The Character of Ideas

Essays in Experimental Logic, by John Dewey is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Chapter VII: The Logical Character of Ideas

VII. THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF IDEAS

Said John Stuart Mill: "To draw inferences has been said to be the great business of life.... It is the only occupation in which the mind never ceases to be engaged." If this be so, it seems a pity that Mill did not recognize that this business identifies what we mean when we say "mind." If he had recognized this, he would have cast the weight of his immense influence not only against the conception that mind is a substance, but also against the conception that it is a collection of existential states or attributes without any substance in which to inhere; and he would thereby have done much to free logic from epistemological metaphysics. In any case, an account of intellectual operations and conditions from the standpoint of the rôle played and position occupied by them in the business of drawing inferences is a different sort of thing from an account of them as having an existence per se, from treating them as making up some sort of existential material distinct from the things which figure in inference-drawing. This latter type of treatment is that which underlies the psychology which itself has adopted uncritically the remnants of the metaphysics of soul substance:[221] the idea of accidents without the substance.[48] This assumption from metaphysical psychology—the assumption of consciousness as an existent stuff or existent process—is then carried over into an examination of knowledge, so as to make the theory of knowledge not logic (an account of the ways in which valid inferences or conclusions from things to other things are made), but epistemology.

We have, therefore, the result (so unfortunate for logic) that logic is not free to go its own way, but is compromised by the assumption that knowledge goes on not in terms of things (I use "things" in the broadest sense, as equaling res, and covering affairs, concerns, acts, as well as "things" in the narrower sense), but in terms of a relation between things and a peculiar existence made up of consciousness, or else between things and functional operations of this existence. If it could be shown that psychology is essentially not a science of states of consciousness, but of behavior, conceived as a process of continuous readjustment, then the undoubted facts which go by the name of sensation, perception, image, emotion, concept, would be interpreted to mean peculiar (i.e., [222]specifically qualitative) epochs, phases, and crises in the scheme of behavior. The supposedly scientific basis for the belief that states of consciousness inherently define a separate type of existence would be done away with. Inferential knowledge, knowledge involving reflection, psychologically viewed, would be assimilated to a certain mode of readaptation of functions, involving shock and the need of control; 'knowledge' in the sense of direct non-reflective presence of things would be identified (psychologically) with relatively stable or completed adjustments. I can not profess to speak for psychologists, but it is an obvious characteristic of the contemporary status of psychology that one school (the so-called functional or dynamic) operates with nothing more than a conventional and perfunctory reference to "states of consciousness"; while the orthodox school makes constant concessions to ideas of the behavior type. It introduces the conceptions of fatigue, practice, and habituation. It makes its fundamental classifications on the basis of physiological distinctions (e.g., the centrally initiated and the peripherally initiated), which, from a biological standpoint, are certainly distinctions of structures involved in the performance of acts.

One of the aims of the Studies in Logical Theory was to show, on the negative or critical side, that the type of logical theory which professedly starts its account of knowledge from mere states of consciousness[223] is compelled at every crucial juncture to assume things, and to define its so-called mental states in terms of things;[49] and, on the positive side, to show that, logically considered, such distinctions as sensation, image, etc., mark instruments and crises in the development of controlled judgment, i.e., of inferential conclusions. It was perhaps not surprising that this effort should have been criticized not on its own merits, but on the assumption that this correspondence of the (functional) psychological and the logical points of view was intended in terms of the psychology which obtained in the critic's mind—to wit, the psychology based on the assumption of consciousness as a separate existence or process.

These considerations suggest that before we can intelligently raise the question of the truth of ideas we must consider their status in judgment, judgment being regarded as the typical expression of the inferential operation. (1) Do ideas present themselves except in situations which are doubtful and inquired into? Do they exist side by side with the facts when the facts are themselves known? Do they exist except when judgment is in suspense? (2) Are "ideas" anything else except the suggestions, conjectures, hypotheses, theories (I use an ascending [224]scale of terms) tentatively entertained during a suspended conclusion? (3) Do they have any part to play in the conduct of inquiry? Do they serve to direct observation, colligate data, and guide experimentation, or are they otiose?[50] (4) If the ideas have a function in directing the reflective process (expressed in judgment), does success in performing the function (that is, in directing to a conclusion which is stable) have anything to do with the logical worth or validity of the ideas? (5) And, finally, does validity have anything to do with truth? Does "truth" mean something inherently different from the fact that the conclusion of one judgment (the known fact, previously unknown, in which judging terminates) is itself applicable in further situations of doubt and inquiry? And is judgment properly more than tentative save as it terminates in a known fact, i.e., a fact present without the intermediary of reflection?

