalistic approaches require not just logical but moral critique.

2.7 Sentiency, Mind, and Consciousness

Dewey’s accounts of sentiency, mind, and consciousness build upon those of impulse, perception, act, habit, and emotion. A cursory view completes this sketch of Dewey’s psychology.

As with other psychic phenomena, sentience emerges through organism-environment transactions. Creatures seek to satisfy needs and escape peril; when precarity disrupts stability a struggle to reestablish balance begins, and what follows is adjustment of self, environment, or both. Sometimes previously successful methods (pre-organized responses) fail, and we become ambivalent. Divided against ourselves about what to do next, it proves advantageous to inhibit practiced responses (look before leaping). It is this inhibitory pause of action that, Dewey wrote, “introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation” ( EN , LW1: 237). In other words, inhibition makes new ways of considering alternatives possible, imbuing crude, physical situations with new meaning. Thus, Dewey wrote, sentiency or feeling

is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction. ( EN , LW1: 204)

At this stage, the new relationships are not yet known ; they do, however, provide the conditions for knowing. Symbolization, language, liberates these now-noticed relationships using tools of abstraction, memory, and imagination ( EN , LW1: 199).

Dewey rejected traditional accounts of mind-as-substance (or container) and more contemporary reductions of mind to brain states ( EN , LW1: 224–225). Rather, mind is activity, a range of dynamic processes of interaction between organism and world. Language offers some clues to the diversity of ways we can think of mind: as memory (I am re mind ed of X); as attention (I keep her in mind , I mind my manners); as purpose (I have an aim in mind ); as care or solicitude (I mind the child); as heed (I mind the traffic stop). “Mind”, then, ranges over many activities: intellectual, affectional, volitional, or purposeful. It is

primarily a verb…[that] denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional. It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups. ( AE , LW10: 267–68)

As Wittgenstein ( entry on Wittgenstein, section on rule-following and private language ) pointed out 30 years later, no private language (see entry on private language ) is possible given this account of meaning. While meanings might be privately entertained, they are not privately invented; meanings are social and emerge from symbol systems arising through collective communication and action ( EN , LW1: 147).

Active, complex animals are sentient due to the variety of distinctive connections they have with their environment. But “mentality” (mindfulness) arises due to the eventual ability to recognize and use meaningful signs. With language, creatures can identify and differentiate feelings as feelings, objects as objects, etc.

Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially and proleptically. With language they are discriminated and identified. They are then “objectified”; they are immediate traits of things. ( EN , LW1: 198)

The bull’s charge is stimulated by the red flag, but the automobile driver takes the red stoplight as a sign.

Dewey thus de-divinized mind while accentuating new aspects of mind’s significance. No longer our spark of divinity, as some ancients held, mind is also no mere ghost in a machine. Mind is vital , investigating problems and inventing tools, aims, and ideals. Mind bridges past and future, an “agency of novel reconstruction of a pre- existing order” ( EN , LW1: 168).

Like mind, consciousness is also activity—the brisk transitioning of felt, qualitative events. Profoundly influenced by James’s metaphor of consciousness as a constantly moving “stream of thought” ( FAE , LW5: 157), Dewey did not conclude that an account of consciousness could be adequately captured in words. Talk about consciousness is always elliptical—it is “vivid” or “conspicuous” or “dull”—always falling shy of the phenomenon. Because the experience of consciousness is ever-evanescent, we cannot fix it as with objects of our attention— for example, “powers”, “things”, or “causes”. Dewey, then, evokes but does not define consciousness. Consider these contrasts in Experience and Nature , ( EN , LW1: 230)

As the comparison makes obvious, psychological life is processual and active; accordingly, Dewey describes consciousness in terms suiting dynamic organisms. Consciousness is thinking-in-motion, ever-reconfiguring series of events that are felt as qualitative experience proceeds. If mind is a “stock” of meanings, consciousness is the realization-and-reconstruction of meanings, reconstructions which can reorganize and redirect activity ( EN , LW1: 233).

Dewey occasionally tried to convey his notion of consciousness performatively, inviting readers to reflect about consciousness while they were reading about it. Here, again, “focus” and “fringe” play a crucial role. ( EN , LW1: 231). As physical balance controls walking, mental meanings adjust and direct ongoing foci and interpretation.

3. Experience and Metaphysics

Dewey’s notion of “experience” evolved over the course of his career. Initially, it contributed to his idealism and psychology. After he developed instrumentalism in Chicago during the 1890’s, Dewey moved to Columbia, revising and expanding the concept in 1905 with his historically significant “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” ( PIE , MW3). “The Subject-matter of Metaphysical Inquiry” (1915, MW8) and the “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic (1916, MW10) developed the concept, showing “experience” did more than rebut subjectivism in psychology, but was also central to his metaphysical accounts of existence and nature (Dykhuizen 1973: 175–76). This was concretized in Dewey’s 1923 Carus Lectures, revised and expanded as Experience and Nature (1925, revised edition, 1929; EN , LW1). Further extensions and elaborations followed, notably in Art as Experience (1934b, AE , LW10). [ 8 ]

Pivotal to his oeuvre, interested readers should track experience across this entry; here, the focus will be on Dewey’s philosophical method and metaphysics.

Why was experience so important that it permeated Dewey’s approach to philosophy? Three influences were paramount. First, Dewey inherited Darwin’s idea of nature as a complex congeries of changing, transactional processes without fixed ends; in this context, experience means the undergoing and doing of organisms-in-environments, “a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and readjustments, of coordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness” (“A Short Catechism Concerning Truth”, MW6: 5). Second, Dewey took from James a radically empirical approach to philosophy—the insistence that perspectival experience, (e.g., the personal , emotional , or temperamental ) was philosophically relevant, including to abstract and logical theories. Finally, Dewey accepted Hegel’s emphasis on experience beyond the subjective consciousness — manifest in social, historical, and cultural modes. The self is constituted through experiential transactions with the community, and this vitiates the Cartesian model of simple, atomic selves (and any methods based upon that presumption). Understood this way, philosophy starts where we start, personally — with complex, symbolic, and cultural forms.

These influences, plus Dewey’s own inquiries, convinced him “experience” was the linch-pin to a broader theory of human beings and the natural world. This renewed focus on experience also amounted to a metaphilosophy; it discarded the assumption that philosophy gave special insights into ultimate truth or reality. Philosophy was equipment for living.

As both sheer terminology and as Dewey deployed it, “experience” generated much confusion and debate. Dewey commented about this toward the end of his life. [ 9 ] Decades later, one of Dewey’s foremost philosophical celebrants, Richard Rorty, lambasted Dewey for both the term and (what Rorty perceived as) Dewey’s intentions. [ 10 ] (Rorty 1977, 1995, 2006) (Rorty 1977, 1995, 2006) Nevertheless, since the term lives on, both in Dewey’s work and in everyday discourse, it deserves continued analysis.

Understanding Dewey’s view of experience requires, first, some notion of what he rejected. It was typical for many philosophers to construe experience narrowly, as the private contents of consciousness. These might be perceptions (sensing), or reflections (calculating, associating, imagining) done by the subjective mind. Some, such as Plato and Descartes, denigrated experience as a flux which confused or diverted rational inquiry. Others, such as Hume and Locke, thought experience (as atomic sensations) provided the mind at least some resources for knowing, but with limits. All agreed that percepts and concepts were different and in tension; they agreed that sensation was perspectival and context-relative; they also agreed that this relativity problematized the assumed mission of philosophy—to know with certainty—and differed only about the degree of the problem.

Dewey disputed the empiricist conviction that sensations are categorically separable contents of consciousness. This belief produced a “whole epistemological industry” devoted to the general problem of “correspondence” and a host of specific puzzles (about the existence of an external world, other minds, free will, etc.) (“Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth”, LW14: 179). This “industry” isolates philosophy from empirically informed accounts of experience and from pressing, practical problems. Regarding mental privacy, Dewey argued that while we have episodes of what might be called mental interiority, it is a later development: “Personality, selfhood, subjectivity, are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social” ( EN , LW1: 162; see also 178–79). Regarding sensorial atomicity, discussed previously in the section on psychology ,

Dewey explained sensation as embedded in a larger sensori-motor circuit, a transaction which should not be quarantined to any single phase—nor to consciousness.

Dewey levied similar criticisms against traditional accounts of reflective thought. He denied a substantial view of mind, especially one ontological apart from body, history, or culture. Reasoning is one function of mind, not the exercise of a separate “faculty”. There is no reason to purify reasoning of feeling, either; reasoning is always permeated with feelings and practical exigencies. It may be practical, at times to “bracket out” a feeling or exigency when they interfere with mental calculating, but it is nevertheless true that reasoning subsists in a wider and “qualitative world” (“Psychology and Work”, LW5: 243).

We have, already, an outline of Dewey’s view: experience is processual, transactional, socially mediated, and not categorically prefigured as “rational” or “emotional”. We add three additional, positive characterizations of experience: first, as experimental ; second, as primary (“had”) or secondary (“known”); and third, as methodological .

First, experience exhibits a fundamentally experimental character. Dewey’s saw, during decades in education, how children’s experiences alternate between acting and being acted upon. Such phases become “experimental” when agents (students) consciously relate what is tried with what eventuates as they come to understand which actions are significant for controlling future events. When experience is experimental, we name the outcome “learning”. [ 11 ]

Second, most of experience is not known or reflective; it is barely regulated or reflected upon. As such, it is “felt” or “had”. Dewey also calls such experience direct and primary. The other kind experience, the focus of philosophy, is characterized by “knowing” or mediation-by-reflection. Dewey labels these “indirect”, “secondary”, or “known”. Known experience abstracts from had (or direct) experience purposefully and selectively, isolating certain relations or connections. The Quest for Certainty provides a cogent description:

[E]xperienced situations come about in two ways and are of two distinct types. Some take place with only a minimum of regulation, with little foresight, preparation and intent. Others occur because, in part, of the prior occurrence of intelligent action. Both kinds are had ; they are undergone, enjoyed or suffered. The first are not known; they are not understood; they are dispensations of fortune or providence. The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that present the funded outcome of operations that substitute definite continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the fragmentary quality due to isolation. ( QC , LW4: 194) [ 12 ]

Dewey’s had/known distinction describes existence without presupposing a dualism between appearance/reality. Much can be unknown without therefore being illusory or merely apparent. Pace Plato, we are not trapped in a cave of illusions with reason as our only escape. We cope with a world that is often confusing or opaque; as we try to make meaning, we keep track of ideas especially helpful predicting and controlling circumstances. Some other experiences are simply enjoyed without making them less real .

