John Dewey’s Experience and Nature

Abstract

John Dewey’s Experience and Nature has the potential to transform several areas of philosophy. The book is lengthy and difficult, but it has great importance for a knot of issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. It bears also on metaphilosophy, devoting many pages to the discipline’s characteristic pathologies, and advancing a view of what sort of guidance ‘‘naturalism’’ provides. Later chapters move on to discuss art, morality, and value. So this is a major statement by Dewey. It may one day transform moral philosophy as he hopes, but this review will focus on the central ideas of the first two-thirds of the book. Here Dewey does succeed, I think, in motivating us to look at his core topics—experience and nature—in a new way. And though Dewey’s language is often obscure and unhelpful, some of the main ideas are simpler than they look. Earlier ‘‘pragmatist’’ philosophical work was novel in its focus on the relation between thought and action. This work had a broadly empiricist orientation, but discarded much of the psychological picture associated with traditional empiricism, both for philosophical reasons and because science has moved beyond it. Drawing on Alexander Bain, Charles Peirce and William James understood belief in terms of its effects on habits of action. This shift, they thought, should change our views of justification, truth, and other epistemological topics. John Dewey, in his training and early inclinations, comes out of an idealist philosophical tradition, influenced by Hegel and the ‘‘St Louis Hegelians.’’ But in part through the influence of James’s Principles of Psychology, and Dewey’s time at the University of Chicago, he moved towards a more naturalistic outlook. Experience and Nature is a mature statement of the view that has been reached. A simple way to relate this work to earlier pragmatist ideas is to say that if earlier pragmatism broadened the empiricist treatment of thought by attending to the links between thought and action, Dewey broadens it further, to consider two kinds of relationships between cognition and the environment of the thinker. Thought is a response to the changeable, unstable aspects of nature—what he calls its ‘‘precarious’’ side. This is what prompts inquiry. And while other pragmatists emphasized that beliefs are expressed in action, those actions, Dewey adds, transform the environment in which the agent lives and operates. Some actions change our relations to the environment, but not the structure of the environment itself—you can leave this room and enter another one. Other acts change the enduring physical structure of our surroundings—rather than leaving the room you can rearrange it, take it apart, or build something new. If all goes well, the actions guided by intelligence transform the factors that gave rise to the problem your environment was posing. In doing so, actions change what will be experienced at the next stages—from moments to years—in time. That actions typically transform an agent’s environment is a familiar everyday fact, in no sense a philosophical discovery. Anyone reading these words is experiencing an environment whose physical structure has been shaped to at least some extent by human action. The common pattern is like this: experience arises from our physical commerce with the environment, thought responds to experience, thought gives rise to action, and action alters the environment that will shape the next round of experience. These facts about our continual ordinary remaking of the world are not usually seen as especially important to philosophical debates about mind, knowledge, and reality. Debates P. Godfrey-Smith (&) Philosophy Program, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA e-mail: p.godfrey.smith@gmail.com