Dewey

A Beginner's Guide

David L. Hildebrand

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781780740164
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Pragmatismus in der Philosophie

A ground-breaking introduction to one of America's most prominent philosophers An icon of philosophy and psychology during the first half of the 20th century, Dewey is known as the father of Functional Psychology and a pivotal figure of the Pragmatist movement as well as the progressive movement in education. This concise and critical look at Dewey's work examines his unique take on morality, art, and religion, his naturalistic approach to science and psychology, and his contribution to political thought. The author of over forty books across a range of topic, Dewey's legacy remains not only through the works he left us, but also through the institutions he founded, which include The New School for Social Research in New York City and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Hildebrand's biography brilliantly interweaves the different strands of Dewey's thought, and examines the legacy he left behind.

1

Experience: mind, body, and environment

Psychology is concerned with the life-career of individualized activities. . . .[Its] subject-matter is the behavior of the organism so far as that is characterized by changes taking place in an activity that is serial and continuous in reference to changes in an environment that persists although changing in detail.

(LW5:224)

After ignoring impulses for a long time in behalf of sensations, modern psychology now tends to start out with an inventory and description of instinctive activities. This is an undoubted improvement. But . . . till we know the specific environing conditions under which selection took place we really know nothing. And so we need to know about the social conditions which have educated original activities into definite and significant dispositions before we can discuss the psychological element in society. This is the true meaning of social psychology.

(MW14:66)

Introduction

To understand the world, we try to understand ourselves: how we perceive, feel, think, and act. We ask questions like, what is an emotion and what, if anything, is it about? How do habits form and why are some so difficult to change? What is consciousness? More grandly, we wonder about the relation between all of our mind’s various functions and our sense of what life is all about. We wonder, in short, how psychological experiences can add up to the experience of a meaningful world.

Many today hope that psychology can resolve questions about life’s meaning. We look to surgery, pills, and therapy to help ‘correct’ our brain functions, expecting that these procedures will answer our questions. Dewey, too, began his career with the expectation that psychology held the key to philosophy’s big questions. As he developed his own psychological theories, Dewey came to two realizations: first, that psychology’s accounts of human behavior were inadequate because they were built upon several old and misleading philosophical assumptions. Second, he came to see that grappling with the meanings of human existence required more than the discipline of psychology could ever provide. In his view, psychology was one, and only one, tool for understanding experience, but much about experience is comprehensible only through art, politics, ethics, and religion – all beyond the bounds of psychology. He came to see that philosophy as a discipline was morally bound to greater engagement with these arenas than scientific psychology.

This chapter is foundational to the rest of the book because it explains how Dewey’s reconstruction of the psychological components of human behavior (instincts, perceptions, habits, acts, emotions, and conscious thought) lead to his development of the concept of experience – a concept that Dewey invokes in every other area of his philosophy. This notion of experience is crucial because it empowers Dewey to liberate the individual mind from subjective isolation so that it can be understood as it functions with and through the natural and social environments.

To understand Dewey’s mature psychology and philosophy of experience, let us briefly consider several important philosophical and psychological influences near the start of Dewey’s career. Philosophically, Dewey began as a Hegelian Idealist. His graduate study of Hegelianism in the 1880s with George Sylvester Morris offered Dewey hope that longstanding divisions between ‘subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human’ could be overcome (LW5:153). Hegelianism inspired Dewey to believe that all kinds of human experience – bodily, psychical, imaginative, and practical – could be explained as integrated parts of whole, dynamic persons. Though Dewey eventually leaves Hegelianism behind (for experimentalism), his early study of Hegel inculcated in Dewey a fundamental bent toward interpreting phenomena in synthetically organized ways. (As later chapters on morality, politics, education, etc., will show, this approach – overcoming dualisms and reaching new syntheses – remains central to Dewey’s approach for the remainder of his career.) It was also during this period that Dewey ambitiously pursued studies in psychology. He had high hopes for this new discipline’s ability to describe and explain experience; at this time he referred to psychology as the ‘completed method of philosophy’ (EW1:157). Though he later downgrades this lofty estimation of psychology’s potential, it nevertheless remains for Dewey one of the most important ways that solid scientific fact can be put in conceptual connection with more freeform philosophical theories.

