Because they enter life and modify experience in imperceptible ways, and their consequences are not realized, speech about them is technical; communication is by means of peculiar symbols.
John Dewey: “Because they enter life and modify experience in imperceptible ways, and their consequences are not realized, speech…”
Editor's note · Context
Dewey discusses the technical nature of scientific communication regarding imperceptible influences on life.
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The problem of securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a reality.
Competition will continue, but it will be less rivalry for acquisition of material goods, and more an emulation of local groups to enrich direct experience with appreciatively enjoyed intellectual and artistic wealth.
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…
But the wingèd words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech.