ABSTRACT
Dewey’s influence on American philosophy was at its greatest during the first two decades of the present century. It declined during the 1930s. This was largely because of the arrival in America of such philosophers as Carnap, Feigl and Reichenbach, who brought with them the doctrines of Logical Positivism. These doctrines were held to be an advance on Pragmatism and for the next few decades they dominated American philosophy. The explanation for their dominance seems to be social rather than philosophical. The newcomers were European intellectuals, who were on familiar terms with some of the leading scientists, who were familiar with the latest scientific discoveries and who were proficient in the techniques of logic and mathematics. This gave them prestige and it was this prestige, rather than their doctrines, which accounts for their success. The doctrines themselves were considerably less sophisticated than those of Dewey. For example, in their earlier days, the Logical Positivists worked with a sharp distinction between theory and senseexperience. Later, it occurred to them that the distinction is not as simple as they had supposed and their views became more sophisticated. As they became more sophisticated, however, they came increasingly to resemble the very Pragmatism they were supposed to have supplanted. Indeed we may trace this process at work within the space of a single text. Thus in Language, Truth and Logic (1954), A. J. Ayer begins by stating that the meaning of a hypothesis or theory is determined by the way in which it is verified in sense-experience. But in later chapters we are informed that verification is relative to hypothesis or theory. Thus if a theory is in conflict with sense-experience, we are not bound in logic to reject that theory. We may reject the sense-experience; for example, we may hold that it is delusive. It follows that what sense-experience counts as verification will depend, at least in some measure, on what theories we hold. We now have a position somewhat more complicated than the one
we were first offered and it is no longer entirely clear how a theory is to be verified. Ayer’s suggestion is that this is to be achieved by an interplay between sense-experience and theory. This means that a theory is likely to be verified or falsified not by a single sense-experience but by an accumulation of such experiences. In short, the test of a theory is likely to be found in the consequences of holding it, in how it fares in the long run. This is a view hardly to be distinguished from Pragmatism. Ayer’s view was developed by Quine in his celebrated article ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1953: 20-47). Quine there argued that theory is underdetermined by sense-experience, so that sense-experience cannot, as in classical Logical Positivism, serve as the foundation for theory. Quine’s view was seen as an advance on Logical Positivism which was itself an advance on Pragmatism. But this is to make progress by going backwards. The view that sense-experience, when taken in itself, is an inadequate foundation for knowledge, whether practical or theoretical, had been a commonplace in American philosophy at least since the 1890s. Dewey – in insisting that sense-experience is to be understood through its role in the whole life of the organism, James – in stressing the idea of the apperceptive mass, Peirce – in emphasising the mass of knowledge which is presupposed in any observation, had all made clear that senseexperience is a source of knowledge only in relation to other knowledge which cannot be analysed in its terms. It is worth noting, also, that James and Dewey especially, in making this clear, had shown the crudity of that stimulus-response psychology to which Quine has given a wholehearted allegiance.
