Upon reading the later version of the opening chapter of this work, and following your comment to my discussion of the 1925 version, I noticed how little Dewey uses the term "denotation." He referres to it only once, "this empirical method I shall call the denotative method" (p. 16). Yesterday I had placed the idea of dictation, transcribing events, living deliberately, or simply attending to one's own experience as it happens (sometimes I think you say a form of writing one's experience into memory?) onto the term denotation. Today, I think of it more like the scientific method of theorizing, which begins in raw experience and must return to it. "Theory may intervene in a long course of reasoning, many portions of which are remote from what is directly experienced. But the vine of pendant theory is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject matter" (p. 11). Dewey illustrates this method in science, through Einstein's theory of deflection. "what role do the objects attained in reflection play? Where do they come in? They explain the primary objects, they enable us to grasp them with understanding, instead of just having sense-contact with them" (p. 16). He illustrates that Einstein first noticed something about light and nature which prompted his reflective inquiry, his theorizing. Einstein then was able to create a hypothesis and test it, using an upcoming eclipse as the natural experience opportunity to measure the bending of light around mass. Dewey also points out, that were this final observation discovered first, as though by chance, its significance could be overlooked, "just as we daily drop from attention hundreds of perceived details for which we have no intellectual use." Dewey also gives us "a first-rate test of the value of any philosophy which is offered us: does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful?" (p. 18). And this I think is an aim of ED 5010, which may be as humble as letting the fly out of the bottle, or as grandiose as to lead to the theory or relativity.
Through following the denotative method of philosophy we see that "the things of primary experience are so arresting and engrossing that we tend to accept them just as they are" (p. 22) The flat earth. The sun marching across the sky. Morals, religion, and politics. "Only analysis shows that the ways in which we believe and expect have a tremendous effect upon what we believe and expect. We have discovered at last that these ways are set, almost abjectly so, by social factors, by tradition, and the influence of education...we believe many things not because things are so, but because we have become habituated..." (p. 23). I believe Wittgenstein might say that the foundation of our mode of life is held up by the house itself.
Dewey writes, "Philosophical simplifications are due to choice, and choice marks an interest moral in the broad sense of concern for what is good" (p. 33) and then, "Selective emphasis, choice, is inevitable whenever reflection occurs. This is not an evil. Deception comes only when the presence and operation of choice is concealed, disguised, and denied" (p. 34). Dewey suggests that philosophies of previous generations went astray when they made unacknowledged choices, and states that the aim of this work is to work with the "great philosophic systems, endeavoring to point out their elements of strength and weakness when their conclusions are employed" (p. 37). To test theory in experience. "It will not be a study of philosophy but a study, by means of philosophy, of life experience" (p. 40). At the end of the chapter I wrote in the book, "Philosophy: empirical method to find choice in social/cultural norms & practices, to critique outcomes in experience, and to offer alternatives."
It's interesting that in 1929 Dewey published The Quest For Certainty. Which like the rewritten chapter above takes a sustained characterization of what we, I guess, can shorthand as "science". Your distinctions in reading the two versions of E&N shows this shift in emphasis.
ReplyDeleteI guess I'd equate denotation as versions of "wide-awakeness" in action. Then later there are degrees of reflection, for Dewey, his view of "science" is a bench-mark for a method of doing science.
But it takes careful and pervasive "wide-awakeness" to not let "science" in Dewey's text (or sometimes "empirical method") devolve into something less than what he actually denotes it as. So in various works during this period, Dewey provides an enormously broad view of "science" (as you noted in the last posting).
This extends to the micro level of "reflection". Where an "idea becomes a theory waiting to be tested in experience". (rough paraphrase there). But it reminds me of Geertz's "practical epistemology" in "How We Think Now". That is, grasping consciously the notion of putting an idea into action experimentally. If you start out at the micro level and plot this all the way to the macro level (social/cultural norms and actions) you get that broad notion of experimental science. It's just that the materials of you experiment with are not the earth and hard science materials....but often the "ideas/reflections/thoughts" that preceded and are attached to those more tangible ways of doing science.
"It will not be a study of philosophy but a study, by means of philosophy, of life experience" (p. 40)
Which accords to things he wrote at the end of E&E and also I think quite direction to Thoreau. In the arts and sciences.....Dewey was careful to stipulate that that "refined results" of the processes he advocated for had to be "returned to experience". This meant never letting the qualitative connection or tether to the original experience be severed. I equate this to being able to still listen with pleasure to Beethoven's 5th Symphony. I've never let the experience of hearing it be severed from certain elements that first impressed it upon me. These have not been replaced....but expanded and are now part of the whole of "an experience".
That page 40 citation is quite fine. I think this comparison of sorts was a good idea. Results in a fine reading of the 1929 version....but one which we would do well to keep tethered to the 1925 one.