SOURCE: "Primary Experience as Settled Meaning: Dewey's Conception of Experience," in Philosophy Today, Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 29-42.

[In the following excerpt, Ryan examines Dewey's views on personal experience, concluding that he never was able to reconcile his seemingly contradictory views.]

This essay will examine and attempt to clarify Dewey's conception of immediate or primary experience. In particular, my aim is to extricate Dewey's actual view from an interpretation still popular among pragmatists consisting of: 1) the phenomenology of "blooming, buzzing, confusion" and 2) its ontological correlate designating a "brute" encounter with "primal, pulsative" reality. Dewey himself, to the contrary, is ahead of his contemporary supporters in overcoming this paradigm whose roots lie in Locke and traditional empiricism. His is not the ontology of other versus self, in-itself existential event versus subjective object of experience, even given the "pragmatic" codicil that the latter knows the former by "interacting" with it. Instead, these denote phases of inquiry—settled havings versus problematic challenges that produce knowings.¹

We will begin with Dewey's ontology of "mediate-immediacy," whereby a thing of primary experience is just what it is experienced as. But it will be made clear that this sense of immediacy necessarily implicates a mediating network of meanings without which experience shifts from "directly enjoyed" to problematic. From this follows the important consequence that even feelings "make sense"—that so-called qualities, sensations, and tonalities are directly experienced only insofar as they cohere to a background of settled meanings. For without such a coherence they mark the interruption of primary experience, a shift from background to focus requiring cognitive disposition. Finally, we will see how inquiry informs us about what is not inquiry—including those natural processes comprising the causal conditions of inquiry itself. It is here we may speak, if we must, of "pulsations," "anteceptions," or "raw feels," but with the full realization that these are products of highly refined reflection—far removed from the true ontological primitives that comprise the subject-matters of everyday experience.

FROM KNOWING TO HAVING

The movement of inquiry that girds Dewey's philosophy cannot be understood without a grasp of the respective roles of knowing and having. To trivialize knowing is to requicken the old "associationalist" psychology that was at a loss to explain how knowledge arises from a hodgepodge of sensations. To trivialize having is to hide behind idealistic blinders in assuming that all experience must be cognitive experience. Any appreciation of Dewey's philosophy as a bona fide alternative to traditional empiricism, idealism, and realism, must accordingly account for the relationship between having and knowing.²

Dewey himself began to work out this relationship in the "pattern of inquiry" first articulated at the turn of the century.³ In this famous model, a direct "having" or "enjoyment" of primary experience is interrupted by confusion or doubt marking the onset of a problematic situation. The resolution of this uncertainty calls forth the formulation of a hypothesis or "end-in-view," data and instrumentalities for testing this hypothesis, and finally actual experimentation. If this is successful, the hypothesis is confirmed as an "object of knowledge." Yet inasmuch as it is no longer problematic, this newly-ascertained meaning itself becomes something directly had or enjoyed—an enrichment of primary experience and a potential resource to be drawn upon in future problematic situations.

Early on, therefore, Dewey's theory of inquiry circumscribed the relationship between having and knowing as a cyclic pattern from having to knowing to having once again. But his chief concern in this period involved warding off misconceptions about the cognitive element within this pattern—to demonstrate that an object of knowledge is a consequence of inquiry and not a self-sufficient antecedent "reality," to develop a supporting logical account of knowledge, truth, belief, and judgment, and to distance himself from contemporary forms of idealism and realism.⁴

The need to extinguish kitchen fires ignited by the debate over cognition and knowledge in these formative years amply justifies Dewey's relegation of noncognitive experience to a back burner. The chief exception to this is his "postulate of immediate empiricism," introduced in 1905 to characterize having or nonreflective experience. According to this intriguing and important ontological credo, immediate empiricism postulates that things—anything, everything—are what they are experienced as Hence if one wishes to describe anything truly, his task is to tell what it is experienced as being (MW 3:158).⁵

Dewey's point is not that "we" have "direct access" to things "as they are outside of experience,"⁶ but that nonreflective experience is ultimate and ontologically primitive: the direct experience of typewriter-in-use undercuts both the object-subject dichotomy of the "typewriter-presented-to-me" and the epistemological quicksand of a supposed correspondence to an ultimately real "typewriter-in-itself."⁷

Yet in its original formulation, the postulate of immediate empiricism seems to obviate analysis of primary experience itself. After all, what more need, or indeed can we say about the typewriter of everyday experience beyond the "common sense" observation that it is what it is experienced as in a determinate context?

From the 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic onward, however,⁸ Dewey increasingly turns his attention to the full elaboration of what he variously terms "gross," "nonreflective," "direct," or "primary" experience. The reasons for this renewed interest are manifest. For one thing, despite a comprehensive analysis of truth and knowledge, the nature of conditions that precede and follow cognition remained undetermined. For another, critics continued to distort his actual view of "having" by interpreting it in terms of sense data popularized by Moore, Russell, and Price. Finally, Dewey's ultimate aim of discovering the integral bond between practice and theory, common sense and science, required a capstone promised by a tenable theory of nonreflective experience. Above all else he wanted to show that encultured values and scientific advance need not conflict—for culture benefits by supplanting blind custom with intelligently directed inquiry, and science enriches itself and humanity by acknowledging an intrinsic involvement with values. But this meant replacing the traditional separation of social values and scientific facts with the realization that each represents a different level of problem-solving activity arising from a common nonreflective source.

