Experience and Thinking

“It also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance” (p. 155).

Young apple tree from graft, possibly surviving.

The Nature of Experience.
“The connection of these two phases of experience [actively trying and passively undergoing] measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience” (p. 146).

“Experience as trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it” (p. 146).

“To 'learn from experience’ is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence” (p. 147).

“Two conclusions important for education follow. ( 1 ) Experience is primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive. But (2) the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which it leads up” (p. 147).

This last citation seems to be particularly important and is one that is perhaps missed or misunderstood in some attempts at “progressive” education.  Although active experience is essential for educational experience, so is a perception of relationships.  It’s not thoughtless action or free play, but the role of the school may be something like introducing what Dewey defines as “mind” into those experiences.  Of course, neglecting the first step, active experience, is probably a more common practice, which presents material as preformed conceptual information. 

“[when] The intimate union of activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to recognition of meaning is broken; [instead] we have two fragments: mere bodily action on one side, and meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity on the other.

It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate them. Some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated. ( a ) In part bodily activity becomes an intruder ” (p. 147).

“The chief source of the "problem of discipline" in schools is that the teacher has often to spend the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take the mind away from its material” (p. 148).

“( b ) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned by the application of

"mind," some bodily activities have to be used” (p. 148).

“For the senses and muscles are used not as organic participants in having an instructive experience, but as external inlets and outlets of mind. Before the child goes to school, he learns with his hand, eye, and ear, because they are organs of the process of doing something from which meaning results…His senses are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow

"conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing something with a purpose. The qualities of seen and touched things have a bearing on what is done, and are alertly perceived; they have a meaning” (p. 149).

“( c ) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from direct occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the expense of relations or connections. It is altogether too common to separate perceptions and even ideas from judgments” (p. 150).

“As matter of fact, every perception and every idea is a sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a thing… A wagon is not perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic connection of the parts which makes it a wagon” (p. 150).

“Judgment is employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is mere sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior judgment, as in the case of familiar objects” (p. 150).

This discussion reminds me of the Lopez essay we’ve used in ED 5010 (Landscape and Narrative) which I credit for getting me to think about the importance of relationships for meaning.  I also feel like that essay led me toward Wittgenstein and the discussions about the relationships between words and meaning.  So in D&E I think we could find some insightful comparisons to Philosophical Investigations.


“Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for ideas” (p. 150).

“We get so thoroughly used to a kind of pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not aware how half-dead our mental action is, and how much keener and more extensive our observations and ideas would be if we formed them under conditions of a vital experience which required us to use judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with” (p. 151).

“The failure arises in supposing that relationships can become perceptible without experience -- without that conjoint trying and undergoing of which we have spoken” (p. 151).

I think these three citations are related with the idea of recognition above, we recognize words to mean things, however when they are employed in theory or to transmit conceptual information they are limited, as I think Wittgenstein argues, and Dewey states, they are only “a kind of pseudo-idea, a half perception.”  Quite often we start schooling experiences with instructions, to explain some concept.  Sometimes that’s where it ends.  Hopefully they are followed with some kind of active experience.  I believe Dewey would reverse the order of operations in his methodology (if we could say that.)  Beginning with raw experience, then finding the words to describe and communicate meanings or concepts (maybe to communicate to our future selves, to remember) seems to give the words we choose specific meanings and avoids limiting perceptions and connections (learning) to the material as presented by the teacher.  The job of the teacher becomes more difficult, involving more intelligence to create and administer experiences which are likely to lead to learning for a particular group.  I connect these citations to the one we use often, something like “no idea can be transmitted from one person to another.  When it is presented it is a fact, not an idea.”


“An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance” (p. 151).

“Because of our education we use words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us from seeing any longer the difficulty” (p. 151).


Reflection in Experience.

“Thought or reflection, as we have already seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation between what we try to do and what happens in consequence. No experience having a meaning is possible without some element of thought” (p. 151).

 “Thinking, in other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous” (p. 152).

“All that the wisest man can do is to observe what is going on more widely and more minutely and then select more carefully from what is noted just those factors which point to something to happen” (p. 153).

“…acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which flow from present action. Reflection is the acceptance of such responsibility” (p. 153).

These suggest to me that an aim of education is to give meaning to experience, which happens when we connect actions and consequences.  I think there is a difference when reflecting on a passive experience, such as observing actions and making connections.  This could be an example of learning from behavior?  But I think more valuable is when we reflect after acting on a hypothesis; we’ve had a problem, made a plan, executed it, and then reflected to see if our actions have the meanings which we had thought.


“To think upon the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is indicated as probable or possible regarding an outcome. To fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is not to think” (p. 153).

“From this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought. Born in partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached impartiality… The almost insurmountable difficulty of achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of events and is designed to influence the result” (pp. 154-155).

“The object of thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to project a possible termination on the basis of what is already given… Acquiring is always secondary, and instrumental to the act of inquiring” (p. 155).

I like the differentiation of acquiring and inquiring here, inquiring in reflection leads to acquiring knowledge, perhaps an end of a hypothesis.  It could be as simple as saying “well that didn’t work.”


“It also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance” (p. 155).

This seems related to the E&N citation, something like “every thinker puts some part of an apparently stable world in jeopardy.” But it is approaching thinking from the other end.  When we think, we acquire knowledge, which is an end, which can be a tool.  Tools can be used for many purposes, sometimes destroying an apparently stable object or attitude.  But thinking is not guaranteed to solve our problems; there is no certainty in what thinking will lead to, and sometimes it despite all the effort could still be without meaning.


“Systematic advance in invention and discovery began when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to guide action in tentative explorations, whose development would confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture” (p. 156).

I connect this theme to E&N when Dewey writes about the beginnings of modern science.


“No matter how great the mathematical probability, the inference is hypothetical -- a matter of probability” (p. 157).

I connect this theme to Wittgenstein’s comments on accuracy and certainty, using “borderless regions” as his analogy, and the series of questions he works with in On Certainty which are things we know to be true… (the sun will rise tomorrow, the earth has existed for a long time before I was born.) 


“So much for the general features of a reflective experience. They are (i) perplexity, confusion, doubt…(ii) a conjectural anticipation -- a tentative interpretation… (iii) a careful survey… (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent… (v)… doing something overtly to bring about the anticipated result, and thereby testing the hypothesis. It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and error plane. They make thinking itself into an experience” (p. 157).

For the educator I think this could be the outline for a lesson plan.


“Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be tried in the world and thereby tried out. And since it can never take into account all the connections, it can never cover with perfect accuracy all the consequences” (p. 158).

Wittgenstein wrote something like “there is no rule for how high a tennis player may hit the ball.”  This last citation seems to incorporate a lot of what Dewey wrote about risk, and the problem of limitation when concepts are taught as detached from experience.  In experience, more could always happen, a tennis player could hit the ball high despite the fact that most usually shoot low and fast, a first grader could play a drum with exceptional musicianship, or I think you once asked, “if Jesus was your student, would you know?”