John Dewey's Earlier Logical Theory

James Scott Johnston

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438453460
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Logique en philosophie

When John Dewey's logical theory is discussed, the focus is invariably on his 1938 book Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. His earlier logical works are seldom referenced except in relation to that later work. As a result, Dewey's earlier logical theory is cut off from his later work, and this later work receives a curiously ahistorical gloss. Examining the earlier works from Studies in Logical Theory to Essays in Experimental Logic, James Scott Johnston provides an unparalleled account of the development of Dewey's thinking in logic, examining various themes and issues Dewey felt relevant to a systematic logical theory. These include the context in which logical theory operates, the ingredients of logical inquiry, the distinctiveness of an instrumentalist logical theory, and the benefit of logical theory to practical concerns—particularly ethics and education. Along the way, and complicating the standard picture of Dewey's logic being indebted to Charles S. Peirce, William James, and Charles Darwin, Johnston argues that Hegel is ultimately a more important influence.

1

Dewey’s Logical Education

From Early Essays to Essays in Experimental Logic

Introduction

In this chapter, I wish to briefly talk of the context of Dewey’s education in logic, the institutions and settings in which Dewey developed his earliest logical ideas, as well as Dewey’s association with certain individuals germane to his early logical development. The rough chronology of Dewey that follows is in no way designed to exhaust the relationships between Dewey and his interlocutors; rather, it is aimed at presenting, in a succinct manner, a statement on Dewey’s formation of his ideas on logic by noting what Dewey did and did not take from his interlocutors. It is Hegel who influences Dewey most profoundly in this regard. I do not insist that others had little or no influence on Dewey. As this chapter will make clear, Dewey borrowed heavily from a number of thinkers, including James, Peirce, Darwin, and others discussed here. However, the movement of the logic itself, and the relationships between the various logical constituents, is heavily indebted to Hegel’s understanding of the development of the concepts and categories in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. As I consider Hegel’s influence on Dewey to be the most important, I will devote the entirety of Chapter 2 to the subject. Here, I will discuss Dewey’s other early influences.

Part One: Dewey’s Motives for Logical Theory

Before I begin examining the various direct influences on Dewey, I want to reflect on what motives Dewey might have had for turning to logical theory. Dewey wrote extensively of self and mind, psychology, ethics, education, knowledge, and the history of philosophy. The various motives for these have been well-documented in the vast secondary literature. Here, I will briefly discuss the importance of his studies on experimental psychology on the one hand and idealism on the other. It is well-documented in various biographies that Dewey was equally interested in both post-Kantian idealism and the emerging field of empirical, experimental psychology. Dewey’s early undergraduate education at Vermont introduced him both to idealism and T. H. Huxley’s popularization of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. When Dewey attended Johns Hopkins, he studied not only with G. S. Morris but also with G. Stanley Hall.1 Dewey’s relationship with Hall was ambivalent. Though Hall did get Dewey to read Wilhelm Wundt (and this was important for Dewey’s early psychology), Dewey disliked Hall’s arrogance, and took instead to Morris. Morris introduced Dewey to the leading British post-Kantian idealists (T. H. Green, Edward and John Caird, John Watson) and Hall introduced Dewey to empirical, experimental, and physiologic psychology—chiefly via the works of Wundt. Dewey even undertook some experimental research while under Hall’s supervision.2 By the time of his graduation, Dewey was not only an ardent proponent of Hegel and the post-Kantian idealist philosophy of the late nineteenth century, but an avid proponent of experimental psychology.3

Post-Kantian idealism of the late nineteenth century, or neo-idealism as I prefer to call it, ranged in philosophical allegiance between Kant and Hegel. The major thinkers of neo-idealism at the time of Dewey’s education were the English philosopher T. H. Green, Scottish philosophers Edward and John Caird, and the Scottish transplant to Canada, John Watson. F. H. Bradley was also beginning to attract attention, primarily through the publication of Ethical Studies. Later, English philosopher Bernard Bonsaquet and in the United States, Josiah Royce, would emerge as prominent figures. T. H. Green, who was Dewey’s most important idealist influence in the early 1880s, leaned more closely to Kant than Hegel in regard to moral theory.4 Edward and John Caird and John Watson leaned more closely to Hegel than to Kant.5 All of them were concerned with the topics of Absolute self, will, individuality, and for Green and Caird in particular, the question of the divine manifest in the world. At the same time, Dewey was intrigued by leading accounts of sensation, attention, perception, and the biological basis of motor control. Wundt’s work in particular, had a powerful impact.6 Dewey wrote a number of articles on topics of interest to the neo-idealists and to those in the burgeoning field of psychology.

As I will discuss later, Dewey had little contact with the leading lights of pragmatism in the first several years of his career. Dewey took a course with Peirce at Johns Hopkins in 1882 but evidently failed to understand him. Dewey had little contact with William James until after the latter’s publication of the Principles of Psychology in 1890. Dewey had no contact with Mead until the latter began to work alongside Dewey at the University of Michigan in 1891. Dewey, of course, was very familiar with Darwin, but he had not yet begun to articulate his evolutionary account of thought and morality until late in the 1890s. It was only gradually that the respective ideas of these leading pragmatist thinkers would seep into Dewey’s own accounts: his earliest motives for his scholarship did not yet encompass these thinkers.

Dewey would try to fuse his idealism with the leading accounts of psychology in the first years after graduation. This fusion culminated in his textbook of 1887, entitled Psychology. This was an ambitious book, not in the least because it attempted to run the idealism of Absolute self together with the novel accounts of sensation, perception, attention, and the will: it was ambitious because Dewey attempted to write not only a textbook for his classes, but a stand-alone introduction to a unified psychology of mind-world. Needless to say, his attempts (he published three editions) did not succeed—at least, in his mind. But they did have the effect of returning him to the central problem of conjoining the best of philosophy and psychology.

While his motives for both philosophy and psychology seem plain enough, the same cannot be said of Dewey’s motives for embarking on an examination of logic. For, he could have (along with Wundt) restricted himself to empirical-physiologic psychology. Or he could have restricted himself to the experimental psychology of James. But he didn’t. He decided to tackle logical theory, bearing his first (written) fruits in 1890. There were undoubtedly philosophical motives behind this, which I will discuss here and in Chapter 2. But there were undoubtedly biographical motives as well. Unfortunately, Dewey’s correspondence gives us no hint of what these might be. And leading accounts of Dewey’s logical theory are silent on this matter as well. We will therefore have to concentrate on the philosophical motives and take an educated guess at the biographical ones.

To begin, logical theory for Dewey was, if not synonymous with, at least a crucial aspect of, method. And method was an aspect of psychology. As I have maintained, psychology dominated Dewey’s early thought. This has been well-documented in the secondary literature. And the literature has also ably demonstrated the various theories that the neo-idealists held; theories that were in common circulation at the time Dewey was a graduate student and young professor.7 What is not so clear is the connection between logical theory and psychology. I surmise it is the need for a method that concerns Dewey: a method of systematic collection and ordering of knowledge. Systematic knowledge, at least in Dewey’s earlier thinking, was tantamount to philosophy and philosophy was the highest achievement of systematic thinking; it was, as Hegel put it, systematic science.8 Logical theory, therefore, was an absolutely necessary tool for rendering knowledge systematic and philosophy a science. Dewey makes this quite clear in his Psychology. Dewey speaks early on in the text of the need for a method of psychology. “The subject-matter of psychology is the facts of self, or the phenomena of consciousness. These facts, however, do not constitute science until they have been systematically collected and ordered with reference to principles, so that they may be comprehended in their relations to each other, that is to say, explained. The proper way of getting at, classifying, and explaining the facts introduces us to the consideration of the proper method of psychology” (EW 2, p. 11). Dewey rapidly discounts the prevailing method of psychology: introspection (EW 2, pp. 11–12). He instead offers what he terms, “experimental,” “comparative,” and “objective” methods—the last being, “The broadest and most fundamental method of correcting and extending the results of Introspection and of interpreting these results, so as to refer them to their laws” (EW 2, 15). This method “is the study of the objective manifestation of mind” (EW 2, p. 15).

What Dewey later calls logical theory is here discussed in terms of stages of knowledge, or thinking.9 Thinking incorporates relation, conception, judgment, and reasoning, including analysis, synthesis, induction, and deduction (EW 2, pp. 177–196). Thinking is systematic; not only this, it constitutes a system. This system, Dewey says, is philosophy. “Philosophy is the attempt to systematize or arrange in their organic unity all special branches or science … Science, in its completeness, including the synthetic function, is philosophy” (EW 2, p. 201). What we have here is a claim for Absolute thought as philosophy; as systematic knowledge. This is an unabashedly idealist claim, though it is an idealism that takes empirical psychology seriously. But more important, it is a claim for the centrality of thinking—of method—in and for philosophy. Method is absolutely essential for systematic knowledge. Dewey would hold to this belief throughout his philosophical career, and explicitly state its importance in the 1938 Logic (LW 12, p. 3).

