David L. Hildebrand

New technologies not only surveil and collect data about us, they also change and alter the way we make or preserve meaning, including aesthetic meaning. Accordingly, the ways we consider, research, and educate aesthetics will have to adapt, at least insofar as it keeps a new range of technological dimensions in mind. To help imagine such dimensions, this paper examines the opportunities and challenges of technologies offering new ways of creating things while also nudging and “hypernudging” our actions. Such developments may initially seem trivial but they are changing our relationships with one another and with ourselves. After a brief, largely factual discussion of how technology is disrupting habits to extract data, some impact on decision-making autonomy is presented. Next, Albert Borgmann’s work is utilized to better understand how these new technologies fit his account of devices and so affect skills, practices, and meaning. Next, Dewey’s position is considered to see how contemporary technologies affect inquiry, memory, and art. Finally, there is brief consideration of the potential for technology to affect empathy, which also affects the foregoing aspects at a fundamental level. The essay concludes with a brief summary of the concerns presented.

Ongoing hostilities between evolution and intelligent design adherents reveal deeper epistemological and ethical crises in American life. First, when adjudicating sociopolitical differences among people, how much epistemological “diversity” can be embraced before the very canons of judgment become suspect? Pragmatist notions of inquiry, warranted assertability, and pluralism can help strike a better balance. Second, the related crisis of factionalized “communities” might be addressed, along Deweyan lines, by the construction of a philosophical “total attitude” redolent of democratic ideals, more broadly conceived. This attitude could grow out of reconstructed educational methods that train imaginative and interactive habits of inquiry and communication.

Although we live in highly technologized societies, we frequently hear the cry, “This changes everything!” Or perhaps we hear this so often because of technology. It is a phrase meant to cut through noise and grab attention—attention being the commodity in truly short supply. The latest developments “changing everything” include generative AI, including versions such as ChatGPT. These developments follow some other recent, revolutionary changes: the growth of social media platforms, smart appliances, apps, smartphones, and (to go way back) the internet. These have been real changes with real effects. We continue to be in a period of rapid change.

Each new decade brings ‘advances’ in technology that are more capable of collecting, aggregating, organizing, and deploying data about human practices. Where we go, what we buy, what we say online, and the people with whom we connect, are captured with ever more sophistication by governmental and corporate institutions. Data are increasingly being sold to schools to help them ‘manage’ teaching and administration tasks. Of course, at the same time, schools, teachers, and students are generating data that further advances the goals of data aggregators. After some discussion regarding data’s philosophical dimensions, this chapter examines the benefits and drawbacks of surveillance and datafication in present educational contexts. In addition, this chapter raises ethical and pragmatic questions related to how datafication often reshapes or redefines agency, choice, personal relationships, and individuality. In response to some of the ethical qualms raised by these questions, a vision (imaginary) is proposed to help conserve some of the educational values threatened by datafication, including values related to genuine interest, sociality, and transformative, and qualitative experiences. CITATION: Hildebrand, D.L. (2024). What are Data and Who Benefits?. In: Buch, A., Lindberg, Y., Cerratto Pargman, T. (eds) Framing Futures in Postdigital Education. Postdigital Science and Education . Springer, Cham. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-58622-4_5

