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Dewey’s Moral Philosophy

John Dewey (1859–1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching conflicts between capital and labor as they were integrated into the urban industrial economy. As the face-to-face communal life of small villages and towns waned, it confronted the need to create new forms of community life capable of sustaining democracy on urban and national scales. Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms nor traditional philosophical ethics were able to cope with the problems raised by these dramatic transformations. Traditional morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Hidebound and unreflective, it was incapable of changing to address the problems raised by new circumstances. Traditional philosophical ethics sought to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic methods. Its preoccupation with reducing the diverse sources of moral insight to a single fixed principle subordinated practical service to ordinary people to the futile search for certainty, stability, and simplicity. In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most people. To address the problems raised by social change, moral practice needed to acquire the disposition to respond intelligently to new circumstances. Dewey saw his reconstruction of philosophical ethics as a means to effect this practical reconstruction.

Dewey’s ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end or supreme ethical principle with the goal of identifying a method for improving our value judgments. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is the use of reflective intelligence to revise our judgments in light of the consequences of acting on them. Value judgments are tools for satisfactorily redirecting conduct when habits fail. As tools, they can be evaluated instrumentally. We test our value judgments by putting them into practice and seeing whether the results are satisfactory — whether they solve our problems with acceptable side-effects, whether they enable successful responses to novel problems, whether living in accordance with alternative value judgments yields more satisfactory results. We make moral progress by adopting habits of reflectively revising our value judgments in response to the widest consequences for everyone of following them. The conditions of warrant for value judgments lie in human conduct, not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct, such as God’s commands, Platonic Forms, pure reason, or nature. Dewey offers a naturalistic metaethic of value judgments, grounded in developmental and social psychology.

1.1 Impulse

1.3 intelligent conduct, 2.1 valuing vs. evaluation, 2.2 desires, interests, and tastes., 2.3 value judgments as instruments, 2.4 experimental confirmation of value judgments, 2.5 contextualism, 3.1 reciprocal determination of means and ends, 3.2 practical judgment is creative, 3.3 practical judgment is transformative, 3.4 practical judgment and character, 4.1 theories of the good (teleological theories), 4.2 theories of right (deontological theories), 4.3 virtue theories, 4.4 reflective morality, 5. aesthetic value, 6. social ethics, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries, 1. developmental and social psychology.

Dewey argues that the function of value judgments is to guide human conduct, understood broadly to include conscious and unconscious bodily motion, observation, reflection, imagination, judgment, and affective responses. There are three levels of conduct: impulse, habit, and reflective action. These differ according to how far they are guided by ideas of what one is doing.

Humans begin life endowed only with impulses as motor sources of activity. Impulses include drives, appetites, instincts, and reflexes. They are “affective-motor responses”: primitive tendencies of movement toward some things (eyes toward human faces, hand to grasping whatever is within reach), away from others (spitting out bitter food, averting eyes from too bright light, brushing off pesky flies), and even activity with no particular orientation toward external objects (stretching, rolling over, crying, fidgeting). Impulsive activity is not purposive. It involves no idea of an end to be achieved by the activity. When a newborn sucks on its mother’s nipple, it obtains food and thereby satisfies its hunger. But it has no idea that this will be a consequence of its sucking, and does not suck with the end in view of obtaining food (HNC 65–69).

Dewey’s choice of impulse as the original motor source of conduct contrasts with conventional desire-based psychology in two ways. First, it takes activity rather than rest as the default state of human beings. Desires are defined by the states of affairs they aim to achieve. On this model, action needs to be inspired by an idea of some deficit. Once the deficit is repaired, the desire is fulfilled, and the organism returns to a state of rest. Dewey observed that this model does not fit what we know about children. They are constantly in motion even when they achieve no particular purpose in moving. They don’t need any end in view or perception of external lack to move them (HNC 118–9). Second, impulse psychology stresses the plasticity of the sources of conduct. Desires are fixed by their ends. Impulses can be directed and shaped toward various ends. Children’s primitive impulses to move their bodies energetically can be directed, through education, toward the development of socially valued skills and interpersonally coordinated activity (HNC 69–75).

Desires or ends in view arise from the child’s experiences of the consequences of its impulsive activity. A newborn infant cries when it is hungry, at first with no end in view. It observes that crying results in a feeding, which relieves its hunger. It gets the idea that by crying, it can get relief. When crying is prompted by this idea, the child sees it as a means to a further end, and acts for the first time on a desire (that is, with an end in view) (TV 197–8). What desires the child acquires are shaped by others’ responses to its original impulsive activity, by the results that others permit such activity to achieve. Parents who respond indiscriminately to their children’s crying end up with spoiled children whose desires proliferate without consideration for others’ interests. Parents who respond selectively shape both their children’s use of means (crying) and their ends, which are modulated in response to the resistance and claims of others. This plasticity of ends and means is possible because the original source of activity is impulse, not desire. Impulses demand some outlet, but what ends they seek depends on the environment, especially others’ responses to the child.

Habits are socially shaped dispositions to particular forms of activity or modes of response to the environment. They channel impulses in specified directions, toward certain outcomes, by entrenching particular uses of means, prescribing certain conduct in particular circumstances. While individuals may have idiosyncratic habits, the most important habits are customs, shared habits of a group that are passed on to children through socialization. Customs originate in purposive activity. Every society must devise means for the satisfaction of basic human needs for food, shelter, clothing, and affiliation, for coping with interpersonal conflict within the group and treatment of outsiders, for dealing with critical events such as birth, coming of age, and death. Customary ways of satisfying needs shape the direction of impulse in the socialized individual. A young child just starting on solid food may be open to eating nearly anything. But every society limits what it counts as edible. Certain foods become freighted with social meaning —as suitable for celebrating birthdays, good for serving to guests, reserved for sacrifice to the gods, or fit only for animals. The child’s hunger becomes refined into a taste for certain foods on particular occasions. She may recoil in disgust or horror from certain edibles deemed taboo or unclean. There may have been a rationale for the original selection of foods. Perhaps some food was deemed taboo when its consumption was followed by a natural disaster, and people concluded that the gods were angry at them for consuming it. But the habit of avoiding it may persist long after its original rationale is forgotten (E 39–48, HNC 15–21, 43–7).

While habits incorporate purposes and socially meaningful ideas, they operate beneath the actor’s consciousness. Once people have learned how to achieve some purpose through habit or skill, they no longer need to tend to what they are doing. Habits, by receding from awareness, conserve people’s reflective resources, make their activity fluid, and enable them to reliably produce results in stable environments. People’s habits embody their characters (HNC 33–43, 50–2).

Because they operate subconsciously, habits may continue after their original rationale has been forgotten or repudiated. Because they entrench modes of conduct rather than ends in view, they may produce unintended results when the environment changes. We can reliably produce alternative results only by acquiring a new habit. Discovering the means required to change habits requires psychological and sociological inquiry, not just conscientiousness and willpower. It is magical thinking to suppose that we can change habits through conscious willing, when we lack knowledge of the means of change. Nor can we check their operation through monitoring, since they operate behind our backs. (HNC 21–32).

Habits tend to be difficult to modify because people form emotional attachments to them, and prevailing ideologies represent current customs as right. Dewey placed his hopes for change in the education of youth. Because children have impulses not yet channeled into rigid habits, they are better able to open up opportunities for change, provided their education instills habits of independent thought, critical inquiry, experimentation, and imagination, including sympathy with others (DE; HNC 127–8). Such education can make habits themselves more intelligent — flexible and responsive to change.

The need to reflect intelligently on one’s conduct arises when the usual operation of habit or impulse is blocked. Customary means may be lacking; changed circumstances may make habits misfire, producing disturbing consequences; the social interaction of groups of people with different customs may produce practical conflicts that require mutual adjustment. Blocked habits lead people to deliberate on the problem posed by their situation. Deliberation is a thought experiment that aims to arrive at a practical judgment, action upon which is expected to resolve one’s predicament. Deliberation is more intelligent, the more articulate the definition of one’s problem in light of more observant uptake of its relevant features, the more imaginative and feasible are proposed solutions, the more comprehensive and accurate the estimate of the consequences of implementing them, and the more responsive is the choice to its expected consequences. As the individual gets more practice in intelligent conduct, the dispositions that make it up become habits (HWT 196–220).

2. Metaethics of Value Judgments

Dewey held that value judgments guide conduct by way of propositions subject to empirical testing. Value judgments can be both action-guiding and empirically warranted because they have an instrumental form. They say that if something were done, then certain consequences would follow, which would be valued. The point of asserting such propositions is to intelligently guide the design and selection of a course of action that will solve a problem, where the assertion is part of the means by which the action is brought about (LJP 16–17). Value judgments figure in Dewey’s psychology in relation to the distinction between valuing and evaluation, and Dewey’s notions of desire, taste, and interest.

Dewey’s metaethics is grounded in the distinction between valuing and evaluation (also denoted as “prizing” vs. “appraising”, or “esteeming” vs. “estimating,”). Dewey’s term “valuation” covers both valuing and evaluation. Valuing, prizing, and esteeming denote “affective-motor attitudes,”, with more emphasis on “motor” than “affective.” Valuing is a matter of loving or hating, liking or disliking something, where these attitudes involve tendencies to act (LJP 23–27). In his later work, Dewey embraced a more uncompromising behavioristic view of valuing that questioned the attribution of inner emotional aspects to valuing (TV 199, 202–3).

At the most primitive level, valuings are tendencies to move toward, acquire, or ingest certain things, or, on the negative side, to avoid, reject, spew out other things. One need not have any idea of what one is valuing in order to value it. Hence, they are less sophisticated than desires, which have propositional content (an end in view) and arise from practical reflection (TV 207). In the first instance, valuings denote impulses toward or away from objects, as when an infant turns toward human voices, or swats away a fly. Valuings of objects as useful can also be immediate — that is, not mediated by cognition or awareness of what one is doing. One uses a fork to pick up food, without thinking about it. Habits, then, are also a species of valuing.

Dewey contrasted valuings, which are mostly behavioral, from the philosophical idea of a pleasure or enjoyment, understood as an isolated and passive experience. Dewey criticized that idea as arising from philosophical demands not grounded in experience (LJP 40–1). In reality, when we enjoy something, as when we savor an ice cream cone, we are actively engaged with it: we roll the ice cream around on our tongues, chew the cone, taking note of its texture and flavor, explore it on all sides. These activities, not just passive experiences, are part of the pleasure of eating an ice cream cone.

Valuings may be expressed in ejaculations. A child may jump up and down, saying “ goody! ” at an ice cream cone. As a spontaneous and uncalculated ejaculation, “ goody ” does not express a value judgment. The child may say the same thing with self-awareness, as if to say “I like ice cream.” Such a subjective report of a valuing still does not express a value judgment.

Value judgments arise when valuings are subjected to evaluation or appraisal, when one asks the question whether (one ought) to value (seek, cherish, consume, etc.) something (TV 208–9; VORC 84–6).

Thus, value judgments are practical judgments. Although they may have a descriptive form (“ x is good,” “ x is right”), the constitutive point of making them is to alter or guide our valuings. The need to question our valuings arises when immediate action on them is not possible or yields unsatisfactory consequences. There is no more ice cream in the refrigerator; is it worthwhile to go to the store to buy some more? Or, the lactose-intolerant person may observe that she gets a stomach ache after eating ice cream, and discover that ice cream is the cause. Should she just give up ice cream, can she take something that avoids the symptoms, or are there lactose-free substitutes? Having sketched out some alternative solutions to her predicament, she imaginatively fills out the details of acting on them, including their projected consequences (Do the pills have side effects? Does the lactose-free ice cream taste good?). The consequences are the objects of valuings, which guide the formation of a new end-in-view, a new valuing — say, to go for lactose-free ice cream, because taking pills would be bothersome, and the lactose-free ice cream tastes just as good. The comparative value judgment (“eating lactose-free ice cream is better than taking pills with regular ice cream, or eating regular ice cream alone”) is practical because its function is to guide conduct toward the best solution to the person’s problem.

Thus, value judgments or appraisals result in new valuings. This fact has two implications, one for the nature of valuing, the other for the assessment of value judgments. First, when valuings change in response to value judgments, they become desires, interests, or tastes. Second, because the function of value judgments is to constitute new valuings that solve the individual’s predicament, they can be assessed instrumentally, in terms of how well they perform that function.

In the ice cream case just described, the lactose-intolerant person was initially consuming ice cream out of impulse or habit, without thinking about it. Her conduct was caused by unreflective valuings. (In reality, Dewey stressed, hardly any of the valuings of adults are wholly primitive, as the valuings of infants are. So the illustration is only of a relatively unreflective valuing, one that incorporates a relatively low level of understanding of the consequences of acting on it.) When she became aware of the fact that her consumption of ice cream was causing a problem, she investigated the problem, articulating its contours, with the aim of solving it, of finding some alternative that would “work,” in the sense of enabling the satisfactory resumption of activity. “Working” need not mean finding an alternative means to resuming the same valued activity. Her activity has changed: now she aims to consume lactose-free ice cream. Her valuation activity has changed both in the object toward which it is directed, and in its cognitive character: it embodies an articulate understanding of what she is going after, which reflects her appraisals of its merits.

The result of such appraisal is the adoption of an end-in-view, the institution of a desire . Dewey’s term “desire” is closer to our “intention” or “purpose” or even “plan” (TV 238) in denoting a tendency toward action that the agent has adopted, rather than simply a motive clamoring for our attention or moving us behind our backs. Desire denotes a reflective, conscious valuing, not a mere “affective-motor” attitude, but an “affective- ideational -motor activity,” a “union of prizing and appraising” (TV 218). It is a cognitive state. As the individual engages this new valuation, she experiences the consequences of acting on it. Reflection upon these consequences is then incorporated into more intelligent valuations, by way of further appraisals. The result of criticism is the refinement of taste — that is, a “rational liking” (VEK 15), a “liking for a reason” (VORC 95). The novice and the connoisseur may both value (like) the same object. But the latter has a reflective and articulate grasp of the features of the object that are liked, plus enough experience with valuations of objects of that type to have warranted confidence that these features merit liking. That is, the connoisseur has enough experience to warrant confidence that there are not further features of the object or consequences of valuing it which, once appreciated, would reverse or detract from the liking. Desires (ends-in-view) do not exist in isolation from each other. We reflect on the consequences of attempting to jointly satisfy our desires. Appraisals of such consequences serve to modify desires so that they are coordinated with one another. Dewey called such systematically coordinated desires “interests” (TV 207).

Dewey characterized value judgments as instrumental in three senses that he did not explicitly distinguish. The first we may call the constitutive function of value judgments. The point of appraisal, of making a value judgment, is to bring about the resumption of unified activity, when the normal course of activity has been interrupted by a problematic situation (TV 221–2). This situation incites hesitation and doubt about what to do. Dewey’s point is that value judgments are essentially practical judgments. They aim to guide action, not just to passively describe things as they are. Making the judgment is the necessary means to deciding on a new course of action that will solve the problem (LJP 14–16).

Second, the content of value judgments is about the value of actions and objects as means — that is, their value in relation to their consequences, or the consequences of valuing them in the situation at hand. Value judgments have the form: if one acted in a particular way (or valued this object), then certain consequences would ensue, which would be valued (VEK 11). The difference between an apparent and a real good, between an unreflectively and a reflectively valued good, is captured by its value not just as immediately experienced in isolation, but in view of its wider consequences and how they are valued. The ice cream seems good to the lactose-intolerant person; it is immediately prized by her. But it is judged to be not really good in view of the intolerable consequence of consuming it. Value judgments place things in their wider context and judge them in relation to their consequences, more fully considered (TV 209–213).

Third, while the proximate and constitutive end of a value judgment is the resumption of activity that has been interrupted by a problematic situation, judgment has a remoter end, of using the action decided upon as a means for uncovering new evidence about what to value. Intelligently made value judgments are held provisionally and hypothetically, with an eye toward revising them if the consequences of acting on them are not found valuable. So viewed, value judgments are tools for discovering how to live a better life, just as scientific hypotheses are tools for uncovering new information about the world (VEK 19–26; VORC 88–9).

Dewey’s pragmatist moral epistemology follows from his instrumental account of value judgments. It is uncontroversial that instrumental judgments are subject to empirical testing and confirmation, since they involve empirical claims about causation. We test scientific hypotheses by bringing about their antecedents and seeing if the results are as they predicted. Similarly, we test value judgments by acting on them and seeing if we value the consequences in the way the judgment predicted. Acting on our value judgments — putting them into practice — supplies the data for confirming or disconfirming them. Roughly speaking, a value judgment hypothesizes “try it, you’ll like it” — a statement easily subject to empirical verification and refutation. Intelligent value judgments proceed not by random trial-and-error, but from skilled projection of prior confirmed “try-like” regularities to analogous novel situations, which are continuously modified in light of experiences of the wider consequences of trying in these new situations.

