But, so it is contended in effect, it is absurd to convert this legal liberation into a dogma which alleges that release from old oppressions confers upon those emancipated the intellectual and moral qualities which fit them for sharing in…
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
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It marked the passage from feudal institutions to industrialism, and was coincident with the transfer of power from landed proprietors, allied to churchly authorities, to captains of industry, under conditions which involved an…
It is argued that the check upon the oppressive power of this particular oligarchy lies in an intellectual aristocracy, not in appeal to an ignorant, fickle mass whose interests are superficial and trivial, and whose judgments are saved…
No longer will views generated in view of special situations be frozen into absolute standards and masquerade as eternal truths.
But opinion in the sense of beliefs formed and held in the absence of evidence will be reduced in quantity and importance.
The apparatus will no longer be taken to be itself knowledge, but will be seen to be intellectual means of making discoveries of phenomena having social import and understanding their meaning.
The social sciences, if these two stipulations are fulfilled, will then be an apparatus for conducting investigation, and for recording and interpreting (organizing) its results.
Secondly, that policies and proposals for social action be treated as working hypotheses, not as programs to be rigidly adhered to and executed.
Such a logic involves the following factors: First, that those concepts, general principles, theories and dialectical developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge be shaped and tested as tools of inquiry.
When we say that thinking and beliefs should be experimental, not absolutistic, we have then in mind a certain logic of method, not, primarily, the carrying on of experimentation like that of laboratories.
It is an affair of applying a hard and fast doctrine which follows logically from his preconception of the nature of ultimate causes.
It is not with him a matter of finding out the particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, under the circumstances, of doing it.