Democracies around the world find themselves under increasing threat; in some quarters, educators are revisiting whether democratic values should be made a more prominent part of curricula to foment a more vigorous social response. This paper does not take up the curricular question. Rather, it begins by discussing some preliminaries about the role of habits and values in education, particularly from John Dewey’s point of view. Dewey articulates especially well how education in the wider sense educates habits necessary for critical inquiry, empathetic imagination, and democratic self-governance. Next, it investigates the technological context which is rapidly constituting the environment in which all institutions, including education, exist. How are important developments in recent technologies affecting children and adults? How are they modifying the way we feel, reason, and imagine ourselves and our future? Finally, these questions lead back to the issue of democracy, for if the feelings, values, and habits are being modified, the very way we inquire or problem-solve is changing, too. What are the impacts on habits critical to democratic life, such as autonomous inquiry and empathetic apprehension of other citizens? Do such changes comprise a critical factor as to whether democratic values can be sustained? I believe the answer is yes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Grayson Douglas Browning (1929–2023)Gregory Pappas, David Hildebrand, and William T. MyersBrowning, Grayson Douglas was born on March 7, 1929, in Seminole, Oklahoma.He received his PhD from the University Texas, Austin, 1958, where he returned later in 1972 to become its Philosophy Department chairman for four years.He was president of the Southwestern Philosophical Association in 1977, of the Florida Philosophical Association in 1967, and of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 1972.He was not only a member of the Society for Advancement of America Philosophy; he encouraged all of his students to attend and become members of this society. Among these former students are Bill Myers, David Hildebrand, and Gregory Pappas.He thought that this was one of the best societies, not only because of its pluralism and scholarship, but because it was a community. He was right!He was the author of several books of philosophy, including Act and Agent and Ontology and the Practical Arena, and he co-edited Philosophers of Process (with William T. Myers). He also has published poetry in Voices, A Journal of Poetry and the Beloit Poetry Journal.In the last years of his life, Doug Browning was a retired Professor of Philosophy, living outside Georgetown, Texas, where he labored at length over poems and novels, staying up throughout the night reading, writing, listening to jazz, and smoking cigars, and enjoying life in his countryside hacienda with his beautiful wife, Becky. During that time, he managed to write and publish sixteen books of fiction. [End Page 106]For us (his former students), one of the most important philosophical contributions of Doug Browning was his insistence that if there is a key lesson from American Philosophy, it is the importance of lived experience ("La Vida") as the "starting point" of philosophical investigation.As he wrote in one of his last published essays:[T]he point is that, wherever one thinks we should start, we can't start with the world. We can't start with the world and we can't test our theories by testing them against the world. Whatever we take to indicate or to provide evidence of a "real" world apart from experience must be found, can only be found, in experience. It must be found in the glass of Barrilito, the aroma of a good cigar, conversation among friends, hotel hallways, cats, thunderstorms, oak trees, and all of the brazen and all of the unpretentious things that we encounter and live among in our day-to-day lives.1Gregory PappasTexas A&M UniversityDavid HildebrandUniversity of Colorado DenverWilliam T. MyersBirmingham-Southern Collegenote1. Douglas Browning, "Dewey and Ortega on the Starting Point," Pragmatism in the Americas, edited by Gregory Fernando Pappas (Fordham UP, 2011), p. 155.Copyright © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois...

Definitions of pragmatism increasingly turn on understanding and relating the philosophies of Richard Rorty and John Dewey. Rorty is often the first and most important lens through which many encounter pragmatism or Dewey; thus, it is crucial to know where “Rorty” ends and where “Dewey” begins. To find that line, this chapter answers the question: What did Rorty believe Dewey contributed to pragmatism, to philosophy, and to humanity? After reviewing how Rorty's personal and academic beginnings intertwined with Dewey, preliminary context is provided by reviewing Rorty's view of pragmatism and neopragmatism and his general interpretive approach to Dewey. These preliminaries yield to analytical descriptions of the main areas in Dewey's work which Rorty was concerned to present: experience; objectivity and truth; inquiry and scientific method; ethics, politics, and democracy; and, finally, the general purpose of philosophy.

This issue of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy's 2020 Proceedings includes papers given at the annual meeting in 2020 at the Hacienda Santa Clara in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. This was the first time that SAAP had ever held its annual meeting in Mexico, and it represents an important milestone for the Society. As immediate past president Gregory Pappas explains in his Address, "thanks to the efforts of many scholars and presidents, SAAP has come to recognize the important philosophical contributions of female, African American, Indigenous, and Latinx philosophers … [and, also] a certain way of doing inter-American philosophy … contrapunteo." This contrapunteo...

Abstract: For most people, mobile phones and various forms of personal information technology (PIT) have become standard equipment for everyday life. Recent theorists such as Sherry Turkle raise psychological and philosophical questions about the impact of such technologies and practices, but deeper further philosophical work is needed. This paper takes a pragmatic approach to examining the effects of PIT practices upon experience. After reviewing several main issues with technology raised by Communication theorists, the paper looks more deeply at Turkle’s analysis of technology's impacts upon solitude and conversation. Because Turkle only raises but doesn’t pursue the philosophical dimensions of these issues, the work on experience of John Dewey, William James, and John J. McDermott is utilized to provide concepts and methods by which PIT’s effects might be judged. Finally, pragmatist aesthetics is introduced and consulted as a source of constructive ideals which might guide future amelioration of PIT’s more significant drawbacks.

