Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality
... As many observers of Dewey have noted, social inquiry was foundational to Dewey's larger philosophical project (Manicas, 1998;Shook, 2000;Brown, 2012). Dewey's philosophy of knowledge and his experimentalist/instrumentalist criterion of truth, to be discussed more at length below, is premised on a particular understanding of human perception and of how humans come to know. ...
... Dewey's experiment was the center piece of his vision for the natural and social sciences as well as his overall philosophical project in the second half of his long career (Brown, 2012). 9 As Shook (2000) and Brown (2012) have argued, Dewey's instrumentalist criterion of truth was a theory of both knowledge and reality as well as an extension of his understanding of how humans come to know. Dewey held a dynamic view of ontology, arguing that all objects are continually unfolding both in experience and underlying reality: "'This" is an indefinitely multiple and varied series of "thises."' ...
... Mead Peirce Dewey James 19601980200019601980 2000 2020 ...
Pragmatism, especially the works of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, is in the midst of a revival in American sociology. American sociologists have drawn on these authors in their addressment of contemporary debates in the wider disciplinary field. Placing these contemporary applications of pragmatist thought alongside the broader intellectual tradition of pragmatic philosophy, however, demonstrates tensions associated with this revival. This paper draws on the work of John Dewey as a particularly stark case of the conflict between the philosophy of social science espoused by the original pragmatist philosophers and the use of their ideas in American sociology today. This treatment affords the opportunity to recover a vision for social science which has been overlooked in the contemporary pragmatist revival with deep implications for the practice of social science today.
... This brings us to Dewey. Through pedagogic research and intermittent readings of Peirce over a period stretching roughly from the 1890s through to the 1930s (Shook, 2000;p. 212), he gradually arrived a theory not dissimilar to former's doubt-belief presentation, which he termed the 'theory of inquiry'. ...
... 212), he gradually arrived a theory not dissimilar to former's doubt-belief presentation, which he termed the 'theory of inquiry'. This theory sits at the very core of his philosophy (see e.g., Shook, 2000;Sleeper, 1986), threading through his treatments of such areas as education, democracy, ethics, aesthetics, but most especially in his logic. Indeed, for Dewey, the theory of inquiry is a logical theory, with the two subject matters of inquiry on the one hand, and logic, on the other, being understood literally as one in the same. ...
... Writing in his introduction to the Collected Works edition of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, the philosopher Ernest Nagel noted that Dewey's logical theory was 'not widely accepted by his 16 contemporaries' (LW 12; p. xxvi). As time passed, his work became obscured and was, arguably, distorted by developments in post-war Anglo-American philosophy, such as logical positivism (Shook 2000;pp. 266-267). ...
This paper explores the relationship between design logic and reasoning and the methodological and epistemological positioning of design-based knowledge production. Examining the relevant literature, we propose that the naturalistic logic of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey offers a potentially useful contextualisation of how logic, reasoning, method and, ultimately, knowledge can be understood as arising from, and be responsive to, context. This is considered in relation to the long-term delivery of a design research programme—termed Experience Labs—which was seen to undergo a gradual methodological shift in response to contextual concerns. It is our core argument that Dewey’s logic can function as a valuable theoretical device, mediating between design and the necessity of methodological and epistemological explication in research.
... Obviously, the revision is not intended to be a rejection of their approach, but rather an attempt of refining some of the theoretical presuppositions that lie at the basis of the conclusions they draw from their analysis of Dewey's lecture on Hegel. 7 As has already been remarked, the lecture is characterized by an expository approach to its subject matter. For this reason, Dewey integrates his exposition of Hegel's philosophy of spirit with pieces of information about his life and with a schematic account of Hegel's most important theses of the Phenomenology of Spirit. ...
... Accordingly, it aims a) to outline the fundamental traits of Dewey's implicit metaphysics, b) to shed some light on those assumptions that Dewey never discussed or criticized, but that unconsciously shaped his whole philosophical outlook, and c) to point out the intellectual debates in which Dewey took part, and in reference to which he elaborated and refined his conceptual apparatus. 20 Shook supplies the reader with an intriguing narration about what he calls "Dewey's evolving stance about religion" (7). He distinguishes four phases of Dewey's philosophy of religion and spirit. ...
... Alternatively, Garrison demonstrates that the Deweyan perspective provides a theory of meaning acquisition and emergent mental development which constitutes one way of understanding social constructivism and situated cognition: In coherence with George Herbert 2. It should be noted that Dewey's philosophy is central, for instance, in Richard Rorty's, Hilary Putnam's, Christopher J. Voparil's, Larry Hickman's and Richard J. Bernstein's works. See also John R. Shook (2000), and Horace S. Thayer (1990). ...
