Soapbox Post

October 20, 2009, is John Dewey’s 150th birthday.  Next month, November 24th, is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, a book that helped reorient Dewey’s allegiance from Hegelian “absolutism to [pragmatic] experimentalism.”

Postmodern pragmatist Richard Rorty has ranked Dewey with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger as among the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century.  But Dewey is the only one to have been a progressive democrat and taken a positive attitude toward science.  (He was also the only one to have a serious commitment to family life.)

What might we learn from Dewey in regard to science policy a century and a half after his birth?  Let me venture three eccentric suggestions.

First, pay attention to China.  Throughout his long life — he was born before the Civil War and died near the end of the Korean War — Dewey traveled widely, but spent more time in China than in any country other than the United States.  From his arrival in Shanghai on May 30, 1919, to his departure on August 2, 1921, Dewey worked hard to understand and appreciate Chinese culture and intellectual life.  His recognition of the importance of China deserves to be imitated, perhaps more today than in his own lifetime.

Second, science can no longer be taken as an end in itself.  Long before contemporary critics, Dewey rejected the linear model of the science-society relationship.  He repeatedly challenged scientists to do more than science.  In an article published in Science in 1934 Dewey argued that the “supreme intellectual obligation” of scientists is not “the self-perpetuation of specialized sciences” but helping the general public adopt the “attitudes of open-mindedness, intellectual integrity, observation and interest in testing their opinions and beliefs that are characteristic of the scientific attitude.”  Scientists need to invest as much energy in addressing truly human problems as in scientific, industrial, and commercial ones.

Third, science is a way of thinking that should inform public decision making.  Dewey’s enthusiasm was for science not as a body of knowledge but as a method for solving problems — problems which can be social as well as intellectual.  Moreover, Dewey’s vision of science education avoided the top down deficit model often criticized today.  Instead of filling the mind with scientific information he argued for transforming the mind through active learning and cognitive construction.

For Dewey, the appropriation of science and technology by narrow interests — scientific self-interests or money-making self-interests — creates what he and other sociologists called “cultural lag.”  “It is science which, through technological applications, has produced the potentiality of plenty, of ease and security for all, while lagging legal and political institutions, unaffected as yet by the advance of science into their domain, explain the want, insecurity, and suffering” that exist in society. 

Dewey thus praised science and criticized scientists and other special interests as well as a public that rejected science.  More than anyone, Dewey was a proponent of evidence-based decision making to promote democratic self-realization.  This “common faith” has been severely challenged by the history of fascism, communist totalitarianism, and now fundamentalist terrorism.  At the intellectual level, postmodernist and social constructivist scholars (promoting a different kind of constructivism than what Dewey argued was the heart of democratic education) have also challenged Dewey’s appeal to science.

In Freedom and Culture (1939) Dewey undertook a critical examination of “science and free culture.”  There he argued for the social control of science, rejected the fact/value distinction, but worried about the possibilities of scientizing democracy.   “While it would be absurd to believe it desirable or possible for every one to become a scientist when science is [defined in terms of content],” Dewey argued, “the future of democracy [depends on] spread of the scientific attitude.”  Only the scientific attitude can make “public opinion intelligent enough to meet present social problems.”  Although not sanguine about this possibility he was committed to promoting it.

Science through its physical technological consequences is now determining the relations which human beings, severally and in groups, sustain to one another.  If it incapable of developing moral techniques which will also determine these relations, the split in modern culture goes so deep that not only democracy but all civilized values are doomed....  A culture which permits science to destroy traditional values but which distrusts its power to create new ones is a culture which is destroying itself.

Many people have worried about the idea of a scientized and technologized society.  I’m one of them.  But Dewey forces us to ask ourselves, What are the alternatives?

Science is not an end in itself and scientists should do more than pursue internalist work in science.  The democratic public needs to adopt scientific approaches to its own decision making.  The connection between theses two and three seems relatively straightforward.  But what about the first thesis: pay attention to China.  I’d venture at least one connection: Evidence based reflection on human affairs today points toward the increasingly importance and even leadership of China in ways that can throw light on possibilities for the reform of scientific practice and the scientific education of the public.  This is not to say that China provides a model to be imitated, only that its failures and successes — with regard, for instance, to the development of wind and solar power — cannot help but stimulate reflections on our own.