N.º 4 — 2004

Experience as Reason: Emotions and Values in the Construction of Rationality[1]

Dina Mendonça

Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Abstract

Dewey’s philosophical project aims, among other things, to connect “reason” intimately and intrinsically with experience. Such philosophical position stands clearly in denial of the traditional account that puts reason in opposition to experience (LW 15:12). This paper explores one of the most outstanding consequences of such philosophical project: the attempt to overcome the intolerable vacuum created by the separation of ideas and knowledge from emotions (LW 14:323). The best illustration of this aspect of Dewey’s philosophical work is given by his proposal for the philosophical consideration of values, which ultimately suggests a scientific approach to values.

The paper begins by some introductory remarks explaining shortly Dewey’s reconstruction of experience and how his pragmatism presents a reconstruction of the notion of rationality. Having shown that such reconstruction necessarily requires a revision of the fact-value distinction, I then explain Dewey’s main ideas concerning the philosophical conception of value. It will become visible that Dewey’s philosophical project provides a new hope for philosophy. Accordingly, the paper concludes by showing how a Deweyan investigation of theory of emotion incorporates and follows up Dewey’s insights.

1. Reason: A Result of the Activity of Experience  

In the Educational Lectures Before Young Academy delivered in 1901, Dewey writes, “Experience is reason in its earlier stage, in its solvent or crystallized condition; judgment is that experience arranged, organized, thoroughly digested, worked out into power (LW 17:335). In order to fully understand what Dewey means by this we must take a step back and look at his reconstruction of experience.

Dewey defines experience as an interaction between an organism and some aspect of its environment (LW 10:50). He writes,

The organism acts in accordance with its own structure, simple or complex, upon its surroundings. As a consequence the changes produced in the environment react upon the organism and its activities. The living creature undergoes, suffers, the consequences of its own behavior. This close connection between doing and suffering or undergoing forms what we call experience. (MW 12:129)

Among other things, Dewey’s conception of experience aimed at providing a way to overcome various dichotomies of the philosophical inquiry. Dewey thought that by redirecting philosophical attention to the activity of experience and finding a philosophical vocabulary that described it fruitfully, philosophy could be recovered. Accordingly, Dewey describes experience as a continuous process, where doing and undergoing appear in a growing and dynamic relationship (LW 10:51) identifiable through situations.

A situation is the contextual whole of experience and it is crucial to understand Dewey’s reconstruction of experience because it grounds the analysis of doing and undergoing. The idea of a situated experience allows us, for example, to clarify that organism and environment are not to be understood as complete and independent entities. In fact, we can only understand organism as part of its environment, and we can only understand environment as a dynamic process that involves the organism. As Tallisse writes, in his simple and clear book on Dewey, “the term ‘environment’ does not denote some permanent, independent entity; rather, it is shorthand for an array of interrelated and active forces or factors that collectively constitute the conditions within which we, at some particular time and in some particular place, live” (Tallisse 2000, 19).

For Dewey, viewing experience as an interaction meant a change comparable to the “Copernican revolution.” The shift proposed by the reconstruction of the concept of experience implied a true change of the center of reflection. Dewey describes this change in The Quest for Certainty in the following way,

The old center was mind knowing by means of an equipment of powers complete within itself, and merely exercised upon an antecedent external material equally complete in itself. The new center is indefinite interactions taking place within a course of nature which is not fixed and complete, but which is capable of direction to new and different results through the mediation of intentional operations. Neither self nor world, neither soul nor nature (in the sense of something isolated and finished in its isolation) is the center, any more than either earth or sun is the absolute center of a single universal and necessary frame of reference. There is a moving whole of interacting parts; a center emerges whenever there is effort to change them in a particular direction. (LW 4:232)

Hence, Dewey’s notion of situation provides this needed new center. In consequence of this conceptual change, the standard of judgment is transformed, for in this new picture of experience, the standard is given neither by the mind nor by the world, but by interactions within a situation.

