This paper addresses the issue of the relationship between technology and art in human existence from a Deweyan perspective. The central idea is that Dewey’s aesthetics is a useful instrument for critically reflecting on that issue. Starting from the tenets of Dewey’s aesthetics, the discourse focuses on “imaginative recovery” and “inhabiting,” two key notions for interpreting and managing technology from an aesthetic perspective. The article seeks an answer to the question of whether new technology (particularly ai) is a useful tool (...) or not in art and, ultimately, for the fulfilment of human life. (shrink)

This essay seeks to clarify where things stand between Richard Bernstein and Richard Rorty, given the fact that both drew their philosophical inspiration in part from the work of John Dewey. Is Bernstein right that the disagreements over Dewey’s legacy are significant enough to matter? Is Rorty’s restrained and infrequent responses to Bernstein’s criticism’s an indication that any disagreements between them, from Rorty’s vantage point at least, make no difference that makes a difference? Or Is it the case, ultimately, that (...) Bernstein is just another in a long line of what Bjorn Ramberg has termed the “demonizing” critics of Rorty? (shrink)

The 4.0 industrial revolution, driven by advancements in artificial intelligence, demands that people innovate their thinking, acquire new experiences, and adapt to emerging professions. Consequently, countries are actively reforming their education systems to cultivate creative capacities and foster adaptability to innovation. Educational programs must provide learners with new professional experiences and ensure equal access to education. John Dewey articulated these principles in his educational philosophy. Today, Dewey’s philosophy and pragmatism continue to influence global education profoundly. However, the international context requires (...) countries to develop educational philosophies aligned with worldwide educational goals. This article employs the dialectical materialist method, incorporating comprehensive and historical principles, to argue that education should focus on learners’ experiences and foster democratic education. The study emphasizes Dewey’s focus on practical applications, student engagement, and social responsibility as vital for educational reform. In Vietnam, educational reform based on Dewey’s principles is essential for improving educational quality, meeting labor market demands, and promoting well-rounded individuals who can contribute to socioeconomic progress. The study suggests that integrating Dewey’s educational philosophy can significantly enhance Vietnam’s efforts to modernize its education system and address contemporary needs. (shrink)

This paper explores indirect verification in pragmatism and its impact on historical inquiry. Indirect verification, as articulated by William James and John Dewey, addresses the challenge of historical knowledge within pragmatism by confirming ideas about past events based on the consistency among their present effects, the ideas themselves, and anticipated future consequences. The paper identifies and discusses key challenges related to indirect verification, such as the ‘coherence verification fallacy,’ the ‘dilemma of interpreting historical consequences,’ and the issue of ‘methodological indirect (...) verification.’ It argues that indirect verification does not substantiate historical interpretations but instead illuminates the nature of historical inquiry. Historical inquiry, it contends, operates as a parasitic epistemic practice, relying on the relationship between the present effects of the past, anticipated future developments, and everyday problem-solving practices. (shrink)

In this article my aim is to see Karl Llewellyn as a member of the central pragmatist canon. Further, I see Llewellyn not only as a “Legal Pragmatist,” but also as developing a full pragmatist philosophy of law. Reading Llewellyn as a pragmatist would greatly add to an extended understanding of early pragmatism. This would show a strong influence of pragmatic thought within the legal academy.. Second, adding Llewellyn to the pragmatist canon would help show pragmatism in action in the (...) world. Llewellyn might be the central theoretical pragmatist of modern US Law. If, as I believe, pragmatism is a philosophy that depends upon an underlying experimentalist attitude towards philosophizing, given his great influence on US law adding Llewellyn brings a large amount of experimentalist data to the tradition. (shrink)

