[In the following review of Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Werkmeister declares Dewey's work as a philosophical landmark.]

The publication of [Logic: The Theory of Inquiry] is most welcome and for at least two reasons. In the first place, it represents the final formulation of basic ideas which Dewey first stated some forty years ago in his Studies in Logical Theory and which he subsequently developed and modified somewhat in his Essays in Experimental Logic and the more recent little book on How We Think. In other words, the new book is important as a landmark in the development of the philosophical system of one of America's most influential thinkers; and it will be interesting to the future historians of philosophy who are concerned with the unfolding and the growth of a philosophical idea. But, beyond this systematic importance, Dewey's Logic has a significance also for philosophical discussions at large, notably at a time when the "new" logic is in danger of losing itself in an abstract and intrinsically "irrational" formalism.

Numerous difficulties and confusions of contemporary logic, Dewey believes, are due to "the attempt to retain Aristotelian logical forms after their existential foundations have been repudiated" (p. 94). For, after all, Aristotelian logic was but a more or less adequate expression of "the conditions of science and culture which provided its background and substantial material" (p. 82). The need, therefore, is "for logic to do for present science and culture what Aristotle did for the science and culture of his time" (p. 95). This theme as such, of course, is not a new one. It inspired Bacon no less than Bosanquet and Mill. But Dewey's solution of the problem deserves special attention, for he deals with the specific problems of logic that have only recently (and largely since the development of symbolic logic) been recognized as problems; and he deals with them from a unique point of view.

Dewey's theory, "in summary form," is that "all logical forms (with their characteristic properties) arise within the operation of inquiry and are concerned with control of inquiry so that it may yield warranted assertions" (pp. 3-4). Now, inquiry begins with the "institution of a problem" ("To see that a situation requires inquiry is the initial step in inquiry" [p. 107]) and ends with a "warranted assertion" or judgment ("Judgment may be identified as the settled outcome of inquiry" [p. 120]). The operational process leading from the former to the latter constitutes the "whole of the inquiry," and this "whole" determines all logical forms and conditions all logically relevant matters.

Thus, "to be a datum is to have a special function in control of the subject-matter of inquiry" (p. 124). The "essential" is now readily distinguishable from the "accidental," for "anything is 'essential' which is indispensable in a given inquiry and anything is 'accidental' which is superfluous" (p. 138). "Propositions are the instruments by which provisional conclusions of preparatory inquiries are summed up, recorded and retained for subsequent use. In this way they function as effective means, material and procedural, in the conduct of inquiry, till the latter institutes subject-matter so unified in significance as to be warrantably assertible" (p. 311). And it is interesting to see how Dewey interprets the Aristotelian "square of opposites" from the "functional" point of view (pp. 190ff.). Especially his conceptions of "contrariety" and of "contradictories" deserve attention. The upshot of it all is that "only if propositions are related to each other as phases in the divisions of labor in the conduct of inquiry, can they be members of a coherent logical system" (p. 310).

From Dewey's "functional" point of view the "syllogism" is not in itself the procedural basis of an inquiry but "a generalized formula for logical conditions that must be satisfied if final judgment is to be grounded" (p. 323). It "means that a conclusion is logically warranted, and is only so warranted, when the operations involved in discourse and in experimental observation of existences, converge to yield a completely resolved determinate situation" (p. 324). "Major premise" (as "procedural propositions") and "minor premise" (as "existential propositions") are both indispensable if there is to be grounded judgment.

Of still greater importance is Dewey's reinterpretation of the traditional "laws of thought": identity, contradiction, and the excluded middle. "The Aristotelian interpretation of them as ontological," Dewey maintains, "and any interpretation which regards them as inherent relational properties of given propositions, must certainly be abandoned. But as formulations of formal conditions (conjunctive-disjunctive) to be satisfied, they are valid as directive principles, as regulative limiting ideals of inquiry" (p. 346). They are "operationally a priori with respect to further inquiry" (p. 14). This, of course, raises the whole question of "rationality," and, concerning it, Dewey says: "Rationality is an affair of the relation of means and consequences, not of fixed first principles as ultimate premises" (p. 9). And "it is reasonable to search for and select the means that will, with the maximum probability, yield the consequences which are intended" (p. 10). Finally, "the principles state habits operative in every inference that tend to yield conclusions that are stable and productive in further inquiries. . . . The validity of the principles is determined by the coherency of the consequences produced by the habits they articulate" (p. 13).

It seems to me that right here we have before us the weakest point in Dewey's "theory of inquiry"—and it is also a fundamental issue; for does not the relation of "means and consequences" necessarily "transcend" all inquiry in the sense of being ontological rather than purely procedural? And do not the "principles" even as "habits" presuppose a "reasonableness" and interdependence of realities, if you please, which is logically as well as existentially prior to all inquiry? Is it not "reasonable to search for . . . the means that will . . . yield the consequences" only because the "relation of means and consequences" is ontological rather than logical?

These questions are not satisfactorily answered by Dewey's contention that "logical forms accrue to subjectmatter in virtue of subjection of the latter in inquiry to the conditions determined by its end" (p. 372), for the possibility of such "subjection" may itself become an issue. But there is at least a suggestion of the required ontology in Dewey's statement that "the purpose for which inquiry is carried on cannot be fulfilled on a wide scale or in an ordered way except as its materials are subject to conditions which impose formal properties on the materials. When these conditions are abstracted they form the subject-matter of logic. But they do not thereby cease to be, in their own reference and function, formsof-subject-matter" (p. 374). I heartily agree with these statements; but I wonder if they do not contradict the previous contention that principles are but "habits operative in every inference."

In his polemic against Aristotle, Dewey makes much of the fact that "the development of modern science destroyed the conceptions of fixed species, defined by fixed essences, upon which the Aristotelian logic rested." This destruction affected ... the Classic conceptions of universal and particular, whole and part, and the scheme of their relationships with one another. Modern logic, however, attempted to retain the scheme but with the understanding that it is purely formal, devoid of ontological import" (p. 182). And it is Dewey's contention that this very fact is the chief source of trouble in contemporary logical theory. I think Dewey is right in his interpretation of the trend of modern science. Everywhere "thing-concepts" have been, or are being, replaced by "functional" concepts; and present-day logic must adjust itself accordingly. Dewey suggests a reinterpretation that may be required in particular with respect to the notions of "substance" ("'Substance' represents . . . a logical, not an ontological, determination" [p. 128]), and of "causality" ("the category causation is logical; ... it is a functional means of regulating existential inquiry, not ontological" [p. 462]). And one wonders if such an interpretation does not raise anew—and in a somewhat new form—some of the epistemological problems confronting the neo-Kantians (cf. Cassirer's Substance and Function)—and this despite Dewey's belief that the "problems" of epistemology "disappear when the characteristic features of scientific subject-matter are interpreted from the standpoint of satisfaction of logical conditions set by the requirements of controlled inquiry" (p. 465).

All philosophers who can see in logic only the formal aspects of intra- and interpropositional relations will be greatly disappointed by Dewey's book; and one must not expect to find in it detailed discussions of "symbolic" logic or the more recent development of this logical line. But for all who are interested in the broader and genuinely philosophical aspects of logic Dewey's book will be stimulating and valuable.