Of course, it would have probably been more correct of Dewey to claim for himself a “Newtonian Revolution” than to deny Kant his philosophical achievement. The reason behind Dewey’s bold claim may lay in the fact that he looked upon the change to his conception of experience as the one that would truly provide a critical philosophy. Philosophy gains a new critical stand because it is capable of analyzing experience based on the complex structure of situations, instead of basing it solely upon the functioning of our sense apparatus and the structure of mind or on the “impressions” from the environment. Dewey thinks that in this way he has provided a way to escape what he labeled the philosophic fallacy -- transforming consequences into antecedent conditions of existence. In other words, Dewey thinks he has found a way to understand distinctions functionally, to show that philosophical distinctions arise out of reflection upon situations, and that philosophical thinking is not a description of antecedent conditions.

In light of his reconstruction of experience, Dewey redefines philosophical distinctions translating them in relationships, instead of considering them as a simple description of existences. Accordingly, Dewey redefines rationality as the successful connections of means and ends. He writes:

Now suppose we talk about reasonableness instead of reason. What is reasonableness? You see a person doing something that is unreasonable. What do you mean? Do you mean that his ends and the means he is using don’t jibe? They don’t harmonize? Either he is setting up ends that he hasn’t got the  means for realizing, or he is using means in such a way that they won’t give him the result he is after. Or, on the other hand, here are these conditions which might be used as means and he isn’t using them as means. He isn’t forming and end consequently to be reached in terms of the means, the resources that he has got in connection with the obstacles and the obstructions that have got to overcome. Now, if you take that to define the meaning, that kind of reasonableness to define the meaning of reason, then pragmatists are adulterated rationalists, but only if you take it that way. (LW 11:565-6)

By viewing rationality as a intelligent connection of means and ends-in-view, Dewey argues that reason is not a given faculty containing potentially all rational apparatus but, instead, that reason is a faculty in constant construction where results from experience are formalized for future experience. To take reason in this dynamic format is to reject a vision of human nature as composed of different, separate capacities. He writes:

My third illustration concerns the dividing-up of human nature into a number of separate water-tight non-communicating compartments. One of these compartments is said to contain reason and all the intellectual factors and capacities by which knowledge and valid ideas are attained. The other one consists of appetites, impulses, desires, wants, everything that is brought under the head of emotional life in its widest sense. Acceptance of the philosophies of the past (spilling over into psychologies that purport to be scientific) which erected this division has resulted in formation of what from a technical point of view is probably the main problem of philosophy at present: the relation between fact and value. (LW 15:323)

Since Dewey thinks that the division of human nature into separate non-communicating results in a mistaken conception of the nature of value, it is crucial for such revision of the meaning of rationality provided by his pragmatism to analyse adequately the nature of value.

2. Values: Conditions for a Theory of Valuation

A discussion about rationality, therefore, cannot be completed without looking at the problematic distinction between facts and values. According to Dewey, the chief obstacle to a more effective criticism of values is found in the traditional separation of nature and experience. Dewey argues that the division between facts and values is the result of a mechanical conception of nature. Nature has been opposed to experience and identified with a mechanical structure. All things that fit in the realm of nature are facts, and all other things are put in the realm of values. The philosophical problem is how to connect and reconcile these two realms (LW 1:296).

However, if we deny this mistaken opposition between nature and experience, and if experience is recognized as the method of reaching nature (LW 1:13), the relevant philosophical problem is the construction of a theory of criticism. Given that the philosophical task is criticism, its role is not that of telling us how to live our lives, but of making available the discovery of the conditions and consequences that qualify likings, bias, and interests. However, in order to produce such criticism and express it in a responsible and informed fashion, philosophy has to reinterpret the realm of values under this new framework. 

With this comments Dewey points out that previous analysis of values have taken for granted a division between fact and value that derives from taking knowledge of facts as the only mode of grasping reality, and thus as the only kind of knowledge available to us. In line with the previous assumption, it is common to adopt a hierarchical understanding of the distinction of practical and theoretical, where practical action takes its standards from theoretical speculation, such that the latter is considered more important than the first.

