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Beyond Realism and Anti-realism: John Dewey and the Neo-pragmatists
by David L. Hildebrand
Chapter 1
The New realists’ insistence upon the independence of existences was something that Dewey could accept only at a very general level, and he felt bound to reject important corollaries of the realist view.
For example, their [realists’] doctrine of external relations held that,
given the proposition aRb, it could not be claimed that aR in any degree constitutes b, that Rb constitutes a, or that R constitute either a or b.39
This view enabled New realists to guarantee the integrity of each individual object, protecting it from the slippery slope leading to absolute idealism.
It affirmed that
“[t]he proposition ‘This or that object is known,’ does not imply that such object is conditioned by the knowing.”40
To begin with, Dewey objected that this doctrine is ambiguous in designation.
What remains unaffected by the relations in the proposition aRb, the logical content of the terms or the existences to which the terms refer?
The stronger implication would be in regard to existences, for it supports the realist tenet that existences are neither produced nor altered by knowing.
Dewey objects to the implication of the external relations doctrine because it isolates knowing—which the realists themselves claimed “belongs to the same world as that of its objects”—from the thing known.
Dewey writes,
- .. the theory means that the existence known does not change in being referred to by a proposition.
This truth is undoubtedly axiomatic in the sense that we cannot swap horses in midstream. . . .
This truth is, however, quite compatible . . . with a change of meaning in the existence referred to, because it has become a subject of knowing.
It is, moreover, consistent with alteration of the existence itself through knowing, as well as with the doctrine that the purpose of knowing is to effect some alteration.
Any other conception implies that any change is fatal to the identity of a thing.
And I do not take it that the realists wish to commit us irretrievably to Eleaticism. (MW 6:140, emphasis mine)
But in a functional sense, the car has changed insofar as it has become an integral part of a larger inquiry;
it has become the subject matter for a new inquiry in addition to being the finished achievement of a previous inquiry.
The present inquiry may conclude that cars produce noxious fumes.
Such a result will reconstruct the overall meaning of “car” for us, in the process changing its identity not only as an item of language (affecting all its lexicographical ties) but as an existence in our lives.
That it has changed existentially can be seen by our newfound reluctance to park the baby’s carriage next to the smoking exhaust pipe.
Dewey’s point is that if knowing is conceived as a natural process, then the result of that process—a change of the meaning of the existence inquired into—is a change in that existence:
- “If we take knowing as one existence, one event in relation to other events, what happens to existences when a knowing event supervenes, is a matter of bare, brute fact” (MW 6:141).
Dewey is merely stating that the mutual modification of meanings and objects is a feature of stable, mundane experience.
Such changes need not alter the identity of the existence any more than a plant’s growth challenges its identity as a plant.
If meaning is classifiable as a distinct kind of existence, it is only such given certain purposes of inquiry, not ab extra.
The same holds true for “mind” and “body.”
Such facts about relations exhibit themselves in experience:
- Dynamic connections are qualitatively diverse, just as are the centers of action.
In this sense, pluralism, not monism, is an established empirical fact.
The attempt to establish monism from consideration of the very nature of a relation is a mere piece of dialectics. . . .
To attempt to get results from a consideration of the “external” nature of relations is of a piece with the attempt to deduce results from their “internal” character. . . .
Experience exhibits every kind of connection from the most intimate to mere external juxtaposition. (MW 10:11–12)
At the same time, he has offered an important clue as to how logic could be reenvisioned: logic is to be the study of knowing as an ongoing process rather than of knowledge as a fixed achievement.
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