Third, Dewey’s renewed and expanded focus on experience was methodological. This requires some unpacking. Dewey’s distinction between experience “had” and “known” was more than a phenomenological observation; it was directive about how philosophy should be done. (We can see this kind of move embedded in Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and James’s radical empiricism.) For Dewey, experience is not just “stuff” presented to (or witnessed by) consciousness; experience is activity, engagement with life. Philosophy, too, is a form of lived activity, which means that doing philosophy properly requires a different starting point. In life, even philosophers do not start with a theory. Theories undoubtedly enter in, but not first. “The vine of pendant theory”, Dewey wrote about the denotative method, “is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter” ( EN , LW1: 11; see also 386). [ 13 ]

Following James and Peirce, Dewey is challenging the theoretical assumptions of previous philosophies—“substances”, “mind vs. body”, “pleasure as natural aim”, and so on. Dewey’s philosophical work did critique those concepts, but the point here is metaphilosophical—that we do not start with what is abstract, conceptual. Dewey’s concern with such theoretical starting points was that they isolate philosophy from a more thoroughgoing empiricism capable of engaging actual human problems.

“Experience as method”, then, is both a warning and a positive recommendation. It warns philosophers to recognize that while intellectual terms may seem “original, primitive and simple” they should be understood as the historically and normatively situated “products of discrimination and classification” ( EN , LW1: 386; see also 371–372, 375). “Knowing” does not stand beyond experience or nature, but is an activity with its own standpoint and qualitative character. Whatever theory is eventually devised, a genuinely experiential method will check it against ordinary experience ( EN , LW1: 26). [ 14 ]

The experiential or denotative method tells us that we must go behind the refinements and elaborations of reflective experience to the gross and compulsory things of our doings, enjoyments and sufferings—to the things that force us to labor, that satisfy needs, that surprise us with beauty, that compel obedience under penalty. ( EN , LW1: 375–76)

Such a method is critical because it forces inquirers to check previous interpretations and judgments against their live encounters in a new situation ( EN , LW1: 364). Philosophy has to engage with new subject matters (and theories), accept challenges beyond the traditional “problems of philosophy”, and embrace the idea that “the starting point is the actually problematic ” ( EN , LW1: 61).

Much that is central to Dewey’s metaphysics has been discussed—the transactional organism-environment setting, mind, consciousness, and experience. Accordingly, this section will examine how Dewey conceived of “metaphysics”, the main project in Experience and Nature , how he attempted to reconnect empirical metaphysics with an ancient idea (philosophy as wisdom), and some of the criticisms his conception received.

Debate over a definite meaning for the term “metaphysics”, was as alive in Dewey’s day as in ours. From the beginning, Dewey sought to critique and reconstruct metaphysical concepts (e.g., reality, self, consciousness, time, necessity, and individuality) and systems (e.g., Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel). Like his fellow pragmatists Peirce, James, and Mead, Dewey wished to transform not eradicate metaphysics. Dewey’s early metaphysical views were closest to idealism, but engagements with experimental science and instrumentalism convinced him to abandon the traditional goal of ultimate and complete accounts of reality.

His interest in metaphysics was revivified at Columbia by colleague F. J. E. Woodbridge, who thought metaphysics could be done in a “descriptive” rather than an extra-physical way (“Biography of John Dewey”, in Schilpp 1939: 36). While many of Dewey’s most important metaphysical works focused on experience (discussed above), special attention is due to “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” (1905, PIE , MW3), “The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry” (1915, MW8), and his “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic (1916c, MW10). [ 15 ] These were all vital precursors to his magnum opus, Experience and Nature . EN ’s final chapters, dealing with art and consummatory experience, were further developed in Art as Experience (1934b, LW10), a text containing additional and significant metaphysical discussions.

While labels tend to obscure what was innovative in his work, it is safe to say Dewey composed a realist, naturalistic, non-reductive, emergentist, process metaphysics. [ 16 ] He described nature’s most general features (“generic traits”) while trying to do empirical justice to the world as encountered. His account also aimed to remain fallible and useful for future researchers seeking to improve life with philosophy. In the end, Dewey described his efforts as a “metaphysics” and as a “system”: “the hanging together of various problems and various hypotheses in a perspective” (“Nature in Experience”, LW14: 141–142). He did not propose a metaphysics from a god’s eye point of view, but one informed and motivated by “a definite point of view” and linked to the contemporary, human world (“Half-hearted Naturalism”, LW3: 75–76 ).

Experience and Nature provides extended criticism of past metaphysical approaches, especially their quest for certainty and assumption of an Appearance/Reality framework, and a positive, general theory regarding how human existence is situated in nature. It is empirical, descriptive, and hypothetical, eschewing claims of special access beyond “experience in unsophisticated forms”. Such experience, Dewey argued, gives us “evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics” ( EN , LW1: 47). EN looks to existing characteristics of human culture, anthropologically, to see what they reveal, more generally, about nature. One significant product is Dewey’s isolation, analysis, and description of “generic traits of existence” and their relations to one another.

While this entry lacks space for even a bare summary, it is noteworthy that EN begins with an extensive discussion of method and experience as a new starting point for philosophy. An extensive presentation of the generic traits follows, which later informs discussions about science, technology, body, mind, language, art, and value. While the traits are not presented systematically (à la other metaphysicians such as Spinoza or Whitehead) there is a progression moving from the more basic to the more complex. [ 17 ]

One might ask, How can metaphysics contribute to the world beyond academic philosophy? Dewey aimed to return philosophy to an older, ancient mission—the pursuit of wisdom. And while Dewey describes philosophy as inherently critical, a “criticism of criticisms”, it still raises questions about the objectives of an empirical, hypothetical, naturalistic metaphysics? ( EN , LW1: 298) Dewey raises the issue, himself, prophylactically:

As a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differentiation into physical and mental, [metaphysics] seems to have nothing to do with criticism and choice, with an effective love of wisdom. ( EN , LW1: 308)

His answer comes by way of an account of existence’s generic traits, which purportedly provides “a ground-map of the province of criticism, establishing base lines to be employed in more intricate triangulations” ( EN , LW1: 308). [ 18 ] A new metaphysics, like a new map, offers new possibilities for framing and explaining the world. This could discredit entrenched truisms—e.g., men are rational, women are emotional, humans are intelligent, animals are dumb, etc.— or facilitate new connections and new meanings. As Dewey saw it, the long tradition of philosophy had rendered too basic conceptual tools (kinds, categories, dualisms, aims, and values) unassailable; his reconsideration offered a new basis for metaphysics, one which would be relevant and revisable.

"Map-making" suggested a new way to do metaphysics and a new role for philosophers. Philosophers, on this model, become “liaison officers”, intermediators able to facilitate communication between those speaking at cross purposes or in different jargons ( EN , LW1: 306). Drawing from contemporary circumstances and purposes, the maps drawn could not promise certainty or permanency but would need to be redrawn according to changing needs and purposes. Their test, as with the rest of Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, would lay in their capacity to sharpen criticisms and secure values.

Dewey received and responded to many criticisms of his metaphysical views. Critics often overlooked that his aim was to undercut prevailing metaphysical genres; often, his view was rashly consigned to some other extant camp. (He was characterized, variously, as a realist, idealist, relativist, subjectivist, etc. See Hildebrand 2003.) One recurrent criticism was that his statement in PIE (that “things are what they are experienced as” ) could not yield a metaphysics because it merely reported subjective and immediate experience; such reports, the criticism went, prevented a more mediated and (properly) objective account. Twenty years later, EN received similar reactions by critics who attacked Dewey’s non-binary approach to experience and nature. [ 19 ]

Subsequent criticisms focused upon Dewey’s supposed neglect of a tension between “qualities” vs. “relations”. Qualities, the argument ran, are immediate, whereas relations are mediate; how could Dewey claim they coexist in the same item of experience? This seemed to embody a contradiction. [ 20 ] Richard Bernstein (1961) seized on this issue, and claimed that Dewey harbored two irreconcilable strains, a “metaphysical strain” and a “phenomenological strain”, but failed to sufficiently account for them with his “principle of continuity”. One response to Bernstein argued that his critique unwittingly reenacted the very spectatorial standpoint Dewey’s experiential starting point seeking to overcome. [ 21 ]

In recent years, some debate whether Dewey should have engaged in metaphysics at all. Richard Rorty and Charlene Haddock Seigfried argued that Dewey’s critique of traditional metaphysics was as far as he should have gone; his further efforts diverted him from more important ethical work (Seigfried 2001a, 2004) or plunged him into foundationalist projects previously disavowed (“Dewey’s Metaphysics” in Rorty 1977). Defenders argue that Dewey’s genuinely new approach to metaphysics avoids old problems while contributing something salutary to culture at large (Myers 2020, Garrison 2005, Boisvert 1998a, Alexander 2020).