At the heart of Dewey’s concern is the conviction that, among other things, the understanding of values in opposition to facts blocks the possibility of a genuine reconstruction of the ethical theory. In other words, as long as knowledge is understood as the disclosure of reality, and reality is understood as prior and independent of knowing, ethical reflection is stuck. Dewey argues that thinking that “knowledge is concerned with disclosure of the characteristics of antecedent existences and es­sences, and that the properties of value found therein provide the authoritative standards for the conduct of life” (LW 4:58) doomed ethical philosophical progress. For its inquiries will always be entangled in trying to find other schemes to justify values, in spite of the findings of hard science, which are alleged to be the only genuine and known qualifications of reality itself (LW 4:35). Unfortunately, because of the assumed distinction between nature and experience, there is a “supposed need of reconciling, of somehow adjusting, the findings of scientific knowledge with the validity of ideas concerning value” (LW 4:40).

Dewey thinks this state of affairs is due to the acceptance of the conclusions of modern scientific inquiry without remaking the conceptions of mind and knowledge in light of such scientific conclusions (LW 4:58). In contrast, Dewey wants to provide a conception of experience that allows a reconstruction of these conceptions, showing that “the complete separation of knowing and doing from one another has broken down” (LW 4:59). Among other things, it means understanding that “standards and tests of validity are found in the consequences of overt activity, not in what is fixed prior to it and independently of it” (LW 4:59). Dewey claims that it is this last point that allows for a transformation of our conception of values. 

Dewey treats in more detail the status of values in his book Theory of Valuation. He begins by looking at the literature on values and finds that the views on the subject range from the belief, writing that,

at one extreme, that so-called “values” are emotional epithets or mere ejaculations, to the belief, at the other extreme, that a priori necessary standardized, rational values are the principles upon which art, science, and morals depend for their validity. And between these two conceptions lie a number of intermediary views. (LW 13:191)

However, all these views show that the problem of valuation is closely associated with the problem of the structure of the behavioral sciences and the way this structure influences the understanding of human relations (LW 13:193). What Dewey is going to argue is that when we see that the phenomena of valuation is seen as having its immediate source in biological modes of behavior, and that its concrete content is influenced by cultural conditions, it is possible to overcome the separation of a “world of facts” versus a “world of values”  (LW 13:249). According to Dewey, the denotative method allows us to recognize the above connections because it is a way to uncover the genesis of philosophical conceptions and, in this way, guide future philosophical investigations.

To avoid such errors, Dewey looks at multiple and varied past philosophical reflections upon value and shows that they all point to “some region of the horizon of experience in which a personal or at least animal attitude is implicated, and an attitude which is not primarily cognitive in nature” (LW 2:83). In other words, we acknowledge that reflection about values is usually identified with things for which a subject cares. However, sometimes values are named to designate a simple state of the subject, and sometimes an attitude that goes out and cultivates the well being of its objects (LW 2:81). In Dewey’s analysis, this state of affairs leads to two conclusions: first, that there exists direct affective attitudes towards things. It is important to point out that these are more than mere feelings; they are dispositions having objective consequences and relationships (LW 2:85). Second, while these dispositions do not define values, they are nevertheless indispensable ingredients of valuations. That is, they are necessary conditions of values but not sufficient conditions (LW 2:85).

Given that affective attitudes are a necessary part of the experience of value, we must search for a more detailed specification of dispositions to investigate values. When we look at the experience of value we apprehend it as the fulfillment of interest involving, on one hand, a readiness for active movement to either retain or come to possess something; and, on the other hand, the enjoyment of possession or aversion to loss. This change -- from interest to enjoyment or aversion -- is marked by the tendency to pass from one relation between subject and object to another through certain means. Now, Dewey argues that such change “implies a mediate factor in the liking which defines value or good”  (LW 2:87) because value is defined in light of means designed to attain a certain relation between subject and object. What is revealing for Dewey is that when we specify the nature of this change we can truly grasp the nature of value.

The first thing to make explicit is that this change is not a change in or of the subject, but a change in the relation of subject and object (LW 2:88). Once the relation stands as the center of concern, we can describe the change in terms of a move from distance or absence to possession or loss. Dewey thinks that understanding value in such terms introduces objective reference into the very constitution of value. The focus changes “from de facto appropriation or assimilation to an assimilation recognized to be the fruit or end-term of the activity -- the choice and preference -- of the subject” (LW 2:88). As a result, it is possible to establish criticism and revision upon valuation because it is possible to establish that a thing taken to be good is in fact not good, just as something taken to be red is indeed not red (LW 2:89).

