John Dewey on Concept Acquisition, Part II

As we discussed yesterday: a child will begin working with a concept of dog with only one data point: Fido.

Nobody waits, or should wait, for enough material to build up a table of similarities and contrasts. The building of assumptions and experimentation begins immediately. Meeting the neighbors' dog is simply an early experiment in one's life. The neighbors' dog may be much larger than our own family dog: I may have to revise my view that dogs fit naturally on human laps, like Fido.

Ah, but what does that have to do with us? One might ask. "There are only adults in this room."

Still: there are matters on which we have only one datum. Consider life on Earth. We know as of yet of only one planet that hosts life. We have hypotheses about others, and a huge body of fiction on the subject. But we have no reliable information about any other such planet.

This is NOT an example of Dewey's. [He was writing How we think only a few years after the H.G. Wells novelistic treatment of an alien invasion. So far as I know he never considered doing a sequel called How they think.]

All we know about life, and thought, any CONCEPT of ours on the subject, comes from this planet and may for all we know someday seem as limited as generalizing about dogs based on Fido, one's childhood pet.

So concept formation can come about, and quite legitimately and rationally, without any basis for comparison. The example shows that Dewey was surely right -- concept formation is something very different from abstraction. There is "thingumbob again" as in -- we worry again today about our fragile planetary ecosystem -- and there is the discovery that thingumbob is part of a larger class.

We earthlings await the neighbor's dog.

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