25.
CHAPTER XXV
THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE:
1. Continuity versus Dualism.
—A number of theories of knowing have been criticized in the
previous pages. In spite of their differences from one another, they
all agree in one fundamental respect which contrasts with the theory
which has been positively advanced. The latter assumes continuity;
the former state or imply certain basic divisions, separations, or
antitheses, technically called dualisms. The origin of these divisions
we have found in the hard and fast walls which mark off social groups
and classes within a group: like those between rich and poor, men and
women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers mean absence
of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent to the
setting up of different types of life-experience, each with isolated
subject matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social
condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is
to be a sincere account of experience. When it gets beyond
dualism—as many philosophies do in form—it can only be by
appeal to something higher than anything found in experience, by a
flight to some transcendental realm. And in denying duality in name
such theories restore it in fact, for they end in a division between
things of this world as mere appearances and an inaccessible essence of
reality.
So far as these divisions persist and others are added to them, each
leaves its mark upon the educational system, until the scheme of
education, taken as a whole, is a deposit of various purposes and
procedures. The outcome is that kind of check and balance of segregated
factors and values which has been described. (See Chapter XVIII.) The
present discussion is simply a formulation, in the terminology of
philosophy, of various antithetical conceptions involved in the theory
of knowing.
In the first place, there is the opposition of empirical and higher
rational knowing. The first is connected with everyday affairs, serves
the purposes of the ordinary individual who has no specialized
intellectual pursuit, and brings his wants into some kind of working
connection with the immediate environment. Such knowing is depreciated,
if not despised, as purely utilitarian, lacking in cultural
significance. Rational knowledge is supposed to be something which
touches reality in ultimate, intellectual fashion; to be pursued for its
own sake and properly to terminate in purely theoretical insight, not
debased by application in behavior. Socially, the distinction
corresponds to that of the intelligence used by the working classes and
that used by a learned class remote from concern with the means of
living.
Philosophically, the difference turns about the distinction of the
particular and universal. Experience is an aggregate of more or less
isolated particulars, acquaintance with each of which must be separately
made. Reason deals with universals, with general principles, with laws,
which lie above the welter of concrete details. In the educational
precipitate, the pupil is supposed to have to learn, on one hand, a lot
of items of specific information, each standing by itself, and upon the
other hand, to become familiar with a certain number of laws and general
relationships. Geography, as often taught, illustrates the former;
mathematics, beyond the rudiments of figuring, the latter. For all
practical purposes, they represent two independent worlds.
Another antithesis is suggested by the two senses of the word
"learning." On the one hand, learning is the sum total of what is known,
as that is handed down by books and learned men. It is something external,
an accumulation of cognitions as one might store material commodities in a
warehouse. Truth exists ready-made somewhere. Study is then the process
by which an individual draws on what is in storage. On the other hand,
learning means something which the individual does when he studies.
It is an active, personally conducted affair. The dualism here is between
knowledge as something external, or, as it is often called, objective, and
knowing as something purely internal, subjective, psychical. There is, on
one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on the other, a ready-made mind
equipped with a faculty of knowing—if it only wills to exercise it,
which it is often strangely loath to do. The separation, often touched upon,
between subject matter and method is the educational equivalent of this
dualism. Socially the distinction has to do with the part of life which
is dependent upon authority and that where individuals are free to
advance.
Another dualism is that of activity and passivity in knowing. Purely
empirical and physical things are often supposed to be known by
receiving impressions. Physical things somehow stamp themselves upon
the mind or convey themselves into consciousness by means of the sense
organs. Rational knowledge and knowledge of spiritual things is
supposed, on the contrary, to spring from activity initiated within the
mind, an activity carried on better if it is kept remote from all
sullying touch of the senses and external objects. The distinction
between sense training and object lessons and laboratory exercises, and
pure ideas contained in books, and appropriated—so it is
thought—by some miraculous output of mental energy, is a fair
expression in education of this distinction. Socially, it reflects a
division between those who are controlled by direct concern with things
and those who are free to cultivate. themselves.