4. Inquiry and Knowledge

The interactional, organic model Dewey developed in his psychology informed his theories of learning and knowledge. Within this framework, a range of traditional epistemological proposals and puzzles (premised on metaphysical divisions such as appearance/reality, mind/world) lost credibility. “So far as the question of the relation of the self to known objects is concerned”, Dewey wrote, “knowing is but one special case of the agent-patient, of the behaver-enjoyer-sufferer situation” (“Brief Studies in Realism”, MW6: 120). As with psychology, Dewey’s wholesale repudiation of the traditional metaphysical framework required extensive reconstruction in every other area; “instrumentalism” was one popular name for Dewey’s reconstruction of epistemology (or “theory of inquiry”, as Dewey preferred). [ 22 ]

As with his earlier functional approach to psychology, Dewey’s instrumentalism leveraged Darwin to dissolve entrenched divisions between, for example, realism/idealism, science/religion, and empiricism/rationalism. Change and transformation become natural features of the actual world, and knowledge and logic are recast as ways to adapt, survive, and thrive. The better way to understand reasoning is by looking to the dynamic and biological world which harbors it, rather than the traditional paradigms of static precision, physics or mathematics. [ 23 ]

Early statements of instrumentalism (and definitive breaks by Dewey with Hegelian logic) may be seen in “Some Stages of Logical Thought” (Dewey 1900 [1916], MW1); that essay follows Peirce ( entry on Peirce section on pragmatism, pragmaticism, and the scientific method ], [ 24 ] especially the well known 1877–78 articles championing the larger framework of scientific thinking, namely the “doubt-inquiry process” (MW1: 173; see also Peirce 1877, 1878). This account is developed in Studies in Logical Theory (Dewey 1903b, MW2), by Dewey and his collaborators at Chicago. In the work, Dewey acknowledges a “preeminent obligation” to James (Perry 1935: 308–309). [ 25 ]

Studies criticizes transcendentalist logic extensively, concluding that logic should not assume either thought or reality’s existence in general but should rest content with the function or use of ideas in experience :

The test of validity of [an] idea is its functional or instrumental use in effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a relatively integrated one. ( Studies , MW2: 359)

Thus, instrumentalism abandons all psycho-physical dualisms and all correspondentist theories of knowing. Dewey wrote,

In the logical process the datum is not just external existence, and the idea mere psychical existence. Both are modes of existence—one of given existence, the other of possible , of inferred existence….In other words, datum and ideatum are divisions of labor, cooperative instrumentalities, for economical dealing with the problem of the maintenance of the integrity of experience. ( Studies , MW2: 339–340)

While instrumentalism was of a piece with Dewey’s other views, it was also responding to dialectic within philosophy’s epistemological positions, particularly between British empiricism, rationalism (see entry on rationalism vs. empiricism ), and the Kantian synthesis.

Classical empiricists insisted that sensory experience provided the origins of knowledge. They were motivated, in part, by the concern that rationalistic accounts effort to link knowledge with thought alone (away from particular sense stimuli), were too unchecked. Without the constraints of sense experience, philosophy was doomed to keep producing wildly divergent systems. Classical empiricists, like Dewey, shared a genuine interest in scientific progress; such progress required, first, escape from unfettered speculation. The account developed by figures such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume claimed that (in Locke’s version) the world writes on a receptive blank slate, the mind, in the language of ideas. Using faculties of memory, association, and imagination, knowledge is generated; extension of knowledge must, on this account, be traceable to origination in sense experience.

Rationalists, in contrast, argued that knowledge was both abstract and deductively certain. Sensory experiences are fluid, individualized, and permeated by the relativity borne of innumerable external conditions. How could a philosophical account of genuine knowledge—necessarily certain, self-evident, and unchanging—be derived using sensorial flux? No, knowledge must be derived from inner and certain concepts. Knowledge, then, is produced by an immaterial entity, mind, with an innate power to reason, independent of the contingencies of practical ends and physical bodies.

Kant responded to the empiricist-rationalist tension by reigning in their ambitions; philosophy must stop attempting to transcend the limits of thought and experience. Philosophy’s more modest and proper aspiration is to discover what can be known in the phenomenal world. Kant, then, refused an originary role to either percepts or concepts, arguing that sense and reason are co-constitutive of knowledge. More important, Kant argued for mind as systematizing and constructive.

Dewey’s response to this three-way epistemological conflict was foreshadowed in the earlier discussion of the “Reflex Arc” paper and the idea of sensori-motor circuits. For Dewey, any proposal premised on a disconnected mind and body—or upon one assuming that stimuli (causes, impressions, or what have you) were atomic and in need of synthesis—was a non-starter. [ 26 ]

Accepting some of Kant’s criticisms of rationalism and empiricism, Dewey rejected Kant’s propagation of several significant but unjustified assumptions: that knowledge must be certain; that nature and intellect were categorically distinct; and that it was justified to posit a noumenal realm (things-in-themselves). Dewey also questioned Kant’s supposition that the sensations ingredient to knowledge are initially inchoate; such a claim was, Dewey believed, driven by Kant’s architectonic. Methodologically, perhaps most significantly, Dewey followed James in criticizing Kant’s standpoint as too spectatorial. From a pragmatic, Jamesean, “radical empiricist” standpoint, one may accept a wide variety of phenomenon (clear, vague, felt, remembered, anticipated, etc.) as real even though they are not known .

Thus, for Dewey, Kant falls short of the philosophical perspective needed to synthesize perception and conception, nature and reason, practice and theory. While Kant’s model of an active and structuring mind was a clear advance over passive ones, it retained the retrograde picture of knowledge as reality’s faithful mirror. Kant failed to see knowledge as a dynamic instrument for managing (predicting, controlling, guiding) future experience. This pragmatic conception of knowledge judges it as one would an eye or hand, gauging how it affects the organism’s ability to cope:

What measures [knowledge’s] value, its correctness and truth, is the degree of its availability for conducting to a successful issue the activities of living beings. (“The Bearings of Pragmatism Upon Education”, in MW4: 180)

Thus, Dewey replaced Kant’s mind-centered system with one centered upon experience-nature transactions—“a reversal”, Dewey wrote, “comparable to a Copernican revolution” ( QC , LW4: 232).

In the context of instrumentalism, what is “logic” and “epistemology”? Dewey does not discard these but insists on a more empirical approach. How do reasoning and learning actually happen? [ 27 ] Dewey comprehensively addresses logic in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry ( LTI , LW12), which calls logic the “inquiry into inquiry”. LTI attempts to systematically collect, organize, and explicate the actual conditions of different kinds of inquiry; the aim, previewed in his 1917 “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, is pragmatic and ameliorative: to provide an “important aid in proper guidance of further attempts at knowing” (MW10: 23).

Throughout his career, Dewey described the processes and patterns evinced in active problem solving. Here, we consider three: inquiry, knowledge, and truth. There is, Dewey argued, a “pattern of inquiry” which prevails in problem solving. “Analysis of Reflective Thinking” (1933, LW8) and LTI (LW12) describes five phases. Disavowing the usual divide between emotion and reason, inquiry begins (1) with a feeling of something amiss, a unique and particular doubtfulness; this feeling endures as a pervasive quality imbued in inquiry and serves as a kind of “guide” to subsequent phases. Next, because what is initially present is indeterminate, (2) a problem must be specifically formulated; note that problems do not preexist inquiry, as typically assumed. [ 28 ] Next, (3) a hypothesis is constructed, one which imaginatively utilizes both theoretical ideas and perceptual facts in order to forecast possible consequences of eventual operations. Next, (4) one reasons through the meanings involved in the hypothesis, estimating implications or possible contradictions; frequently, discoveries here direct one return to an earlier phase (to reformulate the hypothesis or redescribe the problem). [ 29 ] Finally, inquiry closes, (5) acting to evaluate and test the hypothesis; here, inquiry discovers whether a proposed solution resolves the problem, whether (in LTI ’s terminology) inquiry has converted an “indeterminate situation” into a “determinate one”.

The inquiry pattern Dewey sketched is schematic; actual cases of reasoning often lack such discreteness or linearity. Thus, the pattern is not a summary of how people always think but rather how exemplary cases of inquirential thinking unfold (e.g., in the empirical sciences).

Knowledge, on Dewey’s transactional model of inquiry, departs from tradition and brought to earth. “Knowledge, as an abstract term”, Dewey wrote,

is a name for the product of competent inquiries. Apart from this relation, its meaning is so empty that any content or filling may be arbitrarily poured in. ( LTI , LW12: 16)

To understand a product, one must understand the process; this is Dewey’s approach. By denying that knowledge is an isolated product, he effectively denies a metaphysics that makes mind- the-substance separate from everything else. He does not depreciate knowing as an activity , and strongly maintains that “intelligence” is crucial to mediating individual and societal conflicts. [ 30 ]

Truth is also radically reevaluated. Truth long connoted an ideal— an epistemic fixity (a correspondence, a coherence) capable of satisfying the need for further inquiry. Since this is not the actual situation human beings (or philosophy) inhabits, the ideal should be set aside. Still, Dewey was ever the (re)constructivist; in “Experience, Knowledge, and Value” (1939c) he provided an account. Truth no longer points toward something transcendental but toward the process of inquiry (“Experience, Knowledge, and Value”, LW14: 56–57). A proposition is “true” insofar as it serves as a reliable resource:

In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry. ( LTI , LW12: 16)

Truth is not beyond experience, but is an experienced relation, particularly one socially shared. In How We Think , Dewey wrote,

Truth, in final analysis, is the statement of things “as they are,” not as they are in the inane and desolate void of isolation from human concern, but as they are in a shared and progressive experience….Truth, truthfulness, transparent and brave publicity of intercourse, are the source and the reward of friendship. Truth is having things in common. ( HWT , MW6: 67; see also “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge”, 1910b, MW3: 118)

In Dewey’s instrumentalism, then, knowledge and truth are adjectival not nominative, describing a process which, as Peirce tells us, can persist as long as we do. “There is no belief so settled as not to be exposed to further inquiry” (LTI, LW12: 16). Words like “knowledge” and “truth” are honored because of their historic service as tools for past inquiries and their aid in securing values.

5. Philosophy of Education

Around the world, Dewey remains as well known for his educational theories (see entry on philosophy of education, section Rousseau, Dewey, and the progressive movement ) as for his philosophical ones. A closer look shows how often these theories align. Recognizing this, Dewey reflected that his 1916 magnum opus in education, Democracy and Education ( DE , MW9) “was for many years that [work] in which my philosophy, such as it is, was most fully expounded” ( FAE , LW5: 156). DE argued that philosophy itself could be understood as “the general theory of education”, avoiding further hyper-specialization and investing more earnestly in everyday problems.