Sociocultural diversity is notoriously challenging to study. Sociocultural viability theory has proven influential in research and practice positing that 1) consists of four primary ways of perceiving, organizing and justifying social relations; and, 2) complex problems are likely to be solved by harnessing all ways of life, whereas attempts based on fewer are doomed to fail. However, the theory lacks elaboration of its philosophical underpinnings, leading to misunderstandings and confusion. This paper offers a pragmatic account of the theory. Based on (...) a philosophical ontology, the argument exposes the theory’s pragmatic wagers (mind-world monism and phenomenalism). Moreover, it also shows how the theory’s overall project can be undergirded by pragmatism’s focus on practical consequences, provisionality of knowledge, plurality, and public participation. (shrink)

Chiffi and Pietarinen (2020) argue that the knowability paradox disappears if we adopt the concept of conjecturability instead of knowability within the framework of Peirce’s theory of science. They make two main claims: first, conjecturability plays an all-important role in scientific inquiry and it explains better scientific progress than knowability; second, conjecturability does not produce aparadox akin to the knowability paradox. However, based on our reading of Peirce, we contend that knowability plays an important role in scientific inquiry and progress. (...) Moreover, we show that there is a conjecturability paradox with an analogous conclusion as the knowability paradox, which is rooted in their modal analysis of conjecturability. (shrink)

As public concern over governmental inaction on climate change grows, it becomes vital to answer the Question of Legitimate Means: what actions can political actors legitimately take to pursue their goals? This paper argues that a particular understanding of the political realm, which I will call the spectator’s view on politics, prevents theorists from confronting this question. Using the philosophy of Noortje Marres, I will demonstrate that the spectator’s view posits a transcendental goal to politics, subordinating any means to the (...) realization of this goal. I will then contrast this view with the political philosophy of John Dewey. Dewey’s approach not only makes it possible to answer the Question of Legitimate Means, but highlights its importance to any democratic project. (shrink)

This paper examines the common notion of “resonant experience”—an experience marked by extraordinarily rich, powerful, or deep meaning—as a manifestation of the relational nature of meaning and value. I propose to define resonance as an enhanced feeling of the relational context in which experience is determined, and I then proceed to show how this concept of resonance can be used to understand the experience of enriched meaning and value in art. This exploration of resonance is inspired by William James’s claim (...) that meaning is based in the direct experience of relation, together with John Dewey’s claim that basic features of experience are intensified in the enjoyment of art. It also draws from the relational framework of ecological psychology, and is intended to contribute to that framework from a philosophical standpoint. (shrink)

Are current digital technologies supporting democracy? Answering that question depends, among other things, on what is meant by democracy. This article mobilizes a communicative conception of democracy. While it is generally accepted that communication is important for democracy, there are directions in democracy theory that understand communication as not merely instrumental but as central to what democracy is and should be. Inspired by Dewey, Habermas, and Young, this paper articulates a conception of democracy as communication. It is then argued that (...) this “deep-communicative” ideal of democracy, together with the usual ethical and epistemic norms of communication as sketched by O’Neill, offer a tentative normative framework for evaluating digital technologies in relation to democracy. (shrink)

This study extends on work investigating the increased application of mixed methods research in prehospital care. The complexity and diversity of the prehospital environment warrants flexibility and applicability to guide the research process, yet little attention has focused on the theoretical lens used in prehospital research when using mixed methods research. Pragmatism’s characteristics of human inquiry, problem solving, and action align with a clinical reasoning approach, supporting the prehospital researchers epistemological understanding of the world. Through further exploration of this alignment, (...) this article proposes pragmatism as a compatible theoretical lens for mixed methods in prehospital research. (shrink)

Jane Addams takes sympathetic knowledge as a key concept for her moral and political philosophy. However, regarding the classical objections to sympathy as a foundation for morality and democracy, some theoretical remarks are still needed. In this article we aim at showing that the main problem is not due to the absence but to the qualitative import of sympathy in democratic societies. To achieve this goal, we firstly consider Addams’ idea of sympathetic knowledge in light of the influence of social (...) evolutionary theorizing and her distinction between individual and social ethics. Secondly, we analyze the 1894 Pullman strike and the “newsboy” case, and we argue that failures in sympathy may be corrected by a horizontal process. As a result, we consider them not only as failures but mainly as lessons to be learned towards democracy as a rule of living. (shrink)