Dewey derived several unsettling implications for traditional morality and traditional philosophical ethics from his moral epistemology. Traditional or conventional morality tries to enforce unquestioning obedience to its precepts. Dewey argued that this was a formula for perpetual immaturity, because it cut off all possibility of learning better ways to live by experimenting with them. Pragmatist moral epistemology also rejects philosophy’s a priori , dialectical methods for determining the good and the right. One cannot prove that something is valuable by mere argument. Arguments, at best, make certain value judgments plausible as hypotheses — and even then, only if grounded in experience and reflection on the wider consequences of acting on them. Ultimately, the hypotheses must be tested, by seeing how one values the actual results of putting them into practice. It follows that the dogmatism of traditional philosophical ethics is folly. It hobbles progress in life. Even the best confirmed value judgments can hold only provisionally. Circumstances change, thereby modifying the consequences of acting on particular evaluations. Change requires us to revisit our original appraisals with an eye toward modifying them in light of these new consequences (RP). Moreover, we don’t know the consequences of trials not performed. It is therefore always possible that we are missing out on better modes of conduct that we haven’t tested, or even imagined (VEK 25–6).

Dewey’s moral epistemology is contextualist. The form of a contextual standard of value is: it solves the problem encountered in this situation (better than other imagined or tested solutions). A person may articulate the problematic features of her situation in various ways: as obstacles, confusions, conflicts, unmet needs, dangers, and so on. The test of a value judgment — whether it “works” — is whether it successfully identifies an action that overcomes the obstacles, clears up the confusions, resolves the conflicts, satisfies the needs, avoids or eliminates the dangers, and so on. The standard of success for value judgments is thus developed internally to the practices at hand, relative to people’s descriptions of their problems (HNC 199, 208; RP 173–4). Of course, hypothesized solutions may fail in practice. This may lead agents to revise their understandings of their problems, rather than just trying alternative solutions to the same problems. For example, the failure of a course of therapy may lead a doctor to reconsider the original diagnosis. The problematic features of situations are not given. Identification of the problem begins in often inchoate experiences of doubt, confusion, apprehension, frustration, distress, anger, conflict, and so forth, which call for articulate diagnosis. Such diagnoses or descriptions of problems are open to further refinement and even radical revision in light of experimental testing in tandem with proposed solutions.

In upholding contextualism, Dewey rejected the idea that standards of correctness for valuing could be devised external to practice. He rejected any conception of intrinsic value as some kind of existence or property that has value in itself, regardless of context, which is the object of practice to bring about, realize, or conform to. Asserting the existence of such values tears the practice of making value judgments out of the contexts that give them meaning and point. This does not mean that one cannot make meaningful general value judgments. Some problems and solutions are of a generalized sort, encountered in many situations that vary widely in their details. Abstract, general value judgments may therefore be useful in a wide range of situations. But this does not mean that they point to values that exist outside of practice (TV 230).

3. Means and Ends

The standard objection to Dewey’s instrumental theory of value judgments is that it concerns the value of things as means only, and not as ends. It fails to fix on what is ultimately important: intrinsic values or final ends. Some ultimate end outside of practice must be postulated as given, as the standard against which the value of acts as means can be judged, lest we fall into an infinite regress. We either need some conception of a summum bonum , justified apart from practical reasoning, toward which acts must aim, or Dewey’s theory reduces to a form of Humean instrumentalism, in which ends are given by our desires or immediate likings, and the only question is how to satisfy them.

Dewey’s reply to this objection goes to the heart of his moral philosophy. He argued that the character and value of means and ends was reciprocally determined. We do not first already have an end in view, with the only question how to achieve it. We lack a complete conception of our end until we have a complete grasp of the course of action that will take us there. Moreover, a judgment of the value of ends apart from the means needed to get there, and apart from the value of ends as means — as things that have consequences of their own — cannot provide the basis for rational action. Acting on such radically truncated judgments would be crazy. Our judgments of the worth of an end are inextricably tied up with our judgments of the costs of achieving it, both in terms of the means needed to get there and the unintended consequences of getting there. Practical judgment is creative: it institutes new ends-in-view. It is transformative: appraisals affect our immediate valuings of things.

The occasion for making value judgments is a problematic situation, in which one’s activity is blocked and one does not know what to do. At first, the problem is experienced as uneasiness and hesitation. Reflection is needed to articulate what experience signals as a problem. A complete description of the problem to be solved is simultaneously the articulation of a complete solution, a unified course of action identifying a series of steps (means) resulting in an end, which the judger predicts will be found valuable as a complete package . A person is walking to a lake but stops upon reaching a deep ditch. She entertains possible courses of action, which are simultaneously preliminary descriptions of problems and solutions. (“I need to jump across”; “I need to build a bridge”). These incomplete descriptions prompt the gathering of new data to articulate them further (“Can I jump that far?” “Is there a log around?”). A complete investigation yields a joint description of the problem and its solution (“I need to drag this log across here, the narrowest part of the ditch, and walk across.”) (HWT 200–6).

The value of the end depends on the costs and benefits of the means, and the costs and benefits of the further consequences to which the end is judged as a means or cause. In the preceding example, it might appear that a certain final end — getting to the lake — is governing deliberation. But this is so only provisionally. A full inquiry into the means needed to achieve the end may lead to a re-evaluation of the end itself. (“The only log able to bridge the ditch is narrow at the end; I have bad balance; I would be seriously injured if I fell off the log. Getting to the lake isn’t so attractive after all ….”). Furthermore, reaching the end has anticipated consequences of its own (“That bear on the other side of the ditch looks hungry….”) that may modify the valuation of the end (“It’s better if I stay on this side.”). It is irrational to take one’s end as fixed before investigating the costs of the means and the consequences of achieving the end (TV 214). Thus, the standard model of instrumental reasoning, which takes ends as fixed and inquires solely into the means needed to satisfy them, is inadequate. The point of inquiring into means, and into ends considered as means or causes of further consequences, is not merely to determine how to achieve an end, but to appraise the value of the end itself (TV 210–19; VEK 4–7).

The preceding considerations show that practical judgment is creative: it institutes new ends-in-view, new desires. Against Dewey’s claim of creativity, it might be objected that Dewey’s theory of practical reasoning still presupposes certain values. In the ditch case, the original end would not have been rejected but for the agent’s fear of injury. Dewey agrees that “judgment at some point runs against the brute act of holding something dear as its limit” (LJP 46). Without some prizings that are not themselves subject to appraisal at the time of deliberation, there is nothing to guide practical reasoning. Yet these very prizings may be subject to appraisal at some other time, perhaps even as a consequence of acting on them on this occasion.

One might still object that this is not enough to show that practical judgment is genuinely creative. Perhaps it just takes given prizings and determines the end through some kind of vector addition, taking their weights as given. If a man is out to buy a suit, for instance, he approaches the problem with a given set of habitual priorities — for example, that durability and cheapness are more important than style. The man’s choice of suit thus merely reflects the weights of the man’s already given priorities. But if this were all there was to choice, then deliberation would hardly be necessary. He would simply inspect the prized qualities of the available suits, and let impulse determine his choice from there. In fact, Dewey argued, deliberation assigns weights to different prized qualities in the context of choice, rather than taking them as given. We can’t really tell how much weight to put on this or that prized quality until we see it instantiated in combination with the other qualities in the set of alternatives, and consider further how the suit with its qualities will function as a means in the future. Although the man may be used to prizing durability in a cheap suit, and placing little weight on style, this suit is to be used for job interviews, which are expected to land him a much higher paying job. This use of the suit gives him several reasons to alter the habitual weights he assigns to suit qualities. Anticipating that he will soon come to prize style more, once he is able to afford it, he may decide to borrow against the future and go for the expensive stylish suit now, so that he will still prize it after he lands the job. Or he may decide that he needs to make an especially good impression in order to land the job, so that he must weight style more heavily than cheapness now. Or he may decide that he’ll only need to use this suit once, to get a job, and after that his tastes will change commensurately with his income, but in ways he can’t know ahead of time. Hence, he should not count durability as an important value here. Evaluation remains creative even granting that it presupposes certain prizings, because it is still up to us to assign weights to prized qualities in light of the novel features of the context. Prior weightings cannot determine current ones, since the former may be maladapted to the new situation (LJP 30–5; VEK 10–20).

Practical reasoning does not merely generate new appraisals; it transforms our prizings. This is the point of Dewey’s theory of criticism and taste. Judgments of the merits of prizings feed back onto our primitive prizings and transform them. They not only make these prizings more articulate (a union of prizing and appraising); in making us more vividly aware of the features of the object that we prize, they alter the directions of our prizings (VEK 4–9). As a result of deliberation, the man who needs the suit comes to prize style, say, more than he did before, and cheapness less. Nor is this possibility of transformation limited to what are conventionally understood to be “instrumental” values. Whether a quality such as style is “intrinsic” or “instrumental” is not built into the nature of the quality itself, but a function of how it is regarded by the individual at the time. Instruments may be prized in themselves (as when we admire a particularly finely balanced tool). More importantly, stylishness may immediately attract — be immediately prized — but it also has its uses in impressing some prospective employers, and its unintended consequence of turning off others (who may think it important in an employee not to show off).

Against Dewey’s instrumental theory of value judgments, one might object that sometimes we appraise valuings as intrinsically good or bad. We might judge that prizing another’s suffering is despicable, apart from its consequences. Dewey rejected the sharp distinction between character and action, motive and consequence, that this picture presupposes. A character trait is a tendency to pursue certain ends, and so must be appraised in terms of its typical (intended) results. Thus, we condemn schadenfreude primarily because it leads to cruelty. At the same time, conduct has among its consequences a tendency to reinforce the character traits that caused them, or to consolidate into a character trait its direction of impulse. Conduct constitutes the moral self. So, we properly condemn a single manifestation of schadenfreude — say, laughing at suffering caused by a natural disaster — even if it, in itself, did nothing to increase anyone’s suffering. This is the truth that moralities of intention grasp, which narrowly consequentialist theories do not (E 173–5, 286–9).

One who holds that evil attitudes can be bad in themselves, apart from their consequences, would want to say more than this. Dewey can say more, too. He would agree that we do not value attitudes only instrumentally. We immediately prize some attitudes and despise others, in the sense that we directly prize and despise them without first appraising them instrumentally. A sympathetic person immediately hates expressions of schadenfreude without first checking whether they actually caused anyone to suffer. Such valuings can themselves be subject to appraisal. If we endorse them upon reflection on their consequences, we judge that they are merited (see the section on Virtue Theories below). Among the most important consequences of such second-order valuings are their impact on our characters: they tend to reinforce the attitudes that are prized, and make us recoil from the attitudes that are despised, leading us to seek means to change those attitudes. Dewey denies that there is any sensible way to appraise character traits apart from their typical consequences. So there is no getting away from consequences altogether. However, his theory has the resources to (a) condemn particular manifestations of bad attitudes, even when they do not have their typically bad direct consequences, (b) immediately (“intrinsically”) despise them, (c) judge that such immediate condemnations are warranted, and thereby (d) constitute new, reflective and cognitively loaded affective-ideational-motor attitudes of condemnation. His theory can make parallel claims for prizings and appraisals of good attitudes.

Thus, we begin with immediate valuings or prizings of things. Such prizings have no cognitive content. When we ask whether something ought to be valued, we enter the domain of appraisal or value judgments. To appraise something is to judge it in relation to the means required to attain it, and as a means or cause of further consequences. Appraisal, then, is fundamentally about means. However, such appraisals transform our original prizings. If we discover that the cost of attaining something prized is too high, we prize it less (reduce or eliminate our tendency to go after it). If we discover that attaining it has further, disvalued, consequences, we also prize it less. If attaining it has further, prized consequences, or if the means to attain it are themselves prized, we value it even more. Now the valuing has cognitive content, and is articulately directed to that content. Now we value or disvalue something under a description (the ice cream as cause of stomach ailment, the suit as stylish and impressive to prospective employers, the schadenfreude as despicable). The appraisal of things as means feeds back into our prizing of things as ends.

4. Moral Theories: the Good, the Right, the Virtuous

Traditional normative moral theories generally fall into three types. Teleological theories seek to identify some supreme end or best way of life, and reduce the right and the virtuous to the promotion of this good. Deontological theories seek to identify a supreme principle or laws of morality independent of the good, and subordinate the pursuit of the good to conformity with the moral law. Virtue theories take phenomena of approval and disapproval to be fundamental, and derive the right and the good from them. Dewey declined to offer substantive answers to the traditional questions posed by these theories, arguing that no fixed ends or moral rules could be adequate in a world of constant change and plural and conflicting values. In place of fixed goals and rules of action, Dewey offered his method of experimental inquiry, which he argued was shared between theoretical and practical reason (RP 174). He drew insight from traditional moral theories by recasting their substantive answers to traditional moral questions in methodological terms.

Dewey also rejected the reductionist tendencies of these theories, arguing that each drew from an independent source of evidence about what one ought to do. Teleological theories draw from the efforts of the individual agent to distinguish the real from the apparent good, and to harmonize conflicting impulses by subsuming them under a comprehensive conception of the good. Deontological theories draw from the efforts of groups of people to harmonize and adjudicate the conflicting claims they make on one another by means of impartial laws. Virtue theories draw from the praise and blame people accord to each others’ conduct. Resisting the tendency of philosophical ethics to represent the grounds of these theories in metaphysical terms, Dewey insisted that the sources of evidence for these three types of theory were empirical. Teleological theories are based on the reflective desires of the individual; deontological theories on the socially authorized demands of interested others; virtue theories on the spontaneous tendencies of observers to approve and disapprove of people’s conduct. These sources of evidence for different sorts of moral claims are independent from the others. None carries automatic or conclusive authority. Hence, the tension among the three types of moral consideration is permanent and cannot be resolved by reducing one to another or insisting that one automatically overrides the others (TIF). Resolution of conflicts among these considerations depends on the context in which they arise.

We have already seen that Dewey casts the distinction between the apparent and the real good in terms of what is valued immediately in impulse and unreflective habit, and what is valued reflectively as an object of intelligent desire. Dewey insisted on the primacy of the reflective method of inquiry over settling on fixed answers to questions about the good. This can be seen in his critiques and methodological reinterpretations of the three types of theory of goodness dominant today: hedonism, ideal (objective list) theories, and informed desire theory.

Hedonism supposes that the value of acts can be reduced to the quantity of pleasure and pain they produce. Estimating such values requires that we be able to break down the pleasures and pains of different activities and experiences into simple identical units, and then sum them up again. This theoretical demand outruns the holistic and complex character of our experiences of pleasure and pain (LJP 40–1). Pleasures and pains in reflective individuals are inextricably bound up with what Dewey called “ideational” factors — that is, with articulate conceptions of what they are taking pleasure in. They are therefore not pure sensory units but already contain elements of judgment or appraisal. Critical among these are considerations of the consequences of prizing certain things for one’s own moral character. Since we form our character by cultivating habits of valuing some things over others, and we prize and appraise character itself, we cannot simply take current pleasures as given (E 193–4; LJP 41–2). Good and bad people take pleasure in different things. Such facts can give us reason to cultivate different tastes from those we currently have.

Although hedonism fails as a theory that gives us a fixed end, it does contain a methodological insight. Nothing is good that cannot be desired. All desire contains an element of enjoyment or liking. Hence, pleasure can be seen as a sign of the good, as evidence of what is valuable. Nevertheless, what makes desire a sound guide to the good is the fact that it incorporates foresight and reflection on the wider consequences of acting on it, not just that it incorporates a liking of its object (E 195–6).

Ideal or objective list theories attempt to harmonize conflicting desires not, as hedonism does, by reducing them all to a common denominator, but by systematically fitting them together into an ideal or plan of life. Dewey argued that people construct ideals that make sense in view of their particular social circumstances. For example, ideals of material or political advancement make sense of the strivings of business people and politicians. Such ideals have, at best, only contextual validity and cannot be prescribed as fixed ends for all people. There can no more be a single best way of life than there can be an ideal house for all times and places. To suppose that there is forecloses the possibility of imagination inventing something even better. Yet, ideals serve a highly important function for individuals, if they are considered as hypotheses about how one should live that one can test in experiences of living in accordance with them. So understood, ideals are tools for discovering evidence about the good (LE 59–68, 229–30; E 185, 189–91, 202–210).

