I wrote last week about a book by John Dewey, published 104 years ago now, "How we think". I described then the conclusion of the first chapter, that thinking in its essence is the operation by which present facts suggest other facts in such a way as to induce belief in the latter on the basis of the former.
Let us take his line of thought (about thought) a little further. For he moves quickly from thinking in a generic sense to reflective or critical thinking. And THAT is the key. John Dewey is still probably better known as an educational theorist with a reputation for an aversion to tough grading or school discipline.
That reputation is overblown. But ... HOW WE THINK was aimed at the philosophy of education, Its program is this: first let us figure out what thinking is attempting to do, and then let us infer how THAT can be done well. That in turn will lead us to an understanding of how older humans can teach younger ones to do a good job with this common task of thinking.
So, if thinking is the operation defined in the first paragraph of this post: why do we do it? In general, Dewey says, we think when and because we have come to some fork in a road. There are two or more mutually inconsistent ways in which we could proceed, and it is not obvious which one we should adopt. If I'm thinking about whether it will rain, I may be doing so because there is a sort of fork here: should I hurry home, or may I continue my leisurely walk? That is usually a fairly low-stakes fork, but it does motivate attention to present facts that may foretell the near future.
When we look even at such simple examples as that, we come to understand that thinking is something we can do either well or poorly. With deference to Bob Dylan -- it may help to be a weatherman to know what it portends that the wind is blowing.
Or, as Dewey puts it at the start of his second chapter, "A thinking agent will perceive that certain given facts are probable signs of a future rain, and will take steps in the light of this anticipated future."
This is in contrast not only with human children too young to draw a connection between unexpected gusts of wind and coming rains -- it is in contrast too with non-thinking animals, one of which may as Dewey writes "go into its hole when rain threatens, because of some immediate stimulus to its organism."
So, we have arrived at this point: we, humans, think largely in order to make good guesses about the future, and what Dewey calls reflective, or sometimes critical, thinking is simply better at doing that than spontaneous or uncritical thinking. In uncritical thought "the suggestion that occurs is at once accepted," whereas in critical thought we turn the thing over in our minds and hunt for additional evidence which may "develop the suggestion and will either as we say bear it out or else make obvious its absurdity and irrelevance."
Here he arrives at a proto-Popperian point. Thought, to serve its purpose, must be willing to falsify its hypotheses, else we are condemned to stick with whatever suggestion first occurs to us.
You will hear more from me about this book. Probably not next week, but surely the week after that.
Comments
Post a Comment