Essays in Experimental Logic

When you drink to quench your thirst, is the water an object of knowledge—or simply part of what you are doing? John Dewey’s answer unsettles the habit of treating every experience as a thought problem.

In these early-twentieth-century essays, Dewey challenges philosophers to look beyond the moment when reflection takes center stage. Enjoying friends’ company is not the same as studying one of them; appreciating a painting is not the same as inspecting it for its maker or price. Yet, he argues, theories of knowledge often mistake such inquiry for the whole of experience, overlooking its shifting focus, its surrounding world, and the qualities that matter before we stop to analyze them. To understand thought, Dewey says, we must see where it belongs in the course of living. What changes when experience is no longer reduced to what we know?

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