Axiology and Logic

experience As defined by John Dewey, the interaction of a person with his or her environment.

knowledge in a constantly changing world rather than on alleged metaphysical certainties. For example, Peirce, who dismissed certainty as unattainable, replaced it with probability, which had practical applications in human affairs.

Experience, defined as the interaction of the person with the environment, is a key pragmatist concept. A person’s interaction with his or her social, cultural, and natural environments constitutes the process of living, growing, and developing. This interaction may alter or change both the person and the environment. Knowing comes from a transaction—a process—between the learner and the environment.17

Dewey rejects the idealist and realist concepts that reality is a priori or antecedent to human involvement in the world. Rather, he is more concerned with how human beings interact with the environment and construct tentative and flexible conceptions about a changing reality. These tentative assumptions about reality are always subject to further testing and validation, which may lead to a revision, or reconstruction, of an existing assumption or to a new one. Ideas do not exist in their pure state as the idealists assert. Ideas are conceptual instruments that need to be used to determine if they work. Their validity needs to be tested by acting on them and determining what consequences they have for us. Although each interaction with the environment has generalizable aspects that carry over to the next problem, each episode will differ somewhat. It is this element of difference in the episode that causes a problem. When we have solved the problem that the different element has caused, we can add the solution to our network of experience and use it to solve the problems we encounter in the future. For example, attending college may have been a problematic situation for you in that it was a new or different experience. You may have defined the ways in which it was a new or different experience. You might have used your prior experiences in attending elementary and high school to give you ideas on dealing with and solving the new problem. After solving this new problem, you should be able to use your experience as a college student in dealing with the new element of graduate school. Dewey argued that we cannot keep on doing the same things over and over in schools just because they are traditional. We need to use the school as an educational laboratory to test what and how we teach to determine if it leads to the learner’s understanding and growth. Does an educational program, curricular design, or teaching strategy achieve its anticipated goals and objectives, and in doing so, does it contribute to students’ growth?18

Because we and the environment are constantly changing, pragmatists dismiss the idealist and realist curricula based on supposedly antecedent permanent realities or universal truths as empirically untenable. Rather, they assert that our decision making needs to be guided by our experience. Any claim to truth is really a tentative assertion that we can test and revise as we do more research. What we need, say the pragmatists, is a socially and scientifically intelligent method that gives us a process-oriented direction in a constantly changing world.

6-4b axiology and logic

Pragmatic axiology is highly situational and culturally relative. A constantly changing and pluralistic world means that values, too, are not universal and eternal as idealists and realists assert but are changing and relative to time, place, and circumstance. For pragmatists, whatever contributes to personal and social growth is valuable; what restricts or limits it is unworthy. Rather than blindly accepting inherited traditional and conventional values, we can clarify our values by testing and reconstructing them in our experience.

17For an analysis of Dewey’s pragmatic perspective, see Christine L. McCarthy and Evelyn Sears, “Deweyan Pragmatism and the Quest for True Self,” Educational Theory (Spring 2000), pp. 213–227. 18For interpretations of Dewey’s philosophy to contemporary educational issues, see David T. Hansen, ed., A Critical Engagement with Dewey’s Democracy and Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).