... It is a perception of consequences in the sense of intelligent or, we may say, adjusted behavior: To "perceive" meaning, "is to refer the present to consequences, apparition to issue, and thereby to behave in deference to the connections of events" (Experience and Nature: 182), which we can link to the idea that the consolidation of meanings is derived primarily from practical activities. The aim of full understanding is thus realized in "the properly coordinated and completed action" (Shook 2000: 178)-i.e., in Dewey's naturalized empiricism, the adjustment of habitual behavior. ...
... In our view, all the scholars who hold a critical attitude towards Dewey do so on the common premise that experience and nature are incompatible in Dewey's view, or at least that Dewey's argument for the continuity between those two is unconvincing. As a result, some scholars have concluded that Dewey's empirical naturalism is a variant of idealist philosophy dealing with only that experience related to man (Santayana 1925;Westbrook 1991), while others incorporate experience into nature by expanding the latter, making experience an attribute of nature (Sleeper 1992), and still others expand experience to encompass nature, making it an earlier stage in the process of experience (Shook 2000). ...
John Dewey’s naturalism requires viewing nature and experience from the perspective of holism, emphasising the continuity between these two. To Dewey, nature is not a fixed entity, but an event in an ongoing process of unfolding. The temporality of an event can meet Dewey’s requirement of constructing a philosophical notion about change and development. The event has a relatively stable structure. The continuity between living things and non-living things becomes possible because of the characteristic transactions of events, and experience thus becomes something emergent in nature and actively intervenes in its unfolding. The emergence of human intelligence and the application of language has lifted nature to a controllable and operable plane, making experience a crucial guide for the unfolding of nature.
... The Framework says that 'recognition is the process of capturing … an item that meets the definition of one of the elements of financial statements -an asset, a liability, … income or expenses' (paragraph 5.1) and '[f]aithful representation of a recognised asset, liability, … income or expenses involves … recognition of that item' (paragraph 5.24, emphasis added), in both cases 3 Perhaps it is time for accounting scholars to attempt a full-blown metaphysics of financial reporting as embodied in the Framework. If so, Deweyan pragmatics, with its ecological theory of experience, transactional realism, instrumental naturalism, genetic method, and rejection of the duality of an outside world and an observing and thinking mind, is well-suited to the purpose (Alexander 2002;Burke 1994;Shook 2000;Sleeper 2001). 4 For brevity, I will henceforth refer simply to 'events'. ...
This paper argues that the metaphysics of financial performance in the conceptual framework employed by accounting standard-setters is incoherent: income and expenses cannot, as the framework holds, both be independent elements of financial statements, identified from underlying events, tested for recognition and measured by discrete acts, separately from the identification, testing and measurement of other elements and satisfy the analytical relationship between performance and position embraced by the framework. An alternative conceptualisation is proposed, under which income and expenses are part of a wider system of classifying all changes in assets and liabilities, measured indirectly. This approach improves the metaphysical coherence, and thus the intellectual strength, of the framework project; while it leaves the measurement of financial performance unchanged, by emphasising the importance of classification, it invites further attention to the presentation of financial performance, with the potential for improving the usefulness of disclosures.
... Pragmatists like John Dewey have long emphasised the necessity of learning by doing (Janse, 2019). According to Dewey, learners learn better if they interact with their environment (Shook, 2000). Some universities in Zimbabwe, like the Midlands State University and Solusi University, were, by the turn of the millennium, already offering four-year peace studies courses that required one year of work-related learning. ...
This paper uses a positive peace lens to examine the evolution of the War and Strategic Studies (WSS) degree curriculum, to the degree in Conflict, Peace Building, and Social Transformation (CPST) at the University of Zimbabwe in the year 2021, by considering the global pandemic and seeking new directions in the field. The paper addresses two questions: 1) What changes and factors provoked the change in direction, from the WSS curriculum to CPST, and 2) What are the potential benefits of repackaging the war and strategic studies degree programme? The paper argues that the paradigm shift accommodates pandemics like the COVID-19 which configured social, political, and economic patterns of life, and a new direction emerged, that is, a change of focus from negative to positive peace. Among the reasons for curriculum changes, from WSS to CPST, was the desire to give the programme a human face, and to align the degree so that it promotes the positive peace and sustainable development needed to address trajectories associated with emerging nonviolent threats to humanity – such as a global pandemics. Lastly, we see the new direction of the CPST as a counterhegemonic strategy to address confrontational and militaristic approaches to human conflict. COVID-19 has reminded us that confrontational politics are slowly becoming irrelevant for addressing the ambivalence of life, and in the struggle to contain global pandemics, which pose new threats to peace, security and development.
... In 1933, Dewey developed his primary epistemological thesis that stated: natural things can only be known as serving the cognitive needs raised within problematic experience. He developed a secondary epistemological thesis that helped explain his first: the process of knowing, taking place through experience, is a transaction between humans and the world in which humans manipulate natural things (John R. Shook, 2000). This concept of problem orientation through experience is an idea that Dewey believed can drive learning activities in education (Helle, n.d.). ...
