Dewey Technology

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John Dewey: philosopher of technology.

by Larry A. Hickman

John Dewey (1859-1952) was widely known among the reading public of his time for his

humanism, his progressive educational theory, and his commitment to social reform. Near the

end of his life, his work had become so influential that the New York Times dubbed him"America's Philosopher."

Among his fellow academics, Dewey was also known as heir to the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce

and William James and as an energetic opponent of dualistic metaphysical systems. He was

especially critical of the ones that advanced supernatural or transcendent outlooks. He argued

that their separation of facts from values and the mental from the physical had stifled human

progress.

With the exception of his closest colleagues, however, few during Dewey's lifetime seemed to

notice that he was also the first philosopher in America to develop a systematic critique of

technology.

Three factors may have contributed to this oversight. First, there was during Dewey's lifetime

no academic discipline, nor even a clearly defined set of issues, known as the philosophy of

technology. Some philosophers, to be sure, were interested in the theoretical aspects of

science. But technology just seemed to most of them too mundane--too practical--to be

worthy of serious consideration.

Second, although Dewey wrote books that were devoted to established sub-fields within

philosophy, such as ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of art, he never

consolidated his philosophy of technology within a single volume. His critique of technology is

diffused throughout dozens of books and essays.

Third, Dewey's work was so far ahead of its time that few of his contemporaries were able to

grasp its significance. Only now are philosophers beginning to appreciate the extent to which

he undercut the assumptions that have dominated Western metaphysics since Plato. His

understanding of the place of technology in human life played a crucial role in his radical

critique of philosophical business-as-usual.

Dewey's interest in tools and instruments, already apparent in works he published before the

turn of the century, continued throughout his career. His essay "Moral Theory and Practice"

(1891) argued that ethics involves the same type of intelligence that is required in the selling

of wheat or the invention of the telephone. Later, in Essays in Experimental Logic (1916),

Experience and Nature (1925), and Art as Experience (1934), Dewey presented rich analyses

of the interaction of human beings with their tools. Among these tools was language, which he

called "the tool of tools." Given Dewey's early and extensive philosophical critique of

technology, it is ironic that Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, published in 1927, is still widely

accepted as the first major philosophical work to take up these matters.

Dewey's interest in technology was an integral part of his broader philosophical outlook. Hetirelessly argued that philosophy ought to be relevant to everyday life and that all philosophers

worth their salt have the obligation to provide a critique of their environing social conditions.

The formative factors within Dewey's society were so patently technological that one is left

wondering why his philosophical contemporaries were so slow to take them into account. At

the time of Dewey's birth, America was just beginning its transformation from pre-industrial

technologies of wind, water, and wood. As Dewey matured, America increasingly turned to

technologies of steel, coal, and iron. Synthetics, television, and nuclear power had become

realities before he died. One of Dewey's last published essays contained a discussion of the

atomic bomb.

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At the heart of Dewey's philosophy of technology is his theory of inquiry, or deliberation.

Breaking with the long tradition of Western epistemology, Dewey argued that inquiry is neither

primarily theoretical nor primarily practical. It is instead a kind of production. He thought that

inquiry starts with raw materials and then reworks them with specialized tools. But since

change is the only constant, the tools of inquiry are themselves always in need of

improvement. As conditions change, inquiry uses some of its tools to rework others.

Technology and inquiry thus became for Dewey virtually synonymous. Both involve the

invention, development, and use of tools and other artifacts to resolve perceived problems.

Dewey also argued that inquiry requires the production and stockpiling of intermediate parts.

These might include just about any artifact that has proven valuable enough to keep around

for further use. In this category Dewey included not just tangible objects, such as lumber or

sheet metal, but also intangibles, such as concepts and habits. Successful inquiry continually

uses these intermediate products to produce new and more finished products: new ways of

thinking, new materials, and even new tools.

This view, that deliberation relies on instruments of all sorts, both tangible and intangible, is

the core of what Dewey called "instrumentalism," or his unique brand of pragmatism. The term

was used to identify the school of philosophy that Dewey founded during his decade at the

University of Chicago (1894-1904).

Dewey's refusal to admit a gap between the tangible and the intangible in inquiry led him to

some remarkable conclusions. He thought, for example, that a mathematician working in a

room by herself without the aid of computer or pencil and paper is nevertheless engaged in

technological production just as surely as a metalworker in his shop. Just like the metalworker,

she uses raw materials (numbers), stockparts (theorems that have already been proven), and

tools (rules of inference) to create a finished product (a new proof).

