Review
Reviewed Work(s): John Dewey Between Pragmatism and Constructivism by Larry A.
Hickman, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich
Review by: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
Source: The Pluralist , Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 126-129
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for the Advancement
of American Philosophy
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/pluralist.7.2.0126
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the pluralist 7 : 2 2012
and still maintain that a partial fulfillment of obligation is worthy of recognition and further pursuit. I agree that “[t]o be human is to acknowledge
the impossibility of being thoroughly liberated from one’s guilt to refuse to
accept an eventual harmony in which all evil would be eternally forgiven”
(11–12), although I am not convinced that an inability to be perfectly ethical
is equivalent to the inability to be ethical at all.
Regardless, even if one only admits that one cannot always do the right
thing (as opposed to never doing the right thing), then it still follows that
one’s moral project is ongoing and metaphysically infinite. Pihlström’s discussion in this aspect is important insofar as it changes the way that one
may approach morality and moral problem-solving in the world. In other
words, the transcendental nature of guilt accomplishes what Dewey insisted
upon nearly a century ago: philosophy ought to respond to human problems
rather than merely abstract problems generated by philosophers. Pihlström,
quoting Peter Dews, explains: “[P]olitical practices aiming at a better life for
human beings and societies must ‘begin from a sense of fault, from “healthy
culpability,”’ that is, from the understanding that ‘we are what’s wrong with
the world’” (120). We are both the problem and the potential solution.
Pihlström’s investigation of transcendental guilt and the implications
that arise from accepting such a metaphysical position are wide-ranging and
insightful. He relies upon theorists working from a variety of trainings and
backgrounds and carefully weaves the diverse viewpoints into a readable,
coherent philosophical exercise. His book would be helpful to any person
grappling with how humans ought to comport themselves when evil and
suffering seem omnipresent.
Kim Garchar
Kent State University
John Dewey Between Pragmatism and Constructivism
Larry A. Hickman, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich, eds. New York:
Fordham UP, 2009.
Michel Foucault famously commented that progress in the human sciences
was achieved through the successive reclamation of classic texts, as scholars revisit the rich source material that spawned their present intellectual
predicaments. That means that almost any book about such a classic text
or author will be an attempt to disclose the relevance of its subject-matter
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reviews
127
for contemporary debates, whether or not those debates were the same as
those animating the original author. This volume is thus commendable in
its intellectual honesty, as it seeks to examine how John Dewey fits into a
debate about social constructivism that post-dates his career by some decades.
Two questions are tacitly posed throughout the volume: first, the question
of Dewey studies, to what extent was Dewey a constructivist? And second,
the philosophical question, to what extent are Dewey’s ideas and commitments compatible with contemporary social constructivist thought? The two
questions are subtly different, as answering the first places an emphasis on a
holistic reconstruction of Dewey’s corpus, while answering the second takes
inspiration from Dewey but seeks to develop his ideas in perhaps novel ways.
The volume itself is organized around a set of papers that seek to tackle
various aspects of the relationship between Pragmatism and contemporary
constructivism. The results of a conference held at Cologne in 2001, these
five papers—Kenneth Stikkers’s discussion of the German reception of Pragmatism in general and Dewey in particular, Jim Garrison’s case for taking
“Dewey’s constructivism literally” (95) since for Dewey the operations of
inquiry literally construct essences in the course of developing warranted assertions, Kersten Reich’s argument for highlighting the role of the observer
alongside that of the agent and the participant when discussing the validity
of claims, Larry Hickman’s defense of the notion of universalizability as a criterion of scientific truth, and Stefan Neubert’s clarification of the role of “the
real” in contemporary constructivism as a “void signifier” (173) rather than
as something of which it is possible to produce an ontology—are preceded
by a set of chapters surveying Dewey’s life and work, contemporary Dewey
scholarship, and the various strands of philosophical thought implicated in
contemporary constructivism. Ingeniously, the volume closes with a set of
e-mail exchanges between the five authors, in which points are extended and
criticisms responded to.
