Dewey on metaphysics, meaning making, and maps

Transactions of the Charles S Peirce Society

Volumn 41, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 818-844

  Garrison, James W ^a  

^a OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 35748971342     PISSN: 00091774     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2979/TRA.2005.41.4.818     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. LW 12: 138. Nowhere in my paper have emphases been added to quotations.
2. See LW 3: 41-54.
3. Dewey makes a crucial distinction between meaning as an immediate, immanent, holistic, qualitative, and noncognitive "sense" of a given situation and meaning as the "use of a quality as a sign or index of something else" (LW 1: 200).
4. MW 10: 368-369.
5. Dewey writes: Immediacy of existence is ineffable. But there is nothing mystical about such ineffability; it expresses the fact that of direct existence it is futile to say anything to one's self and impossible to say anything to another. Discourse can but intimate connections which if followed out may lead one to have an existence. Things in their immediacy are unknown and unknowable. (LW 1: 74) When language transforms primary experience, it becomes meaningful, sharable, and knowable, when refined into logical essences it becomes known.
6. In "The Subject-Matter of Metaphysics," Dewey clearly states that "it is not necessary to identify these ultimate traits with temporally original traits - that, in fact, there are good reasons why we should not do so" (MW 8: 4).
7. R. W. Sleeper (1992). "What is Metaphysics?" Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XXVI, No. 2 184.
8. Thomas Alexander and Douglas Browning provide the two best descriptions of what I am calling Dewey's first philosophy of which I am aware. See Alexander's "Dewey's Denotative-Empirical Method," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Browning's, "Dewey and Ortega on the Starting Point. " Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34, no. I, 1998, 69-92. I borrow these citations from page 77 of this paper.
9. Later, in his essay, "Qualitative Thought," he would insist that "intuition precedes conception and goes deeper" (LW 5: 249).
10. LW I: 34.
11. Browning, "Dewey and Ortega on the Starting Point", 74.
12. The distinction between noncognitive, immediate, unreflective experience and cognitive, mediating, and reflective experience is a functional distinction between two phases or subfunctions of experience; neither is more "real. " Perhaps the most important reference point for Browning's discussion is Dewey's "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (MW 3: 158-167).
13. See also 138, 283, and elsewhere. Tom Burke, Dewey's New Logic: A Reply to Russell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, remarks that, "a judgment, which is not a type of 'propositions' in Dewey's logic, is an assertion attributing a mode-of-being [e. g. , an object] or mode-of-action to a determinate situation" (179).
14. See Burke, Dewey's New Logic: A Reply to Russell, 229.
15. MW 4:84.
16. LW 10: 33 and many other places.
17. See Jim Garrison, "John Dewey, Jacques Derrida, and the Metaphysics of Presence. " Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, 346-372.
18. LW 11:109-110.
19. LW 8: 172. Dewey goes on to state that the place of formal, logical thought "is suggested by giving it the name 'product' " (L W 12: 173).
20. See Ernest Nagel, The Structure Of Science. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. , 1961, 247.
21. Dewey's first use of the idea of a map occurs in a paragraph where he tells the reader that the purpose of the paper is to reconcile William fames and Charles Darwin's theories of emotion. He acknowledges his own theory is incomplete and states that the effort "may be regarded either as a sketch-map of a field previously surveyed, or as a possible outline for future filling in, not as a proved and finished account" (EW 4: 152). The passage resonates with things he will say decades later about maps, surveying, and future filling in (triangulation).
22. Over twenty years later, Dewey scolded Sholom J. Kahn for failing to grasp the context of his metaphysical comments. There he states, "The three pages in which generic traits are discussed are explicitly devoted to the place occupied by values and the office they may render in the wise conduct of the affairs of life" (LW 16: 388).
23. LW 13:204.
24. EW 3:105.
25. For an extensive refutation of the fact/ value dualism, see Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2002. Putnam states: "The point of view concerning the relation between 'facts' and 'values' that I shall be defending in this book is one that John Dewey defended throughout virtually all of his long and exemplary career" (9).
26. MW 2:284.
27. The map devised by Gerhard Mercator, which has dominated classroom walls in the West since the sixteenth century was constructed to serve the purpose of navigators who sailed the North Atlantic Ocean. Its projection scheme, however, distorts landmasses such that the northern hemisphere (19. 9 million square miles) appears much larger than the southern hemisphere (38. 6 million square miles). Many interpret the Mercator map as a sign of colonialist expansion whose continued use significs that oppressive attitudes persist. Determining whether the map in fact reflects this bias is a matter of reflective cultural criticism across many domains many think mutually exclusive. See Raymond D. Boisvert (1998). "Dewey's Metaphysics: Ground-Map of the Proto typically Real. " In Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation. Larry Hickman (Ed. ). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 149-165.
28. The native population of Haiti estimated conservatively at 1,100,000 in the year 1496 declined to 0 by the year 1555. Columbus had sent Native American slaves back to Spain in 1495 while his son initiated trading in slaves from Africa by 1505. See James W. Loewen, Lies my TeacherTold Me, New York, N. Y. : Simon & Shuster, 1995, 63.