This was a call to see philosophy from an educational standpoint:

Education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic discussions….The educational point of view enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice. If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education . ( DE , MW9: 338)

Dewey was active in education his entire life. Besides high school and college teaching, he devised curricula, established, reviewed and administered schools and departments of education, participated in collective organizing, consulted and lectured internationally, and wrote extensively on many facets of education. He established the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School as an experimental site for theories in instrumental logic and psychological functionalism. This school also became a site for democratic expression by the local community.

Dewey’s “Reflex Arc” paper applied functionalism to education. “Reflex” argued that human experience is not a disjointed sequence of fits and starts, but a developing circuit of activities. Framed this way, learning is a cumulative, progressive process where inquirers move from dissatisfying doubt toward satisfying resolutions of problems. “Reflex” also shows that the subject of a stimulus (e.g., the pupil) is not a passive recipient but an agent actively selecting stimuli within a larger field of activities.

Cognizance of these facts, Dewey argued, compelled educators to discard pedagogies based on the mind as “blank slate”. In The School and Society Dewey wrote, “the question of education is the question of taking hold of [children’s] activities, of giving them direction” (MW1: 25). How We Think (1910c, MW6) primarily aimed to help teachers apply instrumentalism. Overall, education’s intellectual goals would advance by acquainting children using the general intellectual habits of scientific inquiry.

The native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. ( HWT , MW6: 179)

These proposals entailed the revision of the teacher’s role; while teachers still had to know their subject matter, they also needed to understand students’ cultural and personal backgrounds. If learning was to incorporate actual problems, more careful integration of content with particular learners was needed. Motivational tactics also had to change. Rather than rewards or punishments, Deweyan teachers were to reimagine the whole learning environment, merging the school’s existing goals with pupils’ present interests. One strategy was to identify specific problems that could bridge curriculum and student and then formulate learning situations to exercise them. [ 31 ] This problem-centered approach was demanding, requiring teachers to train in subject matters, child psychology, and pedagogies for weaving these together. [ 32 ]

Dewey’s educational philosophy emerged amidst a fierce 1890’s debate between educational “romantics” and “traditionalists”. Romantics (also called “New” or “Progressive” education by Dewey), urged a “child- centered” approach; the child’s natural impulses provided education’s proper starting point. Education should not fetter creativity and growth, even if content must sometimes be attenuated. Traditionalists (called “Old” education by Dewey) pressed for “curriculum-centered” approaches. Children were empty cabinets curriculum fills with civilization’s contents; the main job of instruction was to ensure receptivity with discipline.

Dewey developed an interactional model to move beyond that debate, refusing to privilege either child or society. (See “My Pedagogic Creed”, 1897b, EW5; The School and Society , 1899, MW1; Democracy and Education , 1916b, MW9; Experience and Education , 1938b, LW13, etc.) While Romantics correctly identified the child (replete with instincts, powers, habits, and histories) as an indispensable starting point for pedagogy, Dewey denied that the child was the only starting point. Larger social groups (family, community, nation) have a legitimate stake in passing along extant interests, needs, and values as part of an educational synthesis.

Still, of these two approaches, Dewey more adamantly rejected traditionalists’ (overly) high premium on discipline and memorization. While recognizing the legitimacy of conveying content (facts, values), it is paramount that schools eschew indoctrination. Educating meant incorporating , giving wide latitude for unique individuals who, after all, would inherit and have dominion over the changing society. This is why who the child was mattered so much. Following colleague and lifelong friend G.H. Mead’s ideas about the social self, Dewey argued that schools had to become micro-communities to reflect children’s growing interests and needs. “The school cannot be a preparation for social life excepting as it reproduces, within itself, the typical conditions of social life” (“Ethical Principles Underlying Education”, 1897a, EW5: 61–62). [ 33 ]

Connecting child, school, and society aimed not only to improve pedagogy, but democracy as well. Because character, rights, and duties are informed by and contribute to the social realm, schools were critical sites to learn and experiment with democracy. Democratic life includes not only civics and economics, but epistemic and communicative habits as well: problem solving, compassionate imagination, creative expression, and civic self-governance. The range of roles a child might inhabit is vast; this creates a societal obligation to make education its highest political and economic priority. During WWII, Dewey wrote,

There will be almost a revolution in school education when study and learning are treated not as acquisition of what others know but as development of capital to be invested in eager alertness in observing and judging the conditions under which one lives. Yet until this happens, we shall be ill-prepared to deal with a world whose outstanding trait is change. (“Between Two Worlds”, 1944, LW17: 463)

Democracy is much more comprehensive than a form of government, it is “not an alternative to other principles of associated life [but] the idea of community life itself” ( PP , LW2: 328). Individuals exist in communities; as their lives change, needs and conflicts emerge that require intelligent management; we must make sense out of new experiences. Education empowers that by teaching the attitudes and habits (imaginative, empirical) that made the experimental sciences so successful. Dewey called these attitudes and habits “intelligence”. [ 34 ]

Informing these areas—science, education, and democratic life—is Dewey’s naturalism, which redirects hope away from what is immutable or ultimate (God, Nature, Reason, Ends) toward the human capacity to learn from experience. In “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” (1939b) Dewey wrote,

Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences. (“Creative Democracy”, LW14: 229)

Democracy’s success or failure rests on education. Education is most determinative of whether citizens develop the habits needed to investigate problematic beliefs and situations while communicating openly. While every culture aims to convey values and beliefs to the coming generation, the most important thing is to distinguish between education which inculcates collaborative and creative hypothesizing from education which foments obeisance to parochialism and dogma. This same caution applies to philosophy itself.

Dewey wrote and spoke extensively on ethics throughout his career; some writings were explicitly about ethics, but ethical analyses appear in works with other foci. [ 35 ] As elsewhere, Dewey critiques then reconstructs traditional views; he argued it is typical for traditional systems (e.g., teleological, deontological, or virtue-based) to seek comprehensive and monocausal accounts of, for example, ultimate aims, duties, or values. Such ideal theorizing is obligated to explain morality’s requirements for all individuals, actions, or characters.

Dewey argued for a more experimental approach. Rather than an ultimate explanatory account of moral life, ethics should describe intelligent methods for dealing with novel and morally perplexing situations. No ultimate values should be stipulated or sought. [ 36 ] The only value Dewey celebrated as (something like) ultimate was “growth”. [ 37 ] Ethics means inquiry into concrete, problematic conditions; such inquiry may use theories to inform hypotheses tested in experience. Reliable hypotheses may come to be called “knowledge”, but must, in the end, be considered fallible and revisable. Actual resolutions to moral problems typically point toward plural factors (aims, duties, virtues), rather than just one ( TIF , LW5). Moreover, actual conduct (including inquiry) is undertaken not by isolated, rational actors but by social beings. [ 38 ] “Conduct”, Dewey wrote,

is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical “ought” that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good. ( HNC , MW14: 16)

Dewey’s ethical theory, like those in education and politics, utilizes his transactional views of experience, habit, inquiry, and the communicative, social self. It also exemplifies his metaphysics — a world both precarious and stable, where conflict is natural and quests to ignore or permanently eradicate it are fantastical. [ 39 ] Conflict is a generic trait of life, not a defect; theories denying this tend to be so reductive and absolutist that they divorce inquiry from the essential details of concrete situations, cultures, and persons. Such strategies tend to fail. [ 40 ]

Progress in ethical theory, then, means inquiry that is more discriminating and revelatory of consequences and alternatives. [ 41 ] Improving inquiry requires better methods of deliberation; this means being open to contributions from many sources: sciences, social customs, jurisprudence, biographies, moral systems of the past. [ 42 ] Deliberation especially benefits from what Dewey called “dramatic rehearsal”, where imaginative enactment of possible scenarios can illuminate the emotional weight and color of potential ethical choices. [ 43 ]

For further details on Dewey’s ethics, see the entry Dewey’s moral philosophy by E. Anderson (2023) and Hildebrand (2018).

Dewey’s political philosophy, like other areas, builds on the idea that individuals are not self-subsistent social atoms but are constituted in social environments; it also builds on humans’ ability to inquire to solve problems in hypothetical and experimental ways. [ 44 ] As elsewhere, theory is instrumental; concepts do not uncover an underlying “reality,” but are functional (or not) in particular, practical circumstances. Concepts and theories in political theory are fallible and amenable to reconstruction. Dewey rejected approaches relying upon non-empirical, a priori assumptions (e.g., about human nature, progress, etc.) and those proposing ultimate, typically monocausal, explanations. His work criticized and reconstructed core concepts (individual, freedom, right, community, public, state, and democracy) along naturalist and experimentalist lines. Besides numerous articles (for academic and lay audiences), Dewey’s political thought is found in books including The Public and Its Problems (1927b, LW2), Individualism, Old and New (1930f, LW5), Liberalism and Social Action (1935, LW11), and Freedom and Culture (1939d, LW13). Because Democracy and Education (1916b, DE , MW9) emphasizes profound connections between education, society, and democratic habits—it also merits study as a “political” work.

