Three issues are addressed:

a) overcoming the dualism of science and values;

b) inherent problems of Dewey’s solution; and,

c)  implications for education and culture of a larger conception of knowing, especially in its artistic dimensions

a) Reconciling Science & Values

The author argues that 19th and 20th century positivism is based on three basic assumptions:

i  - that science is the only true method for attaining true knowledge of any kind;

ii - that, where in any human endeavor true knowledge is to be had, science must be brought to bear; and,

iii -  that because science is the only source of knowledge, it can provide an all encompassing view of the nature of reality thereby moving from scientific method to a scientific view of the world. p.24

Modern science, as a method for understanding nature, excludes all qualities and forces that cannot be directly perceived through the senses and interpreted in terms of physical cause and effect.  From the time of Galileo three 'qualities have been recognized in the West. 

Primary qualities involve size and extension in space, number, weight or mass, motion and time.  These alone are accessible to observation, experiment, and measure. 

Secondary qualities pertain to sensation: color, taste, smell, form, etc., as well as larger concatenations of these qualities that exist only in the mind of the observer, not in the world  observed.  Hence, even if  'real', they are not accessible to being known scientifically.  From the beginning, modern science was based on a method which by definition could deal only with the primary qualities, that is, with quantity.  p.24

Tertiary qualities involve 'values'.   "Since all value traits are lacking in objects as science presents them, it is assumed that Reality has not such characteristics.  The result is to deny to nature just the traits that give life purpose and value.  In their place arises ‘the belief that nature is an indifferent, dead mechanism".  We eliminate the distinctively human factor reduction to the physical ensues.’ p.24

[NB -  HHC diminishing marginal returns, have taken ‘science’ to point that findings are more and more expensive, while limited investment in 2nd qualities research have enormous relative return for social investment]

Another way of putting the problem is that science, to the extent that it takes physics as its determinative branch, deals only with the microscopic and submicroscopic worlds.  At the same time, the macroscopic world, ‘the world as experience’ fades away.  In the scientific world views, the macroscopic, experiential world is a world of mere appearances  moving from being a world of phenomena to that of epiphenomena. p.24

b) Dewey's Solution

For Dewey, the task of ‘saving the appearances’ had to be carried out without sacrificing science as the way of knowing in the modern world.  This was critical because:

i  - as organized intelligence, science, for Dewey, was also the possibility and the safeguard of human freedom;

ii  -  biology was paradigmatic for him.  The notion of organism provided a scientific underpinning for unity and furthermore, the notion of the interaction of the organism in its environment offered an analogy to describe the nature and role of thinking in human life; and,

iii  - science in the modern era had, as nothing else, affected the whole of human experience.  The worlds of culture, of social institutions, of man’s relations, and his own self-understanding had been, and, more importantly continue to be, decisively reshaped by scientific discovery and its associated technological applications. p.25

 For Dewey, science is important not primarily for its content and conclusions about reality but as a method for controlling experience of reality... inquiry is participatory.  Dewey rejected objectivistic conceptions of knowing, or what he called “the spectator view of knowing”.  All knowing... involves an active interaction between knower and the known in which each affects the other in the process.  p.26

Moreover, inquiry for Dewey is always in itself valuation.  There is no such thing as value free thinking... Because by its nature, Dewey’s conception of thinking is purposive, values, far from being extrinsic to the process of means, ends, consequences attained, and further consequences sought are present at every point.. p.27

Science is made possible by the ideals that pervade, sustain, and guide it  including cooperation in the scientific community, respect for evidence, experimental openness, and so forth.   That is, ends as values ought not to be abstracted from the larger context of experience.  p.27

 Dewey’s attempt: It showed that modern science has limits set to it, limits within which it has great power and potential usefulness but when modern science is extended beyond these limits, it is misleading and destructive.   The proper domain of science, in Dewey’s view, is precisely the quantitative and mechanical dimensions of reality.  Because every aspect of experience has this dimension within it, Dewey urged the extension of science as the method of knowing and thus gaining direction and control over the qualitative dimensions most desirable to human welfare.  Nature has mechanisms, he wrote, This forms the content of the objects of physical science for it fulfills the instrumental office to be performed by science.  But it is a false extrapolation from this to conclude that nature is a mechanism and only a mechanism. pp.29-30

 Selective emphasis is necessary for all reflective, intelligent inquiry, for selection from the total has to be made, the problem isolated, and abstractive analysis brought to bear upon it.  Every inquiry proceeds from some kind of prior selection and abstraction from the whole.   But this fallacy of selective emphasis is committed when science is identified with reality itself...  Dewey’s solution underscores the absolute necessity that instrumental reason as embodied in science must have a context not itself.   Without such a context, science runs amok.  Equally clear is that this context for quantitative, mechanical instrumental knowing must be qualitative through and through. p.30

The inside of nature and experience, the intrinsic nature of events is revealed in experience as the immediately felt quality of things.  And while science itself cannot reveal this inwardness, it is the qualitative inside of things that is the fundamental, indispensable context for all science and its applications that are to be humanly beneficial.  p.30