Informed desire theories of the good, which define the good in terms of what an individual would desire if fully informed, come closest to Dewey’s own account. Dewey spoke of the good as the object of desires of which we approve in calm, informed reflection (E 208, 212). Yet Dewey’s aims differ from that of most of today’s informed desire theorists. The latter tend to accept as fixed the character of the individual whose good is being judged, and alter only the individual’s cognitive capacities and beliefs so as to read off the good for the individual from what his cognitively enhanced self wants. This commits the same error that Dewey charged against hedonism, of omitting critical appraisal of one’s own character as an important factor in determining what one ought to desire. In identifying the good with the objects of approved desires, Dewey highlighted the importance of character to identifying the good. Before we can endorse a desire, we need to ask whether we, or an impartial observer, could approve of someone who had it (E 239–47). The good is what good people — those possessing foresight and wide sympathies — desire. Dewey also resisted the conversion of a method of inquiry into a fixed criterion of value. There is never an end to inquiry — no such thing as complete information — because circumstances are always changing and imagination constructs new possibilities for living (E 213). Nor does the projection of desires we would have if we reached an end to inquiry offer a recognizable vision of human life. Fully informed people do not desire more information. But education, inquiry, and individual development in light of new discoveries are constitutive goods of human life. The desire to skip to the end to see what is ultimately valuable is a desire to skip human life, as if the process of learning through living were merely a means and not prized in itself (HNC 194–202). What, in light of inquiry, we reflectively desire, and approve of desiring, is evidence of what is good. But it is always defeasible in light of further inquiry.

Pragmatism in ethics is often regarded as a form of teleology or consequentialism. Yet Dewey rejected accounts of the right that defined it in terms of promoting the good (E 214–216). The concept of the right contains an element not contained in the good — namely, that of an authoritative demand. The phenomenology of claims of good and right are also distinct: the good attracts or appeals, whereas claims of right appear to command authority. The demands of the right often conflict with individual desire, since they arise from the conflicting, socially authorized claims of other people. The right arises from the need to harmonize the claims of people with distinct interests and conceptions of the good by means of reasonable principles that all can accept. Thus, although claims of right are grounded in people’s interests in gaining the assistance and cooperation of others, and in protection against others’ encroachments, the right cannot be defined in terms of promoting the good of any individual. Nor can it be defined in terms of promoting some independent conception of the good of society as a whole, since any such conception must already persuade the individual that it accords a reasonable place for her own claims, and thus already incorporate a notion of right (E 215–7; TIF 284–5).

The deontological thought that the right is independent of the good reflects the reality that the claims of others, even when reasonable and authoritative, do not automatically harmonize with the desires of the individual upon whom the claims are made. However, Dewey rejected the further deontological claim that there is a sharp distinction between the moral and nonmoral good, where the former is identified with conformity to the right, and the latter with satisfying individual desires. After all, claims of right are designed to protect and advance the interests of individuals that are considered important enough to warrant social support. Moreover, they are constitutive features of social relationships that people find good. The authority of these claims draws on the appeal of these relationships and on the motives of love, respect, and loyalty cultivated within them (E 218–219).

Deontological theories tend to identify the right either with fixed laws or rules of conduct, such as the Ten Commandments, or with a single supreme principle of morality, such as the Categorical Imperative, understood as supplying a decision procedure in ethics. The attempt to specify substantive rules of right conduct for all cases founders on the need to make exceptions for different circumstances. “Thou shalt not kill” cannot be taken at face value, given the justifiability of killing in self-defense. Yet it is impossible to specify in advance all of the circumstances that could justify killing even in self-defense, given the complications that arise in, say, defensive warfare (e.g., problems of collateral damage). As social conditions change — for example, the technology and tactics of warfare, and our ability to affect the interests of distant others — rules of conduct that had been accepted in the past must be subject to revision, lest learning cease and people remain mired in dysfunctional habits (E 275–9). A method of moral inquiry is needed that can revise given rules, laws, and habits in light of new problems and circumstances. This method would take current and past customs and laws as starting points for moral theory, in conjunction with the history and anthropology of custom, the history of systematic theoretical reflection on morality, and the social sciences, which inform us of the nature of current problems, and the probable consequences of attempting to institute this or that new law or custom (E 178–9). Intelligent moral inquiry, while it begins with current customs and convictions about the right, treats them as hypotheses to be tested in experience.

The attempt to identify a decision procedure for the right independent of considerations of the consequences of following certain principles is also bound to fail. Dewey endorsed the “empty formalism” critique of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, insofar as it aspires to reach moral conclusions without presupposing anything to be good. Yet, reinterpreted as tools of moral inquiry, as standpoints from which to identify and analyze morally relevant considerations, principles such as the Golden Rule and the Categorical imperative offer sound advice: they are designed to ensure that the interests of all have been fairly considered in formulating concrete principles of conduct proposed as general laws or customs to be generally enforced (E 223–5, 280–3).

Virtue theories take approval and disapproval, praise and blame, as the fundamental bases for morality. Customary morality relies heavily on acts of praise and blame to perpetuate itself. Critical reflection seeks a standard by which people’s approvals and disapprovals can be appraised. Dewey argued that the British utilitarians carried this inquiry most deeply with their ideal observer theory of morality, which identified the standard with that by which an informed impartial and benevolent observer appraises conduct — namely, its tendency to promote everyone’s welfare. But, given that the content of people’s welfare is not fixed, but open to imaginative expansion, this standard can no more be applied in algorithmic fashion than moral principles can be. Like moral principles, the utilitarian standard of approval sets up a general standpoint for the appraisal of conduct, and revision of ends in light of such appraisal, rather than a fixed criterion that can be mechanically applied (E 237–47).

Dewey argued that praise and blame function to make individuals conscious of and responsive to the wider consequences of their actions for others. This forward-looking view of praise and blame enabled Dewey to avoid the problem of free will in its connection with responsibility. Praise and blame are tools for enabling people to assume responsibility for their conduct — to enable them to regulate their conduct in view of their consequences for others. Hence, the presupposition of praise and blame is not that the individual held to account could have done otherwise at the time of acting. It is rather that praise and blame can induce people to be more conscientious — to govern their conduct in light of the responsibilities ascribed to them, to act out of a sense of their own responsibility, and thereby to take notice and mastery of the motives by which they act — in the future. This fact is most evident in our practices of praising and blaming children. Young children are not autonomous agents and lack free will in any sense relevant to the debates about responsibility. They are not responsible for their conduct. Yet, in praising and blaming them, we hold them responsible for their conduct, as the necessary means by which they can become responsible for their conduct in the future. This is not a special or anomalous use of praise or blame; it is its paradigmatic use (HNC 119–22; LE 86–96).

Dewey’s accounts of the main types of moral theory fit neatly into his experimentalist account of practical reasoning and value judgments. Individuals begin their lives as human societies did historically: acting on impulse and custom. These modes of conduct, being unselfconscious and shortsighted, cannot handle all the challenges life poses, and generate problems of their own. Thus arises the need for reflective appraisal of conduct in view of its wider consequences, with the aim of controlling future conduct by means of these appraisals, so as to solve the problems at hand. This practical reasoning uses the same general experimental method as theoretical reasoning does. We begin with certain given facts: these are our immediate valuings of things by impulse and habit. The data for appraisal of these valuings come from the consequences of acting on them, along with the ways we value these consequences. The three types of moral theory identify three sources of evidence that bear on our current valuings: our desires (which by definition are informed), the claims or demands of other people, and their approvals and disapprovals of our conduct. Traditional philosophical ethics tries to erect these sources of evidence into transcendent, authoritative criteria, typically by means of certain idealizing moves (such as universalization and full information). Dewey argued that the supposedly external, transcendent criteria for appraising conduct — ideals of the good, principles of right, standards of approval and disapproval — should rather be treated as hypotheses, as tools for uncovering additional data needed to appraise our valuings. They provide us with standpoints by which we can make ourselves aware of a wider set of consequences of our conduct. Ideals of the good enable us to take up the standpoint of the prudent and foresighted individual, concerned to harmonize current desires with one another and with the self’s future needs and interests. Principles of right enable us to take up the standpoint of others who make claims on us in light of the impact of our conduct on their interests. Standards of approval enable us to take up the standpoint of observers, who approve and disapprove of our conduct not just for its consequences but on account of its underlying motives as well. Thus, these norms enable us to survey the consequences of our conduct from a first personal, second personal, and third personal point of view, respectively, and to shape new ends (desires) accordingly. But no actual ideal, principle, or standard exhaustively captures each point of view, since each is subject to further development with further extensions of information, imagination, and sympathy. They can only be accepted tentatively, as hypotheses to be tested by acting on them and seeing what further data they elicit. Some of this data — new regrets, new complaints, new disapprovals — will disconfirm our hypotheses and provide grounds for revising our ideals, principles, and standards. (This is not to suggest that the import of the data themselves should be taken at face value. Some regrets simply reflect the resistance of old dysfunctional habits; some complaints are unreasonable; some disapprovals reflect hidebound and dogmatic dispositions. But these hypotheses, too, can be tested.) History and the social sciences provide us with additional data on the customs and laws by which people have dealt with the problems that have arisen in their circumstances, and general knowledge of human psychology and social interactions that enable us to learn from the experiences of others and formulate educated guesses — new hypotheses — for how we might solve our problems.

Dewey stressed several themes in developing his account of reflective morality for the present day: change, pluralism, conflict, and anti-authoritarianism. Living in an era of unprecedented social change, Dewey situated reflective morality in a non-teleological Darwinian view of organisms’ adaptation to environmental contingencies (IDP). Nature does not supply a telos or rule for human beings, but rather a constantly changing environment to which humans need to adjust by using their intelligence. Modern science and education lead people to doubt old traditions and arrive at different beliefs by empowering them to think for themselves. Immigration brings people of different faiths and cultures together, with a need to devise shared moral norms to regulate their interactions. Interpersonal conflict along lines of class, religion, race, and other socially salient divisions generates demands for new norms to resolve disputes. All of these factors undermine appeals to traditional norms, which are not adapted to changed circumstances, presuppose a consensus that does not exist, and suppress rather than address interpersonal conflict. Nor is resort to traditional authorities any solution. People don’t agree on their authority. Moreover, authority itself corrupts people’s moral views:

It is difficult for a person in a place of authoritative power to avoid supposing that what he wants is right as long as he has power to enforce his demand. And even with the best will in the world, he is likely to be isolated from the real needs of others, and the perils of ignorance are added to those of selfishness. (E 226)

Moral insights come from the demands of others, not from any individual’s isolated reflections. And insights come from all social quarters. Intelligent revision of norms therefore requires practices of moral inquiry that stress mutual responsiveness to others’ claims, and social inclusion of all members of society. Such practices are constitutive features of democracy, understood as a form of everyday life (not simply as a type of state constitution) (CD 224–230). This is the point at which Dewey’s political philosophy emerges from his ethics. Democracy, in Dewey’s view, is the means by which we practice intelligent moral inquiry together, seeking solutions to the problems we face together (PP).

Dewey’s identification of intelligent reflection with experimental methods might be thought to suggest a narrowly scientistic worldview, in which values are reduced to purely subjective, arational “oughts” or likings applied to inherently value-free facts or natural kinds discovered and defined independently of human valuations. In fact, Dewey’s project aims to unify scientific with humanistic inquiry rather than to enforce divisions between the two. While intelligent humanistic inquiry partakes of experimental method, scientific inquiry itself is an art (EN 285–6). The categories in terms of which we make intelligent sense of the world are not limited to those which are useful solely for describing objects of abstract, generalized knowledge divorced from feelings and aspirations. Feelings and aspirations are themselves part of the natural world and hence proper subjects of experimental investigation (EN 316). The job of art is to create objects that enhance our capacities for meaningful, appreciative experience. Criticism in turn aims to develop meaningful categories that inform enriched experiences of objects. “Nothing but the best, the richest and fullest experience possible, is good enough for man” (EN 308).

For experiences to be capable of such enrichment, they must be able to incorporate intelligent appraisals, just as desires and actions do. To the extent that such incorporation is attentive to the features of the object along with their import, so as to produce a unified, free, emotionally engaged, satisfying, appreciative experience of the object, the experience realizes aesthetic value (AE 42–3, 47). Such appreciative perception of the object incorporates knowledge of causes and effects. “[T]here enter[s] into the [epicure’s] taste, as directly experienced, qualities that depend upon reference to its source and its manner of production in connection with criteria of excellence” (AE 55). The listener informed by music theory learns to hear, and thereby take pleasure in, different types of modulation from one key to another, and is thereby primed for certain musical expectations, creating alternating tensions, fulfillments, and surprises as the musical performance unfolds. Similar claims can be made for all of the arts, whether they be “fine” or “practical.”

The job of the critic is not to pass judgment on the object as a judge issues a decision on the basis of precedent, but rather to point out meaningful features in the object in ways that enhance observers’ experience of it (AE 302–4). Nor should aesthetic appraisal of artworks simply consist in applications of prior aesthetic standards to currently perceived works of art. Recall that value judgments are instruments that, while they may have been found useful in past cases, may fail to successfully guide current conduct. To the extent that a work of art is capable of evoking novel appreciative experiences, the application of established standards of aesthetic value to the work may close off such novelty and reduce the experience of it to a stereotyped, boring recapitulation of past experiences (if the artwork happens to meet the old standard), or, worse (if it fails to meet the old standard) provoke a stunted reaction of offense or disapproval. In such cases the aesthetic judgment would have failed to do its job, which is to enhance perception by drawing the observer’s attention to features of the object, and of relations among the object, its creator, and observers, that are understood as meaningful and thereby excite feeling (AE 303). Criticism renders the aesthetic value of an artwork objective to the extent that it succeeds in evoking common appreciative experiences among many observers by drawing their attention to the same features and relations of the artwork (AE 312–3).

On Dewey’s expansive understanding of the aesthetic dimension of experience, aesthetic value is not possessed by works of art alone, but can also be possessed by tools and other instruments (EN 283). In the course of repairing a shelf, one might use a hammer and feel its heft and balance to be splendidly proportioned for the task, feel the handle to be molded in a way that perfectly fits one’s hand, perceive its materials to have been selected with attention to their fitness for driving nails, and so forth. Such intelligent appreciation of the hammer in one’s direct experience of it amounts to an aesthetic valuation of it, insofar as the experience itself is savored and one’s perceptive faculties are not merely identifying instrumentally valuable features of the hammer for future reference but actively engaged in appreciating the aptness of its design and materials. The repair job, too, can have aesthetic value to the extent that one experiences it as a unified, smoothly unfolding process, beginning with an astute assessment of the required operations, leading to the skilled, fluid, unfrustrated execution of these operations, and ending with what is appraised and prized as a successful conclusion--the object experienced as satisfactorily repaired. When the experience of this process as aptly unifying means and ends absorbs one’s appreciative attention, either as actor or as observer, it has aesthetic value.

On this account, the work process itself can have aesthetic value. Dewey’s aesthetic theory thus provides the basis for understanding his critique of work as it exists in societies sharply divided by class. In such societies, the processes of work are reduced to merely mechanical operations assigned to a servile class, and divorced from consummatory experiences of the propertied, leisure class that enjoys the products of others’ labor. Class division, by divorcing means from ends (production from consumption) and intelligent planning from physical operations, reduces physical labor to a tedious, mindless, meaningless mechanical exercise of habit, which thereby lacks aesthetic value in lacking unity and intelligent appreciation. The challenge of the modern day is to consider how work, and human activity generally, can be reformed so that it has aesthetic value and is thus no longer valued merely instrumentally (EN 277–8, 307–8).

Consistently with his contextualism, Dewey stressed the social circumstances in which different moral theories arose. His and James Tufts’s Ethics begins, not with a review of rival moral theories, but with a survey of anthropology and a brief history of the moral problems and practices of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. By locating moral theories in their social contexts, Dewey exposed their limitations. Theories that make sense in certain contexts may not make sense in others. For example, Dewey argued that the failure of ancient Greek teleological theories to grasp the independence of the right from the good arose from the fact that the good for individual citizens of Greek city-states was inextricably wrapped up with participation in civic life and promotion of the good of the city-state as a whole (TIF 283).

Dewey, like Hegel, stressed the ways abstract philosophical doctrines are socially embodied. He frequently focused on the ways these doctrines rationalize and reinforce stultifying and unjust social arrangements. For example, the sharp dichotomy between purely instrumental and intrinsic goods both reflects and reinforces an organization of work life that reduces it to drudgery. Since work is of merely instrumental value, so the thinking goes, there is no point in trying to make it interesting to those who do it. The dichotomy also rationalizes oppressive class divisions. Insofar as the good life is conceived in terms of devotion to or enjoyment of purely intrinsic, noninstrumental goods (such as intellectual contemplation and the appreciation of beauty), it is a life that can be led only by a leisured class, whose members do not have to spend their time earning a living. This class depends upon a working class whose function is to provide them with the leisure they need to pursue the good life. Dewey’s critique of traditional ways of distinguishing means from ends is thus simultaneously a critique of class hierarchy (HNC 185–8, TV 235).

Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual (E 314–316). Thus, in contrast with his voluminous political commentaries, Dewey published very little on personal “applied ethics.” The rapid social changes that were taking place in his lifetime required new institutions, as traditional customs and laws proved themselves unable to cope with such issues as mass immigration, class conflict, the Great Depression, the demands of women for greater independence, racism, and the threats to democracy posed by fascism and communism. Dewey was a founding member of the NAACP and the ACLU. As a progressive liberal, he advocated numerous social reforms such as promoting the education, employment, and enfranchisement of women, social insurance, the progressive income tax, and laws protecting the rights of workers to organize labor unions. However, he stressed the importance of improving methods of moral inquiry over advocating particular moral conclusions, given that the latter are always subject to revision in light of new evidence.