Enormous changes occurred during Dewey’s lifetime, including massive US population growth, the rise of industrial, scientific, technological, and educational institutions, the American Civil War, two world wars, and a global economic depression. These events strained prevailing liberal theories, and Dewey labored to reconceive democracy and liberalism. “The frontier is moral, not physical”, Dewey urged, proposing that democracy was tantamount to a “way of life” which required continual renewal to survive. [ 45 ] Beyond governmental machinery (universal suffrage, recurring elections, political parties, trial by peers, etc.), he also characterized democracy as “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” ( DE , MW9: 93; see also, PP , LW2: 325). Such experience, expressed through collaborative inquiry, required intellectual and emotional competencies so that shared problems and value differences could be discussed and addressed. Ultimately, democracy requires faith that experience is a sufficient resource for future solutions, and that recourse to transcendent rules or aims can be outgrown. [ 46 ]

Dewey’s analysis of individualism arose from earlier academic interests and his sensitivity to contemporary economic and technological pressures. [ 47 ] The older “atomic” individualism—where natural egoists vie to maximize their standing—was now harming not protecting individuals; deployed as a rhetorical pretext, it was enabling wealthy and powerful interests to undermine most of the protections which initially justified liberalism. [ 48 ]

Dewey’s counter-proposal was “renascent liberalism”. [ 49 ] Reconstructing its core concept (“atomic” individuals become “social”), made other key political notions revisable—e.g., “liberty”, “freedom”, and “rights” —as all were resituated in an instrumentalist framework ( LSA , LW11: 35; E , MW5: 394). [ 50 ] Also revised are notions of “community” and “public”. A democratic “public” forms around problems, and aims to conduct experimental inquiry that leads to redress ( PP , LW2: 314). Dewey also expressed a grave concern, still with us today, regarding “inchoate” publics. Such publics include members lacking the education, time, and attention necessary for inquiry. They present democracy with perhaps its most significantly undermining condition ( PP , LW2: 321, 317).

For further details on Dewey’s political theory, see the entry on Dewey’s political philosophy by M. Festenstein (2023) and Hildebrand (2018).

Dewey’s magnum opus on aesthetics, Art as Experience ( AE , LW10: 31) states that art, as a conscious idea, is “the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity” (31). [ 51 ] Such high praise deserves notice. Dewey began writing about aesthetics very early, regarding art’s relevance to psychology (1887, EW2), to education (1897c, EW5), the invidious distinction between “fine” and “practical” art (1891, EW3: 310–311), and on Bosanquet (1893, EW4). His own theory emerged in Experience and Nature (1925a, EN , LW1) and flourished in AE (1934b); he proposed aesthetics as central to philosophy’s mission, namely rendering everyday experience more fulfilling and meaningful.

Dewey’s aesthetics has four main objectives and an overarching purpose. First, it explicates artworks’ ontology, the interrelated processes of making and appreciation, and specifies the functions of interpretation and criticism. [ 52 ] Second, it examines arts’ social role in presenting, reimagining, and projecting human identity. Third, it analyzes the communicative functions of art, especially in education and political life. Finally, it describes and analyzes the implications of art’s expression as experience; such experience can reach levels of integration as they become qualitatively distinct, or “consummatory”. [ 53 ] Consummatory experience happens occasionally; sometimes it occurs not in an “artistic” context (concert, museum, etc.) but in unexpectedly quotidian circumstances. It is life at its fullest. The overarching purpose of Dewey’s aesthetics is determining how more of life’s experiences could become consummatory.

The main problem posed by AE is: How did a chasm arise between the arts, artists and ordinary people? How have cultural conditions and aesthetic theories (reinforced by institutions) isolated “art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing”? ( AE , LW10: 16) AE makes art’s natural continuities with everyday life explicit, while seeking to prevent its reduction to mere entertainment or “transient pleasurable excitations”. ( AE , LW10: 16) [ 54 ] Dewey criticizes traditional aesthetics’ spectatorial (or theoretical) starting point and offers radically empirical accounts of art making, appreciation, expression, form, and criticism. Because aesthetic experience has organic roots, it can be recognized even in everyday objects and events. [ 55 ] Again, the goal is dissolution of dualisms between “fine” and “useful” objects to foment a greater “continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living” ( AE , LW10: 16).

For further details on Dewey’s aesthetics, see entry on Dewey’s aesthetics by T. Leddy (2021) and Hildebrand (2018).

9. Religion, Religious Experience and A Common Faith

The whole story of man shows that there are no objects that may not deeply stir engrossing emotion. One of the few experiments in the attachment of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of devotion, so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in social action. ( A Common Faith , 1934a, LW9: 52–53)

Dewey grew up in a religious family; his devout mother pressured her sons to live up to a similar devotion. His family church was Congregationalist; a bit later, including in college, Liberal Evangelicalism proved more acceptable. At twenty-one, while living in Oil City, Pennsylvania, Dewey had a “mystic experience” which he reported to friend Max Eastman:

There was no vision, not even a definable emotion—just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries [about whether he prayed sufficiently in earnest] were over. (Dykhuizen 1973: 22)

Dewey belonged to congregations for about thirty-five years, turning away circa 1894 as he left for a post in Chicago. After that, Dewey’s deepest loyalties lay outside religion; he was, as John J. McDermott put it,

an unregenerate philosophical naturalist, one for whom the human journey is constitutive of its own meaning and is not to be rescued by any transcendent explanations, principles of accountability, or posthumous salvation. (McDermott 2006, 50–51)

Dewey returned to philosophical issues of religion in the 1930’s. “What I Believe” (1930, LW5) argued for a new kind of “faith”, a “tendency toward action”. Such a faith was not transcendental, but signified that “experience itself is the sole ultimate authority” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 267). This faith arises actively, from “the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 272). In 1933–34, Dewey gave the Terry Lectures at Yale, published as A Common Faith (1934a, ACF , LW9), his major statement on religion and religious experience.

Dewey’s endeavor in A Common Faith seems, in retrospect, insurmountable: to reconstruct religion in a way harmonious with his empirical naturalism, while transforming religious experience and belief to support and advance a secular conception of democracy. Religions vary, of course, but typically posit transcendent, eternal, unobservable entities and reveal themselves in ways which are not, shall we say, open to verification. Empirical experience, typically, is cast as inferior—castigated as flux, illusion, uncertainty, or confusion — and must be set aside. Dewey had squared himself against the metaphysics, epistemology, and seemingly the morality, of major religions.

Who was ACF ’s intended audience? Dewey was not addressing believers content with supernatural religion, nor religious liberals seeking a compromise that would place scientific and spiritual truths in separate categories. He was not addressing militant atheists, and rejected their dogmatism. [ 56 ] Rather, ACF addressed those who had abandoned supernaturalism yet still believed themselves religious (“Experience, Knowledge, and Value”, LW14: 79–80). ACF meant to salvage whatever made the religious attitude valuable in experience while shedding traditional religious frameworks and supernaturalistic beliefs.

Dewey’s strategy was to divorce “religious experience” from religion, showing how the former might arise within a natural and social context. [ 57 ] He found that none of the qualities reported by religious experiencers (feelings of peace, wholeness, security, etc.), offered evidence for the supernatural. ( ACF , LW9ff.) He also found that religious experience is not self-enclosed; it can color or affect other experiences. Just as sunset may exhibit “aesthetic” dimensions or a linguistic remark may betray a “moral” tint, various experiences may have a “religious” aspect ( ACF , LW9: 9.). The “religious” character of experience, then, is attitudinal, lending “deep and enduring support to the processes of living” ( ACF , LW9: 15). Dewey analyzed such religiosity as a kind of coping. Consider three options for coping: (1) accommodate an obstacle by resigning to put up with conditions imposed; (2) adapt or modify the obstacle’s conditions to one’s liking; finally, (3) adjust to the obstacle by changing one’s attitude and altering conditions. (Consider, as adjustment , the case of of becoming a parent which demands significant changes that encompass both self and environment.) Option (3) ( adjustment ) is characteristic of religious experience for it is “inclusive and deep seated” and transformative of attitudes in “generic and enduring” ways ( ACF , LW9: 12,13). Adjustment projects imaginative possibilities and puts them into action—both in oneself (wants, aims, ideals) and in surrounding conditions. The cumulative impact of adjustment is often the evolution of identity ( ACF , LW9: 13). [ 58 ]

Dewey’s effort to naturalize religion reinterpreted other traditional notions, including “faith” and “God”. Typically, faith is juxtaposed against reason. Faith requires neither empirical inquiry nor verification; it reposes in the transcendent and ultimate, in “things not seen”. It typically connotes intellectual acceptance, without proof, of religious propositions (e.g., “God exists and loves mankind”).

Dewey made at least two important criticisms of traditional faith. First, faith is too closely identified with intellectual acceptance, eclipsing its pragmatic side; faith in a cause , for example, indicates a practical willingness to act strong enough to modify present desires, purposes, and conduct. By over-identifying faith with intellectual recognition, traditional accounts undermine inquiry and constructive action. Second, faith tends to reify its objects (e.g., “sin”, “evil”, etc.) making them immune to inquiry and redescription. Creeds based on such interpretations of faith attempt to “solve” problems with formulaic appeals to absolutes. The better approach, Dewey argues, is fallibilistic and experimental: approaching problems with empirical inquiry. Insofar as traditional faith frustrates inquiry (and solutions), it tends to run counter to moral aims.

One faith Dewey can accept he calls “natural piety”. Natural piety is not grounded in unseen, supernatural powers; it is a “just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts” and the recognition that, as parts, we are

marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. (ACF, LW9: 18)

Faith grounded in natural piety accepts the idea that “experience itself is the sole ultimate authority” (“What I Believe”, LW5: 267).

Regarding God, Dewey’s naturalism disallows traditional models—a single being responsible for the physical and moral universe, and its inhabitants. Belief in God is neither warranted nor advisable. Instead, Dewey offers a reconstructed “God”. He proposes we think not of a singular object (person) but of the qualities to which God is compared—goodness, wisdom, love, etc. Such descriptions reveal our highest ideals. Remove the possessor of the ideals and consider how ideals pull us from possibility (imagination, calculation, action) to actualization —and one begins to understand "God" in Dewey’s sense:

This idea of God, or of the divine is also connected with all the natural forces and conditions—including man and human association—that promote the growth of the ideal and that further its realization….It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name “God”. ( ACF , LW9: 34; see also 29–30)

As a pragmatist, a meliorist, and a humane democrat, Dewey sought to harness the undeniable power of religion and religious experience toward ends beneficial to all. Religion provides people with a story about the larger universe and how we fit. He knew simple critiques of religion were ineffective because they leave powerful needs unmet. Dewey did not propose swapping out old religious institutions for new ones; he hoped that emancipating religious experience from institutional and ideological shackles might free its energies toward a “common faith”, a passion for imaginative intelligence in pursuit of moral goods. Methods of inquiry and criticism are not mysteries; society is already deeply familiar with them. What was necessary would be for religious persons to connect inquiry with the enhancement of religious experience and values ( ACF , LW9: 23). If persons could appreciate how many celebrated accomplishments were due not to God but to intelligent, human collaboration, then perhaps the idea of community could inspire a non-sectarian, common faith. [ 59 ]

Dewey thought his call for a common faith was deeply democratic. The idea of the supernatural was, by definition, suspicious of experience (as an adequate guide) and, consequently, suspicious of empirical methods. Unchecked by lived experience or experiment, supernaturalism can produce deep divisions. Dewey’s common faith, in contrast, is bound up with experimental inquiry and open communication. This is why Dewey’s exhortation to exchange traditional religious faith for a common faith is another expression of his ideal of experimental democracy.

