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John Dewey: philosopher of technology.

by Larry A. Hickman John Dewey (1859-1952) was widely known among the reading public of his time for his humanism, his progressive educational theory, and his commitment to social reform. Near the end of his life, his work had become so influential that the New York Times dubbed him "America's Philosopher." Among his fellow academics, Dewey was also known as heir to the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and William James and as an energetic opponent of dualistic metaphysical systems. He was especially critical of the ones that advanced supernatural or transcendent outlooks. He argued that their separation of facts from values and the mental from the physical had stifled human progress. With the exception of his closest colleagues, however, few during Dewey's lifetime seemed to notice that he was also the first philosopher in America to develop a systematic critique of technology. Three factors may have contributed to this oversight. First, there was during Dewey's lifetime no academic discipline, nor even a clearly defined set of issues, known as the philosophy of technology. Some philosophers, to be sure, were interested in the theoretical aspects of science. But technology just seemed to most of them too mundane--too practical--to be worthy of serious consideration. Second, although Dewey wrote books that were devoted to established sub-fields within philosophy, such as ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of art, he never consolidated his philosophy of technology within a single volume. His critique of technology is diffused throughout dozens of books and essays. Third, Dewey's work was so far ahead of its time that few of his contemporaries were able to grasp its significance. Only now are philosophers beginning to appreciate the extent to which he undercut the assumptions that have dominated Western metaphysics since Plato. His understanding of the place of technology in human life played a crucial role in his radical critique of philosophical business-as-usual. Dewey's interest in tools and instruments, already apparent in works he published before the turn of the century, continued throughout his career. His essay "Moral Theory and Practice" (1891) argued that ethics involves the same type of intelligence that is required in the selling of wheat or the invention of the telephone. Later, in Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), Experience and Nature (1925), and Art as Experience (1934), Dewey presented rich analyses of the interaction of human beings with their tools. Among these tools was language, which he called "the tool of tools." Given Dewey's early and extensive philosophical critique of technology, it is ironic that Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, is still widely accepted as the first major philosophical work to take up these matters. Dewey's interest in technology was an integral part of his broader philosophical outlook. He tirelessly argued that philosophy ought to be relevant to everyday life and that all philosophers worth their salt have the obligation to provide a critique of their environing social conditions. The formative factors within Dewey's society were so patently technological that one is left wondering why his philosophical contemporaries were so slow to take them into account. At the time of Dewey's birth, America was just beginning its transformation from pre-industrial technologies of wind, water, and wood. As Dewey matured, America increasingly turned to technologies of steel, coal, and iron. Synthetics, television, and nuclear power had become realities before he died. One of Dewey's last published essays contained a discussion of the atomic bomb.

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At the heart of Dewey's philosophy of technology is his theory of inquiry, or deliberation. Breaking with the long tradition of Western epistemology, Dewey argued that inquiry is neither primarily theoretical nor primarily practical. It is instead a kind of production. He thought that inquiry starts with raw materials and then reworks them with specialized tools. But since change is the only constant, the tools of inquiry are themselves always in need of improvement. As conditions change, inquiry uses some of its tools to rework others. Technology and inquiry thus became for Dewey virtually synonymous. Both involve the invention, development, and use of tools and other artifacts to resolve perceived problems. Dewey also argued that inquiry requires the production and stockpiling of intermediate parts. These might include just about any artifact that has proven valuable enough to keep around for further use. In this category Dewey included not just tangible objects, such as lumber or sheet metal, but also intangibles, such as concepts and habits. Successful inquiry continually uses these intermediate products to produce new and more finished products: new ways of thinking, new materials, and even new tools. This view, that deliberation relies on instruments of all sorts, both tangible and intangible, is the core of what Dewey called "instrumentalism," or his unique brand of pragmatism. The term was used to identify the school of philosophy that Dewey founded during his decade at the University of Chicago (1894-1904). Dewey's refusal to admit a gap between the tangible and the intangible in inquiry led him to some remarkable conclusions. He thought, for example, that a mathematician working in a room by herself without the aid of computer or pencil and paper is nevertheless engaged in technological production just as surely as a metalworker in his shop. Just like the metalworker, she uses raw materials (numbers), stockparts (theorems that have already been proven), and tools (rules of inference) to create a finished product (a new proof). This view provided Dewey with a powerful tool to use against philosophers and theologians who argued that there is an unbridgeable gap between what is "material" and what is "mental" or "spiritual." For Dewey, these terms just refer to different but interacting types of tool use. A "therefore" and the number 2 are no less tools than are hammers and saws. In all inquiry that is successful, these two types of tool-use cooperate with one another in ways that are subject to our control through the study of what he called "the general method of intelligence." There is consequently nothing "mysterious" or "occult" about the mental. A concrete or "material" problem often calls for the use of abstract or "mental" tools to extend itself beyond its own limited "this," "here," and "now." And even though abstract or "mental" tools may help us soar through uncharted realms, the results of such flights must eventually return to be checked by means of the tools of concrete experience. Dewey thought that if men and women ever realized that their metaphysical and religious systems are just technological artifacts, and not absolutes, then there would be less dogmatism, less hatred, and less bloodshed. Like other conceptual artifacts, metaphysical and religious ideals need to be measured and warranted by tools that assess their outcomes or "cash value." Dewey's view that inquiry is technological also led him to turn on its head the old notion that technology is just the application of science and therefore inferior to it. If technology involves the invention, development, and use of tools to solve perceived problems, then theoretical science is a type of technology, or production. The received view since Plato and Aristotle had been that what is theoretical, or contemplative, is superior to both practice and production. In Dewey's view, however, neither theory nor practice is superior to the other; they work together as equal partners in the production of novel and improved outcomes. Dewey thought that there had been no science worthy of the name until it began to take technology, or the production of experimentally warranted results, seriously.