Thus, the main focus of Dewey’s social ethics concerns the institutional arrangements that influence the capacity of people to conduct moral inquiry intelligently. Two social domains are critical for promoting this capacity: schools, and civil society. Both needed to be reconstructed so as to promote experimental intelligence and wider sympathies. Dewey wrote numerous works on education, and established the famous Laboratory School at the University of Chicago to implement and test his educational theories. He was also a leading advocate of the comprehensive high school, as opposed to separate vocational and college preparatory schools. This was to promote the social integration of different economic classes, a prerequisite to enlarging their mutual understanding and sympathies. Civil society, too, needed to be reconstructed along more democratic lines. This involved not just expanding the franchise, but improving the means of communication among citizens and between citizens and experts, so that public opinion could be better informed by the experiences and problems of citizens from different walks of life, and by scientific discoveries (PP). Dewey regarded democracy as the social embodiment of experimental intelligence informed by sympathy and respect for the other members of society (DE 3, 89–94). Democracy is not simply a set of legal institutions but a way of life informed by an ethos of open and respectful communication, in which political rivals repudiate abusive and suspicious modes of discourse and open themselves up to learning from others (CD). Unlike dictatorial and oligarchic societies, democratic ones institutionalize feedback mechanisms (free speech) for informing officeholders of the consequences for all of the policies they adopt, and for sanctioning them (periodic elections) if they do not respond accordingly.

Dewey’s moral epistemology thus leads naturally to his political philosophy. The reconstruction of moral theory is accomplished by replacing fixed moral rules and ends with an experimental method that treats norms for valuing as hypotheses to be tested in practice, in light of their widest consequences for everyone. To implement this method requires institutions that facilitate three things: (1) habits of critical, experimental inquiry; (2) widespread communication of the consequences of instituting norms, and (3) extensive sympathy, so that the consequences of norms for everyone are treated seriously in appraising them and imagining and adopting alternatives. The main institutions needed to facilitate these things are progressive schools and a democratic civil society. Experimentalism in ethics leads to a democratic political philosophy.

Abbreviations of Principal Works Bearing on Dewey’s Ethics

Collections.

• Dewey, J., 1967, The Early Works , 1882–1898, J. A. Boydston (ed.), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
• Dewey, J., 1976, The Middle Works , 1899–1924, J. A. Boydston (ed.), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
• Dewey, J., 1981, The Later Works , 1925–1953, J. A. Boydston (ed.), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
• Dewey, J., 1994, The Moral Writings of John Dewey , J. Gouinlock (ed.), Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Dewey, J., 1998, The Essential Dewey , L. Hickman and T. M. Alexander (ed.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Cochran, M. (ed.), 2010, The Cambridge Companion to Dewey , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Fesmire, S., 2003, John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• –––, 2019, The Oxford Handbook of Dewey , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Frega, R. and S. Levine (eds.), 2021, John Dewey’s Ethical Theory: The 1932 Ethics , New York: Routledge.
• Garrison, J. W. (ed.), 1995, The New Scholarship on Dewey , Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic.
• Gouinlock, J., 1972, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value , Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.
• –––, 1986, Excellence in Public Discourse: John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Social Intelligence , New York: Teachers College Press.
• Hickman, L. (ed.), 1998, Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Pappas, G., 2009, John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Rogers, M., 2008, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Ryan, A., 1995, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism , New York: W.W. Norton.
• Tiles, J. (ed.), 1992, John Dewey: Critical Assessments , London New York: Routledge.
• Welchman, J., 1995, Dewey’s Ethical Thought , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Westbrook, R. B., 1991, John Dewey and American Democracy , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Center for Dewey Studies , Southern Illinois University Carbondale
• John Dewey , Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• John Dewey, American Pragmatist , (pragmatism.org)
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What’s the Problem with Dewey?

In Democracy and Education Dewey has a rich conception of educational flourishing that stands at odds with the instrumentalism about learning endemic to much contemporary educational policy. And his vision posits deep dependencies between the different domains in which education is transformative: the transformation of the individual learner into an inquirer equipped to adapt in a changing environment and the transformations in the social world required for the provision of opportunities for such experiences to all. In this paper, I trace the roots of Dewey’s conception in his account of inquiry. I focus on the key concept of a ‘problem.’ For Dewey, inquiry begins with a problem, but his concept of a problem is challenging and lacks an adequate theoretical rationale. Problems start with disruptions in our environmental engagement that figure in non-knowing encounters. Dewey needs an account of these pre-cognitive disruptions and of what constitutes their resolution. I argue that the account can be found in the aesthetics of experience. This draws upon some of Dewey’s insights regarding our experience of art objects and it finds a central role for the aesthetics of experience as not only the prompt for inquiry and the unification of experience that settles inquiry, but also in what I call the ‘craft of inquiry’ – the very practice of inquiring. If this is right, any adequate account of learning, let alone a pedagogy fit to encourage learning, must have a central role for aesthetics as providing the conditions for the possibility of learning. A proper appreciation of Dewey signals the opportunity for a radical re-thinking of how to shape a pedagogy fit for educational flourishing – a pedagogy designed for inquirers. And it helps us understand better the deep dependencies between the projects of individual and social transformation.

Introduction

• 1 References to John Dewey’s published works are to the critical edition, The Collected Works of John (...)

1 In Democracy and Education Dewey presents a vision of a richly liberal conception of education, one that sees education as fundamentally transformative, from the opening naturalistic conception of living things maintaining ‘themselves by renewal’ to the conception of education as “a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience” (MW 9: 82). 1 This is transformative on a number of different levels. It transforms the individual: in ancient Athens “custom and traditional beliefs held men in bondage” (MW 9: 272) and education needs to provide the “reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of consequent experience” (MW 9: 82). However much this requires transformation of the individual, Dewey is clear that there is a social dimension to the transformative role and purpose of education. The ancient Greeks, for example, did not liberate all from the bondage of custom. Our critique of the class divisions in ancient Athens is only honest if “we are free from responsibility for perpetuating the educational practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a cultural embellishment” (MW 9: 265). A truly democratic society is one “in which all share in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure” (MW 9: 265). Education for democracy requires deep immersion in culture for all, for a “democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (MW 9: 93). And, for all this to be possible, pivotally education requires the acquisition of the higher order abilities for learning how to learn, learning how to be an inquirer, for “a society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability” (MW 9: 93-4).

• 2 See Nussbaum 2009 for a recent appeal to Dewey for the resources to combat the instrumentalism ramp (...)

2 Dewey’s vision is extensive and, arguably, prohibitively expensive. It is extensive for its opposition to the sort of instrumentalism about education with which we have become increasingly familiar. 2 For Dewey, education is about equipping people with the experiences and abilities to take part across the board in the shared enterprise of human culture, in exercises of ‘conjoint communicated experience.’ In addition, it is a conception of education that posits deep dependencies between the provision of individual transformation (personal initiative and adaptability) and social transformations (conjoint communicated experience). It is this latter point that threatens the economic viability of Dewey’s vision. In a policy climate in which service provision is measured for its contribution to the economic well-being of society, a Deweyan liberalism about education will always lose out to an economic instrumentalism that accepts a stratification of opportunities in education. Dewey’s requirement that all experience the immersion in culture on which individual adaptability depends will lose out in the competition for economic resources unless it can provide the basis for a fundamental re-thinking of the intrinsic purposes of education. That is the point of Kitcher’s (2009) well-known defense of Dewey. In this essay, I want to develop some of the tools needed for undertaking this re-thinking.

3 A central question must concern the nature and direction of the dependency between individual transformation and social transformation. I do not propose to decide on the issue of which, if either, is basic? There is, however, room for understanding, in a good deal more detail, the key ideas that drive Dewey’s thinking and which might help hold his vision together. A key idea in Democracy and Education is the concept of adaptability. It operates at both the individual and social level. It requires an ability to respond intelligently to novelty, howsoever that may arise. And although Dewey opens the book with a naturalistic sentiment of life as “a self-renewing process through action upon the environment” (MW 9: 4), that process is already conceived as an open-ended enterprise, for he says, “the living thing […] tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence” (MW 9: 4).

4 This suggests the project of timely adaptation to the contingencies met with in the environment is the individual’s project and demands of the individual the wherewithal to respond to happenings with imagination. And that thought is key to the statement of educational values much later in Chapter 18. Dewey there remarks,

play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. (MW 9: 245)

5 He goes on:

The emphasis put in this book […] upon activity, will be misleading if it is not recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral part of human activity as is muscular movement. (Ibid.)

6 I want to suggest that at the heart of Dewey’s key concept of adaptability is the imagination; that the heart of what it is to be an inquirer responding to problems is to be a subject with imagination. It is the imagination that is the key driver to the transformations at stake in education. It is the imagination that holds together the different strands of Dewey’s liberalism.

7 If we endorse Dewey’s rich liberalism, we have a tool for a critique of the managerialism about educational policy found throughout Europe. But with what right can we endorse Dewey’s liberalism? I shall trace the case for Dewey’s liberalism back to his conception of inquiry. I want to argue that a proper appreciation of Dewey’s model of inquiry lays the foundation for a radical underpinning of his richly liberal conception of education.

8 Here is a simple way of setting out the trajectory I want to explore:

For Dewey, learning is the activity of inquiry.

Inquiry starts with a problem (it is historically rooted).

Inquiry ends when the problem is solved.

9 Adaptation is done in response to problems, and comes to rest (for the time being) when the problem is solved. So education should be geared to solve problems, not serve the economy, nor the instrumental targets set by modern managerialism. But what are problems and what are Europe’s problems re education? There are multiple potential answers to the latter question, many of which are important, but I want to concentrate on the former question, for I think that our key theoretical problem is that we have no detailed and cogent account of how to answer that first question:

What is a problem?

10 Furthermore, I want to suggest a reading of Dewey on problems that provides a radical critique of much extant thought on education and the conditions for learning: problems start at a level of experience properly called the aesthetic.

• 3 See Alexander 2012, 2014 and Leddy 2015, although neither quite capture the central role for the ae (...)

11 Others have marked out some of this path, but thus far the role of the aesthetic of experience has not been accorded the full seriousness and importance it warrants. 3 On the approach I pursue, the aesthetic is not merely an important element of experience that figures in both the drive and consummation of inquiry, it is the condition for the very possibility of inquiry. The idea of inquiry does not make sense without an account of its origins, its practice and its resolution in the aesthetic. If this is right, at the heart of any credible pedagogy there must be an account of the role of the aesthetic as the driver, vehicle and consummation of inquiry.

4 See Zeltner (1975: 18-21).

12 Dewey sees inquiry starting with what, for want of a better label, we might call an ‘itch’; it’s the sense of irritation, of things being not quite so. It’s the sense of unease that all is not right, our place in the environment is out of kilter. Inquiry concerns the dynamic that takes us along a trajectory defined by “the rhythm of loss of integration with the environment and recovery of union” (LW 10: 20-1). 4 As Fesmire (2015: 87) explains the dynamic: “Reflective thought is provoked by a hitch in the works, when an unsettled world stops being congenial to our expectations.”

13 The ‘itch’ is the irritation, the sense that things do not fit. It prompts inquiry, which is resolved when a sense of fit is recovered. But the recovery of a sense of fit is also a recovery that equips us with meaning and understanding, a conceptual grasp of how our problems got resolved. The sense of fit cannot, therefore, be wholly isolated from those cognitive processes that provide understanding. We need an account of how the aesthetics of experience, although outwith the range of a conceptual and knowing experience of things, nevertheless provides the condition for the possibility of an inquiry that issues in conceptual knowing, no matter how much we might also want to insist that inquiry’s closure is only properly delivered by a renewed sense of fit that settles the initial itch. On the reading of Dewey I offer, the aesthetic, while not itself part of a knowing experience, is nevertheless the element of experience that makes knowledge gathering possible. The aesthetic needs therefore, notwithstanding its separateness from the field of a knowing experience, to be capable of integration within the whole of the cognitive apparatus (broadly conceived) of the mind’s engagement with the environment. On my reading, the role of the aesthetic in Dewey’s account of inquiry is as a transcendental condition for knowing encounters.

• 5 “There is nothing intellectual or cognitive in the existence of [problematic] situations, although (...)
• 6 Hence Alexander’s (2014) critique of linguistic pragmatism in favour of Dewey’s experiential pragma (...)

14 It is important to Dewey that this sense of itch falls outwith the frame of our conceptual take on things. It is a sense of itch that makes things salient. It is, however, difficult to see how this notion of salience can make sense without the idea of the ‘itch’ being a disturbance within a patterning to experience. At the same time, the sense of patterning is not yet a conceptual patterning. To make sense of this idea we need the resources for attributing a patterning to experience, something that can be disrupted. This is what people mean when they speak of the role of the noncognitive in Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience (Alexander 2014). The label ‘noncognitive’ is, however, unhelpful. If there is a real point to some such element of experience, then it is something that is handled by human cognitive resources. For sure, it is something that falls outwith the scope of conceptual content and to deny that would be to run the risk of over-intellectualising experience – something Dewey repeatedly warned against. 5 That makes the aesthetic difficult to capture in our description of the phenomenology of experience and it can seem to render it invisible to the tools of analytic philosophy. 6 But that last point is mistaken. The idea of a notion of aesthetic experience that falls outwith the conceptual content familiar to our ordinary notion of meaning is challenging to describe, but we should not thereby take it as challenging to theorise. If we do not theorise about it with care and attention, then we forfeit the right to deploy it in an account of the logic of inquiry that informs pedagogy.

15 I take the idea of a trajectory from ‘itch to fit’ as a serious attempt to understand Dewey’s dynamic concept of inquiry. My project is to provide a theoretical account of this trajectory and make it serviceable for a fundamental re-shaping of pedagogy. Before outlining some of the detail of the theoretical account of the trajectory from ‘itch to fit,’ I want to set out the methodological options. Understanding Dewey, let alone learning from him, requires care regarding our methodological assumptions just as much as the assumptions that shape our substantive ideas.

1. Methodology

16 There are two issues on which I want to set-out my stand before embarking on the detailed argument. The first issue concerns the sort of argument that is involved in appealing to the aesthetics of experience. The second issue concerns how my account of the aesthetics sits with the common presumption that Dewey’s theory of inquiry involves a form of social constructivism (e.g. Carr 2003: 123 f.; and Fesmire 2015: 90 f.). I start with the first issue.

17 If we are interested in the aesthetics of experience, here are two key questions: (i) What is the aesthetic? (ii) What’s the argument for this element of experience? On the first point, the aesthetic concerns elements of experience that must not be over-intellectualised, for there is an intrinsic indeterminateness to the aesthetic in experience. The aesthetic concerns the itch that demands our attention, an unsettlingness that demands a response. So we need a theory of the ‘itch.’ For the moment, this is what I mean by the aesthetic in Dewey’s account. For sure, lots of what counts as ‘aesthetic’ gets rendered into the conceptual frame of thought and talk. For now, I use ‘aesthetic’ as a more neutral term where others use ‘noncognitive’ (Alexander 2014). Neither term is fully satisfactory, but ‘noncognitive’ suggests a distance from cognition that renders opaque the idea that the aesthetic of the itch provides a condition for the possibility of cognition’s inquiry.

• 7 For Dewey, problematic situations are “precognitive” (LW 12: 111). And see Alexander (2014: 71): “N (...)

18 The aesthetic itch is what Dewey had in mind when he says that not all experience involves knowing. 7 That can suggest that the answer to the second question is a phenomenological argument. It will be an argument that broadly works along the line of: ‘Look see. This is how it is. Don’t over-describe it or you run the risk of intellectualising it.’ But that is too quick, for our two questions are quite distinct. In terms of what it is, the aesthetic cannot be captured too accurately in the terminology of modern theories of experiential content without losing its phenomenological indeterminacy. But with regard to the argument for it, we need more than a descriptive claim, for we need, as theorists, to be able to give a clear account of the role of the aesthetic. If we can’t deliver that, then we’re just mumbling in the dark. Giving a clear theoretical account of the aesthetic does not mean we over-intellectualise it, but it does mean we have to give an intellectually cogent account of its role and how it integrates with knowing experience and why it is important. Let’s start with that last point.

