Table Of ContentJOHN DEWEY and ARTHUR F. BENTLEY
A Philosophical Correspondence, 1932-1951
Introduction
Sidney Ratner
The intimate exchange of letters between John Dewey and Arthur F.
Bentley gives us the opportunity to gain insight into the creative proc
esses of two great thinkers. We are fortunate in having about two
thousand communications-letters, drafts of essays, and postcards—that
contain searching inquiries into the nature of scientific knowledge and
into modern theories of knowledge. From these my editorial associates
and I have sought to select the philosophically most important. These
form a series of fascinating dialogues between the internationally most
famous American philosopher since William James and a great American
theorist in political science, sociology, psychology, and scientific method.
The letters, as a continuous series, began May 22, 1935, after Ernest
Nagel suggested to Dewey that he might look into Bentley’s writings,
and ended in 1951, shortly before Dewey’s death. Dewey found two of
Bentley’s books, Linguistic Analysis of Mathematics (1932) and Be
havior, Knowledge, Fact (1935) so stimulating that he acknowledged a
special sense of indebtedness to Bentley in the preface to his Logic: The
Theory of Inquiry (1938). Within the next few years, Dewey and
Bentley very gradually established an unusual intellectual partnership.
Their letters contain a lively, frank, and free interchange of ideas on a
wide variety of philosophical problems. They give Dewey’s and Bentley’s
solutions to these questions, and explain why Dewey and Bentley re
jected various solutions that had been proposed by such leading con
temporary philosophers as Rudolf Carnap, Morris R. Cohen, G. E. Moore,
and Bertrand Russell.
As their friendship ripened, Dewey and Bentley encouraged and ad
vised each other on essays and books they were preparing. Then they
decided to collaborate, at Dewey’s suggestion in a letter dated June 25,
1943, on a project to clarify and to reformulate the “leading words” used
in logic and the theory of knowledge. This co-authorship began when
Dewey was eighty-three years and Bentley seventy-two years old. In
addition to various other essays, these two old but intellectually vigorous
men published between January 4, 1945, and May 26, 1949, eight articles
jointly signed, three articles signed by Bentley alone, and two articles
under Dewey’s signature. These were revised and appeared in 1949 in
book form as Knowing and the Known. This was an appropriate cele
bration of Dewey’s ninetieth birthday and Bentley’s seventy-ninth, and an
important event in the history of American philosophy.
Dewey’s name had appeared as co-author on several previous publica
tions, notably in 1895 with James A. McLellan on The Psychology of
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Number and in 1908 with James H. Tufts on Ethics. These collabora
tions do not seem to have been as extensive and close as with Bentley.
In the case of Knowing and the Known Dewey contributed, through
important criticisms and suggestions, to every chapter, even though
many of them were originally drafted by Bentley and signed by his
name in the book. Similarly, Bentley made extensive valuable com
ments and proposals on the essays that ultimately appeared under
Dewey’s signature. In response to these mutual criticisms, each essay
went through numerous drafts, ranging usually from five to ten. In
addition to these drafts (deposited in the manuscript division of the
Indiana University Library at Bloomington, Indiana), Dewey and Bent
ley wrote challenging discussions of the key philosophical and scientific
issues involved in each essay. The present collection permits the reader
to participate with Dewey and Bentley in the process of challenge and
clarification.
The Dewey-Bentley Philosophical Correspondence is the most exten
sive correspondence of any two contemporary philosophers published in
America or Europe. This interchange constitutes a rare example of
genuinely shared, cooperative thinking. Though Bentley did a larger
share of the essay writing, no word was printed without Dewey’s stamp
of approval or without the benefit of his painstaking evaluations and
proposals for revision. With the publication of this material, Dewey’s
share in writing Knowing and the Known must be given its proper weight
and seen as the final phase of his philosophical career and development.
Dewey and Bentley wrote with impassioned intensity on philosophic
themes. They were consumed with the desire to sweep away linguistic
confusions and fictions in philosophy. They sought to work out scien
tifically justifiable formulations for every important word they thought
needed clarification or correction. Some of these words were “action,”
“behavior,” “experience,” “knowledge,” “mind,” “nature,” “reality,” “sign,”
“space-time,” “substance,” and “truth.” In the letters can be studied the
evolution of ideas from the stage when Dewey or Bentley first expressed
sharp dissatisfaction with some fashionable formulation of a problem and
went on to experiment with a new approach, to the final stage of agree
ment on the question.
Contrary to the assertions of some of Dewey’s recent critics, Dewey and
Bentley scrutinized past and current linguistic usage of philosophic terms
and phrases as scrupulously as the English and American devotees of
“linguistic analysis.” Dewey in this correspondence brilliantly charac
terized the classic figures in philosophy: e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Descartes,
Bacon, Berkeley, Hume, Locke, and Kant. Dewey and Bentley both
made incisive and valuable judgments on the work of such recent
thinkers as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, Alfred
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North Whitehead, George Herbert Mead, Frederick J. E. Woodbridge,
George Santayana, and Morris R. Cohen. These compact and penetrating
thumbnail sketches of philosophic personalities and doctrines provide
long-range perspectives on contemporary problems and fresh evalua
tions of past great thinkers.