The period in which Dewey studied (and tried to reconstruct) psychology was a fertile one for the field, and a few words about the historical context should be helpful. During the late nineteenth century, psychology was dominated by two schools, introspectionism (or ‘mentalism’) and the newer physiological psychology (imported into America from Germany). Introspectionism arose out of the classical associationist psychology of eighteenth-century British empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume. The vocabulary used by these early figures varies somewhat, but in essence classical associationism accounts for intelligent behavior with two main components: (1) internally inspected – ‘introspected’ – entities, such as perceptual experiences (which can supposedly be discovered through mental self-examination) and (2) thoughts or ideas. Intelligent behavior, they argued, arises as the product of associative learning. In short, the mind takes its internal sensations (sometimes called ‘impressions’) along with their fainter copies (mental images) and through repeated associations with ideas (or thoughts), basic intelligence develops. These basic associative pairings (e.g., pairing of ‘red’ with a red-stimulus or internal image of red) are then further associated with other such discoveries, and the resulting web of interrelated concepts is what we commonly call ‘knowledge’. Through complicated sets of such associations, animals and people become familiar with their environment and how to act in it; more sophisticated animals use association to discover the causal structure of the world.

The important link between the associationists’ account and ‘introspectionism’ stems from the fact that the method of discovery (of the mind’s components and their linkages) is one of introspection. This method had a tenacious hold on many in psychology; even when later psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt (Leipzig) and E.B. Titchener (Cornell, NY) endeavored to explain mental phenomena with the ascendant physiological and experimental methods (e.g., by using dedicated laboratories), they nevertheless retained classical associationism’s commitment to introspection as an indispensable part of the method for revealing mental life. In the early part of the twentieth century, introspectionism was further attacked by the ascendant behaviorist movement, which condemned its perpetuation of a mind–body dualism and for the lack of explicit, experimental, and verifiable standards.¹

The other important movement during Dewey’s formative period was physiological psychology. Dewey first studied it in graduate school with G. Stanley Hall, taking all of Hall’s classes (including classes in theoretical, physiological, and experimental psychology); in addition, Dewey conducted experiments on attention in Hall’s laboratory. Unlike the intuitive approach of introspectionism, its methods incorporated strict experimental controls. Furthermore, this approach to psychology brought with it an organic and holistic model of experience, which Dewey thought could overcome the dualisms that made older, associationist models too subjective and isolated for the evolutionary spirit of the times. Dewey writes,

The influence of [evolutionary] biological science in general upon psychology has been very great . . . To biology is due the conception of organism . . . In psychology this conception has led to the recognition of mental life as an organic unitary process developing according to the laws of all life, and not a theatre for the exhibition of independent autonomous faculties, or a rendezvous in which isolated, atomic sensations and ideas may gather, hold external converse, and then forever part.

(EW1:56)

Still, Dewey could not simply adopt physiological psychology as it was. While appreciating its more rigorous scientific approach, Dewey saw that physiological psychology still retained some of the modern period’s more noxious epistemological elements that would have to be pruned away. In particular, it retained the view that experience was a patchwork of atomized ‘sense data’, which operated like a mechanical sequence of causes and effects. Dewey’s Hegelian perspective allowed him to realize that such assumptions about experience would prevent psychology from ever developing accounts that made contact with the world in which we actually live: a world of experienced meanings. Addressing this wider world meant that a much wider arena than that considered by physiological psychology would have to be considered germane to investigation. For Dewey, this arena had to relate the individual’s mental life to that of other individuals, and to the collective, social environment.

The idea of environment is a necessity to the idea of organism, and with the conception of environment comes the impossibility of considering psychical life as an individual, isolated thing developing in a vacuum . . . I refer to the growth of those vast and as yet undefined topics of inquiry which may be vaguely designated as the social and historical sciences,–the sciences of the origin and development of the various spheres of man’s activity.

(EW1:56–7)

This critical point is simple, while also entailing an enormous undertaking. To understand experience, psychology must begin to account for how organisms function in environments. However, any single function can be related to multiple environments, some remote; psychology must expand its method so that it can incorporate data beyond immediate biological or mechanical actions. This would mean it must draw from those sciences charged with studying more complex contexts: anthropology, sociology, ethnology, and linguistics, for example. No longer allowed to wall itself off as a study of ‘the mind’, psychology could only progress by accepting into its studies those very facts already evident in every psychologist’s daily, practical life: that individual mental life is necessarily filled with social dimensions (more on this in a while). In other words, if psychology meant to become truly empirical, its method would have to search farther and wider for more data. Let us turn now to Dewey’s reconstruction of psychology.