Another current opposition is that said to exist between the intellect
and the emotions.
The emotions are conceived to be purely private and personal, having
nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in apprehending facts
and truths,—except perhaps the single emotion of intellectual
curiosity. The intellect is a pure light; the emotions are a disturbing
heat. The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions turn inward to
considerations of personal advantage and loss. Thus in education we
have that systematic depreciation of interest which has been noted, plus
the necessity in practice, with most pupils, of recourse to extraneous
and irrelevant rewards and penalties in order to induce the person who
has a mind (much as his clothes have a pocket) to apply that mind to the
truths to be known. Thus we have the spectacle of professional
educators decrying appeal to interest while they uphold with great
dignity the need of reliance upon examinations, marks, promotions and
emotions, prizes, and the time-honored paraphernalia of rewards and
punishments. The effect of this situation in crippling the teacher's
sense of humor has not received the attention which it
deserves.
All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and doing,
theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of action and
the body as its organ and means. We shall not repeat what has been said
about the source of this dualism in the division of society into a class
laboring with their muscles for material sustenance and a class which,
relieved from economic pressure, devotes itself to the arts of
expression and social direction. Nor is it necessary to speak again of
the educational evils which spring from the separation. We shall be
content to summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of
this conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity.
(i) The advance of physiology and the psychology associated with
it have shown the connection of mental activity with that of the nervous
system. Too often recognition of connection has stopped short at this
point; the older dualism of soul and body has been replaced by that of
the brain and the rest of the body. But in fact the nervous system is
only a specialized mechanism for keeping all bodily activities working
together. Instead of being isolated from them, as an organ of knowing
from organs of motor response, it is the organ by which they interact
responsively with one another. The brain is essentially an organ for
effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli
received from the environment and responses directed upon it. Note that
the adjusting is reciprocal; the brain not only enables organic activity
to be brought to bear upon any object of the environment in response to
a sensory stimulation, but this response also determines what the next
stimulus will be. See what happens, for example, when a carpenter is at
work upon a board, or an etcher upon his plate—or in any case of a
consecutive activity. While each motor response is adjusted to the
state of affairs indicated through the sense organs, that motor response
shapes the next sensory stimulus. Generalizing this illustration, the
brain is the machinery for a constant reorganizing of activity so as to
maintain its continuity; that is to say, to make such modifications in
future action as are required because of what has already been done.
The continuity of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it from a
routine repetition of identically the same motion, and from a random
activity where there is nothing cumulative. What makes it continuous,
consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act prepares the way
for later acts, while these take account of or reckon with the results
already attained—the basis of all responsibility. No one who has
realized the full force of the facts of the connection of knowing with
the nervous system and of the nervous system with the readjusting of
activity continuously to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing
has to do with reorganizing activity, instead of being something
isolated from all activity, complete on its own account.
(ii) The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its
discovery of evolution. For the philosophic significance of the
doctrine of evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon continuity of
simpler and more complex organic forms until we reach man. The
development of organic forms begins with structures where the adjustment
of environment and organism is obvious, and where anything which can be
called mind is at a minimum. As activity becomes more complex,
coordinating a greater number of factors in space and time, intelligence
plays a more and more marked rôle, for it has a larger span of the
future to forecast and plan for. The effect upon the theory of knowing
is to displace the notion that it is the activity of a mere onlooker or
spectator of the world, the notion which goes with the idea of knowing
as something complete in itself. For the doctrine of organic
development means that the living creature is a part of the world,
sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes, and making itself secure in its
precarious dependence only as it intellectually identifies itself with
the things about it, and, forecasting the future consequences of what is
going on, shapes its own activities accordingly.
If the living, experiencing being is an intimate participant in the
activities of the world to which it belongs, then knowledge is a mode of
participation, valuable in the degree in which it is effective. It
cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned spectator.
