ABSTRACT
QUALITATIVE THOUGHT ‘‘Qualitative thought’’ is John Dewey’s term for the non-cognitive, pervasive, felt meaning of a situation that guides all cognitive and instrumental thinking. ‘‘Qualitative Thought’’ (1930), one of Dewey’s most important and difficult articles, is absolutely essential in understanding his instrumentalism and theory of logic; both Art as Experience (1934) and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) amplify many of the ideas found here. The world itself is primarily experienced in a qualitative way, as lived or felt or undergone. With Galileo and Descartes, qualities were treated as non-physical ‘‘mental’’ events, i.e. as subjective, with the resulting dualism between propositions about the world of experience and those about the world of science. Both classical and contemporary relational logic treat subjects of propositions simply as given; what is needed is a logic of inquiry. Subjects and predicates only emerge in relation to each other in the process of experience. Prior to quality as a definite predicate, there is a more elusive quality that pervades any given experience, which can be recognized in the way we encounter a work of art, a person, or an historic event, giving each an expressive individuality. This is not an ‘‘attribute’’ or ‘‘predicate’’: it is constitutive, and all our conceptual analyses rely upon it. It is ‘‘the quality of the subject-matter as a whole’’ that controls inquiry (LW 5.246; see Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, LW 12, Ch. 4).
