On the record
Looking back, with the aid which ex post facto experience can give, it would be hard for the wisest to devise schemes which, under the circumstances, would have met the needs better.
Said by
John Dewey
Source
gutenberg.orgJohn Dewey: “Looking back, with the aid which ex post facto experience can give, it would be hard for the wisest to devise schemes…”
Editor's note · Context
Dewey reflects on the challenges of devising better solutions in hindsight, acknowledging the complexity of circumstances.
Share
More from John Dewey
Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.
Ideas which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought.
But the wingèd words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech.
So to the patent objection that the state is a very modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of those structures which go by the name of states, yet all history, or almost all, records the exercise of analogous…