The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Dewey - The Present Position of Logical Theory
The writer thinks that the contradiction in which the intellectual life of to-day is entangled is due to the fact that science has got far enough along so that its negative attitude towards previous codes of life is evident, while its own positive principle of reconciliation is not yet evident. The prevailing influence in logical theory ought to be to reckon with the scientific spirit, and the essential problem of logic ought to be the consideration of the various typical methods and guiding principles which thought assumes in its effort to detect, master, and report fact. But the present position of logic is this, that any attempt to state in general or to work out in detail, the principle of the intrinsic and fruitful relation of fact and thought which science unconsciously employs in practice, seems metaphysical or even absurd. The paper will try to discover why this is so.
The chief cause is the superstition of formal logic, the fons et origo malorum in philosophy. The assumption of formal logic that thought has a nature of its own independent of facts or subject-matter, and forms of its own which are rigid frames into which the fact must be set, is a bit of scholasticism, the last struggle of medievalism to hold thought in subjection to authority. The two main forces that have been at work against the formulae of formal logic, are inductive or empirical logic on the one hand and the so-called transcendental logic on the other. Although the influence of the inductive logic has been the greater in sapping the authority of syllogistic logic, it does not yet furnish us with the needed theory of thought or fact. Firstly, Mill's theory is simply a theory regarding the formation of the major premise and falls to the ground with the incorrect assumptions of the syllogistic it presupposes. In its account of the derivation of the material of the judgment, inductive logic is still hampered by the scholastic conception of thought. Secondly, the empirical logic begins with sensation as a basis for the superstructure of epistemology; now, apart from the question of the metaphysical meaning of sensationalism, this basis is still not fact, this analysis not the analysis of scientific method as such, but the analysis of something back of the fact of science. Inductive logic, then, is not a free, unprejudiced inquiry into the special forms and methods of science, starting from the actual sciences themselves, but is built up with reference to the scholastic notion of thought. Transcendental logic has been one with inductive logic in rejecting formal logic as not a method or a criterion of truth. Further, transcendental logic shows not only that it is impossible to get valid truth out of the formal scholastic thought, but that there is no such thought at all. It thus advances beyond the empirical logic in discarding altogether scholastic logic, and in trying to form its theory of thought by simply following the principles of the actual process by which man has thus far in history discovered and possessed fact. Hegel is the quintessence of the scientific spirit (while Kant starts from scholastic conceptions of thought). What Hegel means by objective thought is the meaning and the significance of fact itself; and by methods of thought simply the processes in which this meaning of fact is evolved; his reference is not to some outside action of thought in maintaining fact as an object of knowledge, but to the entire structure of fact itself. Hegel denies the existence of any faculty of thought which is other than the expression of fact itself; he contends not that thought in the scholastic sense has validity, but that reality is significant, and thus really anticipates the actual outcome of the scientific spirit. To-day we are at a point where we may, through the successes of scientific method, talk of the rationality of fact. Science, in fact, can afford to lose its fear of metaphysic and attempt to build up the intrinsic method of its domain. The present position of logical theory, then, is that the abstract and general lines of logical theory will run into the particular and isolated lines of positive science.