19 On a phenomenological account, the aesthetic is important because it is required for an account of experience to be full and complete. That is how experience is: it has an aesthetic element. On the argument I want to explore, the aesthetic is important because it provides the condition for the possibility of inquiry; it provides the account of that which renders inquiry possible and which motivates the search for meaning and understanding – that which invites us to adapt. And yet, faithfulness to the phenomenology of the aesthetic means that we owe an account of something that in itself does not provide meaning and understanding. So we need sufficient theoretical granularity to our account of the aesthetic that will support the argument that its existence is a condition for the possibility of inquiry while also accommodating a phenomenology that does not leave it over-intellectualised. We need to talk precisely and with theoretical detail in a way that gives traction to that which is not precise. The theoretical mode of discourse cannot compete with the phenomenological appeal but it needs to legitimise the importance of the phenomenological appeal. Put simply, providing the phenomenology of the Deweyan aesthetic might be an exercise that risks slipping through the net of mainstream analytic philosophy, but providing the theorist’s account of what it is and why it matters is part of the core business of any credible detailed theory of experience. The former project looks to estrange Dewey from the concerns of contemporary philosophy; the latter brings him home.

20 The second methodological issue that I want to note concerns the status of Dewey’s constructivism. There is little doubt that Dewey’s concept of experience is broader than the model of perception as knowledge gathering that dominates contemporary philosophy. As Alexander (2014: 66) notes, “experience” in Dewey’s sense is not “perception” but adaptive existence, which in human existence takes in the form of culture.

21 There are two point at stake here. The first is the point already noted, experience has a dimension that I am calling the aesthetic. This is a dimension that is only problematically captured if one tries to conceive it in terms of contemporary theories of experiential content, regardless of one’s willingness to add ‘nonconceptual content’ alongside conceptual content, or to add a relationalist model of experience to the contentful. One thing that is signaled by ‘culture’ is the indeterminacy of experience that characterises the aesthetic. It’s the point that “not all experience is experience-as-known and that having experience arises and terminates within experience that is not knowing” (Alexander 2014: 71). But there is another element to the appeal to experience as culture, and that’s the social dimension to the construction of culture that many find in Dewey. Alexander again:

We do not begin our inquiries […] except under certain defining situations. Unless one has lived and interacted with others, learning a language and participating in a culture with its stories and traditions, one cannot even begin asking questions. (Alexander 2012: 89)

22 There are a number of issues in this passage. Here are two issues that will dominate in my argument.

23 First, Alexander presents inquiry beginning with questions. That cannot be right, for ‘questions’ do not belong within the domain of the aesthetic. Alexander is well aware of the point and has done much to present Dewey’s concept of inquiry as driven by the non-cognitive. Nevertheless, the use of the idea of ‘question’ here shows the extent of the difficulties we encounter in trying to give a coherent and detailed account of how inquiry starts with the indeterminate ‘itch’ within the aesthetics of experience. I provide a theory of the aesthetic ‘itch’ in the next two sections.

• 8 There are many forms of dependency on the social that figure in theories of learning; for a critiqu (...)

24 Second, Alexander here gives clear expression to a sense of dependency on situatedness in culture as a precondition for asking questions and beginning inquiry. Inquiry is always situated in a shared culture. 8 It’s not clear to me in what sense Dewey endorses this idea of inquiry’s situatedness in shared culture. I shall develop a reading of Dewey that sees the shared culture as a construct of earlier phases of inquiry. It is a construct that scaffolds later stages, but the shared culture is the product of a more basic notion of culture that is found in the individual’s aesthetics of experience. That is the order of explanation that I offer in my reading of Dewey. I will note the reasons for this as the argument proceeds, but it is important to mark now that although at any stage of inquiry shared culture scaffolds the following stage, the role of shared culture is not constitutive of inquiry but a result of the basic form of inquiry that is individualistic both in its problems and its aesthetics. The root to culture is individual, not shared and it is due to those roots that we acquire shared culture. Shared culture is an explanandum , not the explanans . I am assuming that individual transformation is the motor of the social transformation, not the other way around.

25 The individualism in my reading of Dewey will jar many people’s sense of his emphasis on the social, the cultural and the intrinsically democratising drive of his vision of education. With regard to the political and social impact of Dewey’s concept of inquiry I have no problem. My emphasis on the individual notion of culture is an explanatory device. The priority I see in the individual is an explanatory one. There is not space in this essay to treat this aspect of methodology in adequate detail, but let me mark one root to a social constructivist account of Dewey with which I take issue.

26 It is tempting to think that there are at least two senses of problem. The individual’s problems and society’s problems. Problems are the root to learning. So what drives an individual’s learning? The answer, presumably, is their problems. If we find the individual’s problems as those that they inherit from initiation into socially constructed problems, then the source of individual learning is simply the problems inherited by their initiation into the current cultural forms. But that hides the following diagnostic possibility – the idea of a meta-problem with educational thinking:

The meta-problem with educational thought and policy is that it is not driven by an adequate conception of the problems that drive individual learners – it has no account of individuals’ problems.

27 If individuals’ problems are socially constructed (what you pick up from initiation into culture) there is no such meta-problem. But that means that the potential for a Deweyan critique of instrumentalism about education is wholly dependent on how you draft the problems you inherit on initiation into culture. And that is highly contentious. One way of seeing the bearing of Dewey on European educational thought in the 21st century is to focus on the issue: what are Europe’s problems? And that takes us into a long, although potentially interesting series of empirical and policy issues about European education. My argument is located in a different set of concerns. My central claim is that there is a fundamental flaw in educational thinking that Dewey can help us expose and that the exposure provides a powerful individualist cognitive account of why the aesthetic matters at the heart of our thinking about and practice of education.

• 9 Although this is individualistic and although I have noted points of contrast with Alexander’s read (...)

28 This is a different route to the familiar broadly social constructivist reading of Dewey. It is the route that takes the meta-problem seriously and finds leverage on the critique of instrumentalism by rooting the critique in an analysis of the concept of ‘problem’ as it figures at the level of the individual learner. My central claim is that Dewey has the resources for a conception of the individual’s problem that drives inquiry. That notion of problem is framed by his account of the aesthetics of experience. Learning begins by confronting a problem framed within aesthetics, an account of experience that is intrinsically open-ended although patterned. This is an account that explains the deep source of Dewey’s pragmatism – the fact that learning is always situated in real historical time. Learning is timely, not timeless. It is the process by which we smooth the itches in current experience and prepare ourselves for what comes next, where what comes next is invariably open-ended and unpredictable. This is a process that we must face not with rules and prior commitments other than a preparedness to interrogate openly and freely in the search for the smoothing that reduces the friction of the next itch wherever it may lie. 9

29 Inquiry starts with a problem. Depending on how we think of problems, this can seem banal and trivial or challenging but elusive. If a problem is identified with a question, the resulting concept of inquiry is trivial and misses Dewey’s main concern. Here’s a first rough way of marking out how the concept of problem can play an important explanatory role in inquiry.

30 Contrast two different models of problem solving:

problem-solving in terms of working out the consequences of what is already known;

problem-solving as learning, as a source for extending cognition.

• 10 It is interesting to note that such problems are not, of course, problems at all, for unless someon (...)

31 The first sense is trivial. It takes problem solving as little more than moving the conceptual furniture into fresh positions. Many of the things we do in education involve conceptual tidying, but this involves a conception of problem-solving in terms of re-arranging of what is already known into a new configuration, a superficial kind of cognitive make-over. Problem-solving in this sense is exemplified in doing basic arithmetic, for example, let the problem be: what’s 68 + 57? 10

32 The contrast between problems in type (a) and (b) might look too binary, for what about ‘real problems’ as, e.g. in ‘real maths’? That’s a good point in the context of pedagogic policy, but the notion of ‘real’ here means roughly ‘matters in some way to the pupil.’ It is true that there is a sense of that which is, in policy terms, important for gaining pupils’ attention, focus in behaviour, commitment to work, etc. There is also, underlying that, the sense of ‘mattering to the pupil’ that I want to get into focus and that’s the sense of mattering in which the pupil is met with a disruption that demands their attention, a disruption that engages them as inquirer, not simply as a task that is interesting. So ‘real maths’ is important if it offers interesting tasks rather than abstract tasks – agreed. But it is theoretically important if those ‘interesting tasks’ are not just interesting because anchored in some concepts that are key to the pupil (counting change due in a purchase rather than just adding numbers in the abstract), but are enthralling because they present to the pupil an experience or set of experiences that disrupt and reveal new domains to experience that in turn produces cognitive growth – learning.

33 The second sense of problem-solving is the challenging and elusive one. It requires a concept of a problem that arises out of a disruption to experience but where that disruption is not presented within the conceptual resources already available to the learner. It requires a notion of a disruption that can unsettle the learner and drive them into the work of inquiry, but the challenge it presents must be one that opens up new experiences and new concepts, otherwise no real learning will take place. I am assuming here that ‘learning’ requires a transition that delivers cognitive enhancement; at its simplest, the acquisition of new concepts. It is the idea of a disruption in experience that demands attention and demands the work of learning that is key to understanding Dewey’s concept of problem. Whatever else we may say about Dewey, it is clear that the notion of problem-solving he requires is type (b) above.

34 Dewey is clear that problem-solving involves more than mere tasks, it is the means for extending cognition. Problem-solving arises from the things that unsettle us:

The unsettled or indeterminate situation might have been called a problematic situation. This name would have been, however, proleptic and anticipatory. The indeterminate situation becomes problematic in the very process of being subjected to inquiry. The indeterminate situation comes into existence from existential causes, just as does, say, the organic imbalance of hunger. There is nothing intellectual or cognitive in the existence of such situations, although they are the necessary conditions of cognitive operations or inquiry. (LW 12: 111)

35 In this passage we have all the key ingredients for understanding Dewey’s concept of inquiry as problem-solving. Problems arise outwith the scope of intellectual or cognitive experience, they arise from a natural imbalance in our engagement with the environment (akin to hunger). This is a problematic situation. Problematic situations demand our attention, our inquisitiveness. Problematic situations are the necessary condition for inquiry. A problem is a ‘partial transformation’ of a problematic situation. As Dewey goes on to say,

A problem represents the partial transformation by inquiry of a problematic situation into a determinate situation. It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved. (LW 12: 111-2)

36 The key concept in all this is that of the problematic-situation. Without that, problems become mere intellectual games with the “semblance but not the substance of scientific activity” (LW 12: 112). It is the concept of a problematic situation that provides the drive to inquiry and identifies the end-point to any given inquiry which is found in conversion of the problematic indeterminacy into a sense of unity. Hence Dewey’s official definition of inquiry:

Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole. (LW 12: 108)

• 11 The challenge is, of course, the one that most contemporary philosophers think is incoherent – the (...)

37 Dewey’s concept of a problematic situation is, in outline, clear enough, but it has an inbuilt imbalance in its conception, reflected in Dewey’s observation that to call the situation ‘problematic’ is anticipatory. He says this, for in calling it ‘problematic’ we have already started to respond cognitively to the disruption and to begin to formulate it as a problem. But the unsettling disruption must be separate from such beginnings of cognitive response, or else the cognitive response, the first formulations of a problem, would not be one undertaken in response to the disruption that the indeterminate situation presents in experience. I think it is clearer, therefore, if we see the initial experience as involving a simple sense of disruption. That is the key to what Dewey calls a ‘problematic situation’; there is something that unsettles us. The unsettling character is independent of how we respond to it and begin to treat it as a problem. Our challenge as theorists is to make sense of this initial unsettling character to experience. 11

38 In summary, we have the following key ingredients to Dewey’s concept of inquiry:

39 Outline of Inquiry:

A situation can be salient to us independent of our knowing/conceptual encounters with it.

Salience arises from a disruption to our expectations, where these are understood as part of a more primitive and natural mode of engagement with things than a knowing/conceptual engagement.

Resolution of such disruptions arises when the situation is rendered into a unified whole.

40 If we can make sense of the ideas of salience and expectations independent of knowing conceptual encounters with things, we will then have a model of inquiry as problem-solving as the source for extending cognition. Problem-solving thus conceived will provide the basis for learning as a transformative enhancement to the expressive repertoire of cognition.

41 What I want to argue is that Dewey’s concept of salience in terms of disruptions to expectations involves operations within the aesthetics of experience. This provides an account of experience more primitive than the knowing conceptual encounters. In addition, although it is not obvious from the summary above, the sense of ‘unified whole’ that is achieved at the resolution of a problematic situation is also a contribution to the aesthetics of experience. Inquiry begins and ends in aesthetics. Once we can see how to make sense of these claims, we will also have the resources to see how the aesthetic figures throughout in what I shall call the craft of inquiry. It is tempting to think that the only role for the notion of a nonconceptual salience is as the kick-start to inquiry. Then, once a disruptive situation takes on a conceptual form as it becomes a problem-situation, concepts take over and the resulting unification is also a conceptual ordering of the initial disruptive experience. That is not, however, Dewey’s position. For Dewey, the aesthetic is not only the necessary condition for inquiry, it is also the underlying background to conceptual encounters. It is what Dewey called, “our constant sense of things, as belonging or not belonging, of relevancy, a sense which is immediate [not] the product of reflection” (LW 10: 198).

12 Cf. Shusterman (2010: 37) for this way of reading Dewey’s notion of our experience of art.

42 This background is in all experience and when it is foregrounded, it provides what Dewey calls ‘an experience’ – that’s the consummatory experience that provides the sense of unity at the resolution of disruption. It is akin to the sense of ‘an experience’ when the background expectations and saliences are foregrounded in works of art. 12 The task then is to provide sufficient detail to the nature of the aesthetic to begin to make sense of how it can play this foundational role without lapsing into yet another flashback to the myth of the given.

3. Aesthetic Salience

13 A good starting point for contemporary debate about nonconceptual content is Gunther 2003.

43 Dewey needs a coherent concept of salience. That much is clear. It needs to provide a means of engaging with situations independent of conceptual engagements that provide the content to cognition. The obvious move at this point is to treat the concept of salience that Dewey needs as either a return to the myth of the given or to see it as an instance of an appeal to a notion of nonconceptual content to experience. 13 Both options are fraught with difficulties not least of which is the familiar conundrum: how can a level of experience that is devoid of conceptual content give rise to concepts? But the familiar problems here arise in part because we have not heeded Dewey’s insights. If you set up the problem in terms of how nonconceptual content gives rise to conceptual content, you have ignored Dewey’s claim about the indeterminacy involved in salience. The unsettlingness of a problematic situation is not just a matter of a content (albeit a nonconceptual one) not being satisfied. The notion of unsettlingness is not so determinate. I prefer then not to try to capture the concept of salience in content terms at all, but simply to say that salience at the level of aesthetic of experience arises when a pattern is disrupted. There are two things that need to hold with respect to the notion of pattern for it to capture the concept of salience that Dewey needs. First, the notion of pattern must make sense of the indeterminacy of disruption that Dewey wants; second the notion of pattern need not itself contribute to the content of experience. It is not necessary to treat the pattern involved here as itself an element within experience; what is necessary is that the disruption is an element of experience. I treat the second point first.

44 If experience can make things salient due to a disruption, an ‘unsettlingness,’ then that must be because a pattern that the subject expects has been disrupted. It is difficult to see how we could make sense of disruption without crediting the experiencing subject with some sort of expectation of a pattern. But that does not commit us to treating the pattern, let alone the subject’s expectation of the pattern, as themselves elements of experience. For example, a loose floorboard is salient when you step on it. It thwarts your expectations about the rigidity of the floor you are crossing, but it is an unnecessary extravagance to make such expectations a component of phenomenology as you walk across the floor. There need be no ‘way that you experience the floor’ as a component of your experience as you walk over a stable floor. It is only when you step on the loose board that experience changes and you become aware of the board. And even then, although the loose board becomes salient because a pattern of expectations regarding solidity has been disrupted, there is no need to treat that pattern (the ‘way the board is picked out’) as itself an element of experience. It is enough if we treat the board itself as the item of awareness and experience; that is, we have a direct relational awareness of the loose board brought about by the disruption to a pattern of solidity. The pattern need only register at the sub-personal level of experience as something that the subject’s cognitive machinery monitors. From the point of view of the phenomenology of experience, the solidity of the floor is silent. We say that the subject expects the floor to be solid, but that does not commit us to thinking the subject’s experience is awash with representations of the floor’s solidity. It is enough if their sub-personal cognitive systems represent solidity and, when the expectations of those systems are thwarted, an alarm is registered in personal experience that makes the loose board an item of awareness. If we reserve ‘content’ for that which is available to awareness, then the representation of the patterns of solidity need not themselves ever become available to experience (cf. Luntley 2010 for this idea).

45 The above suggestion does not take us very far in understanding Dewey. What it does is remove the impulse to treat the patterns implicated in an account of expectations as items of conscious experience. That is an important move, but it does not take us to the heart of Dewey’s conception of disruption. Having patterns monitored by sub-personal cognitive in silence and below the radar of conscious awareness does nothing to account for a sense of disruption that captures the indeterminacy of which Dewey speaks. To make sense of Dewey’s conception of what starts inquiry, we need not just a notion of pattern that is, for the most part, monitored below the level of personal awareness, we need a notion of pattern that, even if it becomes accessible to consciousness, delivers the indeterminacy that Dewey posits. This is the bit that seems difficult, but it is the component of Dewey’s thinking that shows why Kant was right to use the label ‘aesthetic’ for that which is a condition for judgement and also why what is so labeled figures in those experiences characteristic of our engagement with art. The patterns implicated in the notion of disruptive salience are patterns that enjoy an indeterminate open-endedness. We need to turn to sources different to standard theories of non-conceptual content in order to make sense of Dewey’s concept of a problem.