To give the reader a sense of the process of innovation and critical
revision behind each finished published essay, this volume includes two
drafts by Dewey and two by Bentley of essays later printed in final
form in Knowing and the Known. We have also included two hitherto
unpublished essays by Dewey, “Means and Consequences” and “Im
portance, Significance and Meaning.” These carry to completion certain
themes and ideas that grew out of the epistolary discussions between
Dewey and Bentley. Dewey sent copies of these essays to Bentley,
and would have published them if his health had not failed in the last
few months before his death. Also included are two brief essays by
Bentley on “Dewey’s Logic Compactly Presented” and “Dewey’s De
velopment,” dated October 5 and November 21, 1945, respectively,
which sum up incisively Bentley’s analyses of basic positions and trends
in Dewey’s work.
John Dewey: Experimental Naturalist
The philosophical correspondence of Dewey and Bentley should be
seen against the background of the separate, yet confluent, intellectual
developments of these two strikingly different men. Dewey was born
on October 20, 1859, in Burlington, Vermont, on the eve of the Civil War.
His father, a grocer, served for four years as a quartermaster with the
First Vermont Cavalry. John spent the last winter of the war with his
parents and two brothers in northern Virginia, where the privations suf
fered by the people of the devastated region made a deep impression
on the young boys. Upon returning to Burlington, John resumed the
life of a typical middle-class Yankee schoolboy and eventually went on
to study at the University of Vermont (1875-79). There he first
acquired an interest in Darwinian evolution. From T. H. Huxley’s im
pressive textbook on physiology he came to appreciate the unity of the
living creature. His reading of Auguste Comte’s writings stimulated a
concern for political and social philosophy, especially the interaction be
tween social conditions and the development of thought in science and
philosophy. But the greatest influence on Dewey’s future career came
from the philosophical teaching of Professor H. A. P. Torrey. Dewey
learned about Scotch Common Sense, German Intuitionist and a priori
philosophy (mainly Kant) in Torrey’s undergraduate classes. Some three
years after graduation from college, he received special tutoring from
Torrey in German philosophy. Torrey encouraged Dewey to make
philosophy and college teaching his life vocation.
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Dewey was an outstanding graduate student in philosophy at Johns
Hopkins University from 1882 to 1884. There he read the writings of
T. H. Green, John and Edward Caird, and other neo-Hegelians, and
under the inspiration of the learned George Sylvester Morris he became
converted to neo-Hegelianism. Dewey also studied psychology with
G. Stanley Hall, a pioneer in experimental psychology. Dewey studied
logic with Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, but un
fortunately only some ten to twenty years later did he reach a full
appreciation of Peirce’s stress on the mathematical approach to logic
and the methods of the physical sciences. In the 1930’s, the long-de
layed publication of Peirce’s Collected Papers aided Dewey in perfect
ing his own great treatise on logic.
The impact of George Sylvester Morris on Dewey’s philosophic out
look was twofold. Morris’s neo-Hegelian logic and metaphysics ap
pealed to Dewey because it overcame the oppressive dualisms that he
had acquired in New England at college and at home; the divisions
of one’s self from the world, of soul from body, of nature from God.
Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine
and the human, gave Dewey an immense emotional and intellectual
liberation from the frustrating Kantian dichotomy between the world
of phenomenal existents and events in space and time, and the “super
sensible,” “noumenal,” or “intelligible” world of entities which are neither
in space nor time. Hegel’s treatment of human culture as molding the
ideas, beliefs, and intellectual attitudes of individuals led Dewey to reject
the widespread theory that isolated, individual minds respond to the
physical world, each from his own center. To Dewey the only possible
psychology was a social psychology. Here his thinking was to antici
pate and to influence that of anthropologists like Ruth Benedict in her
classic study, Patterns of Culture (1934).
Despite the fact that during the fifteen years after he won his doc
torate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins, he gradually lost confidence in
Hegel’s dialectic, Dewey felt he owed to Hegel his emphasis on the
principle of continuity and the important role of conflict in human affairs
and in nature. C. S. Peirce at this period expressed an appreciation
of Hegel’s insight into these themes, although Peirce rendered his own
thoughts on these subjects in a more precise, mathematical form. Ber
trand Russell, champion of logical atomism, in 1939 emphasized
Dewey’s Hegelian synthetic background as against his own British ana
lytic background, but when Russell was a student and a fellow at Cam
bridge University in the mid-1890’s, he was an enthusiastic adherent of
Hegelianism in the form made palatable to him by F. H. Bradley and
John McTaggart.
