More on Dewey's "How we think"

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.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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