LIS 450 PT. West chapter on Dewey, Sep. 12, 2002

Poetry and philosophy in Emerson

Dewey’s personal history

Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

(1) cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths, (2) “reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience… One effect of abandoning them is… a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.”

Davidson: “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”

"… we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth--quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and content, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without that dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course, truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be."

metaphor of triangulation between self, others and world

critical intelligence, the focus on pedagogical practice

the University of Chicago Laboratory School

the eclipse of the public

Dewey’s aim to create a public sphere

Communication as the means for community

Moving from Great Society to Great Community

Dewey’s relation to Marxism

…to FDR

cf. public domain symposium

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