Dewey was also permanently affected by Morris’s transmission (from
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his early Scotch philosophical training) of a common-sense belief in
the existence of the external world. He used “to make merry” as
Dewey put it, over those who thought the existence of this world and
of matter needed to be proved by philosophers. The only philosophical
question he saw was: “What is the meaning of this existence?” Here
G. S. Morris and Dewey were at one with the no-nonsense position
about common-sense matters of fact expounded with such force by
G. E. Moore in “A Defence of Commonsense” (1925) and “Proof of an
External World” (1939). But British admirers of Moore have not men
tioned the fact that in 1915 Dewey, in “The Existence of the World as
a Logical Problem,” powerfully attacked Bertrand Russell’s doubts about
the basis for our belief in an external world. In this essay, reprinted
in his Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), Dewey demonstrated that
there is no problem of an external world, logically speaking, because
the very attempt to state the problem involves a self-contradiction.
Dewey remained a confirmed neo-Hegelian during the first four years
of his teaching at the University of Michigan (1884-88) where G. S. Mor
ris and James B. Angell, president of the university, gave him his first
chance at college teaching. After a year at the University of Minnesota,
Dewey returned to Michigan as chairman of the philosophy department
(1889-94). At this time, he developed a view of ideas as plans or
working hypotheses that induced him to characterize his philosophy as
“experimental idealism.” During his stay at Michigan, Dewey’s philo
sophical and social interests expanded and deepened. After his mar
riage in 1886 to (Harriet) Alice Chipman (1859-1927), he became
more aware of the need for action in social affairs and in education.
Dewey also enjoyed the stimulating friendship of such colleagues as
Henry Carter Adams, an economist with strong views on the need for
trade unions and government curbs on business exploitation of labor;
George Herbert Mead, “a seminal mind of the first order,” who pioneered
in bringing biological and sociological theory to bear upon psychology;
Arthur H. Lloyd, an original exponent of Dynamic Idealism, who sup
ported Dewey’s experimentalism, but went beyond Dewey in advocat
ing a panpsychic cosmology; and James H. Tufts, an authority on ethics.
During this Michigan-Minnesota period Dewey published almost a
volume a year: a Psychology in 1887, Leibnizs New Essays Concerning
the Human Understanding in 1888, and his first book on education,
Applied Psychology: An Introduction to the Principles and Practice of
Education (with James A. McLellan) in 1889. None of these books
revealed any notable Darwinian outlook on man in nature. The first
book tried to harmonize the universal mind of absolute idealism with
the contemporary findings of psychological research on the human mind.
The Leibniz revealed Dewey’s sympathy for Leibniz’s view that the
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world forms an organic unity, with continuity and interdependence pre
vailing throughout. Dewey praised Leibniz for seeing mind as an active
process, but deplored his devotion to formal logic and failure to antici
pate Hegel’s logic of organicism and process. The Applied Psychology
offered a scientific basis for the thesis that education should be based
on the interests, activities, and ideas of the children taught. In this work,
Dewey made two important points: first, there is a basic distinction be
tween “having” a sensation or feeling and “knowing” or understanding
something, e.g., the meaning of any words uttered and heard. Second,
all knowledge is “mediate,” that is, it is based on the interpretation of
signs as representative of sensations; this is achieved through the individ
ual mind’s extracting the ideal elements already existing in a Hegelian-
conceived “universal mind.” Dewey was still far from a naturalistic
philosophy in these early writings.
In 1891 Dewey in his Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics broke
through to a tentative Darwinian concern with desire and intelligence
functioning in direct control of human action. Three years later in his
Study of Ethics he presented the kernel of “instrumental” pragmatism
in the thesis that intelligence is the “mediation” of native impulses in
the light of reflection on the consequences of satisfying these impulses.
In this work Dewey introduced the special philosophical idioms and
turns of phrase that were to characterize the writings for which he is
best known, e.g., “experiment,” “ideas as plans of action,” “instruments,”
"practice,” and “conflict.” Here he briefly enunciated a theme to be de
veloped in later books: An antithesis between science and art is not
tenable. “Science does not teach us to know; it is the knowing; art does
not teach us to do, it is the doing.” Knowing is one form of art or doing.
The liberation of Dewey from neo-Hegelian idealism was due in large
part to the impact of William James’s The Principles of Psychology in
1890 on Dewey’s whole way of thinking and his bedrock presuppositions.
Reading James was intellectually as revolutionary an experience to
Dewey as reading Charles Renouvier’s essay on free will had been to
James twenty years before. The chapters in James’s Principles dealing
with conception, discrimination, comparison, and reasoning served as a
better introduction to a pragmatic theory of knowledge for students,
Dewey thought, than James’s later book on Pragmatism. Dewey found
especially congenial that strain in the Psychology which emphasized the
objective approach to psychology, based upon a biological characteriza
tion of the psyche, as against the more subjective view of psychology as
a theory of “consciousness,” even when James presented it as a “stream
of consciousness.” This behavior-centered psychological approach worked
its way more and more into Dewey’s ideas and transformed his basic
philosophic beliefs.
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