The central objective of Dewey’s Democracy and Education is to explain ‘what is needed to live a meaningful life and how can education contribute?’ While most acquainted with Dewey’s educational philosophy know that ‘experience’ plays a central role, the role of ‘situations’ may be less familiar or understood. This essay explains why ‘situation’ is inseparable from ‘experience’ and deeply important to Democracy and Education’s educational methods and rationales. First, a prefatory section explores how experience is invoked and involved in pedagogical practice, especially experience insofar as it is (a) experimental, (b) direct, and (c) social-moral in character. The second and main section on situations follows. After a brief introduction to Dewey’s special philosophical use of ‘situation’, I examine how situations are implicated in (a) student interest and motivation; (b) ‘aims’ and ‘criteria’ in problem-solving; and (c) moral education (habits, values, and judgements). What should become abundantly clear from these examinations is that there could be no such thing as meaningful education, as Dewey understood it, without educators’ conscious, intentional, and imaginative deployment of experience and situations.

Ongoing hostilities between evolution and intelligent design adherents reveal deeper epistemological and ethical crises in American life. First, when adjudicating sociopolitical differences among people, how much epistemological “diversity” can be embraced before the very canons of judgment become suspect? Pragmatist notions of inquiry, warranted assertability, and pluralism can help strike a better balance. Second, the related crisis of factionalized “communities” might be addressed, along Deweyan lines, by the construction of a philosophical “total attitude” redolent of democratic ideals, more broadly conceived. This attitude could grow out of reconstructed educational methods that train imaginative and interactive habits of inquiry and communication.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in pragmatism, especially that of John Dewey. Pragmatism has been embraced as a distinctively American via media, capable of bridging the contemporary divide between philosophy-as-cultural-criticism and philosophy-as-fundamental science. Indeed, the avowal by certain prominent philosophers of pragmatic commitments has been so widespread as to earn them the title of "neopragmatists." On one central issue, however, the interpretations by these philosophers of the classical pragmatists, especially Dewey, has served to place them in opposing camps. This is the issue of whether Dewey's views on truth and reality determine him to be a realist or antirealist, and whether these views could legitimately serve as foundations for contemporary "neopragmatism." For example, two prominent neopragmatists, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, have taken quite opposite stands on this issue. Rorty derives from Dewey an antirealistic position, while Putnam's is markedly realistic. ;It is my view that neither of these neopragmatist approaches are legitimate derivations from Dewey's work. As I see it, the effect of his proposals regarding truth and reality was to undercut the entire realism/antirealism controversy. Dewey prevents such meta-philosophical dualisms in his philosophy by taking as fundamental a starting point which explicitly refuses to equate knowledge and experience. The metaphysics which follow from this starting point cannot be placed within the domain of the realism/antirealism controversy. In this dissertation I argue that Putnam and Rorty misuse Dewey's metaphysical platforms to their own ends, all the while sustaining--under the label "pragmatism"--dualisms which Dewey fought to dissolve. The larger importance of my argument lies in the fact that Dewey's position is more original and, indeed, more defensible than the neopragmatist positions derived from it

An icon of philosophy and psychology during the first half of the 20th century, Dewey is known as the father of Functional Psychology and a pivotal figure of the Pragmatist movement as well as the progressive movement in education. This concise and critical look at Dewey’s work examines his discourse of "right" and "wrong," as well as political notions such as freedom, rights, liberty, equality, and naturalism. The author of several essays about thought and logic, Dewey’s legacy remains not only through the works he left us, but also through the institutions he founded, which include The New School for Social Research in New York City and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Hildebrand’s biography brilliantly interweaves the different strands of Dewey's thought, and examines the legacy he left behind.

In this essay, David Hildebrand connects Democracy and Education to Dewey's wider corpus. Hildebrand argues that Democracy and Education's central objective is to offer a practical and philosophical answer to the question, What is needed to live a meaningful life, and how can education contribute? He argues, further, that this work is still plausible as “summing up” Dewey's overall philosophy due to its focus upon “experience” and “situation,” crucial concepts connecting Dewey's philosophical ideas to one another, to education, and to democracy. He opens the essay with a brief synoptic analysis of Democracy and Education's major philosophical ideas, moves on to sections devoted to experience and situation, and then offers a brief conclusion. Some mention is made throughout about the surprisingly significant role art and aesthetics can play in education.