Many of Dewey's most influential students see his transition from instrumentalism to naturalism as a delayed attempt to overthrow the idealism of his youth for a hardheaded realism. But I see Dewey as continually and consistently developing a middle way between these traditional alternatives. The notable "shift" in such later classics as Experience and Nature and Art as Experience marks not a fundamental conversion from idealism to realism but a shift in focus from reflective to primary experience. In Dewey's very late works, primary experience is ultimately elevated to the "alpha and omega"⁹ of a transactional "circle" of having-knowing-having sketched at the dawn of this century yet not fully closed until the very end of his life.¹⁰

IMMEDIATE VERSUS REFLECTIVE EXPERIENCE

In order to understand primary experience we must first grasp the essential yet initially quixotic-sounding concept of "mediate immediacy." In all settled experience, Dewey tells us, is "something obdurate, self-sufficient, [and] wholly immediate" (LW 1:105). It is, in fact, this very finality that distinguishes having from knowing, experience immediately possessed and enjoyed from that cognitively engaged in the determination of hypotheses and data needed to resolve encountered problems. Yet the core of this finality, and the reason why immediacy is mediate, is a sense of relatedness, connectedness, or, as more recently phrased by Hilary Putnam, "fit."¹¹ The familiar arrangement of furniture in a room, the hypnotic passage of lines on a highway, the egg-salad sandwich grabbed on the run, are what they are in a familiar context. It is the interruption of this integrated whole—the chair discovered mysteriously overturned, the suddenly onrushing barricade, the crack of a tooth on an eggshell—that marks the transition to cognitive focus, the conscious discrimination of "myself and "other," and the recognized need for a plan. Both knowings and havings are charged with relations, but whereas cognitive relations are deliberately directed to some external and as yet unattained end, in having this connectedness is directly enjoyed and terminal—its mediacy reinforces its immediacy.

Keeping in mind this double aspect of primary experience also helps us avoid the empiricist fallacy of equating the "something obdurate" in direct experience either with "incorrigible" sense-data or with "objects" as complex constructs of these. As Dewey frequently points out, such data, let alone their constructs, signify not "simples" but products of refined and discriminating analysis. Indeed, some of us eminently capable of getting around in a world of yellow bananas and yellow caution lights, where yellow is qualitatively what it is within a vast context of things and hues, are pressed to come to grips with the epistemological import of G. E. Moore's alleged experience of "indefinable" yellow.¹²

Primary and reflective experience may be said to differ in other ways as well. Whereas primary experience is frequently transitory and marked by random juxtaposition, reflective experience strives for order, homogeneity, and classification by kinds and species. Reflection further enhances our capacity for problem solving by reformulating common experience into causal explanations and scientific laws (LW 1:114-17).

To say primary experience is mediate immediacy and to note several differences between it and reflective experience merely offers a starting point for its analysis, of course. But before we develop the positive conception of primary experience as settled meaning, it is crucial to distinguish Dewey's general outlook from one popular among pragmatists and often attributed to Dewey himself. This alternative view has two related phases: 1) a phenomenological axiom that primary experience is inherently undifferentiated or "confused," and 2) a metaphysical correlate that this marks a primal or "brute" encounter with "independent reality." Although Dewey clearly regards both as legitimate phases of experience, it is misleading to interpret them in terms of a realist ontology Dewey in fact rejects.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PREMISE PRIMARY EXPERIENCE AS "BUZZING, BLOOMING, CONFUSION"

In humans and other higher animals, Dewey tells us, feeling arises as a "vague and massive uneasiness," a pervasive sense of need requiring response (LW 1:197). According to James Gouinlock, this suggests that primary experience is aptly characterized as a "welter:" a "jumble of characteristics and events" the metaphysician sorts "into common traits for all situations."¹³

Both Gouinlock and S. Morris Eames agree that James' memorable "blooming, buzzing, confusion" aptly portrays the initial phase of experience from which intellectual operations and products are subsequently derived.¹⁴ Eames, however, adds the proviso that primary experience must already be "layered with" or contain "germs of critical reflection."¹⁵ And because immediate and critical components are interwoven, for Dewey an object cannot merely consist of a "bundle of sense qualities," as Russell and the logical empiricists held. Instead, it must be a "bundle of sensory qualities functioning as signs."¹⁶

A METAPHYSICAL COROLLARY PRIMARY EXPERIENCEAS THE "BRUTE" ENCOUNTER WITH INDEPENDENT REALITY

In itself, the claim that primary experience is "confused" or a "welter" is merely a phenomenological description.¹⁷ It need carry no metaphysical import regarding the "structure of reality." Dewey himself, however, at times seems quite concerned with articulating just such a structure. To ward off any "chemical trace" of subjective idealism, he repeatedly reminds us that immediate experience is a natural product of the interaction of an organism and its environment (see, e.g., "Conduct and Experience," LW 5:220; The Quest for Certainty, LW 4:138).

Nowhere is Dewey's naturalism of organism-environment interaction spelled out more boldly than in Experience and Nature. In the rising and setting sun, in the seasons, in the pulse of life itself, nature reveals a "characteristic rhythmic order" (LW 1:65).

Dewey identifies this naturally occurring rhythmic order with "events," to be distinguished from "objects of experience" that denote interpretations of events:

The nearest approach that occurs in ordinary life to making the distinction is when there occurs some brute dumb shock, which we are constrained to interpret, to assign meaning to, to convert into an "object." (LW 1:245)

Reflection, therefore, takes "events which brutely occur and brutely affect us, [and] convert[s] them into objects by means of inference to their probable consequences" (LW 1:245).

Such passages have convinced some of Dewey's most able followers that primary experience is the point of connection between "independent reality" and "objects of experience," i.e., between "events" that causally produce yet are devoid of human experience and distinctively human interpretations.¹⁸ In short, although all knowing involves interpretation and the overlay of meaning, at some primal level having confronts or at least approaches reality "itself."

