Problems in Dewey's Theory of Continuity

Below is an abstract for an article that I wrote.  It concerns a problem in Dewey's theory of continuity.  In short, every situation must be a problematic situation in some sense, else 

There is a paradox at the heart of John Dewey's theory of experience.  Every situation both is and is not a problematic situation.  Experiencing a situation as problematic is a gestalt shift in the continuity of experience, a reorganization of present and emergent elements, that is not emergent ex nihilo.  Since Deweyan naturalism excludes spontaneous causality, and continuity implies that everything has a natural history, the process of a problematic situation must be explained.  I will account for the paradox, elucidate the process, and resolve a conundrum that results.  The conundrum is, why is not every situation experienced as problematic, when logically every situation is problematic.  The explanation includes a synoptic account of Dewey’s theory of experience that emphasizes its processive character as a natural history.  I will also elucidate some implications for agency, intentionality, and the gestalt conditions for problematic experience.

In short, every situation must be a problematic situation in some sense, else a problematic situation emerges ex nihilo.  The essay discusses in what way all situations must be "problematic" or contain a "felt difficulty."  This has several implications.  One, we can only attend to the "problematic" on Dewey's theory.  Two, the emergent "problem" is also the genesis of intentionality; the object calls out our attention to it, though "object" does not have the usual denotation.  Three, if "mind" is an event founded on a "conscious" event and then upon a bodily one, in what way is this event translated or encoded from environment, body, consciousness, and mind?  That is, there is a continuous progression of events; what can be said of the event-structure given a Deweyan framework?  I leave it to later work to compare this to contemporary articulations, e.g., Deacon, Varela, etc.

Motivations: Over-Promising on Our Agency, Imagination, and Morality

I would like to bring it back to basics.  What motivates my work?  Social, cultural, political and moral issues.

Most people believe with their eyes.  We are unaware of the extent to which our upbringing, culture, education,  etc. influence how and we they perceive.  This is not a problem so much as a troubling fact.  The problem begins when we think that behavior and perception are as malleable as ideas.  Our contemporary American culture tends to treat ideas as instruments to some given end.  Change the end or ideal, and our behavior and perceptions change, do they not?  No.  We believe with our blood and bones, and while ideas might begin change, they might also beget lies … lies about what we have been doing, made intentionally or not.

I am a moralist at heart.  I do not fear iconoclasm.  But I also harbor a conservative sentiment whispering that publicly breaking sacred cultural idols is often no more than a temper-tantrum.  Rather than breaking, I wish to understand why—and thus I became a philosopher—but this is founded on an existential and practical ground.  

Because I am a moralist, I call “lying” what some might call “mistakes” or “hermeneutics.”  Why?  So many claim ignorance, but it is a vincible ignorance motivated by morally deficient factors.  I say this in an indirect and odd manner because commonsense ideas of freedom, agency, consciousness are all monolithic notions of discredited faculty psychology.  We want to believe these notions because they allow us to suppose more agency and knowledge than we have at the same time we hide in the shadow of those discredited ideas.  Oh, I didn’t even mean that!  But I didn’t intend that!  I cannot be responsible!

Updates: Americanist Associations, Institutes, Libraries

I have been updating the blog.  I am adding a number of resources on American thought, and I welcome suggestions for anything in any country or language.  I am most familiar with the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Nordic centers and sites, and will be slowly adding them.  I know that there are also centers in China and Japan, for instance, but I am still hunting down that information.

Phenomenological Delving: What Is a Habit?

The following is a snippet from my book manuscript that is the beginning of the explanation of John Dewey's theory of habit, which undergirds my own phenomenological pragmatism.  The habitual body is the primary, proximate source of meaning for human experience.

Dewey writes,

The essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts except as, under special conditions, these express a way of behaving.  Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilictions and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts (MW 14:32; 143).

            "Habit" primarily refers to the capacities of the organism to reconstruct its environment.  While the latent structures of the environment and situation have been discussed, the inclusion of the biological phase of habit in organic processes focuses on how the organism actively structures and restructures its environment and thereby the situation.  Habits "incorporate an environment within themselves.  They are adjustments of the environment, not merely to it"  (MW 14:38; 142).  Hence, habits are a continual incorporation or embodiment of the environment and are continuous with it.  They are not "inner forces," "powers of an autonomous organism," "individual reflexes," "psychic associations," or "repeated actions."[i]  They are "structured processes integrating the organism-environment field … general paths of integration and interpretation … situational structures."[ii]

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[i]           Alexander, Horizons of Feeling, 142.

[ii]           Alexander, Horizons of Feeling, 142.

* This material is copyrighted by me.  By posting it on this site, I in no way transfer any rights or privileges beyond those automatically granted by U.S. law regarding fair use.

Favorite Quotations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality

Favorite Quotations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality

Private Property Begets Evil

“What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared [if civil society had not been founded with the advent of private property] … You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!” (60).

The Family is the Origin of Evil

“Familial sentiment” is the “first yoke” of society (62).

The Weak Chained Themselves to Political Leaders so that They Would Not Have Masters

 “[The weak] all ran to chain themselves, in the belief that they secured their liberty, for although they had enough sense to realize the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.  Those most capable of anticipating the abuses were precisely those who counted on profiting from them; and even the wise saw the need to be resolved to sacrifice one part of their liberty to preserve the other, just as a wounded man has his arm amputated to save the rest of his body (70).”

When a Man Is Not Born a Man, We Call Him “Slave”

 “Thus, just as violence had to be done to nature in order to establish slavery, nature had to be changed in order to perpetuate this right.  And the jurists, who have gravely pronounced that the child of a slave woman is born a slave, have decided, in other words, that a man is not born a man (74).”

Why Do Citizens Allow Themselves to be Oppressed?  To Chain Others

“they consent to wear chains so that they will be able to give them to others” (77).

Citations are to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis/Cambridge, Hackett, 1987).

The Coming Crisis: Realism and Nominalism

This discussion is just too good to leave hanging in comments.  I dive further into realism and nominalism than I have in months and discuss what is at stake in the comments here.

Why is this the coming crisis?  That's something that we can discuss.

Reflections on the Past Debate about Realism and Nominalism

I have been musing on the conversations on realism that occurred in the local blogosphere some months ago.  It seems that some of the mis-alignment of the conversation, at least one my side, was that I was concerned about the implications of acceding only to bare realism to phenomenology and epistemology.  That is, if one only accepts that the external world is mind-independent, then I was concerned about the status of phenomenology and epistemology, especially given the high speculative moves and wish to move way from the anthropocentric.  Among many of my concerns is a common one among those of my philosophical persuasion; we should be very careful about erasing the inquirer from the inquiry and claiming that our conclusions exists antecedently to the inquiry.  This is called the philosophical fallacy.

Among the speculative realists and the others in orbit, my insistence about scholastic realism (realism of universals) was motivated by the following question.  If these theorists do not maintain some kind of scholastic realism, but instead embrace nominalism, then how can any of their inquiries ever pertain to human-independent existence?  The cord between the human and the not-human becomes cut, and as much as we might strive to talk about not-human, we cannot escape our own humanity.   With that said, there is a difference between escaping and thinking beyond the human.  Peirce, Whitehead, and a number of continental thinkers as well, I suspect, do this, but I did not see an explanation of this with some of my interlocutors.  Those who invoked Whitehead have an answer through him, in which case we would and did discuss our own paths.

I leave you with this question that I asked the first time.  I know a number of answers, and thus is it not a leading question, but I do not recall seeing those answers.  Without scholastic realism, how can any nominalist claim anything of the non-human?