Nature becomes fair game... for being taken apart, rearranged, and used up, without regard for its own inwardness, which is denied to it. p.31

The felt appreciation of the other is surely a good.   If, however, it does not include, as integral to the experience, the possibility of a genuine knowing of the other that is more than instrumental, can relations between persons in Dewey’s scheme involve anything other than either manipulative control of the other or an equally exploitative, aesthetic ‘enjoyment’ of the other?...   Such a personal knowledge (knowing the other as person) would require as its essential condition a capacity for change in the knower; an ability to enter empathetically into an understanding of the other in his or her own right.   Such a change would not even entertain the question of controlling the other.   On the contrary, it would most likely arise from a willingness to relinquish control and to take on a vulnerability to the other (the more complete the vulnerability, the more penetrating the knowing). p.31

c) Implications for Education and Culture  

 Dewey recognizes that imagination and inventiveness, whereby alone newness enters human thought and culture, are indissolubly connected with individuality.

 Finally, the abstract nature of science, if not pulled back, anchored in, and made accountable to ordinary experience, has patently undemocratic tendencies.  It fosters an esoteric knowledge inaccessible to the public and controlled by an elite, who because of the actual connection between science and technology threatened to become not merely an intellectual elite but also a power elite.  p.33

If Dewey was then able to maintain that science does not tell us anything about the world in its qualitative reality; science only enables us to act, to operate upon the world... Operationalism in its extreme form... is science at its most formal.   It is entirely a method of manipulating, not for understanding, reality. p.33

 Most important, a strict conception of cognition as control, on the one hand, and on the other, a conception of value qualities as apprehended but not cognitively, does not solve the central problem.  Rather it leaves the basic dualism of modernity, which exercised Dewey all his life, more firmly entrenched than ever.  p.34

Dewey believed in ‘knowing by doing’; a participative and active knowing; an embodied knowing, mortalised and tied into experience (NB, HHC ‘Know-How’?).  It is:

 a knowledge that is preconscious; and,

 a knowledge that is holistic providing the indispensable context of the whole within

 which alone the parts are to be understood and with which, in fact, they are even to be

 recognized.  p.36

 Dewey’s concept of art: ‘art as experience’ (including both artistic creativity and aesthetic appreciation) becomes one of the central pieces in his project to save the appearances, to secure the reality and value of ordinary experience.  p.36  “art represents the culminating event of nature as well as the climax of experience.” ... ‘Aesthetic experience is experience in its integrity.  it is the final flowering of experience, the crown and culmination of nature... then it is the artist who represents nature and life at their best... Art is the indispensable context for all experience and knowledge in which meaning, value, the qualitative, and the humane are guarded and nourished  this includes not only science but philosophy and education. p.37

Artistic experience is the best educator that we can have for developing the capacities that life offers and demands of us.  It is in art, for example, that we encounter and learn to balance and unite the many polarities of experience and to be schooled by them: the 'material’ and the 'spiritual’, freedom and discipline, movement and structure, the fixed and the spontaneous, tradition and innovation, substance and form, and so forth.  Art also reveals the deep rhythms at the heart of nature and experience and enables us to develop the sensitivity and balance to participate in them creatively.  And it is art that presents, as does nothing else, the reality of wholeness as prior and primary to all partial experience... Art is further, and more specifically, fundamental to education because as the prime medium for grasping and working with qualities and qualitative relations, it provides the essential foundation for all creative knowing more narrowly defined. p.37

The production of a work of genuine art probably demands more intelligence than does most of the so-called thinking that goes on  among those who pride themselves on being intellectuals.  p.37

For one thing, the full development of operational thinking itself requires an education in which art is central, if for no other reason than that the formulae and quantitative relations of science and mathematics are themselves abstracted from the deep structures and rhythms of nature first encountered in precognitive and aesthetic experience.   Not to ground the education of instrumental reason in an artistic education may very well mean handicapping the full development of powerful and creative conceptual thinking later on.

Moreover, art as a kind of qualitative thinking involves an education of the feelings.  It is the feelings that give us qualitative experience; it is, therefore, the feelings that are most in need of education.  This is why Dewey says that taste, commonly thought beyond the pale of education, is the one thing above all worth education.  p.37

Art as education involves education of the emotions and an education through the emotions.  Not to educate the feeling life is to leave individuals at the mercy of undirected, unformed passions and desires, and it is to deprive them of the most important way of knowing the most important dimensions of life.  pp. 37-38 [HHC  Sarajevo]

More than once Dewey maintains that art and aesthetic experience provide the most penetrating critique of a society’s social arrangements and worth.   Aesthetic experience, he writes, provides the ultimate judgment upon the quality of a civilization.  p.38

Finally, it is only in art that imagination comes fully into its own.  By implication, it can be only through an artistic education that imagination can be properly nourished and best developed.  ... It is in art that imagination is seen to be precisely that grasp of wholeness in all its qualitative relationships, which is the essence of a sense of beauty.   It is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole.  The whole person also is involved, for imagination is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that makes a new birth in the world.  This conception would seem to call for an education in which the whole person, thinking, feeling, and willing, is involved.

 Dewey in summary: