§82. A New Experience
Dewey objects to the same thing Hegel, Dilthey, Green, and James do in the empiricism of Locke, Hume, and their congeners. They forget about relations and turn mental life into a series of psychological atoms and imaginary continuity.
At this point Dewey might have followed the behaviorists of his day and disavowed the concept of experience; instead, he chose to reconstruct it. Philosophy requires a reconstructed concept of experience because experience is not what it used to be, and not as philosophy is used to thinking of it. When Aristotle wrote of emperia, people's experience, any experience, really was no better than it seemed to him, a desultory hodgepodge of habits and rules of thumb. But that is not experience today, which is no longer something we submit to passively, enduring or enjoying it just as it comes, or manipulate “empirically” with no understanding. Modern experience is experimental experience, and “includes the process by which it directs itself in its own betterment.”2Empiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001.
Empiricism needs to catch up. “What has been lacking throughout the history of thought” is “a genuinely experimental empiricism.” From Democritus to Spencer empirical philosophy is framed in terms of sense data as the material from which concepts are compiled. Critics from Plato to Green use the weakness of this psychology to argue that the crucial connecting ideas are independent of experience, a priori, or innate. Like James, who faced the same dilemma, Dewey seeks a more radically empirical alternative. Plato and Leibniz are right to think connections are required, but wrong to think connecting ideas originate in intellect apart from experience. Like Mach and James, Dewey says that “experience carries principles of connection and organization within itself,” the connections “instituted through operations which define ideas” and put them in action.
'1 he “true ‘stuff’ of experience” is not sensation but “adaptive courses of action, habits, active functions, connections of doing and undergoing, sensori-motor coordinations.” '1 hese are immanent principles of organization which experience bears in itself.3Dewey was an ardent Darwinist and cannot consider experience other than as an evolved, adaptive power conditioned by the evolutionary causality of time. '1 hat precludes viewing the senses as gateways, as in “nothing in intellect not first in sense.” Following Darwin, “The senses lose their place as gateways of knowing, to take their rightful place as stimuli to action.” Sensations are not ultimate cognitions, and not cognitions at all. “'they are provocations, incitements, challenges to an act of inquiry which is to terminate in knowledge.” Sensation is the beginning of knowledge “only in the sense that the experienced shock of change is the necessary stimulus to the investigating and comparing which eventually produces knowledge.” Sensations are scientifically interesting only when they are “consequences of acts intentionally performed.” The only significant sensation is a provoked, experimental sensation, and its significance is not theorematic evidence of truth, but rather the thought and inquiry its experiment induces.4
In the word “experience” Dewey concentrates all the evolved, adaptive relations of organisms to their environment. “Interaction of environment with organism is the source, direct or indirect, of all experience,” which makes experience a word for “the entire organic agent-patient in all its interactions with the environment, natural and social.” Like Helmholtz and Mach, Dewey finds no categorical distinction between a normally functioning nervous system and a scientific experiment (§67), emphasizing the continuity of scientific methodology and animal intelligence. “If one were to trace the history of science far enough, one would reach a time in which the acts which dealt with a troublesome situation would be organic responses of a structural type together with a few acquired habits.
The most elaborate technique of present inquiry in the laboratory is an extension and refinement of the simple original operations.”5The experience from which we learn arises from unscripted instability, in other words, a surprise. That, and not a classical modalized sense impression, is the shock that sets mentation moving. Yet this must be instability in a context of stability, experience emerging from a mix of the new and the familiar. “It is precisely the peculiar intermixture of support and frustration of man by nature which constitutes experience” If life were all one and the same, there would be nothing to remember, nothing to learn, no experience. But when nature fluctuates and inexplicably refuses to satisfy our expectations we have a problem, and an opportunity for trials and learning. The “immediately given” is “a cry for something not given” It is with this problematic experience that inquiry commences, and will with luck terminate in knowledge, which Dewey explains as “a mode of experiencing things which facilitates control of objects for purposes of non-cognitive experiences” He means for the sake of satisfaction, or what he calls consummation.6