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How we think (1920)


Book note.  

An important but neglected work by John Dewey, published by DC Heath, Boston, 1910, and one in the public domain, is known as How we think.

Here is a link.  https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/37423/pg37423-images.html 

How we think opens in striking fashion, "No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them." That phrasing could have led to a Wittgensteinian view of such definitions as games, where usage drives meaning rather than the reverse.  

It doesn't go there. Rather: the first chapter comes to the conclusion that thinking is "that operation in which present facts suggest other facts (or truths) in such a way as to induce belief in the latter upon the ground or warrant of the former."  He suggests a man out for a walk who notices a cold breeze.  This may induce him to look toward the sky, which may in turn appear cloudier, darker than had been the case when he first stepped out for the excursion. He may of course quicken his steps heading home to beat an incoming rain. In such an instance, though it is a simple one, there is a clear operation of thought in which the breeze and clouds become warrant to a belief in an upcoming rainfall.  

Fun fact.  There is a "John Dewey High School" in Brooklyn, New York, NY. See above.

The high school motto, "Dewin it right."

But ... back to my train of thought.  Dewey then proceeds to discuss what we need to add to this idea of thought to justify the adjective "critical".  Critical thinking, readers may remember, is to be the goal of a Deweyite education. 

I'll leave you with that. 

  

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