Of course, when we find that a particular thing that has been taken as valuable is truly valuable we are making an additional claim. For it requires that the thing in question has been examined and tested and possesses the quality attributed to it (LW 2:88).

Dewey uses food to illustrate the objective character of value. He begins by saying that the property of being food is relative to the organic function of nutrition. Though hunger does not constitute things called food, it is because a hungry animal seeks food that there are such things capable of nutritive assimilation. Hence, a thing is food when it nourishes, and whether it nourishes or not is a matter capable of objective investigation. Likewise with value: though valuing does not make things valuable, it is because people seek them and they fulfill their desires that things function as valuable. Dewey writes, “If value be defined as fulfillment of interest, the analogy between ‘liking’ and hunger on one side, and food and value on the other is, I think, clear and instructive” (LW 2:89).

When value is taken as a fulfillment of interest, we can begin to establish what the good is, for in this case knowledge of the good begins with a clarification of intent. The explanation of intention must be such that it brings to the surface what other things are intended when a particular object is desired, and consequently leads to a comparison of different intents. In addition, intents do not appear isolated such that the above explanation necessarily leads to the consideration of a unification of various intents. While some first intents are discovered to be not good, the process of evaluation gives rise to other new goods and intents (LW 2:93). This means that evaluative judgments are an investigation of the claims of things esteemed, appreciated, prized and cherished (LW 2:97), and not a mere statement that a certain thing was desired and enjoyed, for at the same time as it establishes the nature of value it also provides a sense of the objective relationships of what is enjoyed. This is not exactly hard science, but one can see how evaluative judgments can aim at grasping the conditions and consequences of values, creating an objective ground for further valuations.

We can conclude by stating that discourse about value is composed of propositions that describe and define certain things as good in a definite existential relation. The issue of their existential relation is that of means-ends or means-consequences (LW 13:212). It is important to stress that these propositions are not mere statements about valuations that have occurred. Rather they “are generalizations, since they form rules for the proper use of materials” (LW 13:212). Because such propositions are phrased in terms of existential relations of means-ends, they can attain the form of warranted assertions because they are capable of being tested by observation of results actually attained as compared to those intended (LW 13:212).

It may be hard to think of value statements in this manner because we are not accustomed to thinking of them as statements capable of verification. Yet verification of value statements and reformulation of valuations in light of changing conditions take place even when they are not deliberately tested. Let me illustrate such verification of value statements with an example. Let’s imagine that a parent of a toddler (A) advises another parent (B) to refrain from reasoning with a child with a tantrum, stating that, given that the intent of the parent’s attitude towards tantrums is to help the child overcome an existing tension, “it is good to listen and acknowledge the children’s feeling of frustration instead of giving them reasons not to have the tantrum.” Following Dewey’s suggestion, we may elaborate the parent’s advice by saying that listening will shorten the length of the tantrum, it will make the child’s emotional world more stable, it will provide her tools to deal with tantrums when no parent is present, it will provide the child with space to come up with her own reasons. On the other hand, providing reasons will irritate the child and perhaps prolong the tantrum, leaving her unsure of what her emotions are and maintaining her dependence upon parental commands. Even if the parent (B) is convinced of the truth of the statement, only acting upon it and observing the results of such action can warrant such an assertion. The next time toddler (B) has a tantrum, if the parent follows the advice, observing whether in fact the frustration of the child vanishes more quickly, he may adopt the advice as a rule. Now let’s imagine that after listening to his child with a tantrum the parent (B) is confronted with an even longer tantrum from his child. The importance of stating that things are described as good or bad in a definite existential relation comes to the surface. If descriptions of things as good or bad were descriptions of taste, the parent would simply state, “that does not work with my child.” However, precisely because the value statement is phrased in terms of means-ends, he can further investigate the matter by examining what parent (A) meant by listening or what other parents have experienced and done, or whether other parents have found the same results that he did under similar circumstances.

