Skip to main content

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. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
24 comments
Read more

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...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more