A. Works by Dewey

Citations to John Dewey’s works are to the thirty-seven-volume critical edition The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 , edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991). The series includes:

• [EW] 1967, The Early Works , 1882–1898, 5 volumes.
• [MW] 1976, The Middle Works , 1899–1924, 15 volumes.
• [LW] 1981, The Later Works , 1925–1953, 17 volumes.

This critical edition was also published in electronic form as:

• The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953: The Electronic Edition , Larry A. Hickman (ed.), Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex Corporation, 1996, available online . To insure uniformity of citation, the electronic edition preserves the line and page breaks of the print edition.

In-text citations give the original publication date, series abbreviation, followed by volume and page number. For example LW10: 12 refers to page 12 of Art as Experience , which is published as volume 10 of The Later Works .

• [ ACF ] 1934a, A Common Faith
• [ AE ] 1934b, Art as Experience
• [ DE ] 1916b, Democracy and Education
• [ E ] 1908, Ethics , with James H. Tufts,
• [ E-rev ] 1932, Ethics , revised edition, with James H. Tufts,
• [ EEL ] 1916c, “Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logic
• [ EN ] 1925a, Experience and Nature
• [ FAE ] 1930a, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism”
• [ H&A ] 1998, The Essential Dewey
• [ HNC ] 1922a, Human Nature and Conduct
• [ HWT ] 1910c, How We Think
• [ ION ] 1930f, Individualism, Old and New
• [ LSA ] 1935, Liberalism and Social Action
• [ LTI ] 1938c, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
• [ PIE ] 1905, “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism”
• [ PP ] 1927b, The Public and Its Problems
• [ QC ] 1929, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action
• [ RAC ] 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”
• [ RIP ] 1920, Reconstruction in Philosophy
• [ TIF ] 1930d, “Three Independent Factors in Morals”
• [ TV ] 1939e, Theory of Valuation
• 1884, “The New Psychology”, Andover Review , 2(Sept.): 278–289. Reprinted in EW1: 48–60.
• 1886, “Psychology as Philosophic Method”, Mind , old series, 11(42), 153–173. Reprinted in EW1: 144–67. doi:10.1093/mind/os-XI.42.153
• 1887, Psychology , New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted in EW2.
• 1891, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics , Ann Arbor, Michigan: Register Publishing Company. Reprinted in EW3: 239–388.
• 1893, Dewey, review of Bosanquet, “A History of Aesthetic, by Bernard Bosanquet, formerly Fellow of University College, Oxford” , Philosophical Review , 2 (Jan. 1893):63–69. Reprinted in EW4: 189–197.
• 1894a, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus , Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press. Reprinted in EW4: 220–362.
• 1894b, “The Theory of Emotion I: Emotional Attitudes”, Psychological Review , 1(6): 553–569. Reprinted in EW4: 152–169. doi:10.1037/h0069054
• 1895, “The Theory of Emotion II: The Significance of Emotions”, Psychological Review , 2(1): 13–32. Reprinted in EW4: 169–188. doi:10.1037/h0070927
• [ RAC ] 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, Psychological Review , 3(4): 357–370. Reprinted in EW5: 96–109. doi:10.1037/h0070405
• 1897a, “Ethical Principles Underlying Education”, in Third Yearbook of the National Herbart Society , Chicago: The National Herbart Society, pp. 7–33. Reprinted in EW5: 54–83.
• 1897b, “My Pedagogic Creed”, School Journal , 54(Jan.): 77–80. Reprinted in EW5: 84–95.
• 1897c, “The Aesthetic Element in Education”, Addresses and Proceedings of the National Educational Association , pp. 329–30. Reprinted in EW5: 202–204.
• 1899, The School and Society , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in MW1.
• 1900 [1916], “Some Stages of Logical Thought”, The Philosophical Review , 9(5): 465–489. Revised and reprinted in 1916d: 183–219. Reprinted in MW1: 152–175. doi:10.2307/2176692
• 1903a, “Democracy in Education”, Elementary School Teacher , 4 (1903): 193–204. Reprinted in MW3: 229–239.
• 1903b, Studies in Logical Theory , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in MW2: 293–378.
• [ PIE ] 1905, “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism”, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods , 2(15): 393–399. Reprinted in MW3: 158–167. doi:10.2307/2011400
• 1906, “Beliefs and Realities” (later retitled “Beliefs and Existences”), Philosophical Review , 15(2): 113–119; originally read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Cambridge, December 28, 1905. Reprinted in MW3: 83–100. doi:10.2307/2177731
• [ E ] 1908, with James H. Tufts, Ethics , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW5.
• 1908–1909, “The Bearings of Pragmatism Upon Education”, Progressive Journal of Education , originally three papers, 1(Dec. 1908): 1–3; 1(Jan. 1909): 5–8; 1–(Feb. 1909): 6–7. Reprinted in MW4: 178–191
• 1910a, “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth”, in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy , New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 154–168. Reprinted in MW6: 3–11.
• 1910b, “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge”, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy , New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 77–111. Reprinted in MW3: 107–127.
• [ HWT ] 1910c, How We Think , Boston: D. C. Heath and Co. Reprinted in MW6.
• 1912, “Contributions to A Cyclopedia of Education”, in MW7: 207–366.
• 1915, “The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry”, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods , 12(13): 337. Reprinted in MW8: 3–13. doi:10.2307/2013770
• 1916a, “Brief Studies in Realism”, in 1916d: 250–280. Reprinted in MW6: 103–122. Revised version of an article in two parts in 1911, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods , 8(15): 393–400, 8(20): 546–454.
• 1916b, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education , New York: Macmillan. Reprinted in MW9.
• [ EEL ] 1916c, “Introduction” to 1916d: v–vi. Reprinted in MW10: 320–365.
• 1916d, Essays in Experimental Logic , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 1917, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, in his Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude , New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 3–69. Reprinted in MW10: 3–49
• [ RIP ] 1920, Reconstruction in Philosophy , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW12.
• [ HNC ] 1922a, Human Nature and Conduct , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW14.
• 1922b, “Realism without Monism or Dualism”, Journal of Philosophy , 19(12): 309–317, 19(13): 351–361 Reprinted in MW13: 40–60. doi:10.2307/2939872 doi:10.2307/2939610
• 1923, “Individuality in Education”, General Science Quarterly , 7(3): 157–166. Reprinted in MW15: 170–179. doi:10.1002/sce.3730070301
• [ EN ] 1925a, Experience and Nature , Chicago: Open Court Publishing.
• 1925, “The Naturalistic Theory of Perception by the Senses”, The Journal of Philosophy , 22(22): 596–606. Reprinted in LW2: 44–54 as “A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception”. doi:10.2307/2015056
• 1927a, “Half-Hearted Naturalism”, The Journal of Philosophy , 24(3): 57–64. Reprinted in LW3: 73–81. doi:10.2307/2014856
• [ PP ] 1927b, The Public and Its Problems , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in LW2.
• 1927c, “The Rôle of Philosophy in the History of Civilization”, The Philosophical Review , 36(1): 1–9. Reprinted in LW3: 3–11 as “Philosophy and Civilization”. doi:10.2307/2179154
• 1928, “Social as a Category”, Monist , 38(2): 161–177. Reprinted in LW3: 41–54 as “The Inclusive Philosophical Idea”,. doi:10.5840/monist192838218
• [ QC ] 1929, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action , New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW4.
• [ FAE ] 1930a, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism”, in Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements , George Plimpton Adams and William Pepperell Montague (eds), London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan Co., volume 2: 13–27. Reprinted in LW5: 147–60.
• 1930b, “Psychology and Work”, Personnel Journal , 8(February): 337–341. Reprinted in LW5: 236–242
• 1930c, “Qualitative Thought”, Symposium , 1(January): 5–32. Reprinted in his Philosophy and Civilization , New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1931, pp. 93–116. Reprinted in LW5: 243–262.
• [ TIF ] 1930d, “Trois facteurs indépendants en matière de morale”, Charles Cestre (trans.), Bulletin de la société française de philosophie , 30(4): 118–127. First publication in English, 1966, “Three Independent Factors in Morals”, Educational Theory , 16(3): 198–209, Jo Ann Boydston (trans.). Reprinted in LW5: 279–288. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1966.tb00259.x
• 1930e, “What I Believe”, Forum , 83(March): 176–182. Reprinted in LW5: 267–278.
• [ ION ] 1930f, Individualism, Old and New , New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW5: 41–124.
• 1931, “Context and Thought”, University of California Publications in Philosophy , (Berkeley: University of California Press), 12(3): 203–224. Reprinted in LW6: 3–21.
• [ E-rev ] 1932, with James H. Tufts, Ethics, Revised Edition , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in LW7.
• 1933, “Analysis of Reflective Thinking”, in How We Think. a Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process , new edition, Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., ch. 7. Reprinted in LW8: 196–209.
• [ ACF ] 1934a, A Common Faith , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reprinted in LW9.
• [ AE ] 1934b, Art as Experience , New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW10.
• [ LSA ] 1935, Liberalism and Social Action , New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Reprinted in LW11: 1–66.
• 1936a, “A Liberal Speaks Out for Liberalism”, New York Times Magazine , 23 February 1936, pp. 3, 24. Reprinted in LW11: 282–288.
• 1936b, “Authority and Social Change”, School and Society , 44(10 October 1936): 457–466. Reprinted in LW11: 130–145.
• 1937, “Freedom”, chapter 9 in National Education Association, Implications of Social-Economic Goals for Education: A Report of the Committee on Social- Economic Goals of America , Washington, DC: National Education Association, pp. 99–105. Reprinted in LW11: 247–255.
• 1938a, “Democracy and Education in the World of Today”, pamphlet by the Society for Ethical Culture, New York. Reprinted in LW13: 294–303.
• 1938b, Experience and Education , New York: Macmillan. Reprinted in LW13.
• [ LTI ] 1938c, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry , New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in LW12.
• 1939a, “Biography of John Dewey”, Jane M. Dewey (ed.), in Schilpp 1939: 3–45.
• 1939b, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us”, in John Dewey and the Promise of America, Progressive , (Education Booklet No. 14), Columbus, OH: American Education Press. Reprinted in LW14: 224–230.
• 1939c, “Experience, Knowledge, and Value: A Rejoinder”, in Schilpp 1939: 515–608, in LW14: 3–90.
• 1939d, Freedom and Culture , New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Reprinted in LW13: 65–188.
• [ TV ] 1939e, Theory of Valuation , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in LW13.
• 1940a, “Nature in Experience”, The Philosophical Review , 49(2): 244–258. Reprinted in LW14: 141–154. doi:10.2307/2180802
• 1940b, “Time and Individuality”, in Time and Its Mysteries , series 2, New York: New York University Press, pp. 85–109. Reprinted in LW14: 98–114.
• 1941, “Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth”, The Journal of Philosophy , 38(7): 169–186. Reprinted in LW14: 168–188. doi:10.2307/2017978
• 1944, “Between Two Worlds”, Address delivered at the Winter Institute of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Fla., 20 March 1944. Printed in LW17: 451–465.
• 1949, “Experience and Existence: A Comment”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 9(4): 709–713. Reprinted in LW16: 383–390. doi:10.2307/2103300
• [ H&A ] 1998, The Essential Dewey , L. Hickman and T. M. Alexander (eds.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Adajian, Thomas, 2012, “The Definition of Art”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/art-definition/ >.
• Alexander, Thomas M., 1987, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• –––, 2013, The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence , New York: Fordham University Press.
• –––, 2020, “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics”, in Steven Fesmire (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dewey , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 25–52.
• Anderson, Elizabeth, 2018, “Dewey’s Moral Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/dewey-moral/ >
• Bernstein, Richard J., 1961, “John Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience”, The Journal of Philosophy , 58(1): 5–14. doi:10.2307/2023564
• –––, 1966, John Dewey , New York, NY: Washington Square Press.
• –––, 2010, The Pragmatic Turn , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Biletzki, Anat and Anat Matar, 2018, “Ludwig Wittgenstein”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/wittgenstein/ >
• Boisvert, Raymond D., 1988, Dewey’s Metaphysics , New York: Fordham University Press.
• –––, 1998a, “Dewey’s Metaphysics: Ground-Map of the Prototypically Real”, in Larry Hickman (ed.), Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation , Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 149–165.
• –––, 1998b, John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Browning, Douglas, 1998, “Dewey and Ortega on the Starting Point”, The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society , 34(1): 69–92.
• Burch, Robert, 2014, “Charles Sanders Peirce”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/peirce/ >
• Burke, F. Thomas, D. Micah Hester, and Robert B. Talisse (eds.), 2002, Dewey’s Logical Theory: New Studies and Interpretations , Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
• Burke, Tom, 1994, Dewey’s New Logic: A Reply to Russell , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Campbell, James, 1995, Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence , Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court.
• Candlish, Stewart and George Wrisley, 2014, “Private Language”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/private-language/ >
• Caspary, William R., 2000, Dewey on Democracy , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• deVries, Willem, 2016, “Wilfred Sellars”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/sellars/ >
• Dykhuizen, George, 1973, The Life and Mind of John Dewey , Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
• Eldridge, Michael, 1998, Transforming Experience: John Dewey’s Cultural Instrumentalism , Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
• Fesmire, Steven, 2003, John Dewey and Moral Imagination , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• A Brief Account: John Dewey’s Ethics, Political Theory, and Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics , by David L. Hildebrand (2018)
• John Dewey, American Pragmatist, at pragmatism.org
• Gouinlock, James S., “John Dewey”, Encyclopedia Britannica , revision: 27 September 2018. URL = < https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dewey >
• John Dewey, entry by Jim Garrison in Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Education (internet Archive)
• Field, Richard, “John Dewey (1859–1952)”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy . URL = < http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/ >
• Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, resources (research and teaching) on John Dewey and other American Philosophers
• The Center for Dewey Studies
• The John Dewey Society