For Raymond Boisvert, this implies that "object" is no longer a suitable term for existential entities. For the experienced object must be distinguished from the existing thing and "should no way be confused with it."¹⁹ Nevertheless, if knowing is about something, an adequate ontology must provide "a theory of beings which would provide the generic characteristics of these 'somethings.'"²⁰

According to Boisvert, such a theory is to be founded upon 1) "data," described in oddly Lockean phrasing as "the immediate givens received by the individual"; and 2) Brentano's intentionality, whereby an idea is the "mental inexistence of an object" that nonetheless "includes something as object within itself."²¹

In Sandra Rosenthal's "speculative" pragmatism, the "brute" interface of independent reality with experience is captured by the important notion of "anteception," borrowed from Peirce.²² Rosenthal acknowledges that objects of experience, of what she terms the world of human involvements, are infused with meaning structures established by habit and are not merely "constructed" from brute data. She also admits that a "bare reaction event" is only a component in the ultimate reality she terms "processive concreteness." Nevertheless, she insists that a "blind reacting thing" is a substantive "slab" of this whole, and as such expresses the "brute presence" of reality wholly independent of human involvements.²³

According to Rosenthal, what we would normally consider objects of everyday experience are in fact "abstractions" from this far richer "primordial" or "anteceptive" experience.²⁴ Rooted in fundamental organism-environment interaction, anteception is brute sensation that "thickens" awareness to "the ontological presence of an independently there otherness."²⁵ Whereas Dewey's perceptual "focus," "fringe," and "background" are all possessive of meaning to some degree, Rosenthal's anteceptive experience overflows these "meaning containers."²⁶

BRUTE ENCOUNTER AS "INTENTIONAL TRIPPING"

As suggested earlier, characterizations such as "brute sensation" and "independent otherness" are unfortunate not so much because they are wrong but because they fail to articulate the degree to which Dewey's conception of primary experience undercuts the traditional paradigm of internal versus external, self versus other. Primary experience is, to be sure, 1) inevitably interrupted by shock or confusion, without which inquiry would be unnecessary and in fact impossible. There is also 2) a legitimate, reflective sense where we may quite properly conclude that experience is produced as an organism encounters the external world. The distortion occurs only when either 1) the confusion that terminates or marks a transition from primary experience is identified with such experience itself; or, 2) as we will spell out shortly in the distinction between process and function, organism-environment interaction is taken as a processive causal condition of experience in neglect of the crucial functional corollary that such conditions themselves, like all facts about the world, cannot be posited without appeal to reflective inquiry.

Inasmuch as it tends to reduce Dewey's radical innovation to an "interactive" version of realism,²⁷ the metaphysics of "brute encounter" will be taken up first. To begin with Boisvert's analysis, any hint of an affinity between Dewey and Brentano on intentionality also insinuates the company of Frege, Meinong, Russell, and the logical empiricism of which Brentano was an influential progenitor.²⁸ Whereas Dewey, as even Boisvert allows, was attempting to "avoid realistic and idealistic theories" altogether,²⁹ Brentano's conception of intentionality vir tually self-destructs in an effort to remain faithful to realism. Stung by allegations of subjectivism arising from his appeal to "mental inexistence," Brentano insists that the ground of any intention is always some physical existence and never a mental attitude or disposition. This, of course, precludes all intentionality toward counterfactuals, whether 1) by design, e.g., "the golden mountain does not exist," or 2) by mistake, as in assuming "my uncle is at the station," when in fact he's delayed in traffic. For Brentano, such statements can only be improper uses of language requiring "translation" into something with bona fide existential reference.³⁰

By this criterion, any allegorical or fictional reference is technically nonsense. But must my idea about Vanya's nihilism, for example, really intend ink on a page or electro-chemical traces in the brain of Dostoyevsky? Certainly Dewey didn't think so. For him, as for William James before him, dreams, hallucinations, fictions, even errors, are as "real" as spatio-temporal sticks and stones.³¹ The issue is not between reality and non-reality, but between success and failure when different sorts of beliefs are acted upon. Checks written on the belief there is money in the account will have adverse consequences if in fact you are overdrawn.

But the ultimate defect in Brentano's translation scheme, as illustrated by the example of erroneous reference, is that it ultimately destroys the very principle it attempts to specify. For on his interpretation I cannot rightfully claim to "intend" an external object unless I already possess an incorrigible guarantee of its existence. Nor can I be sure I "intend" a property or quality of an object without a similar guarantee of that property's existence. But if I can only intend what I already incorrigibly possess, what is the purpose of intentionality?

Dewey would undoubtedly regard Brentano's intentional realism, including his translation scheme amounting to physical reductionism, as but another instance of the "intellectualist" fallacy where both the intentional "state of mind" and its physical referent must be known a priori by some allegedly "superior" act of cognition or "God's-eye view." His alternative, not sketched until 1950,³² suggests that intentionality signifies neither a subjective "mental inexistence" nor secured terminal objects alone. Instead, intentionality incorporates elements of both in the context of a hypothetical meaning linked to specific behavior. Here the so-called "mental" or "ideational" component takes the form of the hypothesis "if x then y" where y—an "end in view"—is what would be achieved if x—existential entities employed as data and instruments in coordinated activity—successfully procures y.

Intentionality as hypothesis avoids the intellectualist fallacy because neither the end-in-view nor the data utilized are authentically "known." The end-in-view is not known because it is not yet achieved. The data are not known because they possess settled meanings merely had in this inquiry.³³ This avoids subjectivism because the so-called "mental" component has nothing to do with some mere attitude or state of mind; it literally means or intends something beyond itself. What it intends is not, to be sure, some antecedent thing-in-itself, but a concrete consequence or consummation.

Once Dewey's intentionality is distinguished from Brentano's, a related misconception about the nature of "data" may be avoided. From a traditional perspective, Boisvert's description of data as the "immediate givens received by an individual" suggests a manifold of primitive sense-data somehow "synthesized" into objects by inquiry. But as we saw earlier, the postulate of immediate empiricism explicitly reverses the notion that objects are constructs of data. To the contrary, common sense things and affairs, and not their isolated characteristics, are our true primitives. Given that they are what they are experienced as, they carry their own ontological credentials. To repeat, this in no way disbars us from seeking their causal conditions, components, or qualities; nor does it discourage the conclusion that such determinations unavoidably alter the character of future havings. But it does forcefully remind us that such conditions and components are, to repeat, products of prolonged and often sophisticated reflection. The more we wish to know about the world beyond our feeble flailings the harder we must push the horizons of inquiry. There is no getting "behind" experience, no pretense of primitive data or undifferentiated feeling as a threshold to "independently there otherness."