This paper develops the pragmatic “atheoreticism” of Quine and Rorty. A position I dub “postpragmatism”—paralleling the post phases of modernism and humanism—my purpose here is to bring to a culmination what Quine and Rorty started decades before. By doing so, I argue, it becomes possible for Quine, and more so Rorty, to avoid the most common critiques of their atheoretic form of pragmatism. Chief among them, that it is mired in self-contradiction. Rather than rely upon theory to justify atheoreticism—the very (...) stuff of their self-contradiction—I rely instead upon Rorty’s own insouciance, syncretism, and eclecticism to shift the ground of debate from concern with what is justified to concern with what is interesting. (shrink)

The book that Dewey co-authored with Arthur Bentley, Knowing and the Known, has long resisted coherent interpretation in relation to his previous work. This article suggests that we look at his work from a methodological rather than a metaphysical point of view. This requires looking first at what he was doing with his concepts and only secondly to their content. The whole purpose of his philosophy was to construct an account which, when used, would draw our attention to observable phenomena (...) and have the consequence of promoting empirical inquiry. (shrink)

What do we do when we say ‘We’? This paper pursues a response from analytic pragmatism. The guiding idea of analytic pragmatism is to look to what one must implicitly know how do to be able to use expressions to say something, including how to make that implicit know-how explicit. Accordingly, the question we are tasked to answer is what one must know how to do to say ‘We’ – that is, what practical know-how saying ‘We’ requires and can be (...) employed to make explicit. The concept normative ascent is introduced in developing an answer. On this approach, the know-how in question turns out to be a distinctively normative capacity. Both being and saying ‘We’ turns out to involve being able to do and say something normative. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to address Rorty’s critique of Dewey’s notion of experience and to reaffirm a view in which the call to experience is indispensable for a genuinely contingent philosophy. In the first part, I analyze Rorty’s critique of Dewey and show its inconsistency. In the second part, I draw a comparison between their aesthetic views and argue that a true aesthetic experience must consist in the cultivation and creative transfiguration of situational resistances. In the third part, (...) using Jane Addams as an example, I illustrate how at Hull House the resistances provided by the situation were transfigured into original and meaningful aesthetic experiences that touched people’s lives and allowed for a meaningful and intelligent reconstruction. (shrink)

Scott Aiken and Thomas Dabay contend that a satisfactory account of truth is both infallibilist and antiskeptical. Externalist correspondence theories, they say, preserve the infallibility of the truth-relation yet invite skeptical qualms. In tying truth to experience, pragmatist theories resist skeptical challenges, but embrace a fallibilism that renders their account of truth inconsistent and even incoherent. While agreeing with Aiken and Dabay that externalist accounts are vulnerable to skepticism, I dispute each of the four arguments they offer against pragmatist fallibilism. (...) Though partially successful against Peirce’s more popular view that truth is the final belief of a community of inquirers, their arguments are wholly ineffective against Dewey’s account of truth as warranted assertability. (shrink)

Pragmatist aesthetics has not yet reached its full potential. This is primarily due to the legacy of John Dewey’s aesthetics. In order to confront the shortcomings and insufficiencies of his aesthetics, pragmatist aestheticians ought to establish a dialogue with continental aesthetics. The attempt to clarify what pragmatist aesthetics can learn from Theodor W. Adorno’s materialist aesthetics is still a desideratum. This essay focuses on two aspects. First, it shows that pragmatist aestheticians can use Adorno’s modern aesthetics in order to gain (...) a deeper and more complex understanding of the social nature or register of form (of what might be termed “die Gesellschaftlichkeit der Form”). Second, the essay demonstrates that Adorno, in contrast to Dewey, is valuable for the endeavor to grasp the significance of the dialectics of harmony and dissonance or organicity and fragmentation when analyzing modern art and literature. (shrink)