The undergraduate philosophy major is often seen as an irrelevant degree. While this may be attributed to a number of causes, it is also occasion for academic philosophers to reevaluate pedagogical methods at the undergraduate level. The author evaluates typical pedagogical methods and argues that overemphasizing epistemological goals of philosophical investigation (e.g. truth and justification) instrumentalizes the process of inquiry and stifles students’ philosophical imagination, resulting in the impression of philosophy’s irrelevance. An alternative model is offered on the basis of John Dewey’s pattern of inquiry. It is argued that a pedagogy that attends to Dewey’s five phases of inquiry promotes greater attention to the process of inquiry itself, which emphasizes knowledge as social, open to revision, and pertinent to students’ needs and interests. The author concludes by considering the philosophical implications of implementing such a pedagogy.

A critical introduction to the major areas of John Dewey's philosophical thought: psychology, epistemology, ethics, politics, education, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Publisher: A ground-breaking introduction to one of America's most prominent philosophers An icon of philosophy and psychology during the first half of the 20th century, Dewey is known as the father of Functional Psychology and a pivotal figure of the Pragmatist movement as well as the progressive movement in education. This concise and critical look at Dewey’s work examines his unique take on morality, art, and religion, his naturalistic approach to science and psychology, and his contribution to political thought. The author of over forty books across a range of topic, Dewey’s legacy remains not only through the works he left us, but also through the institutions he founded, which include The New School for Social Research in New York City and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Hildebrand’s biography brilliantly interweaves the different strands of Dewey's thought, and examines the legacy he left behind. Source: Publisher

In Vermeer’s painting The Lacemaker an artisan works with loving intensity, employing a sensibility at once intimate and strategically detached. Davidson’s careful prose embodies both the logic and beauty of lace as it simply and plainly leads one into the intricate connections among thought, language, and sociality. While the subject matters are analytic and serious, Davidson imbues them with a dry sense of humor and sparkles of warmth. Of course Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective is an important collection of philosophical work; it also happens to be a pleasure to read.

This essay argues that to understand Dewey's vision of democracy as “epistemic” requires consideration of how experiential and communal aspects of inquiry together produce what is named here “pragmatic objectivity.” Such pragmatic objectivity provides an alternative to absolutism and self-interested relativism by appealing to certain norms of empirical experimentation. Pragmatic objectivity, it is then argued, can be justified by appeal to Dewey's conception of primary experience. This justification, however, is not without its own complications, which are highlighted with objections regarding “radical pluralism” in political life, and some logical problems that arise due to the supposedly “ineffable” nature of primary experience. The essay concludes by admitting that while Dewey's theory of democracy based on experience cannot answer all of the objections argumentatively, it nevertheless provides potent suggestions for how consensus building can proceed without such philosophical arguments

In recent years, a genre of introduction to philosophical figures and movements for non-specialists has gained in popularity; these introductions aim to be neither too cursory nor too laden with academic detail. Oxford’s “Very Short Introductions” and the “Wadsworth Notes” series are examples of the cursory type, while academic monographs are examples of the detailed type. Steven Fesmire’s Dewey is a welcome and unique contribution to the new introductory genre, joining similar efforts such as Raymond Boisvert’s John Dewey Rethinking Our Time and my own Dewey A Beginner’s Guide. Dewey possesses a number of helpful features.

Kenneth Burke's recent death has spurred academics in a variety of disciplines to reassess the import of his prolific output. As a specialist in American philosophy, I have begun to make inroads on a question I have heard thus far only in English and Communication departments: Should Kenneth Burke be considered a pragmatist. This paper seeks to persuade specialists in Pragmatism and American Philosophy that Burke's work has enough in common with the epistemological and metaphysical doctrines of Classical Pragmatism to merit renewed consideration by philosophers.

In "The Incoherence of Whitehead’s Theory of Perception" (PS 9:94-104), Robert H. Kimball tries to show how Alfred North Whitehead’s account of perception is a failed attempt to reconcile two traditional theories of perception: phenomenological (or sense-data) theory and causal (or physiological) theory. Whitehead fails, Kimball argues, in two main ways. First because his notion of symbolic reference requires the simultaneous enjoyment of perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. Kimball believes this experience is, in principle, impossible and supports this claim by attacking Whitehead’s conception of causal efficacy and the experiential evidence used to support it. Whitehead’s second failure results from the first: Whitehead’s erroneous belief in the simultaneous enjoyment of the two modes of perception leads him to construct a theory of perception which is composed of two contradictory parts: realism and mediatism. In this essay, I will examine Kimball’s attack on causal efficacy and symbolic reference and show why Whitehead’s theory of perception is not susceptible to Kimball’s charge of incoherence.