User:Ryguasu/Dewey

Misc

"Growth is Dewey's general concept for continuity of experience. Dewey uses growth instead of the more usual concept of 'development'."

he does have some kind of "child as scientist" view of things

Mind and society

Dewey thinks something like this: as an individual, a person is not really human -- no "thinking" takes place, and one acts more or less like a Sinner-boxed rat; one becomes human -- acquires "thought", "meanings", and conscious foresight -- through becoming part of a society. (see pp. 12-13)

Does he have arguments for the above?

"for it is from collective human activity, and specifically the development of shared meanings that govern this activity, that the mind arises. Thus rather than understanding the mind as a primitive and individual human endowment, and a precondition of conscious and intentional action, as was typical in the philosophical tradition since Descartes, Dewey offers a genetic analysis of mind as an emerging aspect of cooperative activity mediated by linguistic communication." (IIoP)

his theory of language?

• the meaning of a term is what the corresponding thing is good for, i.e. how it can transform the world
• you can only learn this by having experience in common (??)

(see also, Quine's paper "Ontological Relativity")

"education" as change in "disposition"

"A person may be in such a condition that forcible feeding or enforced confinement is necessary for his own good. A child may have to be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt. But no improvement of disposition, no educative effect, need follow." (pp. 26-27, my ephasis)

"A man can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to commit burglary. When we confuse a physical with an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the person's own participating disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing with him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way." (p. 27, my emphasis)

"disposition"

Note that "disposition" apparently means part of "mind". That is, there are no "purely physical dispositions". (?)

"...it strengthens some beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval of others. Thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior, a certain disposition of action." (p. 11, my emphasis)

"For an underlying disposition represents an attitude not to this and that thing nor even to the aggregate of known things, but to the considerations which govern conduct." (p. 324-5, my emphasis)

"For every act, by the principle of habit, modifies disposition -- it sets up a certain kind of inclination and desire." (p. 357) ????

"education" as change in mental and emotional disposition

"The changes considered [i.e. what counts as "training"] are in outer action rather than in mental and emotional dispositions of behavior." (p. 13)

See also

[1]