Dewey’s challenge was to develop a conception of experience which took account both of experimental limits and the pervasive influence of culture. His new approach would have to temper the excesses of the physiological approach (its atomistic materialism) while also tempering excesses in the Hegelian philosophies which first inspired him (especially the assumption of an Absolute reality which was essentially unified and perfect).² It was likely that William James’s tour de force, Principles of Psychology (1890), showed Dewey how a unified consciousness and intelligent self could be explained without appealing to a transcendental Absolute. Infinite absolutes do not instruct us about what to do next; such practical guidance comes, rather, from ‘study of the deficiencies, irregularities and possibilities of the actual situation’ (MW14:199). Thus, content to leave deterministic materialism and quietistic idealism behind,

Dewey’s ‘new psychology’ would start with lived experience and attempt to understand it in terms of its organic movement and wholeness. Abstractions, in other words, were to be understood in terms of it rather than vice versa . . . By starting with experience as it is lived, the method of psychology can come to understand how the various phases or elements arise within it and so be understood in terms of their functional origins.

(Alexander 1987, 19, 23)

This holistic or functionalist approach to psychology is powerfully represented in his 1896 critique of the reflex arc concept, which he wrote during his tenure at the University of Chicago, a period of deepening engagement with educational theory and practice. To understand Dewey’s functionalism, it is best if we begin with his critique of the ‘reflex arc’ and then summarize how this critique amounted to a statement of his new psychology.

Toward functionalism and instrumentalism

A contemporary trend in psychology offered Dewey the opportunity to create a new synthesis from the opposition between physiological and introspective psychology. ‘The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology’ (1896) stands today as a major step forward for his view of experience as well as a seminal contribution to the field of psychology.

At the time, growing numbers of psychologists looked toward the reflex arc concept to help explain human behavior in experimental and empirical ways. The hope was that this new model of behavior, built using pairings of cause (stimulus) and effect (response), could replace explanations which relied on ‘psychic entities’ or ‘mental substance’ and so rescue psychology from entities that were mysterious, unobservable, and untestable. The reflex arc model works as follows: a passive organism encounters an external stimulus; this engenders a sensory and motor response; in some cases, this is a conscious response. In a typical example, a child sees a candle flame (stimulus), reaches toward it (response), burns his hand (stimulus), and quickly wrenches his hand away (response). This model argues that these plainly observable elements are the basic stimuli and responses in the event; in time, all their connections could be satisfactorily described with mechanistic and physiological terms; no recourse to the unobservable was necessary.

Dewey criticizes the reflex arc framework for several inadequacies. First, it artificially separates events in order to make them discrete (and analyzable). Sensory stimulus, central response, and act are all separate events on this description. ‘As a result’, Dewey writes, ‘the reflex arc is not a comprehensive, or organic unity, but a patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied processes’ (EW5:97). Second, it misdescribes how we interact with our surroundings. It is simply untrue that organisms passively receive a stimulus and then become active responders. The nature of organisms is to interact continuously with their environment in a manner that is cumulative and mutually modifying. No child is a passive spectator when he first encounters a candle; he is already actively engaged with his environment – exploring the room, anticipating that he will find something, for example. The child’s notice of the candlelight modifies these ongoing activities. ‘The real beginning’, Dewey writes, ‘is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light’ (EW5:97). Third, this model too rigidly identifies events as the starting point (stimulus) or the ending point. Both stimulus and response are enmeshed in an ongoing matrix of sensory and motor activities. A stimulus comes from somewhere and a response leads elsewhere – to further coordination and integration of both sensory and motor responses. Depending on how the wider range of events are framed, a stimulus can be a response, and a response a stimulus.

In effect, Dewey is criticizing the metaphysical assumptions behind the reflex arc concept. But rather than trying to parse whether there is an underlying reality we may designate as pure ‘stimulus’ or ‘response’ we should see that problem as one of pragmatic consequences. We are seeking to discover ‘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’ (EW5:102; emphasis mine). We need not abandon terms like ‘stimulus’ and ‘response’, so long as we remember that they are attached to events based upon their function in a wider dynamic context, one that includes interests and aims.

Instead of the reflex arc model’s patchwork of stimuli and various responses, Dewey suggests one that understands organism–environment interactions as ‘sensori-motor coordinations’, circuits in continual reconstitution and adjustment. Instead of starting with a narrow ‘seeing’ or sensory stimulus, he recommends we start from the act: a seeing-for-reaching. ‘What precedes the “stimulus” ’, Dewey ...