Frank Burke

This work addresses issues debated by John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, following the appearance of Dewey's Logic in 1938. Russell initiated this debate in 1939 with his contribution to the Library of Living Philosophers volume devoted to Dewey; he followed that in 1940 with a chapter in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, and later, a chapter on Dewey in A History of Western Philosophy. Dewey's replies appeared in the Library of Living Philosophers volume, and in a Journal of Philosophy article in 1941. ;The present work focuses on several concepts which were slighted, misrepresented, or ignored by Russell, but which need to have been satisfactorily squared away prior to addressing the larger topics around which this debate was centered. From the outset Russell misunderstood several concepts and distinctions which are fundamental to Dewey's views, and he was therefore not in a good position to appraise Dewey's logical theory. ;In following out parts of this debate, the goal of this dissertation is to explain Dewey's distinction between propositions and judgments, requiring first that one understand his conceptions of inquiry, situations, and other notions central to his approach to logic. An introductory chapter includes biographical and historical notes. Chapters 2-4 address some of these more basic issues, prior to focusing on propositions and judgments in Chapter 5. In each of these chapters, several of Russell's arguments are analyzed in detail, to show how his misconceptions of these notions skew his picture of Dewey's logical theory. ;The final chapter addresses Dewey's conceptions of warranted assertibility and truth, his theory of knowledge, and the theory of intelligence and intentionality these conceptions support. Contributions of Dewey's logical theory to current developments in formal semantics and the philosophy of language are discussed. As a result of unsympathetic reviews such as Russell's, and because of the untimely nature of Dewey's views in the 1930s and 1940s, Dewey's logical theory has been considered obscure, naive, and irrelevant, when in fact it is complex, subtle, and increasingly relevant to current investigations of language, information, and intelligence

The coupling/constitution fallacy has been a persistent annoyance if not a stumbling block for some proponents of externalist conceptions of mind (Menary 2010). It has been charged, namely, that anything to be accounted for by way of a conception of mind as being extended outside of the head—as being constituted in part by things external to the body—can just as well be accounted for by way of a more standard inside-the-head conception—with minds being tightly coupled to but not therefore constituted by the body’s external environs. It is alleged that some if not much of what has been written in favor of cognitive externalism has tended to slide unwittingly from examples and discussions of coupling to claims of constitution without clear justification for such a move. Everett (2012) finds a response to this challenge in John Dewey’s early work (in particular, Dewey 1896). The present paper will outline how Everett’s way of addressing the coupling/constitution fallacy in the philosophy of mind might bear on Mead’s social-psychological conception of mind.

Good old-fashioned cognitive science characterizes human thinking as symbol manipulation qua computation and therefore emphasizes the processing of symbolic representations as a necessary if not sufficient condition for “general intelligent action.” Recent alternative conceptions of human thinking tend to deemphasize if not altogether eschew the notion of representation. The present paper shows how classical American pragmatist conceptions of human thinking can successfully avoid either of these extremes, replacing old-fashioned conceptions of representation with one that characterizes both representatum and representans in externalist terms.

This demonstration shows inverse gnomonic projections of flat surface areas lying in a horizontal plane tangent to the projection sphere. It shows how optical surface area varies regularly as the distance of the respective surface area from the eye varies, decreasing as the latter increases. According to ecological psychology, this kind of regularity or "invariant" is what sensory systems are designed to detect. Attunement to such invariants in the interactions of eyes and terrains make possible the perception of distance and of surface walkability.

The limited aim here is to explain what John Dewey might say about the formulation of the grue example. Nelson Goodman’s problem of distinguishing good and bad inductive inferences is an important one, but the grue example misconstrues this complex problem for certain technical reasons, due to ambiguities that contemporary logical theory has not yet come to terms with. Goodman’s problem is a problem for the theory of induction and thus for logical theory in general. Behind the whole discussion of these issues over the last several decades is a certain view of logic hammered out by Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and many others. Goodman’s nominalism hinges in essential ways on a certain view of formal logic with an extensional quantification theory at its core. This raises many issues, but the one issue most germane here is the conception of predicates ensconced in this view of logic.

Throughout his many writings Charles Sanders Peirce occasionally presented examples of how to use the pragmatist method of defining one’s terms, having insisted that pragmatism is just that: a methodological stance concerning how best to clarify one’s terminology. One of the more remarkable examples is his definition of the word ‘reality’ with the corollary definition of the word ‘truth’. It is argued here that this definition also supplies for free a corollary definition of the word ‘knowledge’. Moreover, the same type of definition (involving long-run perfectionist ideals of some sort) can be given for the words ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’.

This volume is composed of extended versions of selected papers presented at an international conference held in June 2011 at Opole University—the seventh in a series of annual American and European Values conferences organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. The papers were written independently with no prior guidelines other than the obvious need to address some aspect of George Herbert Mead’s work. While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, these papers have brought that work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. There is good reason to classify Mead as one of the original classical American pragmatists (along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) and consequently as a major figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his thought has been marginalized for the most part, at least in academic philosophy. It is our intention to help recuperate Mead’s reputation among a broader audience by providing a small corpus of significant contemporary scholarship on some key aspects of his thought.

F. Thomas Burke believes that pragmatism, especially as it has been employed in politics and social action, needs a reassessment. He examines the philosophies of William James and Charles S. Peirce to determine how certain maxims of pragmatism originated. Burke contrasts pragmatism as a certain set of beliefs or actions with pragmatism as simply a methodology. He unravels the complex history of this philosophical tradition and discusses contemporary conceptions of pragmatism found in current US political discourse and explains what this quintessentially American philosophy means today.

Realism/antirealism issues are considered in light of a pragmatist dual-process active-externalist theory of experience. This theory posits two kinds of experience such that mentality (as a capacity for thinking, hypothesizing, theorizing, reasoning, deliberating) constitutes one of the two kinds of experience. The formal correspondence of theory with facts is characterized in terms of a functional correspondence between these two kinds of experience. Realist and constructivist aspects of this view are then discussed. Active externalism guarantees a kind of ecological realism that allows the theory to avoid radical constructivism or irrealism.