Recalling that Boisvert initially appealed to Brentano's intentionality and to immediate data to try to determine the general character of "events" beyond the purview of "objects of experience," it should now be clear why neither device offers much promise. Intentionality certainly fails once we replace the notion that the intended "thing" is not some extra-experiential event constitutive of reality "itself," but the coordination of a meaning-hypothesis and an activity designed to confirm or disconfirm it.³⁴ Data certainly fail once we realize these mark not the primitive encounter with "reality" but instrumentalities chosen to procure ends-in-view.³⁵

An appraisal of Rosenthal's more fully developed system also follows along the same lines. To begin with, Dewey would have no difficulty accepting what Rosenthal at times calls the "analytic categorical" sense in which "blind reacting things" may be identified in nature.³⁶ In certain contexts, this sort of specification may serve inquiry well, just as Newton's laws work better than Einstein's in certain contexts, and Euclid's geometry fits better than Reimann's. Dewey would caution us, however, never to forget that specifications such as "blind reacting thing" and "processive concreteness" are products of highly refined reflection. And claims about "reality itself," if permissible at all, call forth even more rarified levels of inquiry.³⁷

This seems just what is neglected in the attempt to force the arcane notion of "anteception" onto primary experience per se. Whatever its value to physics, physiology, or psychology, "pulsating anteception" seems a peculiar and expressly nonempirical way to characterize having. Dewey's phenomenological assessment, that such experience is populated with everyday things and affairs, has far more prima facia plausibility. In my own experience a sense of immediacy-in-connectedness does indeed seem to pervade everyday doings and involvements. But Rosenthal's "ontological presence of an independently there otherness" utterly eludes me on all but those mercifully rare occasions when I've been pressed into reading Heidegger late into the night.

These difficulties merely illustrate what appears to be the underlying problem with Rosenthal's conception of anteceptive experience—that it seems an unwarranted inversion of what Dewey calls focus and fringe. In Dewey's terms, blind reacting things—stubbing a toe, being hit in the face by a softball, suffering a bee sting—present themselves as immediately focal, not as vague presences that overflow our fringe. They require immediate attention, the preparation and execution of some directed course of action.³⁸ Nor is the experience of a bare reaction event "thick" or "rich," as Rosenthal avows. To the contrary, richness is a product of the systematic replacement of such events with objects of knowledge in inquiry. Objects become richer, unfolding what Dewey at times calls their nature or essence, as directed intelligence uncovers new levels of utility and relatedness to other objects. A background is rich, therefore, not because it bumps up against primordial reality, but because it contains a wealth of meanings developed in previous inquiries that are at least provisionally secure in this inquiry.

THE "BLOOMING, BUZZING, CONFUSION" CONFUSION

Once it is evident we primarily encounter a world of things and affairs and not shocks or crude sensations, the phenomenology of perceptual "confusion" requiring cognitive processing or "layering" also may be rectified. Certain physio-psychological states, such as infant perception, might well be regarded as "confused."³⁹ But it is apocryphal to suppose some such primordial state as underlying normal adult perception. Indeed, even James intends his famous "stream of consciousness" metaphor to demonstrate that confusion marks the interruption of a "substantive resting place." Consciousness as a "stream" thus designates not vagueness or confusion but "perchings and flights" whose beginnings and ends are always coherent settled states.⁴⁰

Even from his earliest writings on the topic, Dewey, too, takes great pains to show that primary experience is neither vague nor confused. For him, to suggest that having is a kind of "unconscious" experience would amount to "suicide" for empiricism. Quite to the contrary, primary experience is characterized by "assurance or control," or even "the peace which passes understanding." Primary experience, then, is saturated with content and value and "unconscious," only in the sense that it is not concerned with reflective reference ("The Knowledge Experience Again," MW 3:179).

This conclusion is also confirmed by the postulate of immediate empiricism itself: since immediate presences are "just what they are, it is illegitimate to introduce such notions as obscurity or confusion into them." Confusion and doubt mark the transition from having to diagnosis of the problem. They also can arise when proposed data or instrumentalities are found inadequate or inappropriate ("Logic of Judgments of Practice," MW 8:57)

PRIMARY EXPERIENCE AS SETTLED MEANING

The lesson here is that it is folly to portray primary experience either in terms of a brute encounter with independent reality or as a bundle of sensory qualities "synthesized" into a cognitive object. To be sure, there is something obdurate about everyday experience, but this is better characterized as a settled state of affairs than as an intrusion. The actual perception of disturbance usually marks a transition from primary experience to the inquiry situation resolved in the procurement of a new cognitive object.

It is in this context alone that the distinction between event and object makes sense. Dewey overthrows the whole mind-set of a bare existential event as a thing-in-itself set over against an object of experience as a mental appearance or phenomenon. For him, the important distinction is not between event and object at all, but "between events which are challenges to thought and events which have met the challenge and hence possess meaning." (LW 1:246) In other words, events assert themselves as "brute existences" when connections have been severed and thus require reconstruction into reflective objects—objects returned to primary experiences as existential, to be sure, yet certainly not as "brute."

Hence although is clear that an event is spatio-temporally antecedent to an object, the fact that inquiry is a circle reminds us of a legitimate sense in which it is a consequent as well:

What is signified [by primary experience] is that there is a direct possession and enjoyment of meanings to be had in that experience of objects which issues from reflective knowledge. (The Quest for Certainty, LW 3:177)

Here Dewey is making two crucial points:

1) The pattern of inquiry is a circle exhibiting closure, for in addition to the movement from having to knowing, each thing directly had "issues from" something previously known. Stated otherwise, the immediacy of primary experience is mediated by its relation to an established pattern of doubt-resolution activity.