Project-based learning (PBL) is an instructional strategy that is promoted throughout education for its use of active learning and ability to connect to real-world applications. Studies have been conducted on PBL ranging from early elementary grades through graduate courses, however little research considers the effectiveness of PBL at the secondary science level. This thesis considers the use of PBL and describes the implementation of a PBL unit in a rural Maine 11th grade chemistry classroom. The thesis aims to better understand the impact PBL has on students’ content learning and additional skills acquired through the PBL learning process. Along with the impact on student growth, this thesis considers the ability to tailor PBL to students with differing levels of achievement and motivation. Over the course of two weeks, a PBL unit around forensics was implemented through a jigsaw classroom technique to 31 honors chemistry students. The unit includes three evidence-collection assignments and the presentation of a final project by each of the groups. Students were required to collect evidence, share evidence with their synthesis groups and make connections with the evidence collected to create a final project. Along with the PBL unit, students completed a pre- and post-engagement survey regarding the unit and two self-reflections, one for each week of the study. The engagement survey encompasses overall engagement, interest, and challenges posed throughout the unit. The self-reflections have students reflect on their own abilities to participate in the group and how the group dynamic is progressing. Field notes have been collected along with the student responses to gauge student use of collaboration and critical thinking skills while working in their groups. From the data, 26 of the 31 students met or exceeded the standards addressed in the PBL unit and reinforced a strong understanding of the content by making connections from their evidence and applying their findings to the problem outlined in the unit. Students found the PBL unit to be more engaging and interesting, as well as challenging, as compared to the traditional teaching style used prior to this study. An increase in collaborative and critical thinking skills was observed throughout the unit and increased as the study progressed. Along with field observations of these skills, students were also able to identify their own strengths and weaknesses through self-reflections. Students’ metacognition and ownership of their own strengths and weaknesses drew awareness to the collaborative skills they needed to develop. The four case study students ranging in achievement and motivation levels all displayed growth throughout the study. Students of prior high academic achievement found value in having additional group members working toward a common problem while lower achieving students gained confidence and the ability to participate in group discussion. Motivation levels did not impact student engagement throughout the unit as all four of the case study students were actively participating throughout the study. Overall, 88% of students recommended that this PBL be continued for chemistry students in the future.
... John Dewey lived ninety-two years-October 20, 1859 -June 1, 1952-leaving behind a vast oeuvre (thirty-eight volumes of The Collected Works of John Dewey and other four volumes of the Correspondence) that deals with topics belonging to several areas of philosophy, from epistemology and metaphysics, through philosophy of psychology to ethics and philosophy of education. Facing this indisputable variety, a question that one usually finds at the very beginning of articles and books on Dewey gravitates around what the heart of his philosophy is (Alexander, 1987;Hickman and Spadafora, 2009;Rodríguez, 2017;Shook, 2000;Quinton, 2011;Bernstein, 1961;Cunningham, 1995;Shusterman, 1989;and Westbrook, 1991). ...
No interior do pensamento de Dewey, a gênese da estética merece mais atenção do que lhe é dada na literatura. Um aspecto, em especial, tem sido virtualmente negligenciado — com as notáveis exceções de Robins 2015, Ueno 2016, Hein 2017 e Granger 2018a e 2018b — a saber, os vínculos com Albert Coombs Barnes. Nossa hipótese é que Barnes desempenhou um papel relevante na “virada estética” da filosofia madura de Dewey. Neste artigo, nós tomamos um primeiro passo rumo ao esclarecimento da relação entre eles e uma tentativa de mostrar a influência do colecionador de arte na obra do filósofo.
... We anticipate what12 However, see Ryder 2005 (claiming that Dewey's conception of experience remains epistemological, and expressing doubts on the idea that experience is "full of inference"). Cf.Cometti 1999, Shook 2000. See also Experience and Nature of 1925, and Reichenbach 1938 on the predictive aspects of experience. ...
The purpose of the article is to make a distinction between two concepts of experience, singular and general. They track two ways in which we connect experientially to the world. The former is captured by the idea of "having an experience"; the latter is captured instead by the idea of "having experience". Classical and contemporary pragmatists contribute to this distinction, and the article explores some of their views. Finally the article indicates some consequences of the distinction. In fact, in the spirit of Peirce's pragmatic maxim, those consequences are the very meaning of the conceptual distinction at stake, since they point out how we inferentially treat in different ways the fact of having an experience and the fact of having experience.
