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MUDWALLS

                                                          December 19, 2021

Starting again.


    John Dewey, "Experimental Logic"
    (1916):

       "Thought is accessory as
       accomplice, not as addendum."


Dewey continues:

    "'Thought' is to eliminate mere coincidence
    and to assert grounded coherence."

So... there's a mental process you use to sift data,
and decide if a correlation is meaningful--

But Dewey's language here uses an active sense, you
*assert* "grounded coherence", you don't just confirm
it, or discover it.

Is he going in the direction of suggesting that the
thinker creates the truth?


Dewey goes on to complain more about that damn
"idealist" Lotze:

   "Lotze makes it clear he does not at bottom
   conceive of 'thought' as an activity 'in itself'
   imposing a form of coherence

So for Dewey thought *imposes* coherence, the
order is not an external thing, the thinker
does the organizing.

Well: that also once again seems pretty strange,
and yet it's certainly true that there's often more
than one way of categorizing data, and people sometimes
drive themselves crazy trying to find the One True Correct
Way of categorizing, e.g. taxonomies of living creatures...


   "[for Lotze] the organizing work of 'thought'
   is only the progressive realization of an inherent
   unity, or system, in the material experienced."

So, there *is* an underlying truth to be discovered.


There's some material about the fallacy of
"empiricism" and "rationalism", which appears
to mean data vs thought, or as I think we would
say experiment vs. theory.

Dewey expends some energy complaining about
Lotze trying to fix the problems with each by
combining the two, but that sounds like the
standard approach of Science to me:  we use         I'm tempted to call it
both "experiment" and "theory", and sometimes       "philosopher's
the first corrects the second, and sometimes        disease": the idea that
vice-versa.                                         you have to declare one
                                                    winner, a single
                                                    privileged principle
   "Lotze recognizes the futility of thought        from which all others
   if the sense data as data are final, if          will be derived.
   they alone are real, the truly existent,
   self-justificatory and valid.  He sees           Sometimes the wall
   that, if the empiricist were right in his        restrains the mud,
   assumption as the the real worth of the          sometimes the mud
   given data, thinking would be a ridiculous       shores up the wall,
   pretender, either toilfully and poorly           and the philosopher
   doing over again what needs no doing, or         wants to choose between
   making a wilful departure from truth."           wallism and mudism.

      Well you know, if the shoe fits...






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