2) Our "direct possession and enjoyment" is of things-with-meanings, not of brute shocks or "raw feels," though these meanings are clearly noncognitive or "settled" and, as such, no longer part of the foreground of cognitive objects of reflective inquiry. For once a problem is resolved, and knowing returns to having, a cognitive solution becomes a settled meaning—a habituated set of relations no longer requiring conscious attention. We no longer have to think about riding the bike, stopping for the red light, booting up the computer. These, in a simple and straight-forward sense, are natural existences, things, or events.⁴¹

Once we understand that Dewey's true ontological primitives are such directly possessed havings it becomes possible to grasp the boldness and originality of his reaction against both traditional philosophy and the "problem of knowledge" it generates. Dewey rejects not only the ontological priority of a passive "correspondence" between spectator and object of knowledge, but that of an interactive naturalism of organism and environment as well.⁴²

Yet the total repudiation of metaphysical realism conveyed in the redescription of objects as cognitive meanings and events as settled meanings has frequently provoked the opposite charge of idealism: Isn't Dewey, after all, "making everything meaning?"⁴³

To reply to this, we must again revisit the postulate of immediate empiricism. Dewey never tires of reminding us that having is not an experience of experience, but an experience of things. Nor is experience of meaning, but of things with meaning. What holds for "independent reality" holds for the conception of meaning as well—both are products of reflective inquiry. Although we speak of, e.g., hypothetical meanings and settled meanings, in its "purest" sense, meaning is synonymous with the movement of inquiry itself: the means-consequence activity denoting the successful consummation of an end-in-view.⁴⁴ Hence the subject matters addressed by the conception of meaning are logical, epistemic, and semiotic, and not to be confused with physical processes or causal explanations.

Here an important distinction must be made between Dewey and Peirce, who gratuitously cast perfectly serviceable logical categories across the firmament of the physical cosmos.⁴⁵ The same holds true for James, who even lured an unwitting Russell into flirting with the notion of a "neutral stuff."⁴⁶ To the contrary, Dewey consistently avoids such pitfalls Whitehead pegged as "category mistakes."

FUNCTION AND PROCESS

Despite his acuity in identifying the shortcomings of his predecessors, it was not until late in his career that Dewey himself began to develop the distinction between function and process that distinguishes an ontology of existence and meaning from causal or physical accounts of their development and employment.⁴⁷ Function discriminates the general patterns of existences as they are encountered in inquiry—the circle of primary and reflective experience encompassing having-knowing-having. Process is a core conception of a pragmatic theory of nature, especially crucial in establishing the continuity between comparatively rare and highly specialized human problem-solvings and more primitive "pushes and pulls" generic to all existences. It is here that an analysis of organism-environment interaction is warranted as a causal account of the origination and development from "significant gestures" to a sophisticated system of symbols. Circles abound here as well: an organism doesn't merely "react" to an environmental stimulus. Instead, what counts as a stimulus, and thus helps initiate an appropriate response, depends upon patterns habituated in previous organism-environment interactions.⁴⁸ Nor is it possible to develop a conception of a "self without an empathetic understanding of an "other."⁴⁹

Yet Dewey's ultimate "circle," approached only in his final "transactional" phase, is that of process and function. As the idea of a circle suggests, each half presupposes yet reinforces the other. From a transactional perspective we readily affirm, on the one hand, that inquiry is the causal and historic outcome of natural processes; on the other hand, however, we insist that process is always delineated within a functional context of inquiry, without which no claim to "independence" or "existence" can be coherent. Dewey's naturalistic legacy has spawned an able and enthusiastic defense of his philosophy of process. At this time, however, both the task of developing his correlative conception of function and that of employing it to close the transactional circle remains tantalizingly incomplete.

NOTES

¹ Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Dewey's writings are from John Dewey, The Early Works, 1884-1898 (EW); The Middle Works, 1899-1924 (MW); and The Later Works, 1925-1953 (LW), ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1990). Hereafter references to EW, MW, and LW will appear in the text.

² Even in his early writings on pragmatism, Dewey identifies the "intellectualist" fallacy underlying traditional empiricism, idealism, and realism. 1) Empiricism (and presentative realism, see note 7 below) attempts a correspondence between ideas and things, yet renders any sense of "agreement with reality" unintelligible by insisting that things are exclusively known through ideas. 2) Idealism absurdly assumes that the world itself has the characteristics of ideas (or hypotheses) that are in fact instrumentalities for change in the world. 3) Direct realism, in making truth a property of things or events apart from the context of their discovery, unwittingly joins intellectual rationalism in conceiving of the natural universe as a truth system. Dewey thus boldly throws his philosophical rivals into reductio ad absurdum by declaring that "the non-pragmatist, if logical, thus appears as either a pure subjectivist or an objective absolutist" ("The Dilemma of the Intellectualist Theory of Truth," MW 4:76-77).

³ The well known articulation of the pattern of inquiry in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, LW 12:109-22, is clearly foreshadowed as early as the Studies in Logical Theory (1902), where Dewey develops the notion of "the movement of experience in its reconstructive transition" (MW 2:360).

⁴ "The Dilemma of the Intellectualist Theory of Truth," noted above (n. 2), is representative of Dewey's overriding concern for correcting misconceptions about the nature and scope of knowledge in the period prior to 1916. Despite their surface disagreements, realism and idealism alike regard mere perception as knowledge and thus falsely conclude that knowledge is a "ubiquitous" relation ("Brief Studies in Realism II," MW 6:111-12). Hence realists such as F. J. E. Woodbridge, who held that knowledge is a "privileged" kind of experience ("The Knowledge Experience and its Relations," MW 3:73), and James Evander McGilvary, who equated knowledge with consciousness ("A Reply to Professor MeGilvary's Questions," MW 4:74), were equal to any idealist in their intellectualism.