... John Dewey gave 'five steps' of scientific processes, which had been advanced and tested over time for pragmatist inquiry (Dorstewitz and Kuruvilla 2007). Dewey's 'five steps' of inquiry have been described in several texts by various researchers, such as Bernstein (1966), Dewey (1938), Dorstewitz and Kuruvilla (2007), and Shook (2000) to name a few. New ideas for research are either generated from insight or recognition (East and Ang 2017). ...
Consumers occasionally buy commodity products without much thought but purchase high involvement products or services after rigorous information collection and detailed comparisons of the different options. At the core, research on consumer behavior comprises studies on the cognitive processes involved in consumer purchasing decisions and the way buying decisions are made. The discipline of consumer research and marketing has remained dominated by positivist, empiricist, and realist philosophies. Since consumer behaviour is a social phenomenon, the researchers have used logical positivist and interpretivist philosophies to study and develop various theories about consumer behaviour. However, both of these philosophies have inherent limitations to capture the complete knowledge of consumer reality. Pragmatist philosophy is capable of providing solutions to real-life problems by starting with research question and exploring the issues from multiple perspectives. It is, therefore, suggested to explore the various aspects of consumer behaviour research from a pragmatist perspective and contribute more effective information to the body of knowledge in this discipline.
... The closest approximation to an epistemological stance the researcher currently has is that of Dewey (Shook 2000), a naïve realist with a pragmatic perspective: experience is the basis of knowing and things are as they are experienced to be; notwithstanding, the researcher's view is that there still exists immutable truths regardless of perspective. ...
Corporate Social Responsibility is an important part of a modern organisation. The definition of CSR can be seen to play an important role in understanding and engagement by organisational stakeholders. There are a numerous definitions and frameworks in the field of CSR and different organisational stakeholders may hold different views in respect of strategic priorities. The research explores three questions: firstly, what is the respondents’ personal definition of CSR? Secondly, how does the concept of implicit / explicit CSR fit within an organisational context? And finally and to a much lesser extent, are there any variant CSR themes within the island of Jersey compared to, for example, the UK?
A multiple case study methodology was adopted, which supported the exploration of CSR policy and activity from the perspective of organisational members. Semi-structured interviews were used along with critical incident technique to explore the definitions, beliefs and values of a range of organisational stakeholders. Empirically based findings support the general definition of the respondents’ personal definition of CSR and also an augmented implicit / explicit framework of CSR which is based on Matten and Moon’s paper (2008). In respect of a personal definition of CSR, 21 respondents were interviewed across 11 organisations and a general, personal definition was found. Generally, respondents defined CSR at an explicit level as being about philanthropy, role in society and engagement. Implicitly, respondents generally defined CSR in terms of ethical, legal and economic interests. People tend to define CSR at an explicit level as ‘fundraising’ and ‘philanthropy’ and at a more implicit level about ‘social good’ and ‘doing the right thing’. An electronic survey showed that respondents from one of the researched organisations prioritised organisational responsibility in the following order: legal, ethical, economic and philanthropic.
The exploration of the implicit / explicit framework of CSR revealed the advantage of utilising a relational perspective which integrates perspectives rather than frames them as a paradox (although this is a perspective adopted by the researcher which is likely to invoke debate rather than be universally accepted). A series of diagnostic dimensions were defined which was used to place the 1,315 respondent meaning units into the framework, resulting a balance of implicit and explicit influences on the organisational framework. The meaning units derived from the implicit / explicit model tended to mirror the respondents’ personal definition of CSR.
There are several areas of recommended research, including an opening of dialogue regarding paradoxical / complementary perspectives of CSR versus organisational responsibility. Recommended research also is how CSR knowledge is transferred from the individual stakeholder to the institution within which she sits and vice versa.
The idea of self-realization is one of the most significant points of intersection between ethics and philosophical anthropology, the disciplines that study, respectively, human conduct and human nature. An examination of this idea, therefore, allows us to shed light on these two fields and their entanglement. In this article I present two possible accounts of self-realization: the Essentialist Account, which understands it as the actualization of an intrinsic potential, and the Interactionist Account, which conceives it as the successful interaction between an individual and her environment. My goal is to argue for the Interactionist Account, in the comprehensive version developed by John Dewey. To do so, I proceed as follows: I introduce the Essentialist Account; I present Dewey’s alternative, by examining first the Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics and then some major later works, thereby showing the continuity (and discontinuity) of his conception of self-realization, or growth, throughout his career; after a closer comparison between the Interactionist Account and the Essentialist Account, I finally clarify the relevance of Dewey’s view for understanding the entanglement between ethics and anthropology.