This view provided Dewey with a powerful tool to use against philosophers and theologians

who argued that there is an unbridgeable gap between what is "material" and what is "mental"

or "spiritual." For Dewey, these terms just refer to different but interacting types of tool use. A

"therefore" and the number 2 are no less tools than are hammers and saws. In all inquiry that

is successful, these two types of tool-use cooperate with one another in ways that are subject

to our control through the study of what he called "the general method of intelligence."

There is consequently nothing "mysterious" or "occult" about the mental. A concrete or"material" problem often calls for the use of abstract or "mental" tools to extend itself beyond

its own limited "this," "here," and "now." And even though abstract or "mental" tools may help

us soar through uncharted realms, the results of such flights must eventually return to be

checked by means of the tools of concrete experience.

Dewey thought that if men and women ever realized that their metaphysical and religious

systems are just technological artifacts, and not absolutes, then there would be less

dogmatism, less hatred, and less bloodshed. Like other conceptual artifacts, metaphysical and

religious ideals need to be measured and warranted by tools that assess their outcomes or

"cash value."

Dewey's view that inquiry is technological also led him to turn on its head the old notion that

technology is just the application of science and therefore inferior to it. If technology involvesthe invention, development, and use of tools to solve perceived problems, then theoretical

science is a type of technology, or production.

The received view since Plato and Aristotle had been that what is theoretical, or contemplative,

is superior to both practice and production. In Dewey's view, however, neither theory nor

practice is superior to the other; they work together as equal partners in the production of

novel and improved outcomes. Dewey thought that there had been no science worthy of the

name until it began to take technology, or the production of experimentally warranted results,

seriously.


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Dewey would have opposed those among our contemporaries, such as Jeremy Rifkin and many

fundamentalist Christians, who hold that nature is somehow "sacred" and should not be

"tampered with." Because he thought such dualistic outlooks untenable, unstable, and

unproductive, he would have rejected their "technophobic" attempts to pit technology against

nature, or the works of human beings against the works of God.

Because he was a committed Darwinian naturalist, Dewey rejected the view that technology

and nature are in conflict. He viewed technology instead as the cutting edge of evolution.

Since human beings exist within and as a part of nature, then what they do is also a part ofnature.

Because he identified inquiry with technology, Dewey thought that abandoning or limiting

technology was not a live option. The real issue, he argued, is how better forms of technology

can be found to replace ones that have proven unsatisfactory.

Dewey's understanding of technology was a source of considerable misunderstanding among

some of his critics. Some of them thought that he was a proponent of what members of the

Frankfurt School called "instrumental rationality" and what Langdon Winner later called

"straight-line instrumentalism." This is the view that technology ought to "dominate" nature

without regard to collateral damage."

This kind of uncritical "technophilia" was once almost universally practiced, and the ecological

devastation now coming to light in the former Soviet Union indicates that it was also practicedthere until recently. But Dewey rejected "technophilia" with the same type of criticisms that he

marshalled against its opposite, "technophobia."

Because Dewey took Darwin seriously, and because he wanted to construct a new naturalism

that would take into account continuities within nature, he looked for a way to define

technology broadly enough that it could include two major categories of technological

production that some had thought incompatible. One would involve the prudent alteration of

the environment to meet human needs by balancing costs and weighing alternative outcomes.

The other would be a technology of self and community, that is, an equally judicious

production of new ways of adapting human beings to environing conditions. Although this

second conception of technology is often associated with the work of Max Scheler and Michel

Foucault, it also had a central place in the work of Dewey.

If Dewey's contemporaries had understood his critique of technology and acted on his

suggestions, our world might now be quite different from its present state. We would have

long since begun to attack social and moral problems with the same type of experimental

outlook that has proven so successful in the physical sciences. Instead of holding tightly to

dogmas that separate humans from nature, body from mind, thinking from feeling, and one

social class from another, we would now be involved in a common effort to articulate and solve

common problems. Instead of clinging uncritically to the frayed products of metaphysical and

religious systems invented decades or even centuries in the past, we would by now have

subjected them to the same experimental tests that have worked wherever they have been

applied within science and industry.

Dewey realized that dogmatic religious and metaphysical views tend to break communication

and isolate human beings from one another. In his view, technology offers the best hope forcommon action because it is the most basic and therefore the most common human project.

The reward of undertaking honest technological inquiry, he suggested, would be "a society

worthy to command affection, admiration and loyalty."

Larry A. Hickman is professor of philosophy, general editor of The Correspondence of John

Dewey, and director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University,

Carbondale. His most recent book is John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (Indiana University

Press).

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Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Article Title: John Dewey: Philosopher of Technology. Contributors: Larry A. Hickman -

author. Magazine Title: Free Inquiry. Volume: 14. Issue: 4. Publication Date: Fall 1994. Page Number: 41+. COPYRIGHT

1994 Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, Inc.; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group This material is protected by

copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any

means.


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