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Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays

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Philosophy World Democracy

 the grace of jean-luc nancy ,  the other beginning of philosophy , science and democracy.

2 January 2022

Image Credit: evidencefordemocracy.ca

This essay provides a historical overview of the complex relations between science and democracy. It contrasts two main positions: The first understands scientific attitudes as applicable to matters of social and political life, while a second opposed view, portrays science as a distinctive activity ill-suited as a model for civic life. During the Cold War, the connections forged between science, industry and the military highlighted the uneven distribution between the cost of scientific programs and their social benefits. Responding to these concerns, many have examined ways to make science more democratic, highlighting how expert knowledge stands in tension with that goal. This has led to a deeper understanding of the nature of expertise and the examination of different forms of citizen participation, one that suggests a more positive alliance between scientific expertise and democratic citizenship.

The proper role of science within democratic society has been a central area of debate over the last several centuries. While science and democracy maintain an important partnership, their relationship remains full of difficulties. Democratic governments face demands for increased citizen participation over decisions that arise from the way science impacts the public. This include requests for greater control over technologies that seem to operate unchecked. In addition, the scientific community complains about the public’s ignorance, while citizens often view scientific experts with suspicion and distrust. Such contemporary concerns are tied to longstanding debates concerning the social organization of scientific research and its political significance. (1) Two main positions have emerged from such disputes. The first understands science as representing a method or attitude that can be further extended to matters of social and political life. In its most ambitious form this view saw modern science as the proper cultural foundation both for democratic politics and the making of moral citizens. A second opposed view, portrays science as a distinctive type of activity dealing with its own problems and therefore ill-suited as a model for civic life. From this perspective, science requires autonomy from the political sphere in order to ensure continued scientific and technological advance. This view was largely successful in supporting attempts to secure government funding for scientific research without the centralized planning that was thought to hamper scientific research and innovation.

During the Cold War, the authority and autonomy granted to science began to be more critically examined. The connections forged between science, industry and the military highlighted the often uneven distribution between the cost of scientific programs and their social benefits. Responding to these concerns, many have examined ways to make science more democratic, further highlighting how expert knowledge may stand in tension with that goal. A number of different models for public participation in scientific and technical decision making have been proposed with varying degrees of success. Recently the application of such models has moved beyond countries such as Canada, Denmark, and the United States to include the social contexts of Asia, especially in Japan, Korea and Taiwan.This has led to a deeper understanding of the nature of expertise and the examination of different forms of citizen participation. The following offers a brief overview of this transition concluding that while science is clearly not the royal road to democracy, increased citizen participation holds the promise of forging a more cooperative alliance between scientific experts and citizens.

Science as Civic Ideal: Scientific Democracy

A central feature of Western thought since the scientific revolution emphasized how the spread of science within community life would further support democratic self-government. This idea was a common theme in the early days of the American republic, and took on more ambitious form in late nineteenth and early twentieth century when science was depicted as a vehicle for strengthening American democratic practices. Advocates of this scientific culture attempted to reconcile what might be seen as the competing demands of scientific research and its democratic legitimacy. On this view, science and democracy should be seen as harmonious and mutually reinforcing components of American life.

These ‘Scientific Democrats’ argued that in addition to technological resources, greater scientific development offered a moral outlook suitable to American democratic life. They were mainly interested in making the central claim that science could help in the forming of moral citizens. The philosopher John Dewey was a leading voice in this call for ‘scientific democracy’. His guiding philosophical conviction saw modern science as containing the resources for an egalitarian democratic culture once extended to the study of human affairs, including the social and political spheres of community life. He further thought that promoting a scientific attitude within American life would help contribute to a more egalitarian democratic society. Such extensions of science to cultural life took many forms as is illustrated by Dewey’s own example. He offered experiment and experimentation as a model for political deliberation and at times presented science as a means of social and moral engineering. (2)

Consensus conferences have had notable successes in terms of their ability to increase public participation without loss of clarity or rationality within the decision making process. In Taiwan their use has demonstrated the effectiveness of interaction between experts and the lay public by increasing scientific literacy concerning controversies in science.

By ‘Democracy’ the scientific democrats simply meant the popular sense of a polity defined by popular sovereignty. Moreover, it was generally assumed that the social influence of science was found in its ability to improve the formation of the public will, where this crucially involved the molding of its citizen’s moral character. While there was resistance to these ideas, the view that science reinforced the values of democratic society was not deeply questioned until during the Cold War. Later thinkers would highlight the myriad ways in which the interests of science and democracy are not identical and further emphasis the importance of increased public participation in scientific decision making, especially when it affects the public.

Some Dissenting Voices: The Need for Scientific Autonomy

During this same period, the differences between science and democracy were vividly depicted by those who criticized the idea of extending scientific ideals to civil society. In Germany the social scientist Max Weber sharply criticized assigning political significance to scientific work. He argued that expertise and specialization were conditions of scientific success and that this type of achievement did not further generalize to addressing the problems of life. Other notable anti-democratic approaches to scientific planning were opposed to the idea of an autonomous science disengaged from political and social life. Examples included Marxian views where cultural conditions were presented as responsible for scientific advance including the idea the technological practice drives theory construction. The Soviet emphasis on scientific planning was also influential. Scientific results were taken to derive from state organization, where the further application of its methods would abolish human dependence on the material world.

