Dewey’s Bewildering Anti-Melioristic Backsliding: Scientific Inquiry is Only Justified by a Remote Asymptotic Ideal of Complete Agreement
It’s hard for me not to feel a bit dismayed and disappointed when one of my favorite philosophers says something that seems to undermine what I understand as their philosophical worldview. It happened with Richard Rorty and I wrote about it in my essay, Rorty’s Bewildering Platonic Backsliding: Truth Claims are Absolute and Eternal.
And now it’s happened with John Dewey. In a previous essay, I celebrated his rejection of the need to imagine ideals as remote goals that we incrementally (asymptotically) approach across the centuries: Dewey’s evolutionary non-cumulative, retrospective meliorism. I even got into a debate on Mastodon with CJ Stevens that Dewey rejected Peirce’s vision of concrete reasonableness as one such a remote, asymptotic ideal.
One of my favorite Dewey quotes in this regard is
Men have constructed a strange dream-world when they have supposed that without a fixed ideal of a remote good to inspire them, they have no inducement to get relief from present troubles, no desires for liberation from what oppresses and for clearing-up what confuses present action.
So imagine my reaction when I read the following passage in Dewey’s 1937 review in The New Republic of the recently published The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce:
Science does not consist in any body of conclusions, but in the work of ever renewed inquiry, which never claims or permits finality but leads to ever renewed effort to learn. The sole ultimate justification of science as a method of inquiry is that if it is persisted in, it is self-correcting and tends to approach ever closer to stable common agreement of beliefs and ideas. Because science is the method of learning, not a settled body of truths, it is the hope of mankind.
The first sentence seems to reinforce Dewey’s commitment to perpetual, boundless, non-cumulative inquiry: ever renewed inquiry which never claims or permits finality. But then he undermines his rejection of the necessity of remote ideals to inspire us when he says, the sole ultimate justification of science as a method of inquiry is that [it] tends to approach ever closer to stable common agreement of beliefs and ideas. This directly contradicts his rejection of the need for remote ideals to motivate our efforts! If approach[ing] ever closer to stable common agreement as the hope of mankind is not a strange dream world with a fixed ideal of a remote good meant to inspire us, then I don’t know what is. What’s also surprising to me is that I was unable to find any discussion of this apparent flip flop in the literature. I searched for [“ultimate justification of science”] and found no discussions.
Given this is only a single instance of such backsliding, and it appears in a book review as opposed to a philosophical paper or book, I’ll chalk this up as merely highlighting a tension in Dewey’s philosophy. While Dewey clearly rejected the necessity of remote social or moral ideals to justify our efforts at reform in favor of a present and local meliorism, he seems to have had a blind spot when it came to science. Why couldn’t Dewey imagine that scientific inquiry could be justified by the mere melioristic improvement of existing problems with scientific theories and methods?
