![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Reconstruction is a central notion in Dewey’s account of inquiry and in his metaphilosophical commitments. In his work, Dewey made a call for reconstruction of philosophy, in the reconstruction of central notions of the discipline, like knowledge, logic, truth, the good, reason, and experience. Inquiry itself is reconstructive, according to Dewey, involving the transformation of an indeterminate situation into one which is determinate and understood. Dewey’s philosophical views should therefore be of interest to those taking part in the recent turn towards revisionary philosophical methodologies, like conceptual engineering, explication, and amelioration. In light of the recent developments in revisionary methodologies, I aim to explore Dewey’s conception of concepts in relation to the conceptual engineering literature, suggesting that it provides a useful conception of concepts for conceptual engineering, and to suggest a Deweyan model of philosophical inquiry where concepts are the objects of inquiry. In both cases, I hope to show a productive interaction between Dewey’s ideas and contemporary discussions of conceptual engineering.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Céline Henne for detailed discussions and feedback on earlier versions and ideas of this paper, as well as Yvonne Hütter-Almerigi and an anonymous reviewer for helpful feedback. Thanks as well to Hasok Chang, Marabel Riesmeier, Rory Kent, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Miguel Ohnesorge, and the audience at the Conceptual Engineering and Pragmatism Online Workshop for commenting on a previous draft of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 We might worry about the level of explanation of the psychological concept, in that it is not a given that it provides a functional description of concept, depending on what we mean by ‘functional’. There is a real question about whether the psychological notion aims at manifest or operative concepts (Haslanger Citation2006), and another question in addition about how that matches with the target concept in an ameliorative project.
2 Dewey uses many different notions to discuss what we would call concepts: ‘meanings’, ‘ideas’, ‘conceptions’, and only sometimes the notion ‘concept’. See Gronda (Citation2020, 50) for discussion.
3 I thank an anonymous referee for pushing the point of whether (a) concepts are tools for the resolution of an indeterminate situation or (b) concepts are the subject or object of transformative inquiry. As I see Gronda’s semantic point, in Dewey’s account of inquiry, (a) and (b) are necessarily related.
4 I thank Céline Henne for helping me clarify this point.
5 See also (LW13, 57): ‘Intelligent activity is distinguished from aimless activity by the fact that it involves selection of means – analysis – out of the variety of conditions that are present, and their arrangement – synthesis – to reach an intended aim or purpose.’
6 ' To understand is to grasp meaning.’ (LW8, 221) See also (LW13, 56): ‘Growth in judgment and understanding is essentially growth in ability to form purposes and to select and arrange means for their realization.’
7 After all, ‘action is at the heart of ideas’ since ‘[i]deas direct operations’ (LW4, 134)
8 Fesmire (Citation2015, 72–73) makes a similar point, though does not spend much time on relating the means-consequence relation to meanings or concepts.
9 See Dutilh Novaes (Citation2020) for discussion, where I first found this quote by Jeffrey.
10 Dewey (LW8, 231) is particularly clear on things being meaningful, as opposed to just sentences and words.
11 Dewey’s view of meaning has a lot in common with current views of operationalism, as Gronda (Citation2020, 73–75, 85). A key difference between Bridgman’s (Citation1927) operationalism and Dewey’s pragmatism is the latter’s emphasis on operations bringing out means-consequence relations, as has been emphasised here, while Bridgman focuses on the operations alone. I see the DCC as an explication of operationalism, given Dewey’s (LW4, ch. 4–5) alliance with operationalism. As such, I think any benefit operationalism enjoys can be taken up by the DCC.
12 Precision does not imply exactness. Vague concepts can be more useful for specific purposes than an exact one, and so more precise in the above meaning. I think this picture of CE and concepts is able to accommodate this point.
13 Here I am thinking of Bridgman’s (Citation1927) discussion of various scientific concepts, like ‘space’, ‘time’, etc. See Chang (Citation2017) for elaboration and discussion.
14 In traditional terms, Dewey also identifies the ‘conceptual contents which anticipate a possible solution and which direct observational operations’ with predicates (LW12, 127–129).
15 As he puts it in (LW1, 305), philosophy’s ‘business is to accept and to utilize for a purpose the best available knowledge of its own time and place. And this purpose is criticism of beliefs, institutions, customs, policies with respect to their bearing upon good.’
16 See Dewey (LW8, 200–207) and (LW12, ch. 6). Brown (Citation2012) helpfully distinguishes between the temporal sequence of inquiry and the functional pattern of inquiry. See fig. 1.
17 Isaac (Citationin progress) also formulates a five-stage account (the DEDTI-model) of CE.
18 We might think of this along the lines of Queloz’s (Citation2021) thinking about the practical origins of ideas, or Hannon’s (Citation2019) function-first epistemology. Both views have a lot in common with Austin’s (Citation1979, 182) discussion of the underlying rationales of our ‘common stock of words’.
19 Dewey (LW8, 199) remarks upon the difficulty of identifying data in philosophical problems.
20 It can be used to identify the manifest or operative concept(s), for example. See footnote 1.
21 We want to do responsible CE, as Queloz (Citation2021, 42) puts it, paying attention to both positive and negative aspects of a concept. Engineering is not just about paying attention to defects, but also their good or useful functions. See also Chang (Citation2017, 35–36) on multiplicity and unity in operationalism.
22 Chang (Citation2017, 36) continues in a Deweyan spirit: ‘more meaningful concepts are more effective facilitators of inquiry about nature.’ Dewey also thinks that our ability to understand, our ability to achieve the aims of inquiry, ‘is immensely furthered by language and by elaboration of a series of meanings and through reasoning’ (LW8, 232).
23 As Brown (Citation2012) emphasises, the process of inquiry, on Dewey’s view, is not totally linear.
24 See (MW12) for discussion of all concepts, (LW1) for discussion of reality, and (LW4, LW8, LW12) for discussion of knowledge. Dewey’s (Citation1916) also provides extensive discussion of truth and knowledge.
25 See also Dewey (LW8, 266) on application of concepts to new situations, which would satisfy another notion of fruitfulness from Stuart (Citation2016).
26 Active CE is inspired by Chang’s (Citation2012) active realism and active pluralism, which encourages actively pursuing resistance with reality through the proliferation of systems of practice in science. Chang (Citation2017) puts operationalism to work in this vein, arguing for a multiplicity of measurement methods and concepts.