While it certainly seems the case that logic occupied a central and necessary role in thinking, science, and philosophy in Dewey’s early and manifestly Hegelian thought, it does not explain why Dewey would continue to write and think on logical theory after his seeming “turn” to Darwinian and naturalist accountings of self. An explanation for this must be sought. I believe that explanation is to be found in an essay on logical theory written shortly after his supposed “turn”—“Some Stages of Logical Thought” (1900). For Dewey, the final stage of logical thought—the stage of experimentation—is singularly responsible for the “newer” disciplines of the social sciences, including psychology and sociology, as well as the subfields of the sciences of biology and chemistry (MW 1, p. 169). And it is the insights of these sciences, through their use of experimentation, that have resulted in “a statement in which all the distinctions and terms of thought—judgment, concept, inference, subject, predicate and copula of judgment, etc., ad infinitum—shall be interpreted simply and entirely as distinctive functions or divisions of labor within the doubt-inquiry process” (MW 1, p. 174). Without the progress in methods, the new disciplines of psychology and sociology (to which Dewey would increasingly be indebted) would not have arisen. The tremendously valuable experiments that demonstrated to Dewey the importance of attending to sensation, perception, and attention, as well as the psychological components of the will, would not have been available for Dewey to construct an empirically idealistic theory of the self, and Dewey himself recognized this.10 This is what was at stake for Dewey in choosing to continue to reflect on logical theory, and this is what Dewey thought lay ahead for those sciences that followed the “logical” method of experimentation.

Logical theory, therefore, was crucial not only to science and the sciences, but to Dewey’s systematic philosophy as well. Indeed, no philosophic system could avoid an account of logic. The crucial inclusion of logic in systematic philosophy could even extend to any philosophy that purports to make judgments. Dewey makes this clear in the preface to Studies in Logical Theory: for “judgment is the central function of knowing, and hence affords the central problem of logic …” (MW 2, p. 296). But Dewey had a further aim for logical theory: logical theory was not only indisputably necessary for philosophy, but for the broader theory of psychology Dewey was attempting to construct in part to contrast with the Absolutist notions of self and mind of the neo-Hegelians. Dewey continues, “that since the act of knowing is intimately and indissolubly connected with the like yet diverse functions of affection, appreciation, and practice, it only distorts results reached to treat knowing as a self-enclosed and self-explanatory whole—hence the intimate connections of logical theory with functional psychology …” (MW 2, p. 296). The result of this connection was a functionalist and empirical psychology that incorporated Hegelian elements of method in quest of an organic and holistic account of self and ultimately truth, reality, nature, and experience.

Part Two: Dewey’s Logical Education 1882–1902

I have given a rough portrayal of the motive forces behind Dewey’s interest in logical theory, as well as a brief outline of the history of Dewey’s earliest philosophical development. I now wish to discuss Dewey’s logical education more specifically. Dewey matriculated at the University of Vermont in 1879, and while there, took classes in philosophy under H. A. P. Torrey. Torrey was an enthusiastic if somewhat amateurish student of German idealism and particularly Kant, and if the biographies are correct, taught Dewey both Kant and German after Dewey returned in 1882 from a two-year stint teaching mathematics to high school students in Oil City, Pennsylvania.11 Dewey’s Vermont experience, if we are to believe Alan Ryan, was for the first three years a continuation of his high school studies: courses on English, mathematics, classical literature and histories, and the like. His fourth year was an improvement because he was able to study moral, social, and political theory under Torrey and Matthew Buckham—Vermont’s president.12 Robert Westbrook has even less to say about Dewey’s experience at the University of Vermont than Ryan, although both comment on Dewey’s later characterization of Torrey as “constitutionally timid,”—a conclusion based likely in Torrey’s indecisiveness with respect to balancing his Christian faith against Kant’s denial of religious or theological knowledge.13

As Dewey read Kant with Torrey, who was a Kantian scholar of some repute, we can surmise that Dewey was familiar with Kant’s discussion of logic, both in the Critique of Pure Reason (transcendental log...