The main benefit of an exercise like the one on offer in this volume is
the possibility of disclosing the “sticking points” (to borrow a turn of phrase
from Ian Hacking) involved in contemporary constructivist claims. Although
the volume’s title suggests a debate between Pragmatism and constructivism,
what emerges in these pages is—not surprisingly—a debate between a dualistic realism in which valid knowledge is founded on a connection to mindindependent reality, and a monistic constructivism in which valid knowledge
is that which is viable within a specific social context. I say “not surprisingly”
because the sticking points of contemporary constructivism are all about a
rejection of realism and dualism, given the prominence of such realism and
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the pluralist 7 : 2 2012
dualism in addressing the Cartesian anxiety that afflicts Enlightenment and
post-Enlightenment epistemology; it is dualists and realists for whom the core
commitments of a constructivist position are sometimes hard to swallow. In
this debate, Dewey and Pragmatism more generally are less declared partisans
than contested territory, since traces of both realism and constructivism can
plausibly be found in them. The volume thus uses Dewey and Pragmatism as
an occasion to flesh out the realist-constructivist controversy, and provides a
great intellectual service in disclosing precisely where these positions disagree.
A key sticking point that is nicely fleshed out in this volume involves the
importance of a power-laden social context in the production of truth claims.
Stikkers argues that, for Pragmatists generally, “inquiry is . . . the quest for
stable community” (68), and Garrison maintains that for Dewey, understanding is that which allows us “to functionally coordinate with another’s experience as well as our own” (103); both are thus keenly aware of the transactive
and interpersonal character of the quest for knowledge. But neither seem as
interested as Reich is in debunking putative universalisms as resulting from
the influence of “particularly powerful communities of interpretation” (139),
which is a classic aim of Continental sociology of knowledge in the tradition
of Ideologiekritik and Karl Mannheim. This in turn leads to some productive
exchanges about whether Dewey’s writings on technology and democracy are
fruitful sources for thinking through these issues, or whether one needs to
turn to Foucault or Baumann or Habermas for a fuller appreciation of the
“ambivalence of modernity” (215) and the potential for abuse contained in
too-hasty claims about certainty.
Unfortunately, the volume also features considerable discussion of a chimera that often rears its head in exchanges between realists and constructivists:
“cognitive relativism,” or the misleading notion that because of the unavailability of an unquestionably superior frame of reference, truth is a function
of individual thought and perception and thus arbitrary and subjective. But
this is quite problematic, because the constructivist rejection of metaphysical
realism does not entail the kind of anything-goes relativism that makes truth
a function of culturally derived conceptual schemes. Nor does the rejection
of metaphysical realism raise problems for—to use an example that recurs
several times in the volume—the claim that the melting point of tin is the
same in “Kansas City, Cologne, or Kandahar” (156), because even though a
cognitive relativist might make the absurd assertion that tin would melt at
different temperatures depending on the locally dominant cultural values, a
contemporary constructivist would not. The constructivist point is, rather,
that the concept “the melting point of tin” doesn’t make any sense outside of
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an ensemble of practices associated with techno-scientific manufacturing,
and hence that outside of those practices, evaluating the melting point of tin
would be a meaningless exercise. Instead, the discussion should have been
about translatability: to what extent can Dewey’s work help us in probing
the potentials and the limits of our contemporary scientific vocabulary?
The concern with “cognitive relativism” also indicates another issue in
transatlantic discussions of Dewey and Pragmatism, an issue that remains
implicit throughout much of the volume. “Cognitive relativism” is a problem
for some of the US authors in the book, and not as much of a concern for the
German authors, largely because of the different ways that the relationship
between science and politics plays out in those different social settings: in
US thought, science is supposed to correct politics and improve it, while in
much of the Continental European tradition, science is supposed to get out
of the way so that politics can unfold in a less constrained manner. Hence
the opponents of “cognitive relativism” in the volume frequently refer to
creationism as the kind of position that should be categorically ruled out of
bounds because of its false claims and detrimental effects on public education, while the volume’s constructivists prefer a more nuanced approach to
the issue that does not rely on defending the unquestioned superiority of
experimental science. The reception of Max Weber’s thinking on scientific
objectivity on different sides of the Atlantic illustrates this divergence, and
from the essays presented in this volume, the reception of Dewey is likewise
illustrative of these same tensions. And in the end, illustrating tensions may
be the most important benefit of dialogues like the one on offer here.
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
American University
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