When these questions—I mean, of course, questions which are exemplified in these queries—are answered, we shall, perhaps, have gone as far as it is possible to go with reference to the logical character of ideas. The question may then recur as to whether the "ideas" of the epistemologist (that is, existences [225]in a purely "private stream of consciousness") remain as something over and above, not yet accounted for; or whether they are perversions and misrepresentations of logical characters. I propose to give a brief dogmatic reply in the latter sense. Where, and in so far as, there are unquestioned objects, there is no "consciousness." There are just things. When there is uncertainty, there are dubious, suspected objects—things hinted at, guessed at. Such objects have a distinct status, and it is the part of good sense to give them, as occupying that status, a distinct caption. "Consciousness" is a term often used for this purpose; and I see no objection to that term, provided it is recognized to mean such objects as are problematic, plus the fact that in their problematic character they may be used, as effectively as accredited objects, to direct observations and experiments which finally relieve the doubtful features of the situation. Such "objects" may turn out to be valid, or they may not. But, in any case, they may be used. They may be internally manipulated and developed through ratiocination into explicit statement of their implications; they may be employed as standpoints for selecting and arranging data, and as methods for conducting experiments. In short, they are not merely hypothetical; they are working hypotheses. Meanwhile, their aloofness from accredited objectivity may lead us to characterize them as merely ideas, or even as "mental states," provided[226] once more we mean by mental state just this logical status.

We have examples of such ideas in symbols. A symbol, I take it, is always itself, existentially, a particular object. A word, an algebraic sign, is just as much a concrete existence as is a horse, a fire-engine, or a flyspeck. But its value resides in its representative character: in its suggestive and directive force for operations that when performed lead us to non-symbolic objects, which without symbolic operations would not be apprehended, or at least would not be so easily apprehended. It is, I think, worth noting that the capacity (a) for regarding objects as mere symbols and (b) for employing symbols instrumentally furnishes the only safeguard against dogmatism, i.e., uncritical acceptance of any suggestion that comes to us vividly; and also that it furnishes the only basis for intelligently controlled experiments.

I do not think, however, that we should have the tendency to regard ideas as private, as personal, if we stopped short at this point. If we had only words or other symbols uttered by others, or written, or printed, we might call them, when in objective suspense, mere ideas. But we should hardly think of these ideas as our own. Such extra-organic stimuli, however, are not adequate logical devices. They are too rigid, too "objective" in their own existential status. Their meaning and character are too definitely[227] fixed. For effective discovery we need things which are more easily manipulated, which are more transitive, more easily dropped and changed. Intra-organic events, adjustments within the organism, that is, adjustments of the organism considered not with reference to the environment but with reference to one another, are much better suited to stand as representatives of genuinely dubious objects. An object which is really doubted is by its nature precarious and inchoate, vague. What is a thing when it is not yet discovered and yet is tentatively entertained and tested?

Ancient logic never got beyond the conception of an object whose logical place, whose subsumptive position as a particular with reference to some universal, was doubtful. It never got to the point where it could search for particulars which in themselves as particulars are doubtful. Hence it was a logic of proof, of deduction, not of inquiry, of discovery, and of induction. It was hard up against its own dilemma: How can a man inquire? For either he knows that for which he seeks, and hence does not seek: or he does not know, in which case he can not seek, nor could he tell if he found. The individualistic movement of modern life detached, as it were, the individual, and allowed personal (i.e., intra-organic) events to have, transitively and temporarily, a worth of their own. These events are continuous with extra-organic events (in origin and eventual outcome);[228] but they may be considered in temporary displacement as uniquely existential. In this capacity they serve as means for the elaboration of a delayed but more adequate response in a radically different direction. So treated, they are tentative, dubious but experimental, anticipations of an object. They are "subjective" (i.e., individualistic) surrogates of public, cosmic things, which may be so manipulated and elaborated as to terminate in public things which without them would not exist as empirical objects.[51]

The recognition then of intra-organic events, which are not merely effects nor distorted refractions of cosmic objects, but inchoate future cosmic objects in process of experimental construction, resolves, to my mind, the paradox of so-called subjective and private things that have objective and universal reference, and that operate so as to lead to objective consequences which test their own value. When a man can say: This color is not necessarily the color of the glass nor the picture nor even of an object reflected but is at least an event in my nervous system, an event which I may refer to my organism till I get surety of other reference—he is for the first time emancipated from the dogmatism of unquestioned reference, and is set upon a path of experimental inquiry.

[229]

I am not here concerned with trying to demonstrate that this is the correct mode of interpretation. I am only concerned with pointing out its radical difference from the view of a critic who, holding to the two-world theory of existences which from the start are divided into the fixedly objective and the fixedly psychical, interprets in terms of his own theory the view that the distinction between the objective and the subjective is a logical-practical distinction. Whether the logical, as against the ontological, theory be true or false, it can hardly be fruitfully discussed without a preliminary apprehension of it as a logical conception.

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Dewey, John. 2012. Essays in Experimental Logic. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved May 2022 from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40794/40794-h/40794-h.htm

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