⁵ The postulate of immediate empiricism supports Dewey's specific denial of the charge, leveled by critics such as Arthur Kenyon Rogers, William Ernest Hocking, and Morris Cohen, that he is concerned only with the "actual advance of knowledge" rather than with a "faithful report of reality" ("Realism Without Monism and Dualism," MW 13:59). Dewey is in fact building upon Kant's famous thesis that objects must conform to mind—a reversal of traditional empiricism's claim that mind consists of impressions and associations acquired from external reality. Yet Dewey conceives of "mind" and "experience" in a wholly nonsubjectivistic sense: "mind" does not primarily reside within "someone's head." Instead, it encompasses 1 ) a conscious foreground of things, data, and instrumentalities needed to resolve problematic situations; 2) a rich background of things and events with settled meaning ultimately constitutive of culture, and 3) problem-solving activities by which the former may be reconciled with the latter. My essay, "The Kantian Ground of Dewey's Functional Self," Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 28 (1992): 127-44, explores the affinity between the young Dewey and an ontology he ascribed to a "liberated" Kant. For Dewey's mature conception of mind, experience, and culture, see Experience and Nature (LW 1:365-92; 230-36).

⁶ To the contrary, this expresses the epistemological monism of direct realism. Ralph Barton Perry, for example, held that "physical nature" can be "directly present in consciousness" ("The Program and Platform of Six Realists," MW 6:477), a claim not illuminated by the assertion that "one knows truly because one's knowledge merges into its object." See "A Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge," reprinted in S. Morgenbesser, ed., Dewey and His Critics (New York: Journal of Philosophy, 1977), p. 221.

⁷ "Presentative" or "critical" realists rejected the epistemological monism of direct realism for an epistemological dualism positing a "correspondence" between percept and object perceived. Beyond this, however, they shared no common "program and platform" about either the nature of this correspondence or the underlying reality represented. George Santayana embraced metaphysical materialism; Bertrand Russell, Durant Drake, and Roy Wood Sellars promoted "scientific" objects and relations; Arthur O. Lovejoy and James Bisset Pratt remained metaphysical as well as epistemological dualists in positing an ineradicable psychic element without which knowledge of the physical world is impossible.

⁸ In the introduction to the Essays in Experimental Logic (MW 10:322-23), Dewey first develops the conception of primary experience in terms of 1) internal relatedness and organization and 2) focus and context, important themes later developed in Experience and Nature.

⁹ See Kenneth Chandler, "Dewey's Phenomenology of Knowledge," Philosophy Today 21 (1977): 43-55. In this exceptional essay, Chandler both recognizes primary experience as the "alpha and omega of all theorizing" (p. 51 ) and suggestively links it to Husserl's life-world. Heidegger's Verhandensein, and Dewey's own Hegelian roots.

¹⁰ In recent years Dewey scholarship has begun to emerge from an almost exclusive focus upon the naturalism of Experience and Nature promoted by influential successors such as John Herman Randall, Jr., Sidney Hook, and Ernest Nagel. Ralph Sleeper, who for years accepted Randall's dismissal of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) as a "geriatric whim," has recently praised this as the best statement of Dewey's "first philosophy" ("Commentary on 'Epistemology as Hypothesis,'" Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 26 (1990): 437-38. See also The Necessity of Pragmatism [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986], pp. 5-10; 66-71; 90-92; 134-67). I hope future scholarship will come to acknowledge the Logic as merely the headwaters of a remarkable project, undertaken with Arthur F. Bentley, to integrate logical method, metaphysical function, and naturalistic process within an overarching principle of transaction.

¹¹ Not unlike Dewey, Putnam also replaces the "external" affirmation of things-in-themselves with the "internal" assertion that objects "fit" within conceptual schemes, with practices and discovered utilities that eliminate the paradoxes of standard correspondence theories. See, e.g., Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 49-54.

¹² The point here is not to challenge conceptions such as, e.g., the "indefinability of yellow," but to bring attention to the fact that such characterizations are not "building blocks" of everyday experience, but products of sophisticated reflection. For recent empirical documentation of Dewey's claim that so-called "simple" sensations of color in fact require discrimination within a context, see C. L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), pp. 41-43; see also Putnam, pp. 70-71.

¹³ James Gouinlock, John Dewey's Philosophy of Value (New York: Humanities Press, 1972), p. 29.

¹⁴ Gouinlock, p. 25; S. Morris Eames, "Primary Experience in the Philosophy of John Dewey," Monist 48 (1964): 409. In fairness, Gouinlock also provides a very apt characterization of primary experience in the example of a swimmer moving effortlessly through the water (p. 28). My intent is merely to note that such experiences are neither "confused" nor a "jumble."

¹⁵ Eames, pp. 408, 416.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 410.

¹⁷ "Phenemological" in the sense of what "appears" or "shows itself."

¹⁸ For a recent example, see Barry E. Duff, "'Event' in Dewey's Philosophy," Educational Theory 40 (1990). Duff finds it necessary to distinguish nonconscious "bare" events from events that express "ordinary happenings" in human experience (p. 466).

¹⁹ Raymond D. Boisvert, Dewey's Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), p. 86.

²⁰Ibid., p. 85.

²¹Ibid., pp. 86 n. 14, 96.

²² Sandra B. Rosenthal, Speculative Pragmatism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 45.

²³ Rosenthal offers the caveat that a "bare reaction event" is an "analytic distinction" (p. 126). This initially suggests that Rosenthal is echoing Dewey's insistence that "bare reaction event," like the "indefinability of yellow," is a product of reflection rather than an ontological primitive. But she is clearly intending a different, physicalistic account of such events in characterizing them as "slabs" of the "processive concreteness" that "comprises the natural universe."