In this paper I argue that the “dynamic functionalism” of Dewey’s evolutionary approach to ethics – moral norms emerge to address specific problems but must be constantly readjusted to changing contexts – had its roots in the comparative jurisprudence of Sir Henry Sumner Maine and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. First, I will discuss the rise of the comparative sciences in the nineteenth century, part of the backdrop for the work of Maine and various evolutionary anthropologists. Next, I will examine Maine’s Ancient Law (1861), Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), and Holmes’s The Common Law (1881), three related books that set up a dichotomy between existing custom and historical progress. Finally, I will show how this dichotomy was reflected in Dewey’s writing and teaching at the University of Michigan in the early 1890s, including “Anthropology and Law” (1893) and several courses in political philosophy.
This article articulates some of the historic as well as the main philosophic contributions to the transitional period in educational thought in America, 1866-1895. This is a period in which the movement away from idealism towards pragmatism as the basis for educational thought began. Contemporaneous with the development of pragmatism was a development in educational thought that stressed naturalism, functionalism, and the organic nature of mind and behaviour. As idealism laid claim to the dominant philosophy in America in the period 1866-1895, so too did it lay claim to being the dominant philosophic presupposition of educational thought. It was the first American philosophy of education: America’s first philosophy of education was not pragmatist; it was idealist, though this would change, beginning in the mid-1890’s. As pragmatism began to take hold of philosophy at the fin de siècle, so too did it begin to take hold of, and later dominate, the philosophic presuppositions of educational thought.
This article analyses the state-of-art literature in the field of citizenship studies based on relational approaches. It does so by differentiating between field relationalism (FR) and process relationalism (PR) and comparing, in this context, the framing of citizenship by three leading relationalist scholars in the field: Engin Isin, Margaret Somers and Gurminder Bhambra. In doing so, we focus first on the ways in which they envisage overcoming the analytical dualisms responsible for social exclusion and the hierarchies related to citizenship, and second on their normative assumptions concerning the emancipation of society. We demonstrate that the differences between the two metatheoretical assumptions have important implications for understanding each author’s research objects and methodology, as well as the normative assumptions present in their study of citizenship.
This chapter is about our faith—the Methodology—we believe that, almost like a religion, research is not more important than its adopted worldview or lifeworld. The whole book is surrounded and covered by the ontological position in this chapter. Here we have four headings—delineate the four philosophical streams—guide the entire study. The second heading limns the study’s context and then lays the instruments out of this Methodology following a methodological limitation reflection. Our first stream is for ourselves. We have been repairing the ‘self’ as a researcher. Then we followed the Critical stance of knowledge, traced back from Al-Farabi (872–950) and Saadia Gaon (882–942). Our Third source of understanding generated came from the post-structuralist movement. Our final justifications come with two stands. One is the Indigenous Gnoseology, the root of knowledge practice, and the Decolonial Knowledge in social science and Tenets of Methodology. The order of philosophical trends is paced in terms of origin, not the influentially, yet, as a whole, enriched our ‘being’—the methodological acumen.
In the research, Experience-Based Cyclical Curriculum, which is based on Dewey's views of experience and focuses on learners’ experiences, was designed, implemented and evaluated. The design-based research applied in the study consists of "exploration", "design", "implementation" and "evaluation" stages.
This book is based on the understanding that the diversity and heterogeneity of science and society are not only issue of critique, but engender experimental forms of collaboration. Building on John Dewey’s experimental theory of knowledge and inquiry, practice theory, science and technology studies and the anthropology of nature, the book offers a trenchant redefinition of a present-focused sociology as a science of experience in the spirit of experimentalism. Crisis, instead of being a mere problem, is understood as the baseline for creativity and innovation. Committed to the experimental pursuit, the book provides an experience-based methodological approach for an inter- and trans disciplinary sociology. Finally, it argues for a globalized and transformative sociological outreach beyond established epistemic and national borders. This book is of interest to sociologists and other social scientists pursuing experimentalism in method and/or practice.
African linguistic complexity is often defined in terms of its multilingualism and a complicated colonial sociolinguistic heritage. Tis colonial heritage is seen in the prevalence of European languages, especially English and French, in the lingual Franca of sub-Saharan states. A corollary to the latter assertion is that education in Africa, south of the Sahara, is primarily Eurocentric and quite unAfrican in context. More often than not, it is disempowering rather than empowering if we go by Paulo Freire’s notion of education as being central to empowerment and poor education as the primary agent and metaphoric vehicle for modern day disempowerment, a knowledge base that does not liberate the mind or embrace the cognitive progression of the learner.1 After all, the original goal of colonial education was to train the “natives” in European languages so as to be able to communicate with and, ipso facto, serve their colonial “masters,” and help him to rule the same “natives.” The proverbial “Food for the slave” is relevant here; and as the saying goes, “it is not given to provide the slave nourishment or enhance good growth, but to provide just enough energy to keep on serving the malevolent master.” Such is the unfortunate paradigm that captures the essence of colonial education in which the lingua franca of the indigenous learner is not only backgrounded but altogether demonized in some cases. Otherwise, how else could the common warning in the typical colonial classroom “Vernacular speaking is prohibited”? The so-called “vernacular” in question is the Yoruba language!