It is customary to question Dewey’s reconstruction of the terminology of the field of values on the grounds that, Dewey’s philosophy fails to distinguish between things that are good in themselves (intrinsically good) and things that are good for something else (instrumental goods). The objection is that the failure to acknowledge such of crucial distinction destroys the validity of Dewey’s conclusions (LW 13:212). In order to respond to such objection we must analyze the relation of means and ends.

Dewey begins by stating that there is a clear dependence of ends attained upon means employed. He writes, “any survey of the experiences in which ends-in-view are formed, and in which earlier impulsive tendencies are shaped through deliberation into a chosen desire, reveals that the object finally valued as an end to be reached is determined in its concrete makeup by appraisal of existing conditions as means” (LW 13:213). When we treat ends as something immediate and exclusively final, we deny the possibility of looking for further consequences of reaching a certain end (LW 13:214). Consequently we prevent the possibility of a critical analysis of values. However, it is possible to critically reformulate ends-in-view when we acknowledge that given means to a certain end determine the value of that end as an end-in-view because it gives concrete vision of what is meant to desire a certain end.

Dewey thinks that past consideration of the relation of means and ends uses the word “intrinsic” in an inherently ambiguous fashion because it uses the term both in reference to a subject and in an absolute way (LW 13:214). Dewey writes,

If one has an ardent desire to obtain certain things as means, then the quality of value belongs to, or inheres in, those things. For the time being, producing or obtaining those means is the end-in-view. The notion that only that which is out of relation to everything else can justly be called inherent is not only itself absurd but is contradicted by the very theory that connects value of objects as ends with desire and interest. (LW 13:215)

It is this ambiguity of discourse that explains the failure of other theories of valuation to fully appreciate the definite existential means-ends relation embodied in desires and interests. With Dewey’s conception of experience it is possible to accommodate this existential relation because it allows for the fact that desires are subject to frustration and interests subject to defeat (LW 13:217). Original impulses are different from “desires and interests that incorporate the results of critical inquiry” (LW 13:218). This shows that desires are not immutable feelings, and it explains the distinction drawn between what is desired and what is desirable (LW 13:219). Thus, Dewey says,

We commonly speak of “learning from experience” and of “maturity” of an individual or a group. What do we mean by such expressions? At the very least, we mean that in the history of individual persons and of the human race there takes place a change from original, comparatively unreflective, impulses and hard-and-fast habits to desires and interests that incorporate the results of critical inquiry. (LW 13:218)

Dewey identifies two sources at the base of the belief that there are ends having a value apart from valuation. On the one hand, he identifies the mentalist psychology which reduces “affective-motor activities to mere feelings has … operated in the interpretations assigned to ends-in-view, purposes, and aims” (LW 13:222-3). On the other hand, he points out the insistent isolation of enjoyment from the conditions under which enjoyment occurs (LW 13:225).

Here again, Dewey’s concern lies in pointing out that the problem arises when we take the distinction of means and ends as a fixed, immutable distinction instead of understanding the distinctions functionally. However, just as it is with the distinction of subject and object, Dewey’s criticism does not mean that we can no longer use such terminology. According to Dewey, the above division is detrimental when it assumes that the value attached to things as ends or means belong to the things themselves as some prior qualities independent of human interaction. However, we can use the distinction fruitfully when we understand it functionally. In this case values are not qualities independent of human conduct, but are the result of human interaction with the world. In Dewey’s perspective, then, values are capable of objective determination. They are not “strange entities” opposed to “facts,” but are the result of human interaction and therefore capable of being objectively described and critically assessed.

Dewey’s ethical proposal is not a naive consequentalistic ethical theory where all that matters is to observe and weigh results and consequences of action, which ultimately leads to the maxim “the end justifies the means.” On the contrary, Dewey thinks it is only the conception of ends-in-themselves that can warrant that maxim insofar as such a conception assumes that the ends-means relation is unilateral, proceeding exclusively from ends to means (LW 13:228).