The Soviet emphasis on the idea of scientific planning led to an increased interest in the scope of freedom assigned to scientific inquiry, where the focus turned to the crucial issue of scientific autonomy. The American sociologist Robert Merton offered an argument for the autonomy of science with his discussion of the ethos of science involving four key norms: universalism, organized scepticism, “communism” or the sharing of scientific results, and disinterestedness. Merton argued that social integration depends on cultural norms, but that the normative structure of the scientific community was not derived from public standards. This is precisely what made science vulnerable to ‘anti-rationalist’ attempts to exert centralized control over science. For him, the way forward involved recognizing that scientific autonomy is threatened by ideals concerning the cultural extension of science, and that science and democracy are compatible only if the autonomy of science is recognized and maintained.

The scientist Michael Polanyi offered further influential arguments for the autonomy of science by claiming that science did not need political governance since it was already governed by its own traditions. He stressed that scientific method was a non-mechanical activity of discovery based on inarticulate knowledge grounded in tradition. The scientific community was then distinct from the planning mentality of corporate bureaucracy, where such planning would destroy the very community that allows for the freedom of scientific discovery. This further suggested, however, that science shares features of other communities with the importance of strong tradition, free discussion and decisions of conscience. Such commonalities recommend an attitude of mutual respect between science and democracy that Polanyi thought would help highlight how scientific advance is secured through its autonomy.Harvard president James Conant was a further important voice in rejecting the idea that science makes better citizens, and this viewpoint informed his own case studies based education policy. Both he and Polanyi concluded that science should be governed indirectly by facilitating active competition among scientists. The American historian of science Thomas Kuhn further argued that neither science nor its reward systems operated democratically. These views lent increasing support to the idea that the demands of scientific research and the interests of democratic society were not the same.

Postwar Debates: Expertise and Public Participation

In the postwar era the political autonomy and authority given scientific research was challenged by scholars who sought a renewed democratization of scientific practice. The increasing tensions between science as an authoritative technique and science as a vision for civic life would later develop into a political debate over scientific authority and expertise. The connections between science, politics and public interests were now more carefully examined in the attempt to make scientific work more accountable to the public. (3)

The key problem with any deference to the authority of scientific expertise within democratic society stems from its apparent threat to citizen rule. The challenge becomes one of attempting to carefully situate expertise within an ongoing commitment to democratic values. It is here that commentators have recommended the increased public evaluation of scientific results and assumptions made about the social world. The sociologist Stephen Turner argues that in principle expert judgments can themselves be democratically accepted, while remaining both tentative and open to challenge. In the same vein, others emphasis that an increased public evaluation of scientific results can help identify conflicting values among interest groups and further indicate how this impacts public risk. Steven Epstein chronicles how AIDS activists recognized faulty assumptions within the protocols devised by scientists for new drug testing. This enabled them to further question both the ethics and artificial nature of these clinical trials.

Greater participation can also highlight those concerns that remain in the public interest but which are simply unknown by scientific experts. Brian Wynne’s examination of Northern English Sheep farms possibly affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident revealed how farmers remained sensitive to other possible sources of radiation and had relevant knowledge about sheep farming absent from scientists. This issue can be further framed in terms of the nature of expertise and expert knowledge. Expertise can come in many forms, and the public may exhibit a type of expertise conducive to scientific advance that is lacking in the scientific community. The sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans have offered a taxonomy of different types of expertise in order to clarify meaningful forms of participation in the hopes of yielding a greater knowledge egalitarianism. Another approach to combining different kinds of expertise involves what philosopher Philip Kitcher calls an ‘ideal of well-ordered science’. (4) According to this model, scientific research is well-ordered when the problems it addresses are selected by a diverse set of representatives that are fully informed about what science has established, what areas remain open, and who are committed to addressing the perceived needs of the public. These ideas have been used in developing democracies such as South Africa where attempts at ‘civic science’, the active dialogue between scientists, engineers and other community members, are seen as effective means for resource management. (5) This interaction supports democratic processes through recognition of diverse sources of expert knowledge, and further creates an environment favorable to the promotion of democracy through science.

The key problem with any deference to the authority of scientific expertise within democratic society stems from its apparent threat to citizen rule. The challenge becomes one of attempting to carefully situate expertise within an ongoing commitment to democratic values.

Such examples have led to greater insight into how public participation in technical decision making improves the value and quality of science and technology. Participatory processes are especially effective when they are representative of those interested, encourage fair deliberation, provide sufficient resources for informed debate, remain transparent and accountable, and are conducted efficiently. This democratization of science and technology has taken many forms including ‘Consensus conferences’ originating in Denmark and further used in other parts of Europe, Canada, the United States and more recently in Asia. Consensus conferences consist of citizen panels responsible for making non-binding recommendations to government concerning a specific technical issue of broader social concern. These panels can hear from experts but retain sole responsibility for their recommendations. Consensus conferences have had notable successes in terms of their ability to increase public participation without loss of clarity or rationality within the decision making process. In Taiwan their use has demonstrated the effectiveness of interaction between experts and the lay public by increasing scientific literacy concerning controversies in science. The lay public is further able to identify the biases and positions of scientific experts, and also raise important points not clearly suggested by scientific experts. The use of consensus conferences in Korea and Japan has led to exploration of other models of public participation, where an important guiding theme focuses on clarifying the precise ways in which local community contexts impact the process of public deliberation over technical decisions. Such citizen panels provide clear examples of how informed citizens can identify scientific bias and introduce significant issues not suggested by scientific experts. (6) What this then suggests is that the relationship between scientific expertise and democratic citizenship can be less antagonistic, as increased citizen participation can help to forge a more cooperative alliance between scientific experts and citizens.

1. For a helpful overview seeRoy Macleod, “Science and Democracy: Historical Reflections on Present Discontents” Minerva v.35 (1997).

2. Further details on the scientific democrats can be found in Andrew, Jewett. Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The main lines of Dewey’s varying views on science and democracy can be seen in his Reconstruction in Philosophy , Beacon Press,1920 and “Science and Free Culture.” In Freedom and Culture , 102- 118. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1939.

3. These issues are further examined in Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, eds. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies 3rd Edition . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. See especially the chapters by Bucchi and Neresini, Irwin, Sismondo, and Turner.

4. Further details are found in H.M. Collins and Robert Evans. Rethinking Expertise . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007 and Philip Kitcher. Science in a Democratic Society . Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011.

5. Further details can be found in E. van Wyk, C. M. Breen, T. Sherwill and D. Magadlela. “Challenges for the relationship between science and society: developing capacity for ecosystem governance in an emerging democracy.” Water Policy 9: Supplement 2 (2007): 99-111.

6. These issues and cases studies are treated in the following articles: Jill Chopyak and Peter Levesque. “Public participation in science and technology decision making: trends for the future.” Technology in Society 24(2002): 155–166; Dung-Sheng Chen and Chung-Yeh Deng. “Interaction between Citizens and Experts in Public Deliberation: A Case Study of Consensus Conferences in Taiwan.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal 1(2007): 77–97; Kohta Juraku, Tatsujiro Suzuki and Osamu Sakura. “Social Decision-making Processes in Local Contexts: An STS Case Study on Nuclear Power Plant Siting in Japan.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal 1(2007): 53–75; Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner and Seyoung Hwang. “Governance of stem cellresearch: Public participationand decision-making in China,Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.” Social Studies of Science 42: 5 (September 2012): 684–708.

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The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment

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If we don’t know what the words “democracy” and “democratic” mean, then we don’t know what democracy is. This book defends a radical view: these words mean nothing and should be abandoned. The argument for abolitionism is simple: those terms are defective and we can easily do better, so let’s get rid of them. According to the abolitionist, the switch to alternative devices would be a significant communicative, cognitive, and political advance. The first part of the book presents a general theory of abandonment: the conditions under which language should be abandoned. The rest of the book applies this general theory to the case of “democracy” and “democratic”. The book shows that “democracy” and “democratic” are semantically, pragmatically, and communicatively defective. Abolitionism is not all gloom and doom. It also contains a message of good cheer: we have easy access to conceptual devices that are more effective than “democracy”. We can do better. These alternative linguistic devices will enable us to ask better questions, provide genuinely fruitful answers, and have more rational discussions. Moreover, those questions and answers better articulate the communicative and cognitive aims of those who use empty terms such as “democracy” and “democratic”.

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'Panama Papers' trial starts. 27 people charged in the worldwide money laundering case

PANAMA CITY — The trial of 27 people charged in connection with the worldwide “Panama Papers” money laundering started Monday in a Panamanian criminal court.

Those on trial include the owners of the Mossack-Fonseca law firm that was at the heart of the 2016 massive document leak.

The Panama Papers include a collection of 11 million secret financial documents that illustrate how some of the world’s richest people hide their money.

The repercussions of the leaks have been far-ranging, prompting the resignation of the prime minister of Iceland and bringing scrutiny to the leaders of Argentina and Ukraine, Chinese politicians and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.

The often-delayed trial opened Monday, with lawyers Juergen Mossack, Ramón Fonseca and other ex-employees of the firm facing money laundering charges.

Mossack was present in the courtroom; lawyers for Fonseca said he was in a hospital in Panama.

The case centers on allegations the firm set up shell companies to acquire properties in Panama with money from a sprawling corruption scheme in Brazil known as the Car Wash , or Lava Jato in Portuguese.

Fonseca has said the firm, which closed in 2018, had no control over how its clients might use offshore vehicles created for them. Both Mossack and Fonseca have Panamanian citizenship, and Panama does not extradite its own citizens.

The two were acquitted on other charges in 2022.

The records were first leaked to the German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, and were shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which began publishing collaborative reports with news organizations in 2016.

U.S. federal prosecutors have alleged that Mossack Fonseca conspired to circumvent American laws to maintain the wealth of its clients and conceal tax dollars owed to the IRS. They alleged the scheme dates to 2000 and involved sham foundations and shell companies in Panama, Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands.

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america