John Dewey’s Logic of Science

Abstract

In recent years, pragmatism in general and John Dewey in particular have been of increasing interest to philosophers of science. Dewey’s work provides an interesting alternative package of views to those which derive from the logical empiricists and their critics, on problems of both traditional and more recent vintage. Dewey’s work ought to be of special interest to recent philosophers of science committed to the program of analyzing “science in practice.” The core of Dewey’s philosophy of science is his theory of inquiry—what he called “logic.” There is a major lacuna in the literature on this point, however: no contemporary philosophers of science have engaged with Dewey’s logical theory, and scholars of Dewey’s logic have rarely made connections with philosophy of science. This article aims to fill this gap, to correct some significant errors in the interpretation of key ideas in Dewey’s logical theory, and to show how Dewey’s logic provides resources for a philosophy of science.

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