Twelve DEWEY’S SCIENCE: A TRANSACTIVE MODEL OF RESEARCH PROCESSES

Philipp Dorstewitz

1. Introduction

Dewey’s supporters cannot complain about the recognition his work has received around the world. Dewey’s impact is greatest on those aspects of our common life that he himself deemed most important: primary and secondary education. Yet, it is astonishing how little attention other fields have given to Dewey’s work, where his contribution is equally ground-breaking. With a few notable exceptions, mainstream philosophy of science has ignored Dewey as a predecessor of many topical debates in the field. Dewey’s conceptions of “experience” and “inquiry” were not only at the very heart of his philosophy; they were also highly innovative contributions and could still be tapped as an important resource for contemporary theory of science. Since Dewey’s death in 1952, philosophers of science have debated how we can live up to the methodological rigor of empiricism without losing the realist notion that our theories are actually about something natural; they have discussed ways to acknowledge the fallible character of all knowledge while at the same time believing in the scientific method as a warrant for improvement. Many wondered how we can do justice to the historical nature of science as a social institution while still crediting scientific research with a rational or intelligent method. During the last thirty years, cognitive scientists began to argue that experience is a productive and not merely receptive process, and philosophers of science saw that experiments create facts rather than just observing or registering them. Since the 1960’s new attention has been given to the idea that science is not only a bystander in society and politics, but an important player, and itself a field of ideological altercations. Questions regarding objectivity and value-neutrality of scientific research have recently been revived. Finally, attention is currently being given to science in the making, or “how the ship gets into the bottle”, together with debates on the instrumental character of theories and scientific models. Dewey1 asked most of these questions more than fifty years ago and came up with innovative answers that today’s philosophers of science could benefit from. Curd and Cover’s2 collection, Philosophy of Science – the central issues, comprises some fifty representative contributions. Dewey is only 206 PHILIPP DORSTEWITZ marginally mentioned in three articles (by Carl G. Hempel, Larry Laudan, and Ian Hacking). Hacking once titled a subheading “On not reading Dewey”3, under which he owned up to the confession, “I once tried valiantly to read Dewey, but it did not click. He goes on and on.” Hacking made the admission: “My own view, that realism is more a matter of intervention in the world, than of representing it in words and thought, surely owes much to Dewey”4. Yet later he qualifies: “Owes. Not in the sense that Dewey incited me to think that way, but in the sense that, when I looked back over the history of philosophy, I recognised that Dewey had been there before me”5. Admittedly, reading Dewey can be like swimming in porridge6, but Dewey scholars such as Richard Bernstein7, Larry Hickman8, John R. Shook9, David Hildebrand10 and many others have done a thorough job of clarifying the complex concepts of “inquiry” and “experience”, and have made Dewey’s convoluted work fertile ground. Dewey’s style is no longer an excuse for ignoring what he has to offer to contemporary debates. My aim here is not to trace Dewey’s footprints in supposedly newly discovered territory. I will discuss four fields where I believe that Dewey’s theory of inquiry has an important contribution to make to contemporary post- Kuhnian debates. The first concerns a new determination of the elements of scientific inquiry and their relations. Many theorists of the late 20th century have claimed that we cannot consistently separate the working of conceptual, intellectual, and empirical phases of research; that we must reorganize our understanding of tasks like “formulating hypotheses”, “theoretical reasoning”, and “experiment” as mutually dependent elements within scientific practice. The Deweyan model of inquiry that I will present here redefines the relation between theory and practice and between “representing” and “intervening” as Ian Hacking argued11. The present model will introduce the elements “hypothesis”, “reasoning”, and “experiment” as concurrent and mutually dependent activity streams. These centre on the imaginative production of warranted beliefs and normative orientations. The second field where Dewey can make a contribution is the question of how scientific research methodology relates to practical circumstances. Post-Kuhnian philosophers rejected Poppers’ separation between logical and historical accounts of scientific research. They insisted on looking at the history of science as episodes of discovery with an open outcome. Theorists of science have recently focused on scientific practice as a process situated in concrete places like offices, laboratories, zoos or botanical gardens, and gave great attention to the economic, social, instrumental, and political conditions of research as part of its epistemic situation. Dewey’s theory of inquiry is surprisingly apt at accommodating this sciences-studies perspective within a logical and methodological account of scientific research. At the same time, he grounds the origin of inquiry and possible criteria for its successful conclusion in natural qualities, and not in arbitrary conventions.