Another objection usually brought against Dewey’s theory of valuation is that it fails to provide criteria for valuation. Since Dewey’s conception of valuation is always based on an analysis of past valuations the “valuation activities and judgments are involved in a hopeless regressus ad infinitum” (LW 13:231). Dewey replies that this has not been a problem for other scientific fields. Giving the example of a physician that has to determine the value of various courses of action and their result in the case of a particular patient, he argues that though there is no a priori standard of health, medical care has developed certain criteria out of past situations (LW 13:233). Dewey thinks that the advances of medical science and of scientific inquiry are most instructive on this point. He writes,

As long as actual events were supposed to be judged by comparison with some absolute end-value as a standard and norm no sure progress was made. When standards of health and of satisfaction of conditions of knowledge were conceived in terms of analytic observation of existing conditions, disclosing a trouble statable in a problem, criteria of judging were progressively self-corrective through the very process of use in observation to locate the source of the trouble and to indicate the effective means of dealing with it. These means form the content of specific end-in-view, not some abstract standard or ideal. (LW 13:233)

We may conclude by summarizing Dewey’s view on valuations. First, “valuations are empirically observable patterns of behavior and may be studied as such” (LW 13:237). Valuations that arise from desire and interest can be investigated because we can investigate their conditions and consequences. Second, desires are not side effects of impulse or routine-habit; they aim at ends-in-view, which can be judged and improved according to consequences attained in comparison with their content (LW 13: 237-8).

Philosophy does not hold any private store of knowledge or methods to reach truth nor a privilege access to the good (LW 1:305). Instead, the ethical task of philosophy is to clarify and to communicate the multiple and various traits of experience, stating the conditions and consequences of choices to allow clearer future choices.

3. Conclusion: the Need for a Deweyan Theory of Emotion

Dewey provides a place for truth and objectivity in ethics when he reveals the possibility of scientific inquiry into values, for by describing knowledge as a process to be examined in terms of transforming indeterminate situations, he moves away from the simplistic view of scientific inquiry as purely descriptive of “facts.” Therefore, Dewey’s conception of experience ultimately shows that ethics can adopt a methodology analogous to other scientific inquiries. As Jennifer Welchman argues in Dewey’s Ethical Thought,

from investigations of what people naturally do want, approve, disapprove, think right or wrong or obligatory, ethical theorists can formulate general descriptions and predictions regarding these phenomena. Moreover, … they can also generate prescriptions about what they ought to believe regarding the phenomena of wanting, approving, disapproving, and being obliged, and about how they ought to conduct themselves with regard to these phenomena in [the] future. (Welchman 1995, 2)

The conclusions enumerated above do not provide a complete theory of valuation, but they establish the conditions for such a theory (LW 13:239), showing how it is possible to construe an objective analysis of desires and ends. In addition, such conditions show that “the business of moral theory is not at all with con­summations and goods as such, but with discovery of the conditions and consequences of their appearance, a work which is factual and analytic, not dialectic, hortatory, nor prescriptive” (LW 1:323). In sum, Dewey thinks that the critical task of moral theory is to uncover the conditions and consequences of action such that we can remake subsequent action (LW 1:323).

The outline conditions for a theory of valuation clearly request an understanding of emotion, for value points to a region of experience where emotional connections are the strength and direction of actions. Consequently, no theory of valuation can be completed without incorporating a serious analysis of emotional activity. Dewey never undertook the topic of emotion within this frame of work as the subject matter of philosophical reflection. Nevertheless, it is clear that under Dewey’s philosophical project, emotions participate in the construction of rationality in different ways: first, they stand as original impulses towards ends-in-view. That is, emotions are part of the raw material that grounds rationality. It is important to stress that this doesn’t imply, like the argument sketched above indicates, that emotions stand free of critical examination because they are part of the ground condition of the ability to criticize.

Second, emotions appear as evaluative processes resulting from a critical assessment of original affective attitudes towards things, and thereby compose the direction of rationality. Needless to say the emotions differ greatly as they appear as original affective attitudes towards things (crude emotions) from when they appear as result of critical examination of original affective attitudes (refined emotions). Finally, emotions seem to also take part in the development of critical assessments in themselves, for Dewey describes them as being capable of directing and guiding situations (LW 10:82).