At this point a profound gulf appears to open between Dewey's postulate of immediate experience and Rosenthal's speculative pragmatism. For Dewey, the objects and affairs of ordinary experience are the true "ontological primitives:" all "underlying" processes or reaction-events, though equally real, are products of sophisticated reflection. Rosenthal, to the contrary, restricts ordinary experience to the "world" of human involvements that must be set apart from the truly ontological processes of the independent "universe." In this scheme,

the general categorical features of the natural universe independent of man's activities will provide the categorical features for understanding man and the emergent features of [a human-determined] world" (p. 110; also see pp. 156-60, 170).

Dewey would likely regard this as but another attempted "correspondence" ultimately resulting in a dualism between "human world" and "in-itself universe." The ontological primacy of primary experience, to the contrary, explains how scientific experience (including causal accounts of the emergence of intelligence and culture within nature) grows out of the common ground of primary experience without recourse to a futile "correspondence."

²⁴ Rosenthal, p. 61.

²⁵Ibid., p. 68.

²⁶Ibid., p. 42.

²⁷ It is universally known that Dewey opposed the "Spectator Theory of Knowledge" whereby the external world is held as passively conveyed to or impressed upon the mind. But we must equally guard against the complacent view that the problem is overcome by replacing the passive model with an "interactive" one that still clings to the notion of distinct organisms and environments that "interact." For Dewey and Bentley's usurpation of external interaction by internal transaction ("external" and "internal" in Putnam's sense, see n. 11), see Knowing and the Known, LW 16:67-68.

²⁸ There is room for doubt about the degree of the affinity Boisvert perceives between Dewey and Brentano. In one place (p. 85) Boisvert says Dewey's "intentionality" is a term borrowed from another tradition, suggesting that the affinity may be slight. Elsewhere, however, he concludes a detailed statement of Brentano's position by citing Victor Kestenbaum's monograph "comparing Dewey to the phenomenological tradition" (p. 96 n. 14). Unfortunately Boisvert fails to mention that Kestenbaum's comparison (The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1977], p. 1) is to Merleau Ponty's "internal" intentionality, and not to Brentano's "external" version.

²⁹ Boisvert, p. 86.

³⁰ For an elaboration of this exchange between Brentano and Meinong, see Dagfinn Follesdal's comments in Hubert L. Dreyfuss, ed., Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 32-34.

³¹ In The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 925, James recounts Kant's teaching that the mere affirmation of something's reality of existence adds no qualitative or quantitative content to it: one hundred real dollars is not a greater sum than one hundred imagined dollars. What we regard as unreal, therefore, are those things perceived to be irrelevant to a given context (p. 920). Within the context of my dream, for example, the winged horse is real: it has no reality, however, in my waking world of physical objects (p. 919). In "Beliefs and Existences" Dewey affirms the point that "the radical empiricist, the humanist, the pragmatist . . . believes not in fewer but in more 'realities' than the orthodox philosophers allow" (MW 3:94-96). But he avoids James' subjectivistic tone by insisting that objectively achieved consequences, and not merely personal perceptions of relevance or interest, are the ultimate determinants of operative realities.

³² In fact, Dewey's last two letters to Bentley, written as his health began to fail in late 1951, are about intentionality, see S. Ratner and J. Altman, eds., John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964), pp. 644-46.

³³ This is not to deny, of course, that data possess settled meanings on this occasion inasmuch as they themselves have been objects of knowledge on prior occasions, nor that the selection of appropriate data may involve their cognitive evaluation.

³⁴ This strongly suggests that Dewey's conception of intentionality is much closer to Husserl's than Brentano's. Husserl, aware of the difficulties of an intentional stance toward in-itself reality, reconstrued intentionality as directed to a noema. According to this thesis, the directedness of intentionality is accounted for not by the external object alone but by the very structure of experience. This structure, or noema, is a hypothetical orientation that coordinates our activities "as if there were an external object. Dewey's late description of intentionality as the ideational hypothetical seems quite similar to the "as if of Husserl's noema. Nevertheless, whereas the status of the external object "itself" remains problematic for Husserl and invites the possibility of subjectivism, for Dewey both the ideational plan or hypothesis and its object or consummation are "open and above board" at all times.

³⁵ For Dewey's insistence that a datum is a product of reflective experience, see "Realism Without Monism or Dualism II," (MW 13:57); also see "In Reply to Some Criticisms," (LW 5:211).

³⁶ In Knowing and the Known (LW 16:68) Dewey and Bentley call this "specialized interactional treatment within the wider transactional presentation." For Rosenthal's characterization, see note 23.

³⁷ Dewey, though well known for eschewing reality überhaupt for specific encountered reals, nevertheless reserved a philosophical niche for what he called "infinity" words such as being, reality, and universe—words that are "transcendental, noumenal, a priori . . . [with] emotional, esthetic, or mystical impact but no definite meaning." Any immediacy, had or known, is what it is because of a mediating network of relations that "shades off into an indefinite background. Similar to Kant's regulative ideas, infinity words provide direction toward achievable ends while preserving the wonder and open-endedness of the procurement of future consummations. For a development of this little-known dimension of Dewey's thought, and the obscure yet colorful character who helped inspire it, see Dewey's "First Introduction to Universe, by Scudder Klyce" (MW 13:412-19).

³⁸ In Experience and Nature, Dewey specifies focus as the perception of immanent need or urgency, fringe as that recently requiring or soon to be in need of attention, and background as the remote field of stable meanings that "may be dependably counted upon in dealing with immanent need" (LW 1:235-36).