Dewey’s Art as Experience is an indispensable work for people interested in aesthetics. Our purpose in this article is to show that a contemporary reading that rescues the book’s best aspects (reading that attempts to overcome the ambivalences and tensions that it brings) must necessarily relate it to some aspects of Dewey’s pedagogy and his philosophy of education. We attempt to show this relationship in our article.
Compulsory state-sanctioned schooling continues to be constructed as the “great equalizer,” and accordingly education research as a benevolent contributor to this material and ideological project of education. Following a Fanonian-Wynterian theoretical approach and cosmogonical-constellatory citation politics, I narrowed over 2,500 educational studies and reviewed approximately 150 articles and chapters that questioned the ways of knowing, being, and valuing which have naturalized these assumptions. Consequently, I theorize the cosmogony and development of the overrepresented genre-specific figure of educational researcher emerging from Man2-as-human, who has come to control the ways of knowing “education” and being an “educational researcher”: Man2-as-educational researcher. I examine how overlapping and interconnected African/Black, Asian, Latinx, Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities have engaged in modes of resistance, survivance, fugitivity/marronage, refusal and abolition to challenge this regime, and enact and imagine genres of being an educational researcher outside of the dominant order of Man2-as-educational researcher. In turn, I consider how these communities have affirmed, honored, fostered, sustained and revitalized ways of gathering, interpreting, and sharing educational knowledge for collective liberation, which have centered the wretched of the research and gaze from below. In so doing, I conceptualize and call forth the need to move toward what I am referring to as the 36 th chamber of education research.
In this chapter I focus in the subject of knowledge or knowing in design. First, I explore the advance of design research over the last four decades, noting the field’s shift from a science to a practice orientation. Here, particular emphasis is placed on the work of Donald Schön and his concept of an epistemology of practice, a concept which is largely underpinned by Dewey’s philosophy. This leads directly in to a discussion of the recent emergence of research involving practice in design—in other words, research involving practice. At this point, I hone in on some recent methodological formalizations of such an approach, putting forward the argument that these lack a sufficient epistemological justification. As a response, I turn to look at Dewey’s theory of inquiry. Examining the theory, it is shown to offer the beginnings of an epistemological justification for design research involving practice through its articulation the role of practice in research, as well as the practice-research relationship. By outlining and contextualizing the theory of inquiry, a general point of reference is established for the remaining chapters.
In this chapter I set out to cohere the book’s broader argument by exploring how a synthesis of Dewey’s key theories relating to knowing, reality, communication and value might be drawn to together to enrich our understanding of knowledge production in design research. In doing so, I turn first to the work of Dewey scholar Ralph Sleeper who has proposed that Dewey’s approach to knowledge emerges through the linking of the theory of inquiry to his metaphysics via his theory of communication. By grouping these aspects together, it is possible to argue that Dewey sees inquiry—or, more particularly, the identification and resolution of problems—as a transformational act which reconfigures the world. Having set out this ‘Deweyan perspective’ on inquiry, I move on to consider the question of value in research by considering his theories of value and of valuation, i.e., how, from his point of view, we might approach the subject of values (qualitative form in situations) and valuation (how we attach value to things). The chapter closes with a discussion of how design research involving practice can be seen to operate similarly, with the ‘making’ of products, services, and experiences ‘remaking’ our reality and, equally, our understanding of ‘the possible’ and ‘the valuable’.
In this chapter I offer a conclusion for the book as a whole at the same time as aiming to trace a forward path. I open with a general summary of the books’ argumentative arc, lining up the key points of the preceding discussions. Next, based on these key points, I explore the potential methodological implications of Dewey’s pragmatism for design research involving practice. The aim here is to draw out the relevant considerations and questions that might guide a project’s advance. Lastly, in the final section, I offer a statement on the potential value of adopting Deweyan pragmatism as a philosophy for design research involving practice and, as such, installing Dewey as an ‘intellectual underwriter’ of ‘designerly knowledge production’.
In this chapter I offer an introduction to the book as a whole. I begin by first exploring the contemporary state of design practice, highlighting a number of recent shifts that have led to the discipline’s transformation. Following on, I offer an overview of the historical trajectory of design research and consider its present configuration as well as some key points of continued contestation. Following on, the relationship between design research and philosophy is briefly examined with reference to the work of Wittgenstein, the phenomenologists and the pragmatists. This leads into a discussion of classical pragmatism in particular. From this, I finally focus in on John Dewey’s work by offering an early, concise outline of his unique brand of pragmatism and its special features. I then move to close the chapter by considering his work in relation to the other, already referenced, popular philosophic perspectives within the field of design research, i.e., the later Wittgenstein and phenomenology.
