ABSTRACT
Section V.a: The instrumentalist conception of truth It was observed in the first chapter that Dewey entered philosophy as an adherent of a movement, post-Kantianism, which opposed the idea that the truth of a thought lies in its correspondence to something wholly outside experience. The aim of intellectual activity and what it is that constitutes such activity as ‘objective’ lies in features which are to be found in experience. This is an outlook which Dewey retained even after he gave up other features of post-Kantian idealism, such as the principle that everything that exists, exists for consciousness. Even after James’s Principles of Psychology helped Dewey to a conception of experience as a biological phenomenon, only part of which qualifies as conscious, he retained the idea that the truth of our thoughts should be ‘an experienced relation among the things of experience’ (M3, p. 126).