³⁹ But even here a cautionary word is in order. In the past two decades the trend in infant and child psychology has reversed the model of, as Susan Caey phrases it, Piaget's "confused child." ("Cognitive Development in Childhood," in Steven Schiffer and Susan Steele, eds., Cognition and Representation [Boulder: Westview Press, 1988], p. 131.) Lila Ghent Braine, "Early Stages in the Perception of Orientation," in Cognitive Growth and Development: Essays in Memory of Herbert G. Buch (New York: Brunner Mazel, 1979), pp. 105-06, 131, observes that the "orientation errors" once thought to accompany the development of motor skills are in fact remarkably advanced "orientation judgments" limited, however, by insufficient experience and habituation. Note also Hardin (p. 41), who documents the surprising finding that infant color discrimination is remarkably similar to that of adults.

⁴⁰ James, Principles, vol. 1, p. 290. See also p. 268, where he specifically repudiates the notion of a "manifold of sense" requiring synthesis.

⁴¹ In Experience and Nature Dewey expressly captures the reciprocal relation between objects and events in his assertion that a "bare existence event" is not something that precedes inquiry, but something so settled or habituated that its connection to a problem-solving activity has been "lost":

A solution ceases to be a solution and becomes a bare incident of existence when its antecedent generating conditions of doubt, ambiguity, and search are lost from its context. (LW 1:58)

Here "lost" clearly conveys the sense of being "resolved" or "rendered innocuous" rather than "forfeited." In early childhood, for example, we habituate the ability to walk to the degree that it soon becomes a bare existential event requiring little or no reflection. Should this habituation become truly "lost," say through accident or stroke, we would have to reestablish walking as an objective of inquiry.

⁴² For a representative example of the latter, see Arthur O. Lovejoy's "Time, Meaning, and Transcendence," MW 15:360. Lovejoy eschews the passive Spectator Theory of Knowledge for a vigorous interaction where

all our knowledge (beyond bare sensory content) is a kind of foreign commerce, a trafficking with lands in which the traffickers do not live, but from which they may continually bring home good store of merchandise to enrich the here-and-now.

Such "trafficking" organisms need only 1) the ability to represent things in the external environment as "present as absent" and 2) the belief "that the characters which as present they bear are the same characters which they bear as absent" ("Pragmatism Versus the Pragmatist," MW 13:474).

Dewey's rejoinder attacks the notion that some "psychological percept" grasps or points to "some entity immediate or complete in itself" ("Realism Without Monism or Dualism II," MW 13:52). For this psychical experience of "presentas-absent" constitutes the knowing experience that somehow—magically or mysteriously, but in any case transcendent of experience itself—"hooks up" or "converses" with "ready-made" existences. In fact, however, what is delivered is not a real existence but only its psychic surrogate ("Some Comments on Philosophical Discussion," MW 15:40).

⁴³ See Boisvert (p. 56) for an impressive documentation of accusations of idealism against Dewey raised, among others, by Charles Bakewell, George Santayana, Benedetto Croce, Bertrand Russell, Stephen Pepper, and Evander Bradley McGilvary.

⁴⁴ Despite the charge that Dewey's use of "meaning" is ambiguous or equivocal (see, e.g., Everett W. Hall, "Some Meanings of Meaning in Dewey's Experience and Nature," LW 3:401-14), he is in fact both clear and consistent regarding its "primary sense." From as early as "The Control of Ideas by Facts II" (1907), this sense denotes the active doing that brings an end-in-view "into" a hypothesis in literally "fulfilling its own meaning" (see Morgenbesser, p. 199). This is reiterated in Experience and Nature, where meaning "is primarily a property of behavior, and secondarily a property of objects" (LW 1:141).

⁴⁵ Dewey's admiration for Peirce expanded with his own renewed interest in logic and semiotics in the period following Experience and Nature. For Dewey, Peirce was a master of the phenological/logical analysis of experience: "the matter of experience as experienced" ("Peirce's Theory of Quality," LW 11: 86), and pioneered a realism where

it is only the outcome of persistent and joint inquiry which enables us to give intelligible meaning in the concrete to the expression "characters independent of what anybody may think them to be. ("The Pragmatism of Peirce," MW 10:77)

Nevertheless, by hyperinflating qualities encountered in the phenomenological analysis of inquiry—feeling, doubt, freedom, striving—into physical properties of the cosmos itself, Peirce succumbed to an unfortunate "pan-psychic metaphysics" (LW 11:86). In terms to be introduced shortly, we might say Peirce confused function with process, and one wonders whether a similar inference could not be drawn to Rosenthal's "processive concreteness."

⁴⁶ Dewey's foreshadowing of his later distinction between function and process is even more pronounced in the 1917 essay "The Concept of the Neutral in Recent Epistemology." Here he carefully distinguishes a beneficial logical sense, where certain distinctions such as subjective/objective, physical/mental, are suspended for certain phases of inquiry, from a harmful metaphysical sense suggesting some "neutral stuff in nature that is the object of "pure experience." James, says Dewey, unfortunately fails to separate these two senses of "neutrality" (MW 10:49-51).

⁴⁷ Although a prototype of the function/process distinction occurs in Experience and Nature (LW 1:139) with an acknowledged difference between a logical sense of relation and one constituted by physical "pushes and pulls," the first clear statement occurs in The Quest for Certainty (LW 4:130), where Dewey uses the example of a machine to distinguish the constant function of its operation from the particular spatio-temporal variations that comprise its processes.

⁴⁸ Dewey's first and masterfully prescient articulation of this theme, enveloped consistently for more than five decades, is the "reflex circuit" of "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896), EW 5:96-109.

⁴⁹ Dewey's conception of "self is indebted to his colleague and former student George Herbert Mead. See Patrick L. Bougeois and Sandra B. Rosenthal, "Role Taking, Corporeal Intersubjectivity, and Self: Mead and Merleau Ponty," Philosophy Today 34 (1990): 117-28, for an enlightening discussion of Mead's theory of empathetic role-taking in the development of a sense of self compared to Merleau-Ponty's "primordial generality" of self and other.