In this chapter, building on the previous discussion of knowledge/knowing, I turn to consider the themes of meaning and communication in design research. To open, I explore of the work of three key theorists—Roberto Verganti, Klaus Krippendorff and Nathan Crilly—who have each explored these themes in detail. From this, I turn once again to Dewey’s work, looking in particular at his handling of the subjects of language, the imagination and the ‘work of art’. With these positions set out, I then move to consider some of the possible implications for design research, focusing in particular on the ‘work of art’ concept. Ultimately, emphasis is placed on how Dewey’s insights can support the theoretical articulation of meaningfulness in design as well as the communicative value of artifacts in academic design research.
In this chapter I aim to draw some initial alignments between Dewey’s work and design research by focusing in on the theme of experience. To begin, I examine Dewey’s approach to experience in both its general and aesthetic forms. This then leads in to a consideration of how the theme of experience is currently approached within the field of design. Here, some existent points of Deweyan inspiration are identified in user experience and experience-centered design literature. Thereafter, I seek to extend the discussion further by offering an in-depth exploration of Dewey’s theoretical interlinking of experience and nature within his ‘naturalistic metaphysics’—an often-overlooked aspect of his philosophy. The chapter then concludes with a reflection on how, by drawing on Dewey’s work, a more expansive understanding of experience might be established within design.
This paper responds to the new story about the history of pragmatism and early analytic philosophy presented in Cheryl Misak's Cambridge Pragmatism. One of the new story's key claims is that pragmatism was a home-grown American philosophy that entered the intellectual scene of 1920s England as an imported good. Taking up the long-neglected case of the English logician John Venn, the paper shows that pragmatism, as defined by Misak, existed in Cambridge, England several decades before the turn of the century. It concludes with the view that a more complex and richer perspective on the twin histories of pragmatism and early analytic philosophy, on both sides of the Atlantic, is needed.
Over the last four decades, John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy has formed an intellectual core in design research, underpinning Donald Schön’s theory of reflective practice, the experiential perspective in HCI and the democratic commitments of participatory design. Taking these existing connections as a starting point, Brian Dixon explores how deeper alignments may be drawn between Dewey’s insights and contemporary design research’s concern with practice, meaning and collaboration. Chapter by chapter, a fresh intellectual approach is revealed, one which recognises the transformative power of doing, making and knowing as a force for positive change in the world. We see that, for Dewey, experience comes first. It connects us to surrounding world and the society of which we are part; good things can happen and new realities are possible—we just have to work for them. The implications for design research are vast. We are offered a new way of understanding designerly knowledge production, as well as the methodological implications of adopting Deweyan pragmatism in design research. Taken as a whole, Dewey and Design not only draws out the value of Dewey’s work for design research but also, crucially, offers a clear articulation of the value of design itself.
This chapter is preliminary. My aim is to frame Dewey’s philosophy of science in the wider context of his notion of experience. Dewey’s account of experience has posed serious difficulties to his interpreters. My proposal is irenic: I take Dewey’s experience to be a function performed by living beings who have the capacity to master the use of language. I focus on the metaphilosophical use that Dewey makes of the notion of experience thus understood, showing that such notion is introduced to account for the plurality of activities or life-behaviors in which human beings are engaged.
Neuroscientific Considerations and the Law, points to the use of neuroscientific evidence and tools and the use of them as they have appeared in the courtroom.
This article tries to discuss about mathematics and islamic thought. By seeing the relationship between mathematics and islamic teaching resources, this article found that science in this world can be classified into three groups, namely natural sciences, social science, and humanities. The natural sciences which consist purely consist of physics, chemistry, and biology, and some people enter mathematics again. The social sciences that fall into the category of pure sciences include sociology, anthropology, psychology, and history. Whereas the humanities consist of philosophy, language and literature, and art. Qur’an and Hadith in the development of science are positioned as sources of qawliyyah verses while the results of observations, experiments, and logical reasoning are positioned as sources of kauniyyah verses. With its position like this, then various branches of knowledge can always be sought from the source of the Qur'an and Hadith. Like, the science of mathematics developed on the basis of the Qur'an and Hadith sources as well as the results of observation, experimentation, and logical reasoning. Mathematics itself has a very close relationship with the spiritual traditions of Muslims, is familiar with the Qur'an, and of course mathematics can also be used as a "path" towards achieving happiness benefits both in this world and the hereafter.
In this chapter, d’Agnese analyzes the questions of thinking and subject in Dewey’s oeuvre and discusses the educational consequences that follow from such an analysis. Specifically, d’Agnese argues that Dewey revealed a radical uncertainty at the core of human thinking while dismantling the understanding of the subject as a detached and self-assured center of agency. In Deweyan thinking, inquiry and reflection are to be understood as the power to evolve new ways of acting, creating new points of interaction within experience and thus pushing experience forward. This understanding of thinking, cognition and subject has far-reaching consequences for education, which must be conceived not as the attempt to master and control experience but as the means to create new, unpredictable experience by introducing new points of interaction into our relationship with the environment, changing our being-embedded-in-the-world. Dewey repositions educational, intentional agency away from control and mastery and in the direction of growth and openness.