4. The Sense of Fit

14 Cf. Fodor 1975, 2008, and many other places.

46 I want to appeal to recent work in both psychology and philosophy to begin to fill out a theory of the kind of disruption that Dewey appears to have in mind. Carey (2009; see also Carey et al. 2011) has set out a comprehensive developmental account of the acquisition of number concepts. It is a bootstrapping theory. Like any bootstrapping theorist, Carey has been criticised for failing to account for the transformative transition from possession of the pre-cursors of number concepts to grasp of number concepts. Any bootstrapping theory that posits a form of experience that is weaker than a conceptually saturated experience but which, nevertheless, is held to give rise to the latter will be met with the outraged response: ‘How did you get all that out of so little?’ Hence the enduring appeal of those who argue that the bootstrapping problem cannot be solved. 14 But what can make that response look inevitable is, in part, the poverty of our conception of what goes into the form of experience that is precursor to the conceptually saturated one. And it is here that Dewey has suggestions that dovetail with two otherwise separate initiatives in contemporary research.

47 Carey does not dwell on the point, but she makes a key observation regarding her account of the experiences that are precursors to grasp of cardinality. She says that before children use numerals to express number concepts, they use them akin to nonsense words in strings like nursery rhymes and similar word games. So the sequence

1, 2, 3, 4…

is learnt as a string akin to

eeny, meeny, miny, mo.

• 15 Ignoring the transition problem might seem an act of outrageous bravado, but the point is simple. I (...)

48 The rhythm, rhyme and repetition of sounds provides the young child with a use of numerals where they serve as ‘placeholders’ for what will become numerical concepts. I shall ignore the issue of what resources are required to pull off the transition from placeholders to concepts. My interest lies in understanding the starting point. 15

49 A child who knows the sequence for the numerals as placeholders has a sense of pattern to their use, a sense that draws upon formal features of strings found in their rhythm and the repetition of this rhythm, often also involving rhyming games. The young child who hears

expects ‘4’ to come next. There is a pattern to their experience. If you said, ‘1, 2, 3, 5’ they would experience it as wrong. But that notion of ‘wrong’ is not a content notion. It is not a semantic sense of wrong; it is not that the sequence is false. The child may yet have no sense of cardinality. Their sense that the sequence is wrong is just like their sense that

eeny, meeny, mo, miny

is wrong. This is wrong, but no semantic error is involved. Both ‘disruptive’ sequences are sequences that are experienced as disruptive. This does not seem like the loose floorboard. The child might be actively playing with rhyming sequences, enjoying the counting rhymes, aware of the rhythms and rhymes displayed in the repetition and when another child presents the disruptive sequence, it sounds wrong. The challenge is to identify theoretically this notion of ‘wrong.’ Carey does not address the issue, but let’s make some obvious moves.

• 16 ‘Brought up,’ for these things are only properly understood in the context of their natural history (...)

50 The first thing one might want to say is that anyone brought up with these rhymes acquires a sense that, e.g., ‘mo’ comes after ‘miny.’ 16 It fits. The word belongs in that position. We might say this: it is what you ‘ought’ to say after ‘miny’ in that sequence. And the same applies to the use of ‘4’ after ‘3’ in the counting rhymes. The concept of ‘fit’ here picks out what Ginsborg calls primitive normativity (Ginsborg 2011). The concept of primitive normativity involves a sense of ‘ought’ that characterises our experience of various patterns. It is a phenomenologically real feature. It is primitive in two senses.

51 First, it contributes to a very basic form of experience involving our engagement with various formal features of things, patterns of rhythm, rhyme, repetition in the case of words; balance of hue and intensity with regard to colours, and patterns of line and shade in graphic forms. These are properties that figure large in our experience of art objects, but they figure in patterns that are importantly subjective. This is the second sense in which the normativity of fit is primitive. The sense of fit that applies to the position of ‘mo’ after ‘miny’ is a sense of ought that lacks generality. It is a sense of how things are experienced as belonging in my experience. That I find ‘mo’ belonging after ‘miny’ does not mean that I thereby have resources for criticising you if you produce the sequence

Eeny, meeny, mo, miny.

52 I will find the sequence disruptive, but not with a sense of error that provides resource for critiquing your performance. Your performance will jar. It will sound wrong, but there is no semantic error involved. The error is an aesthetic error, your performance does not fit in the patterns that I have come to expect in the use of these tokens. It is the lack of generality to the position occupied by ‘mo’ that betrays the fact that whatever pattern is involved here, it is not a conceptual pattern.

17 For the generality constraint, cf. Evans 1982.

53 A defining feature of conceptual content is that the bearers of such content exhibit a generality with respect to the place they occupy within structures that carry conceptual content. 17 The word ‘four’ only carries the concept of the number between three and five in the series of natural numbers when it figures in patterns of use that make its applicability correct of sets of things that share the same cardinality, namely they all have four members. As a concept bearing device, the word ‘four’ carries a conceptual content when it has a role applicable to groups of apples, of people, the suits in whist, the riders of the apocalypse, and so on. The word ‘mo’ exhibits no such generality of application. The sense of ‘ought’ governing the fit of ‘mo’ in the nonsense rhyme is therefore quite unlike any sense of ‘ought’ that might be thought applicable to the use of content bearing words when used in adherence to standards of semantic correctness. The objectivity of such standards is manifest in the generality of application that provides the resources to critique others’ usage if, e.g., they use ‘four’ when only three riders go by.

• 18 Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a path, indeed a garden path, for the idea of a rule: see Wittgen (...)

54 The idea of primitive normativity opens up scope for a rich structure to experience that populates a good part of the things we ordinarily treat within the aesthetic. The idea of the sense of fit as a subjective ‘ought’ captures that part of our experience of things that finds a heftedness, a sense of belonging and order to experience in the absence of rules and objective demands upon patterns. It introduces patterns that, although oftentimes accompanied with a strong sense of ‘fit’ are, by any sense, quite open-ended and amenable to playful imaginative extension. These are patterns with their accompanying sense of fit that are, nevertheless, open to agential modification. Like the paths we tread when walking across open country, these are patterns to which we feel some sense of allegiance – we respect the path as worn by previous walkers – but we are not beholden to them or to anything else to always walk in just the same way. 18

55 In short, the sense of salience that I think Dewey needs is found in the disruption experienced in the sequence

56 The sequence thwarts our expectation. But there is no determinate sense of error here, for the notion of fit that has been transgressed has no generality to it. For sure a sequence that retained the rhyme but replaced the last word,

Eeny, meeny miny, oh

might not jar as much, but it still does not fit; it lacks the repetition of the em sound expected as the lead consonant to the last three words of the sequence. The indeterminacy is manifest also in the adaptability of fit. The disruptive sequence can be rendered fit by adopting the varied rhyming scheme and placing it within an extended instance of the rhythmic pattern with,

eeeny, meeny, mo, miny mine is big and yours is tiny.

19 See Cook 2000 for a good starting point on the literature on children’s language and play.

57 Such examples are commonplace in the playful engagement with rhythm and rhyme found in young children’s early encounters with language. 19

5. Fit, Work, and Closure

58 The appeal to the idea of fit gives theoretical purchase on the ‘itch,’ the disruptive irritant that starts inquiry and which, when attended to, provides us with a problematic situation. With the idea of an experience that jars our sense of fit, we have the starting point to inquiry. There is much more to be said about how to develop the detail of the cognitive dynamics of this reading of Dewey’s account of inquiry. But we have the beginnings of a reading of Dewey that permits theoretical development in laying out the trajectory of an individual’s engagement with inquiry that offers explanatory leverage on what is going on, rather than merely descriptive comfort.

59 Dewey has inquiry starting with an indeterminate situation and resolving when this is transformed into a ‘unified whole.’ Part of what is implicated in the end point of any inquiry will doubtless involve a conceptual unification, but I think Dewey intended the sense of closure and wholeness at the terminus of inquiry to mean much more than that. On the reading that I have indicated, the closure is also part of the aesthetics of experience. The slogan I offered was to consider inquiry as the dynamic from ‘itch to fit.’ The disruptive ‘itch’ is theorised as the loss of fit. It is proper then to see the conclusion of inquiry as the return to a sense of fit. That is the idea that is clear in Dewey’s conception of inquiry as a dynamic that restores a balance to our engagement with the environment that was unsettled by the problematic situation.

• 20 Having the aesthetic order restored is also, perhaps, part of what Wittgenstein meant by bringing p (...)

60 In his account of our experience of art, Dewey makes explicit appeal to the notion of ‘an experience’ and I think that is best understood on the model that I am promoting as an appreciation of fit. There are many ways of responding to art objects and many of them involve ascription of content to the objects, whether words, patches of paint or movements of a dancer. But some of the ways of responding to art objects that seem central to many aesthetic experiences involve the response that comes from an appreciation of the formal properties of fit. Apt vocabulary choices can provide the novelist with a sentence whose individual words are hefted in each other’s company in a way that alerts us to the cadence available when words are handled by writers with a craftiness for finding fit. Or consider the resonance of colours in a Malevich abstract, or the thrum of the etched lines and scratchings in the paint in a Ravilious landscape. There are lots of moments when our experience of art draws upon our sense of fit, when the artist provides an arrangement of words, colour or line that brings to our attention the way some patterns can be enjoyed for their sense of fit, whatever other purpose they may also serve. One of the things art can do when it provides what Dewey calls ‘an experience’ is bring to the surface the patterns that provide some of our most basic expectations in experience, the patterns whose disruption prompts inquiry. How natural, then, that inquiry should end in the resolution of those disruptions, in an experience in which the aesthetic order is, for the time being at least, restored. 20

61 And all this is natural in a sense that is central to Dewey’s philosophy. It is natural, for it draws upon features of our experience that fall within a naturalistic account of inquiry as a dynamic between the rhythm of disruption and fit in our sense of aesthetic patterns. The account is, in this respect, properly on a par with the dynamic from hunger to satiation of need in our pursuit of food. What is natural for our species is the ‘hunger’ for patterns that fit. The idea of primitive normativity is the idea of a sense of ‘ought’ that is subjective. It is, however, not idle. It is not subjective in the way that colour or value are sometimes taken to be subjective in error-theories of those properties. The ‘ought’ of fit is subjective, for it is part of how we respond to regularities, but it is a natural response for creatures like us. And that we have this response does explanatory work in our self-understanding, for it is because we respond to patterns with a sense of fit that we seek out patterns, that we adjust them when they are disrupted, that we create new extensions of them when their course dries up. It is our aesthetic sense of fit that is a key driver in the pursuit of pattern making and pattern sustenance. And that, at heart, is the idea running through Dewey’s theory of inquiry.

62 The dynamic from itch to fit is not, in itself, a knowing dynamic. It is not a trajectory of conceptual organisation. It is a naturalistically conceived dynamic. It is, however, I suggest, the necessary condition for the emergence of conceptual organisation. Making good on that suggestion is work for another occasion, but it is important to note that even if that claim can be substantiated, it does not remove the aesthetic dynamic from inquiry; it does not get supplanted by the conceptual dynamic, rather it contributes to it.

6. The Craft of Inquiry

• 21 “An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of realization of every kind of t (...)

63 I have suggested a reading of Dewey that provides a naturalistic theory of inquiry. I have used resources from contemporary research to provide a reading of Dewey’s concept of inquiry that provides explanatory purchase on the dynamic from itch to fit. The appeal to the aesthetics of experience in characterising the initial ‘itch’ does not exhaust the explanatory project I am grafting onto Dewey’s theory of inquiry. The aesthetic plays an important role in concluding inquiry, but it also figures in the ongoing culture of inquiry. The work of inquiry also has room for the aesthetics of experience. I want to close with some brief remarks on the phenomenology of inquiry. The details of the theoretical model that I am recommending require more space and the explanatory project of working through the detail of the theoretical model sketched must wait on other occasions. But if the approach is plausible, what does it capture in the phenomenology of inquiry? The answer, I think, is that it provides some important observations about what we might call the ‘craft of inquiry.’ It also gives credence to Dewey’s recommendation that it is the imagination that is the hallmark of human action, and the mark of teaching that is more than merely mechanical. 21

64 When confronted with an initial itch, the unsettlingness that once attended to provides the sense of a problematic situation, it is not obvious how one should respond. As Dewey observes, ‘a problem well put is half-solved.’ But what, then, is it to put a problem well? Clearly, at a minimum, it is something like this: it is to frame the question(s) that drive inquiry in a way that permits solution. But that just invites a further question, ‘What is it to frame a question?’ What is the initial move by which an itch is taken up by cognition? There are lots of things to be said about this, but I want to sketch some ideas that seem to me to illuminate aspects of the phenomenology of inquiry that we rarely talk about, aspects that are themselves part of the aesthetics of experience.

65 An itch is a disruption in a pattern of expectations that lacks the generality due to conceptual patterns. We are unsettled by the disruption. So where there’s an itch, there’s a breach in an aesthetic pattern. By its nature, the pattern breached provides no resources for handling the sense of itch, for there is no generality to the position in the pattern where the breach occurs. So if it feels like a breach, we need other resources to heal the sense of disruption. One option is the simple playful one in which we capture the breach and make it a moment within a different sense of fit. This is the move that is rampant in children’s play with words. It is the move that seals the breach in

by offering the new pattern,

eeny, meeny, mo, miny mine is big, yours is tiny.

• 22 The big questions concern how much native ability is required in order to support communication and (...)

66 Many breaches are settled in that way, but that is not the way of inquiry, it is the way of aesthetic improvisation. In inquiry, the task is to repair the breach with a response that offers understanding. Inquiry therefore demands, of the inquirer, some grasp of concepts and some thirst for applying them. 22 That means that when inquiry moves to seal a breach in the aesthetic pattern, the move at stake is to find some general pattern to repair the breach. There is no recipe for selecting the general pattern, other than improvisation, the experimentation with ways of treating the breach as an instance not just of a new fit pattern, but of a pattern that is general.

67 If something like this is right, what moral does it suggest with regard to the phenomenology of inquiry? I think it suggests that we should expect to find the phenomenology of inquiry manifest as an imaginative and oftentimes playful experimentation with the aesthetic forms of experience. Of course, we identify hypotheses, we test them by checking their consequences for observation and the inferential shadow they cast over our web of beliefs. But we also judge them with respect to how well they fit with some of our deepest cultural bearings, the intellectual myths and presumptions that reflect some of the shape of the aesthetics of experience. What does this mean? Here’s a simple example.

68 Think of the experience common to many academics on grading student papers: early on in reading the paper, perhaps as early as the first couple of paragraphs, you form a view about the intelligence on offer and the grade due. Some academics are shy of acknowledging this point, for it might reflect an improper rush bordering on prejudice to admit such views arising so early. I think, however, acknowledging it tells us something important about the culture of inquiry. Our early initial judgement might be due to the fact that the student is posing exactly the right questions and making our favoured first inferences in evaluating them. But I think it is rarely that simple. I suspect there is something real and important to the thought that what you are responding to, what makes you think that there is an intelligent voice present in the paper with an impressive grip on things, is that the writing exhibits a sense of fit in their formulation of the key problem. It is the thought we might express by saying something like, ‘it hangs together.’ If so, I suggest that whatever conceptual unity we might be commenting on, there is also and underlying that, an aesthetic unity. This is something that can be salient early on and, of course, one might later revise one’s view on this.

69 Think of the phenomenology of engaging in inquiry, e.g., the phenomenology of writing a paper. How is for you when you start on a research paper? When I started this paper, I did not know that I would write this section on the craft of inquiry. That came later. Did I not know what I was doing when I started? If so, that might betray a lack of foresight on my part, but I suspect a more honest and interesting answer reflects a common and important way of working. We work in inquiry by playing around with the itch – the sense of what bothers us and we gesture towards a sense of what might settle us. Then we experiment and play around with ways of framing the problem. Sometimes, it comes clear very quickly. We crank the handle and churn out the essay, but most of the time, it is not like that. Most of the time, it takes work, graft and craft that is much more exploratory and playful than simply doing the analysis and running through the inferences. Learning involves a trial and error strategy not just in the narrow analytic sense of conjectures and refutations, but in the adjustments to the aesthetics of experience, the imaginative and playful experimenting with the aesthetic form of things until we arrive at a formulation of a problem that delivers the fecundity appropriate for serious cognitive work (MW 9: 245 f.). Even then, there is a considerable to and fro between careful analysis and derivation of the consequence of assumptions and theoretical posits and the crafty manoeuvrings of the domain of fit.

70 The reading of Dewey that I am offering is not based on the appeal to these phenomenological observations. It is based on the explanatory work that the aesthetics of experience enables in providing an understanding of the dynamic from itch to fit. But that explanatory work gains credence if it offers legitimacy to a phenomenology of the craft of inquiry that, to my mind, rings true.

7. The Problem with Dewey

71 I have outlined a reading of Dewey that takes seriously the project of providing an explanatory account of how inquiry is driven by problems. Inquiry is learning. Learning is driven by, brought to rest by and, arguably, its many modes of operations are replete with, manouevrings in the aesthetics of experience. If that is what learning is, we have no pedagogy fit for learning if we do not place the provision of the aesthetics of experience at the heart of our pedagogy. Engagement with the aesthetics of experience is much more than a motivational ‘extra,’ a boost to the cognitive enterprise, a means for framing interest, attention and motivation in the learner. Engagement with the aesthetics of experience is the condition for the very possibility of learning. The theory of pedagogy needs to start with aesthetics.

• 23 For an implicit grasp of the elusiveness and yet centrality of things that fall under the aesthetic (...)

72 Educators acknowledge this. 23 Policy-makers normally dare not, for the aesthetics is messy, hard to plot, intractable to modern management methods, invariably lost to the schedules of accounting targets, and so on. But if the aesthetics of experience does seem messy to the mindset of 21st century policy makers in education, no matter, for inquiry is, by their lights, messy. That’s the point. That’s the problem with Dewey. And it is perhaps a gesture towards an explanation of why the transformative inquiries of individuals require a transformation in our social spaces so that they provide conjoint common experienes. There is no telling where the messiness of problems will lead, nor where the resources for fit might be found. Such messiness is a problem with Dewey, but it’s a problem we should celebrate and proclaim and by so doing begin to reshape our conception of what pedagogy might become when once we understand how learning happens.

Thanks to the editors of this special volume for giving me the opportunity to expand my initial paper and for their helpful suggestions in this regard.

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1 References to John Dewey’s published works are to the critical edition, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953 , edited by Boydston J.   A., Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1991, and published in three series as The Early Works 1882-1899 [EW], The Middle Works 1899-1924 [MW], and The Later Works 1925-1953 [LW].

2 See Nussbaum 2009 for a recent appeal to Dewey for the resources to combat the instrumentalism rampant in much educational policy.

3 See Alexander 2012, 2014 and Leddy 2015, although neither quite capture the central role for the aesthetic that I envisage.

5 “There is nothing intellectual or cognitive in the existence of [problematic] situations, although they are the necessary conditions of cognitive operations or inquiry” (LW 12: 111). Alexander (2014: 71) notes: “Not all experience is experience as known […] knowing experience arises and terminates within experience that is not knowing.”

6 Hence Alexander’s (2014) critique of linguistic pragmatism in favour of Dewey’s experiential pragmatism and compare Kitcher’s (2014) jibes against the preoccupations of logic-chopping philosophers who miss the pragmatist drive to “reconnect philosophy with life” ( Ibid . : 99). Note also that Kitcher links this with Dewey’s “worries about the detachment of art from everyday life” ( Ibid . : 100). Similar sentiments run through Kitcher 2012.

7 For Dewey, problematic situations are “precognitive” (LW 12: 111). And see Alexander (2014: 71): “Not all experience is experience-as-known and that knowing experience arises and terminates within experience that is not knowing.”

8 There are many forms of dependency on the social that figure in theories of learning; for a critique of the influential Vygotskian version, see Luntley forthcoming.

9 Although this is individualistic and although I have noted points of contrast with Alexander’s reading of Dewey, I agree fully with the main thrust of his reading that in Dewey we find something usefully called ‘experiential pragmatism’ in contrast to the linguistic pragmatism found in Brandom. And the reason for this lies in the notion of the “irreducibility of the noncognitive” (Alexander 2014: 65). I disagree with Alexander only on the detail of how to make sense of the noncognitive (I prefer ‘aesthetic’), with the need to have a coherent and detailed theoretical account of the aesthetic and the explanatory advantage in seeing the social aesthetic arising out of the individual aesthetic.

10 It is interesting to note that such problems are not, of course, problems at all, for unless someone else asks you the question, ‘What is 68 + 57?,’ it has no obvious appeal; it does not, in the abstract demand attention. This sense of problem-solving is invariably dependent on others raising the question and is, perhaps, one reason for taking the social turn in the account of problems. Dewey contrasts arithmetical examples with real problems, arithmetical problems are, he says, merely “tasks,” things set by others, cf. LW 12: Ch. 6, § II, esp. p. 111.

11 The challenge is, of course, the one that most contemporary philosophers think is incoherent – the challenge of making sense of the ‘given’ as a pre-conceptual input to cognition, for classic treatments see Sellars 1956; McDowell 1994; and Brandom 1994. And that is why Brandom’s version of pragmatism is a linguistic one, he thinks the option of an experiential pragmatism would require returning to the myth of the given. My reading of Dewey is, therefore, a reading that amounts to claiming that the default setting in much contemporary philosophy re the foundational nature of the linguistic needs to be adjusted. There is much at stake here.

15 Ignoring the transition problem might seem an act of outrageous bravado, but the point is simple. If there is an answer to the transition problem, it will arise in the detail of the account we provide in pulling together a staged bootstrapping account of learning. It will not be settled in a single sentence.

16 ‘Brought up,’ for these things are only properly understood in the context of their natural history, something Wittgenstein (2009: § 25) emphasized too: “Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.”

18 Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a path, indeed a garden path, for the idea of a rule: see Wittgenstein (2005: § 90; and 1978: § 163).

20 Having the aesthetic order restored is also, perhaps, part of what Wittgenstein meant by bringing peace to philosophical perplexities. If so, his quietism is momentary, not enduring; it applies to the settlement of a moment in a Deweyan dynamic, rather than an endpoint to philosophy.

21 “An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in teaching” (MW 9: 245).

22 The big questions concern how much native ability is required in order to support communication and the pursuit of inquiry. For an exploration of this in a manner that captures something of Dewey’s insistence on avoiding too intellectualist a view of experience, see Malloch & Trevarthen 2009.

23 For an implicit grasp of the elusiveness and yet centrality of things that fall under the aesthetics of experience as I have been promoting it, see the detailed account of a year in the life of a New York kindergarten class in Diamond 2008.

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Education, teaching and discipline are lifelong social phenomena and conditions for democracy, according to acclaimed American philosopher John Dewey.

Education is life itself

One of Dewey’s ideas about teaching and learning is that practical problem solving and theoretical teaching should go hand in hand. This idea has had a huge impact, especially among teachers in the USA. In Denmark, his way of thinking inspired the school system to such a degree that Denmark has been called Dewey’s second home country.

Furthermore, Dewey was sought after in countries like China and Soviet where he was used as a pedagogical consultant.

However, Dewey’s pedagogical philosophy is not just about learning by doing. According to Dewey teaching and learning, education and discipline are closely connected to community – the social life. Education is a lifelong process on which our democracy is built. As he put it: “ Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

Children are not listeners

Dewey was pragmatic and in no way did he agree with the romantic Rousseau that “the untainted nature of the child should be protected from the depraving influence of culture.” Not only did this position make him contradict the traditional concept of learning – it was also going against progressive anti-authoritarian pedagogy.

Traditional schools with practical learning by passive reception he described as “medieval”. Partly because it submitted pure intellectual, detached knowledge that belonged to the past – and partly because it was based on the inaccurate assumption that children are listening creatures. “But they are not,” Dewey emphasised. “Children are first and foremost interested in moving, communicating, exploring the world, constructing and expressing themselves artistically.”

The teacher is the master

Furthermore, he criticized the school for counteracting the children’s ability to corporate, because it was considered “cheating” and “copying”, if the children helped each other. On the other hand, he wasn’t a follower of the anti-authoritarian pedagogy, which in his opinion tended to see any form of pedagogical leadership and guidance as an intervention in the individual’s freedom.

On the contrary he declared that authority is a pedagogical condition for the individual’s development. Of course, he didn’t mean the outer authority of the traditional school, but the one of the “modern human knowledge and skill.”

Learning life skills

In 1896 Dewey founded an experimental school at the University of Chicago. It was shaped by “what the best and wisest parents want for their children.” In Dewey’s opinion that had to be what the community would want for all their children.

Dewey’s own children attended the school and in 1902 – when the number of pupils was at its highest – it had 140 students and 23 teachers, who were occupied with the core of the school’s teaching: Chores.

Good judgement

In a Dewey school the stereotypical gender roles are discarded. Girls participate in crafting equally to the boys, who have as many cooking classes as girls.

However, the children are divided by age, where the youngest do what they know from their home. The six-year-olds build a farm of blocks and plant crops they process.

The seven-year-olds study prehistorical life. The eight-year-olds are occupied by exploring, the nine-year-olds geography, and the older ones by scientific experiments within anatomy, physics, political economics and photography.

Dewey thought that this type of practical learning combines more learning recourses than any other method. Partly because you do something, partly because you do it together and thereby acquire social interest and moral knowledge.

The goal is to make the children want more teaching. That is the only way democracy can function as a lifeform, Dewey thought. And the ultimate goal is to create human beings with good judgement, who can participate in the community to discover the common good.

Still controversial!

What is Pedagogy for Change?

The Pedagogy for Change programme offers 12 months of training and experiencing the power of pedagogy – while you put your skills and solidarity into action.

Studies and hands-on training takes place in Denmark, where you will work with children and youth at specialised social education facilities or schools with a non-traditional approach to teaching and learning.

In short: • 10 months’ studies and hands-on training in Denmark, working with children and youth at specialised social education facilities or schools. At the same time yo will study the world of pedagogy with your team – a group of like-minded people. You will meet up for study days every month.

• 2 months of exploring the reality of communities in Scandinavia / Europe, depending on what is possible – pandemic conditions permitting. You will travel by bike, bus or perhaps on foot or sailing.

• Possibility to earn a B-certificate in Pedagogy.

How to tackle intolerance

Being an active bystander means becoming aware that inappropriate or even threatening behaviour is going on and choosing to challenge it. Collective action is the way forward.

Mónica shares her experience

Mónica just finished the Pedagogy for Change programme and we asked her to share some of her considerations and main takeaways from her experience of practising and studying social pedagogy in Denmark.

“Zone of Proximal Development” exemplified

In this blogpost, we exemplify how the theory of the “Zone of Proximal Development” can be implemented in real life when working in the field of social pedagogy.

MORE GREAT PEDAGOGICAL THINKERS

Axel Honneth

Through recognition, human beings develop self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. The theory of recognition was developed by German philosopher and educator Axel Honneth.

Astrid Lindgren

Astrid Lindgren’s thoughts about children were provocative in the 1940s, and her approach to childhood as a phenomenon is progressive, even today.

Lev Vygotsky

Interaction with peers, imitation, collaborative learning and other social interaction is key to how the human mind develops, according to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

Maya Angelou

In times of injustice and hardship, Maya Angelou’s call for humanity, unity and resilience teaches us many important life lessons. Her works inspire hope through action.

James P. Comer

“No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship.” Really? Does Dr. James Comer mean that students need to be close to their teacher to learn something?

Jean Lave is a social anthropologist and learning theorist who believes that learning is a social process, as opposed to a cognitive one – challenging conventional learning theory.

Søren Kierkegaard

Making choices and taking action are at the very core of existentialism. By taking on these responsibilities, as human beings – we find the meaning of life.

Maria Montessori

Children prefer to work, not play. This is one of the main ideas of Maria Montessori, a trailblazers of early childhood education. “The child who concentrates is immensely happy” she noted. 

Sofie ‘Rif’ Rifbjerg

Brought up in the countryside Sofie Rifbjerg knew intuitively that fresh air, free play & a deep respect for children’s own agency was paramount for their positive development.

The Possible in the Life and Work of John Dewey

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The American philosopher John Dewey and the tradition of pragmatism is often connected to the concept of experience. This entry explores John Dewey’s pragmatism with a particular emphasis on experience as transformative events based on two main principles – continuity and interaction. In relation to this we discuss how experience is linked to imagination and seen as a transformative source. Experience can be perceived as a creative process in which the meeting of different experiences creates new ideas and new understandings revealing what is possible. Consequently, experiences do not only form the basis for what we can do and understand, but also what we can imagine and create. Despite the positive and educative associations to the concept, experience is not always an educative phenomenon and Dewey realized that some experiences can also be harmful. Thus, in order to understand the complexity of the concept we also elaborate on educative and miseducative experiences, and the relationship between experience and moral judgement.

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Egelandsdal, K., Ness, I.J. (2022). The Possible in the Life and Work of John Dewey. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90913-0_199

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Constructivism Learning Theory & Philosophy of Education

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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On This Page:

Constructivism is a learning theory that emphasizes the active role of learners in building their own understanding. Rather than passively receiving information, learners reflect on their experiences, create mental representations , and incorporate new knowledge into their schemas . This promotes deeper learning and understanding.

Constructivism is ‘an approach to learning that holds that people actively construct or make their own knowledge and that reality is determined by the experiences of the learner’ (Elliott et al., 2000, p. 256).

In elaborating on constructivists’ ideas, Arends (1998) states that constructivism believes in the personal construction of meaning by the learner through experience and that meaning is influenced by the interaction of prior knowledge and new events.

Constructivism Philosophy

Knowledge is constructed rather than innate, or passively absorbed.

Constructivism’s central idea is that human learning is constructed, that learners build new knowledge upon the foundation of previous learning.

This prior knowledge influences what new or modified knowledge an individual will construct from new learning experiences (Phillips, 1995).

Learning is an active process.

The second notion is that learning is an active rather than a passive process.

The passive view of teaching views the learner as ‘an empty vessel’ to be filled with knowledge, whereas constructivism states that learners construct meaning only through active engagement with the world (such as experiments or real-world problem-solving).

Information may be passively received, but understanding cannot be, for it must come from making meaningful connections between prior knowledge, new knowledge, and the processes involved in learning.

John Dewey valued real-life contexts and problems as an educational experience. He believed that if students only passively perceive a problem and do not experience its consequences in a meaningful, emotional, and reflective way, they are unlikely to adapt and revise their habits or construct new habits, or will only do so superficially.

All knowledge is socially constructed.

Learning is a social activity – it is something we do together, in interaction with each other, rather than an abstract concept (Dewey, 1938).

For example, Vygotsky (1978) believed that community plays a central role in the process of “making meaning.” For Vygotsky, the environment in which children grow up will influence how they think and what they think about.

Thus, all teaching and learning is a matter of sharing and negotiating socially constituted knowledge.

For example, Vygotsky (1978) states cognitive development stems from social interactions from guided learning within the zone of proximal development as children and their partners co-construct knowledge.

All knowledge is personal.

Each individual learner has a distinctive point of view, based on existing knowledge and values.

This means that same lesson, teaching or activity may result in different learning by each pupil, as their subjective interpretations differ.

This principle appears to contradict the view the knowledge is socially constructed.

Fox (2001, p. 30) argues:

• Although individuals have their own personal history of learning, nevertheless they can share in common knowledge, and
• Although education is a social process powerfully influenced by cultural factors, cultures are made up of sub-cultures, even to the point of being composed of sub-cultures of one.
• Cultures and their knowledge base are constantly in a process of change and the knowledge stored by individuals is not a rigid copy of some socially constructed template. In learning a culture, each child changes that culture.

Learning exists in the mind.

The constructivist theory posits that knowledge can only exist within the human mind, and that it does not have to match any real-world reality (Driscoll, 2000).

Learners will be constantly trying to develop their own individual mental model of the real world from their perceptions of that world.

As they perceive each new experience, learners will continually update their own mental models to reflect the new information, and will, therefore, construct their own interpretation of reality.

Types of Constructivism

Typically, this continuum is divided into three broad categories: Cognitive constructivism, based on the work of Jean Piaget ; social constructivism, based on the work of Lev Vygotsky; and radical constructivism.

According to the GSI Teaching and Resource Center (2015, p.5):

Cognitive constructivism states knowledge is something that is actively constructed by learners based on their existing cognitive structures. Therefore, learning is relative to their stage of cognitive development.

Cognitivist teaching methods aim to assist students in assimilating new information to existing knowledge, and enabling them to make the appropriate modifications to their existing intellectual framework to accommodate that information.

According to social constructivism, learning is a collaborative process, and knowledge develops from individuals” interactions with their culture and society.

Social constructivism was developed by Lev Vygotsky (1978, p. 57), who suggested that:

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level and, later on, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological).

The notion of radical constructivism was developed by Ernst von Glasersfeld (1974) and states that all knowledge is constructed rather than perceived through senses.

Learners construct new knowledge on the foundations of their existing knowledge. However, radical constructivism states that the knowledge individuals create tells us nothing about reality, and only helps us to function in your environment. Thus, knowledge is invented not discovered.