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Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Dewey would have opposed those among

our contemporaries, such as Jeremy Rifkin and many fundamentalist Christians, who hold that nature is somehow "sacred" and should not be Publication Information: Article Title: John Dewey: Philosopher of Technology. Contributors: Larry A. Hickman "tampered Title: Free Inquiry. Volume: 14. Issue: 4. Publication Date: untenable, unstable, and author. Magazinewith." Because he thought such dualistic outlooks Fall 1994. Page Number: 41+. COPYRIGHT unproductive, he would Secular Humanism, Inc.; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group pit material is protected by 1994 Council for Democratic andhave rejected their "technophobic" attempts to This technology against copyright and, with the exception of fair use, mayagainst the works of God. nature, or the works of human beings not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any
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Because he was a committed Darwinian naturalist, Dewey rejected the view that technology and nature are in conflict. He viewed technology instead as the cutting edge of evolution. Since human beings exist within and as a part of nature, then what they do is also a part of nature. Because he identified inquiry with technology, Dewey thought that abandoning or limiting technology was not a live option. The real issue, he argued, is how better forms of technology can be found to replace ones that have proven unsatisfactory. Dewey's understanding of technology was a source of considerable misunderstanding among some of his critics. Some of them thought that he was a proponent of what members of the Frankfurt School called "instrumental rationality" and what Langdon Winner later called "straight-line instrumentalism." This is the view that technology ought to "dominate" nature without regard to collateral damage." This kind of uncritical "technophilia" was once almost universally practiced, and the ecological devastation now coming to light in the former Soviet Union indicates that it was also practiced there until recently. But Dewey rejected "technophilia" with the same type of criticisms that he marshalled against its opposite, "technophobia." Because Dewey took Darwin seriously, and because he wanted to construct a new naturalism that would take into account continuities within nature, he looked for a way to define technology broadly enough that it could include two major categories of technological production that some had thought incompatible. One would involve the prudent alteration of the environment to meet human needs by balancing costs and weighing alternative outcomes. The other would be a technology of self and community, that is, an equally judicious production of new ways of adapting human beings to environing conditions. Although this second conception of technology is often associated with the work of Max Scheler and Michel Foucault, it also had a central place in the work of Dewey. If Dewey's contemporaries had understood his critique of technology and acted on his suggestions, our world might now be quite different from its present state. We would have long since begun to attack social and moral problems with the same type of experimental outlook that has proven so successful in the physical sciences. Instead of holding tightly to dogmas that separate humans from nature, body from mind, thinking from feeling, and one social class from another, we would now be involved in a common effort to articulate and solve common problems. Instead of clinging uncritically to the frayed products of metaphysical and religious systems invented decades or even centuries in the past, we would by now have subjected them to the same experimental tests that have worked wherever they have been applied within science and industry. Dewey realized that dogmatic religious and metaphysical views tend to break communication and isolate human beings from one another. In his view, technology offers the best hope for common action because it is the most basic and therefore the most common human project. The reward of undertaking honest technological inquiry, he suggested, would be "a society worthy to command affection, admiration and loyalty." Larry A. Hickman is professor of philosophy, general editor of The Correspondence of John Dewey, and director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His most recent book is John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (Indiana University Press). -1-

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