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Hook and Dewey, or C.S. Peirce?: A Reply to Nicholas Capaldi
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20504 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
2,807 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
Nicholas Capaldi's article on Hook, Dewey, and Marx is a superb statement of Sidney Hook's philosophical position and its genesis. However, his use of terms such as usefulness, truth, and realism raises serious questions. Hook and Dewey believed that science had its foundation in common sense--that is, in our knowledge of the everyday world, of our sense experience and of our practice--which they believed provided the most reliable knowledge that we have. However, this commonsense knowledge is not a product of an immediately knowable external world. It is affected both by the operations of our neurological systems and by our expectations. For instance, we see a table as unmoving. Yet, because the pupils of our eyes are in continual motion, the sensory inputs to our optic nerves are not steady, although our perception of the table is, because the optic nerves rectify the message of the incoming signals to produce a stable image. We often misperceive because of what we expect to see. It is a truism of law that eyewitness testimony is highly unreliable. Finally, practices that have worked and thereby led us to perceive them as expressing fundamentally true relationships do often fail, and we then learn that our commonsense evaluations were faulty.
Furthermore, as Irving Langmuir's treatise on pathological science instructs us, on occasion a firm grasp of theory is needed to qualify commonsense observations. For example, in the cold fusion case of several years ago, although existing theories might have required qualification, the weight of evidence supporting them made it more likely that the experiments supposedly supporting cold fusion were faulty. It is not common sense but a praxical assessment based on the larger realm of knowledge that permits the critical assessments of truth value. And this fact is the key to the philosophical flaw in the positions of Dewey and Hook, both of whom were pragmatists.
The Origins Of Pragmatism
Pragmatism had its origins in G.W.F. Hegel's Die objektive Logik (Nuremburg, 1812), which was the first part of his Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of logic). After Immanuel Kant reduced knowledge to the level of phenomenon, leaving reality unknowable, Hegel, influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, attempted to show how knowledge of reality arises from transactions between the self, others, and things. Because the science of the time implied a uniquely hierarchical world, Hegel restored this determinism not in history--which was the determinism not in history--which was the realm of accident--or in phenomenal knowledge, but in the
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