The suggestions about the relation of emotions to rationality in Dewey’s philosophical project outlined above need further elaboration. For the present purpose it shows that not only Dewey’s philosophy was suggesting connections that neurology is now proposing (Cunningham 1995) for Dewey saw that the philosophical crises was partly due to a misunderstanding of the nature of emotional activity as is clearly illustrated by his question: 

Can we fail to see the irony in a situation wherein desire and emotion are relegated to a position inferior in every way to that of knowledge, while at the same time the chief problem of that which is termed the highest and most perfect knowledge is taken to be the existence of evil—that is, of desires errant and frustrated? (LW 4:28)

In addition, and perhaps more importantly, Dewey conception of experience proposes a radical critical philosophy, which ultimately “procures for philosophic reflection something of that coopera­tive tendency toward consensus which marks inquiry in the nat­ural sciences” (LW 1:34). A defense of an empirical method for philosophical inquiries means that philosophical reflection works through hypothesis that must be tested. When we regard philosophy in this manner, we can see that philosophy is capable of accumulation like other scientific practices.  The value of philosophical hypothesis relies on how it presents and discloses the issues reflected upon, or how it impairs and suffocates them. In summary, the “first-rate test of the value of any philosophy” is given by an analysis of whether such reflections render or not ordinary life experiences more significant to us (LW 1:18). The question that philosophical hypotheses must answer is: “Does it yield the enrichment and increase of power of ordinary things which the results of physical science afford when applied in every-day affairs?” (LW 1:18)

By providing us with this background understanding of philosophy, Dewey gives us some tools to continue investigating the difficult nature of emotion and its intimate connection to rationality. What the above paragraph point out it that Dewey’s reconstruction of experience provides a methodological rebirth for philosophical inquiry, which begins by analyzing the consequences of using certain philosophical methodologies in its analysis. If we follow Dewey’s program and compare contrast different philosophical approaches to the nature of emotion we may be capable of not only overcoming the traps of ambiguity that plague philosophy of emotions presently, but also identify some of the crucial traits of emotional activity and perhaps identify some other traits that have been systematically ignored by philosophers of emotions. This may provides with the outline of an answer to “[t]he problem, the difficult but urgent problem, of whether emotional charges that are not warranted can possibly be replaced by desires that are linked up with our best knowledge is evaded. Yet this is the problem which we are compelled to face if we ask whether human behaviour is capable of being directed by other means than either superior force, external authority, uncriticized customs, or sheer emotional outbursts not controlled by authenticated ideas” (LW 14:325).

Therefore, we will be able to compare and contrast how different philosophical hypotheses concerning the nature of emotion enrich and increase the power of ordinary experience in the following way: first by tracking their impact on educational practices; second by pursuing and elaborating the outcomes of different philosophies of emotion; and third, by taking up what each and every theory of emotion suggest and see if these suggestions prove to be fruitful for philosophy itself and other scientific investigations.

Bibliography:

Cunningham, Suzanne. “Dewey on Emotions: Recent Experimental Evidence” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Fall, 1995, Vol. XXXI, No. 4: 865-874.

Damásio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error. Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Basingstone and Oxford: Papermac, 1994.

———. The Feeling of What Happens. Body, Emotion and the making of Consciousness. London: William Heinemann, 1999.

———.Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. London: William Heinemann, 2003.

Dewey, John. The Later Works, 1025-1953, 17 Volumes. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988-1991.

LeDoux, Joseph. 1998. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Talisse, Robert B. On Dewey: The Reconstruction of Philosophy. Belmont, USA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000.

[1] This paper would not have been possible without the post-doctoral fellowship (SFRH/BPD/14175/2003) granted  by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, which allowed me to research and write this paper. I also want to thank Sofia Miguéns for inviting me to contribute to this issue.

John Dewey (1859-1952) Filósofo do pragmatismo norte-americano. Na sua opinião, a investigação é um processo que se corrige a si mesmo, não precisando de encontrar um fundamento seguro. O conhecimento é apenas aquilo que se encontra garantido pela investigação.

© Dina Mendonça, 2004. Todos os direitos reservados.