It is often, and to my mind rightly, said that humans are animals, too. However, this statement comes in different forms and can provoke different responses. In this chapter, I analyse two strategies of asserting the animal nature of humans: a naturalising and a moralising strategy. The goal is to extract what is useful in them for a pragmatist conception of human nature that allows for a creative re-assessment of what it might mean to become more fully human in light of changing human-animal-relations.
The article argues in favour of replacing Dewey’s notion of 'experience' in today's cognitive sciences with Mead’s notion of 'act.' Although Dewey's approach to cognition is an essential contribution to the pragmatist turn of cognitive science and his theory of organic relation is particularly useful for future developments in this field, his notion of 'experience' risks proving to be the weak link in the program of empirical implementation of such a turn. In a perspective that shows a clear empirical intent such as that of the 4E programme, the concept of experience, as intentionally vague and smoky, with its strong metaphysical significance, does not seem to offer a useful operational criterion to exclude from evaluation aspects that should not be considered constitutive of the mental. Moreover, in its openness to the overall determination of the relationship between organism and environment, this notion does not contribute to the definition of the phases that characterize the relational dynamics itself. The essay proposes as a solution to these difficulties to turn the attention to Mead's notion of 'act.' Although Mead's act and Dewey's experience are undoubtedly similar concepts, as the result of elaborations often carried out jointly by the two authors, the act seems more suitable to describe in its different characteristics the ideo-sensori-motor process that characterizes the integrated approach in which perception and action are indissolubly linked. Mead's theory of the act is an epistemological tool particularly useful to the empirical program of the 4E, also offering an interesting contribution to the debate between radical representationalists and enactivists.
This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one (the neural dynamics of the sensorimotor contingencies and the emergence of enactive agency) and the personal one (the dynamics that emerges from the organism-environment interaction in ecological terms). If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology.
This book is the first monograph fully devoted to analyzing the philosophical aspects of affordances. The concept of affordance, coined and developed in the field of ecological psychology, describes the possibilities for action available in the environment. This work offers a systematic approach to the key philosophical features of affordances, such as their ontological characterization, their relation to normative practices, and the idea of agency that follows from viewing affordances as key objects of perception, while also proposing an innovative philosophical characterization of affordances as dispositional properties.
The Philosophy of Affordances analyzes the implications that a proper understanding of affordances has for the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, and aims to intensify the dialogue between philosophy and ecological psychology in which each discipline benefits from the tools and insights of the other.
Manuel Heras-Escribano is a Juan de la Cierva-Formación research fellow working at the IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. Formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Granada, Spain, and the Alberto Hurtado University, Chile, his work focuses on the philosophical and conceptual aspects of the embodied and situated cognitive sciences, with a growing interest in the evolutionary origins of cognition.
In this chapter, I offer a sketch of some key aspects that should be taken into account for proposing a theory of agency based on the main contributions of the ecological approach. In this sense, the conclusions of this chapter are far from offering a full-blown approach to agency from an ecological standpoint; I simply aim to provide some ideas and contributions from which elaborating such a general view in the future.
This chapter aims to analyze a few current challenges for ecological psychology. These challenges are varied and range from minimal to social cognition, including applications of ecological principles to sensory substitution devices, the relation of sociality to perceptual processes from an ecological perspective, and the political dimension of affordances.
The aim of this chapter is twofold: First, I offer an ontological characterization of affordances as dispositional properties. Second, I explain some aspects related to the metaphysics of ecological psychology, specially the idea of direct or ecological realism.
The idea of normativity is, according to some authors, pervasive: Social practices, institutions, and interactions are said to be normative (Canguilhem 1966/1986; Brandom 1994; Crowell 2013; Rip 2013). In this chapter, I will focus on the normative aspect of the unreflective situated behavior, a kind of behavior that is carried out without explicit deliberation—for example, when we maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator or in a bus stop (Rietveld 2008).
The following text is an English translation of the (originally German written, and published in the conference report) conference lecture on "Politics, Education and Religion at John Dewey". The chapters (contents) are:
Why England was not a model of American democracy - The conflict between science and religion in a biographical context - Christianity and democracy - On the common origin of the political and the religious at Dewey - The liberation of religion from - Democracy and education as a religion - Publicity and political conflict situations in the socio-organic view of society - Dewey's anti-liberalism and the plurality of relligions Did Dewey's prognosis about the decline of religion come true? Re-read Dewey (References, Comments).
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