Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Despite the scant echo of Dewey's contributions in the field of Logic, the development of Logic during the second half of the twentieth century and during the twenty-first century can be considered a confirmation of Dewey's ideas about the role of logic in relation to knowledge. Logic, in the precise sense that Dewey gives the term, has been the constant concern of Dewey's philosophy and is the pinnacle that crowns his project of a naturalization of philosophy. In the case of Logic, Dewey’s project tries to show how logical forms arise in the operation of investigating and are in charge of controlling the investigation so that it can produce warranted assertability. Two consequences follow from this approach, that is, the empirical character of logical principles and hence its naturalization and a radical reformulation of the classic problem of truth.  

In this paper, I compare the approach to truth characteristic of pragmatism, often identified with warranted assertability, with the prosentential proposal put forward by Robert Brandom. I argue that Brandom´s is a genuine step forward from pragmatism and analytic philosophy, even though his philosophical take includes classic pragmatist features. Furthermore, I show that Dewey and Brandom coincide in their social kind of naturalism, also supported by evolutionary psychology. I conclude that the essential distinction between truth and warranted assertability cannot be exposed without involving an external perspective, the third-person perspective, which is absent in standard pragmatist approaches to truth.

After a brief review of John Dewey's proposal of an Empirical Logic, in which I trace its similarities to modern Argumentation Theory or Informal Logic, I examine the type of naturalistic stance advocated in "Logic, The Theory of Inquiry" (1938), posited as a physical or organic naturalism that later opens up to a cultural or social naturalism. I critically examine the fusion of "natural causes" and "cultural reasons" in Dewey's approach and conclude that, while it consistently accounts for the continuity between the two, it does not resolve the incompatibility between epistemic perspectives.

Dewey's thoughts on historical knowledge should be appreciated under the light of the disputes in contemporary philosophy of history, especially in the narrative drift. On the one hand, as he addresses the subject in terms of narration and writing, this chapter appears as a precursor text of narrativist philosophy of history. Furthermore, given that his accounts on history are framed within a general theory of inquiry (narrative writing of the past is a case of judgment), offers us a useful tool to avoid skeptical readings of narrativism. We find in Deweyan text a strong strategy to give good reasons (in terms of pragmatist rationality) to appeal to literary studies when analyzing the processes of construction and acceptance of historical knowledge. Finally, as he presents narrative as the expression of the temporal phase of inquiry in general, on the one hand, he avoids engaging with the methodological dualism that stablishes substantive differences between history and science, and, on the other, he gives arguments against the collapse between history and artistic literature. However, they will not be expressed in Rankean terms (something that Dewey explicitly rejected) but in pragmatist terms, that is, pointing out a functional difference between historical and artistic narrative.

John Dewey refers, in his text on Logic, to the distinction between natural and social sciences. The question of the differences between both sciences has various articulations that revolve around a central axis: the plausibility that social research can generate—as natural sciences do—existential modifications that give materiality to this process. The aims of this work will be to: analyze the decolonial, postabysmal proposal of Boaventura de Sousa Santos in dialogue with some of the pragmatist’s assumptions about the methodological capacity of natural science research. This proposal makes visible the network that unites Dewey’s methodological pretension with the general framework of modern epistemology, and, establish a possible translation of the ways in which both epistemologies are complementary.

In his later works, John Dewey questioned some of the traditional assumptions about the nature and function of the qualitative in inquiry. Dewey foresaw what recent scientific accounts of human thinking are confirming: it is more complex, less linear, more emotional, affective, bodily-based, non-reflective, non-linguistic, non-conscious than philosophers have assumed. Commentators on Dewey have emphasized how inquiry is social, instrumental, and experimental, but for the most part have neglected the qualitative dimension of inquiry. The first section of this essay outlines the different forms that the neglect of the qualitative has taken in Dewey scholarship. The second addresses what Dewey means by the qualitative. The third presents nine specific functions the qualitative has on thinking (inquiry). The essay concludes in the fourth section with some implications of the view presented on the normative dimension of Dewey’s philosophy, and suggests which promising future inquiries remain open regarding the function of the qualitative in inquiry.

Dewey problematically introduces the notions of truth and knowledge into the general argument of his Logic. He maintains that the purpose of research is to produce statements that have warranted assertibility and equates, by definition, knowledge and truth with this type of statements. This strategy has to deal with problems stemming from two different fronts. The first one has to do with the line of continuity that Dewey establishes between animal behaviour, behaviour in everyday life, and scientific behaviour. If the notion of truth is not necessary to describe animal behaviour, neither will it be necessary to describe scientific research. The second one comes from the epistemological consequences that Dewey draws from the change in our scientific theories and their warranted assertions. I explore the role that error and repetition have in this area and argue that Dewey's position, while not false, constitutes a case of metonymy, i.e. of taking a part for the whole.

Review of: Marta Segarra (2022): Humanimales. Abrir las fronteras de lo humano. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg.

In this article, I review John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry in order to show some points of coincidence with the work of a later author: Thomas S. Kuhn. I support the view that despite the disparities that their works sometimes show—and the reservations that Kuhn himself had about Dewey’s work—there are interesting coincidental points that help to offer a common standpoint that goes against more traditional views on logic, inquiry and scientific methodology. I focus on three main aspects: the contextual and social nature of logic; the significance they both grant to problem-solving contexts; and their convergence on a developmental view of the progress of knowledge.

Foreword to the monographic issue on John Dewey's Logic.