Radical constructivism also argues that there is no way to directly access an objective reality, and that knowledge can only be understood through the individual’s subjective interpretation of their experiences.

This theory asserts that individuals create their own understanding of reality, and that their knowledge is always incomplete and subjective.

The humanly constructed reality is all the time being modified and interacting to fit ontological reality, although it can never give a ‘true picture’ of it. (Ernest, 1994, p. 8)

Constructivism Teaching Philosophy

Constructivist learning theory underpins a variety of student-centered teaching methods and techniques which contrast with traditional education, whereby knowledge is simply passively transmitted by teachers to students.

What is the role of the teacher in a constructivist classroom?

Constructivism is a way of teaching where instead of just telling students what to believe, teachers encourage them to think for themselves. This means that teachers need to believe that students are capable of thinking and coming up with their own ideas. Unfortunately, not all teachers believe this yet in America.

The primary responsibility of the teacher is to create a collaborative problem-solving environment where students become active participants in their own learning.

From this perspective, a teacher acts as a facilitator of learning rather than an instructor.

The teacher makes sure he/she understands the students” preexisting conceptions, and guides the activity to address them and then build on them (Oliver, 2000).

Scaffolding is a key feature of effective teaching, where the adult continually adjusts the level of his or her help in response to the learner’s level of performance.

In the classroom, scaffolding can include modeling a skill, providing hints or cues, and adapting material or activity (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009).

What are the features of a constructivist classroom?

A constructivist classroom emphasizes active learning, collaboration, viewing a concept or problem from multiple perspectives, reflection, student-centeredness, and authentic assessment to promote meaningful learning and help students construct their own understanding of the world.

Tam (2000) lists the following four basic characteristics of constructivist learning environments, which must be considered when implementing constructivist teaching strategies:

1) Knowledge will be shared between teachers and students. 2) Teachers and students will share authority. 3) The teacher’s role is one of a facilitator or guide. 4) Learning groups will consist of small numbers of heterogeneous students.

What are the pedagogical (i.e., teaching) goals of constructivist classrooms?

Honebein (1996) summarizes the seven pedagogical goals of constructivist learning environments:

• To provide experience with the knowledge construction process (students determine how they will learn).
• To provide experience in and appreciation for multiple perspectives (evaluation of alternative solutions).
• To embed learning in realistic contexts (authentic tasks).
• To encourage ownership and a voice in the learning process (student-centered learning).
• To embed learning in social experience (collaboration).
• To encourage the use of multiple modes of representation, (video, audio text, etc.)
• To encourage awareness of the knowledge construction process (reflection, metacognition).

Brooks and Brooks (1993) list twelve descriptors of constructivist teaching behaviors:

• Encourage and accept student autonomy and initiative. (p. 103)
• Use raw data and primary sources, along with manipulative, interactive, and physical materials. (p. 104)
• When framing tasks, use cognitive terminology such as “classify,” analyze,” “predict,” and “create.” (p. 104)
• Allow student responses to drive lessons, shift instructional strategies, and alter content. (p. 105)
• Inquire about students’ understandings of the concepts before sharing [your] own understandings of those concepts. (p. 107)
• Encourage students to engage in dialogue, both with the teacher and with one another. (p. 108)
• Encourage student inquiry by asking thoughtful, open-ended questions and encouraging students to ask questions of each other. (p. 110)
• Seek elaboration of students’ initial responses. (p. 111)
• Engage students in experiences that might engender contradictions to their initial hypotheses and then encourage discussion. (p. 112)
• Allow wait time after posing questions. (p. 114)
• Provide time for students to construct relationships and create metaphors. (p. 115)
• Nurture students’ natural curiosity through frequent use of the learning cycle model. (p. 116)

Critical Evaluation

Constructivism promotes a sense of personal agency as students have ownership of their learning and assessment.

The biggest disadvantage is its lack of structure. Some students require highly structured learning environments to be able to reach their potential.

It also removes grading in the traditional way and instead places more value on students evaluating their own progress, which may lead to students falling behind, as without standardized grading teachers may not know which students are struggling.

Summary Tables

What is constructivism in the philosophy of education.

Constructivism in the philosophy of education is the belief that learners actively construct their own knowledge and understanding of the world through their experiences, interactions, and reflections.

It emphasizes the importance of learner-centered approaches, hands-on activities, and collaborative learning to facilitate meaningful and authentic learning experiences.

How would a constructivist teacher explain 1/3÷1/3?

They might engage students in hands-on activities, such as using manipulatives or visual representations, to explore the concept visually and tangibly.

The teacher would encourage discussions among students, allowing them to share their ideas and perspectives, and guide them toward discovering the relationship between dividing by a fraction and multiplying by its reciprocal.

Through guided questioning, the teacher would facilitate critical thinking and help students arrive at the understanding that dividing 1/3 by 1/3 is equivalent to multiplying by the reciprocal, resulting in a value of 1.

Arends, R. I. (1998). Resource handbook. Learning to teach (4th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.

Brooks, J., & Brooks, M. (1993). In search of understanding: the case for constructivist classrooms, ASCD. NDT Resource Center database .

Copple, C., & Bredekamp, S. (2009). Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs . Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education . New York: Collier Books.

Driscoll, M. (2000). Psychology of Learning for Instruction . Boston: Allyn& Bacon

Elliott, S.N., Kratochwill, T.R., Littlefield Cook, J. & Travers, J. (2000). Educational psychology: Effective teaching, effective learning (3rd ed.) . Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill College.

Ernest, P. (1994). Varieties of constructivism: Their metaphors, epistemologies and pedagogical implications. Hiroshima Journal of Mathematics Education, 2 (1994), 2.

Fox, R. (2001). Constructivism examined . Oxford review of education, 27(1) , 23-35.

Honebein, P. C. (1996). Seven goals for the design of constructivist learning environments. Constructivist learning environments : Case studies in instructional design, 11-24.

Oliver, K. M. (2000). Methods for developing constructivism learning on the web. Educational Technology, 40 (6)

Phillips, D. C. (1995). The good, the bad, and the ugly: The many faces of constructivism . Educational researcher, 24 (7), 5-12.

Tam, M. (2000). Constructivism, Instructional Design, and Technology: Implications for Transforming Distance Learning. Educational Technology and Society, 3 (2).

Teaching Guide for GSIs. Learning: Theory and Research (2016). Retrieved from http://gsi.berkeley.edu/media/Learning.pdf

von Glasersfeld, E. V. (1974). Piaget and the radical constructivist epistemology . Epistemology and education , 1-24.

von Glasersfeld, E. (1994). A radical constructivist view of basic mathematical concepts. Constructing mathematical knowledge: Epistemology and mathematics education, 5-7.

Von Glasersfeld, E. (2013).  Radical constructivism  (Vol. 6). Routledge.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Further Reading

Constructivist Teaching Methods

Constructivism Learning Theory: A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning Strategies Which Can be Implemented by Teachers When Planning Constructivist Opportunities in the Classroom

Related Articles

Child Psychology

Vygotsky vs. Piaget: A Paradigm Shift

Interactional Synchrony

Internal Working Models of Attachment

Learning Theory of Attachment

Stages of Attachment Identified by John Bowlby And Schaffer & Emerson (1964)

Child Psychology , Personality

How Anxious Ambivalent Attachment Develops in Children

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John Dewey is credited as founding a philosophical approach to life called ‘pragmatism’, and his approaches to education and learning have been influential internationally and endured over time. He saw the purpose of education to be the cultivation of thoughtful, critically reflective, socially engaged individuals rather than passive recipients of established knowledge. He rejected the rote-learning approach driven by predetermined curriculum which was the standard teaching method at the time. However, importantly, he also rejected child-centred approaches that followed children’s uninformed interests and impulses uncritically. While he used the term ‘progressive education’, this has since been misappropriated to describe, in some cases, a hands-off approach to children’s learning which was not what Dewey proposed. Dewey believed that traditional subject matter was important, but should be integrated with the strengths and interests of the learner.  

He developed a concept of inquiry, prompted by a sense of need and followed by intellectual work such as defining problems, testing hypotheses, and finding satisfactory solutions, as the central activity of such an educational approach. This organic cycle of doubt, inquiry, reflection and the reestablishment of sense or understanding  contrasted with the ‘reflex arc’ model of learning popular in his time. The reflex arc model thought of learning as a mechanical process, measurable by standardised tests, without reference to the role of emotion or experience in learning.   Dewey was critical of the reductionism of educational approaches which assume that all the big questions and ideas are already answered, and need only to be transmitted to students. He believed that all concepts and meanings could be open to reinvention and improvement, and all disciplines could be expanded with new knowledge, concepts and understandings. 

The m ain features of Dewey’s theory of education  

Dewey suggested that individuals learn and grow as a result of experiences and interactions with the world. These interactions and experiences lead individuals to continually develop new concepts, ideas, practices and understandings, which, in turn, are refined through and continue to mediate the learner’s life experiences and social interactions. According to Dewey:  

Interaction s  and  communication s   focused on enhancing and deepening shared meanings  increase potential for learning and development . When students communicate ideas and meanings within a group, they have the opportunity to consider, take on and work with the perspectives, ideas and experiences of other students.  

Shared activities are  an important  context for learning and development . Dewey valued real-life contexts and problems as educative experiences. If students only passively perceive a problem and do not experience the consequences in a meaningful, emotional and reflective way, then they are unlikely to adapt and revise their habits or construct new habits, or will do so only superficially.  

Students learn best when their interests are engaged.  It is important to develop ideas, activities and events that stimulate students’ interest and to which teaching can be geared. Teaching and lecturing can be highly appropriate as long as they are geared towards helping students to analyse or develop an intellectual insight into a specific and meaningful situation.  

Learning always begins with a student’s emotional response ,  which spurs further inquiry.   Dewey advocated for what he called ‘aesthetic’ experiences: dramatic, compelling, unifying or transforming experiences in which students feel enlivened and absorbed.  

Students should be engaged in active learning and inquiry.  Rather than teach students to accept any seemingly valid explanations, education ought to give students opportunities to discover information and ideas by their own effort in a teacher-structured environment, and to put knowledge to functional use by defining and solving problems, and determining the validity and worth of ideas and theories. As noted above, this does not preclude explicit instruction where appropriate. 

Inquiry involves students in reflecting intelligently on their experiences  in order to adapt their habits of action . Experience should involve what Dewey called ‘transaction’: an active phase, in which the student does something, as well as a phase of ‘undergoing’, where the student receives or observes the effect that their action has had. This might be as simple as noticing patterns when adding numbers, or experimenting to determine the correct proportions for papier mâché. 

E ducation  i s a key way of developing skills  for democratic activity . Dewey was positive about the value of recognising and appreciating differences as a vehicle through which students can expand their experiences, and open up to new ways of thinking rather than closing off to their own beliefs and habits.  

What e mpirical evidence  is there for this philosophy in practice?  

While there is no direct evidence that Dewey’s approach improves student outcomes, Dewey’s theory of students’ learning aligns with current theories of education which emphasise how individuals develop cognitive functioning by participating in sociocultural practices 1 , and with empirical studies examining the positive impact of interactions with peers and adults 2  on students’ learning. Quantative research also underlines a link between heightened engagement and children’s learning outcomes, with strategies such as making meaningful connections to students’ home lives and encouraging student ownership of their learning found to increase student engagement 3 . A few empirical studies which examined the effectiveness of aesthetic experiences for students confirmed that students experienced those lessons as more meaningful, compelling and connected than a comparison group. 4

Dewey’s influence on teaching practice  

Dewey’s theory has had an impact on a variety of educational practices including individualised instruction, problem-based and integrated learning, dialogic teaching, and critical inquiry. Dewey’s ideas also resonate with ideas of teaching as inquiry.  

I ndividualised instruction  

Dewey’s ideas about education are evident in approaches where teaching and learning are designed to be responsive to the specific needs, interests, and cultural knowledge of students. Teachers therefore learn about students and their motivating interests and desires in order to find subject matter, events and experiences that appeal to students and that will provoke a need to develop the knowledge, skills and values of the planned curriculum. Students are encouraged to relate learning to their lives and experiences.  

Problem-based learning  and integrated learning approaches  

Dewey’s principles of learning are evident also in problem-based learning and project approaches to learning. These approaches begin with a practical task or problem which is complex, comprehensive, multi-layered, collaborative, and involves inquiry designed to extend students’ knowledge, skills and understandings. Problem-based learning should: 

• start by supporting students to intellectualise exactly what the problem is  
• encourage controlled inquiry by helping students to develop logical hypotheses (rather than depending on their habits of thinking to jump to conclusions), for example, by connecting or disconnecting ideas they already have encountered  
• encourage students to revise their theories and reconstruct their concepts as their inquiry unfolds.  

Student engagement   

Dewey’s theory has also been extended to the problem of enhancing student engagement. Some strategies that have been found to increase student engagement and that align with Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experiences include:  

• engaging students in deeper perception – going beyond the simple recognition of objects to look carefully at colours, lines and textures, question perceptions, and use new understandings to perceive things in new ways  
• building intellectual, sensory, emotional or social connections to a topic, such as connecting to the topic of space travel through intellectual connections to the concepts of speed, power and force, sensory connections to the sounds, fire and vibrations, and emotional or social connections to the feelings of astronauts involved 
• encouraging risk-taking, such as suggesting a calculation, or experimenting to make papier mâché    
• encouraging sensory exploration 
• using a theme or metaphor to illuminate powerful ideas and to produce a sense of wonder, imagination and anticipation, such as  ‘rocks have a story to tell’ 
• provoking anticipation with evocative materials or suggestive situations, enabling students to unravel a mystery rather than follow a recipe.  

Engagement can be heightened when students have ownership of their learning, for example, by being engaged in curriculum planning and cooperatively build curriculum themes, or by selecting a topic to research rather than being assigned a topic. Students can take responsibility for judging the value, significance and meaning of their experiences as well as next steps.  

Dialogic teaching  

Dialogic teaching emphasises the importance of open student dialogue and meaning-making for learning, and builds on Dewey’s ideas about the importance of communication and social interaction. In this approach, students are encouraged to form habits of careful listening and thoughtful speaking: for example, they might be discouraged from raising their hand to speak in a lesson, as that action triggers anticipatory thought rather than full attention to the current speaker. Attention is paid to issues of power, privilege and access that may hinder open dialogue.  

Critical  inquiry    

Dewey’s approach to education is evident in curricula focused on critial thinking skills in which students engage in intellectual reflection and inquiry, critique, test and judge knowledge claims, make connections, apply their understandings in a range of different situations, and go into depth, rather than be given quick answers or rushed through a series of content. Dewey’s philosophy of education highlights the importance of imagination to drive thinking and learning forward, and for teachers to provide opportunities for students to suspend judgement, engage in the playful consideration of possibilities, and explore doubtful possibilities.  

Teaching as inquiry  

Dewey’s perspective on teaching and learning encourages a teaching as inquiry mindset. His principles for teaching and learning suggest that teachers should cultivate an energetic openness to possibilities alongside a commitment to reflectively learning from experiences, be willing to experience ambiguity and use problems as an opportunity to get deeper into an understanding of self, students, the subject and the context. 

References  

Dewey, J. (1980). Democracy and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.),  John Dewey: The middle works 1899-1924: Vol 15, 1923-1924  (pp. 180-189). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, J. (1988). Experience and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.),  John Dewey: The later works 1925-1953: Vol 13, 1938-1939  (pp. 1-62). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Girod, M., & Wong, D. (2002). An aesthetic (Deweyan) perspective on science learning: Case studies of three fourth graders. Elementary School Journal, 102 ( 3 ) , 199-224.

Hickman, L., Neubert, S., & Reich, K. (2009). John Dewey between pragmatism and constructivism. Fordham University Press.

Moroye, C. M., & Uhrmacher, P. B. (2009). Aesthetic themes of education. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 11 ( 1&2 ) , 85-101.

1 Tomasello 1999, 2008, cited in Garrison, J. W., Neubert, S., Reich, K. (2012).  John Dewey’s philosophy of education: An introduction and recontextualization for our times.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

2 Göncü, A., & Rogoff, B. (1998)Children’s categorization with varying adult support. American Educational Research Journal, 35 (2), 333-349; Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press.

3 Turner, J. C. (2014). Theory-based interventions with middle-school teachers to support student motivation and engagement.  Motivational interventions.  341-378.

4 Girod, M., Rau, C., Schepige, A. (2003). Appreciating the beauty of science ideas: Teaching for aesthetic understanding.  Science Education, 87 ( 4), 574-87.

By Dr Vicki Hargraves

PREPARED FOR THE EDUCATION HUB BY

Dr Vicki Hargraves

Vicki runs our early childhood webinar series and also is responsible for the creation of many of our early childhood research reviews. Vicki is a teacher, mother, writer, and researcher living in Marlborough. She recently completed her PhD using philosophy to explore creative approaches to understanding early childhood education. She is inspired by the wealth of educational research that is available and is passionate about making this available and useful for teachers.

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