(iii) The development of the experimental method as the method of
getting knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not mere
opinion—the method of both discovery and proof—is the
remaining great force in bringing about a transformation in the theory
of knowledge. The experimental method has two sides. (i) On one
hand, it means that we have no right to call anything knowledge except
where our activity has actually produced certain physical changes in
things, which agree with and confirm the conception entertained. Short
of such specific changes, our beliefs are only hypotheses, theories,
suggestions, guesses, and are to be entertained tentatively and to be
utilized as indications of experiments to be tried. (ii) On the
other hand, the experimental method of thinking signifies that thinking
is of avail; that it is of avail in just the degree in which the
anticipation of future consequences is made on the basis of thorough
observation of present conditions. Experimentation, in other words, is
not equivalent to blind reacting. Such surplus activity—a surplus
with reference to what has been observed and is now anticipated—is
indeed an unescapable factor in all our behavior, but it is not
experiment save as consequences are noted and are used to make
predictions and plans in similar situations in the future. The more the
meaning of the experimental method is perceived, the more our trying out
of a certain way of treating the material resources and obstacles which
confront us embodies a prior use of intelligence. What we call magic
was with respect to many things the experimental method of the savage;
but for him to try was to try his luck, not his ideas. The scientific
experimental method is, on the contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even
when practically—or immediately—unsuccessful, it is
intellectual, fruitful; for we learn from our failures when our
endeavors are seriously thoughtful.
The experimental method is new as a scientific resource—as a
systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as a
practical device. Hence it is not surprising that men have not
recognized its full scope. For the most part, its significance is
regarded as belonging to certain technical and merely physical matters.
It will doubtless take a long time to secure the perception that it
holds equally as to the forming and testing of ideas in social and moral
matters. Men still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed by
authority, to relieve them of the trouble of thinking and the
responsibility of directing their activity by thought. They tend to
confine their own thinking to a consideration of which one among the
rival systems of dogma they will accept. Hence the schools are better
adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers.
But every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to
aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative methods of
forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the past, and to
transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active concern
with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing temporal reach
and deploying greater range of things in space. In time the theory of
knowing must be derived from the practice which is most successful in
making knowledge; and then that theory will be employed to improve the
methods which are less successful.
2. Schools of Method.
—There are various systems of philosophy with characteristically
different conceptions of the method of knowing. Some of them are named
scholasticism, sensationalism, rationalism, idealism, realism,
empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, etc. Many of them have been
criticized in connection with the discussion of some educational
problem. We are here concerned with them as involving deviations from
that method which has proved most effective in achieving knowledge, for
a consideration of the deviations may render clearer the true place of
knowledge in experience. In brief, the function of knowledge is to make
one experience freely available in other experiences. The word "freely"
marks the difference between the principle of knowledge and that of
habit. Habit means that an individual undergoes a modification through
an experience, which modification forms a predisposition to easier and
more effective action in a like direction in the future. Thus it also
has the function of making one experience available in subsequent
experiences. Within certain limits, it performs this function
successfully. But habit, apart from knowledge, does not make allowance
for change of conditions, for novelty. Prevision of change is not part
of its scope, for habit assumes the essential likeness of the new
situation with the old. Consequently it often leads astray, or comes
between a person and the successful performance of his task, just as the
skill, based on habit alone, of the mechanic will desert him when
something unexpected occurs in the running of the machine. But a man
who understands the machine is the man who knows what he is about. He
knows the conditions under which a given habit works, and is in a
position to introduce the changes which will readapt it to new
conditions.
In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an
object which determine its applicability in a given situation. To take
an extreme example; savages react to a flaming comet as they are
accustomed to react to other events which threaten the security of their
life. Since they try to frighten wild animals or their enemies by
shrieks, beating of gongs, brandishing of weapons, etc., they use the
same methods to scare away the comet. To us, the method is plainly
absurd—so absurd that we fail to note that savages are simply
falling back upon habit in a way which exhibits its limitations. The
only reason we do not act in some analogous fashion is because we do not
take the comet as an isolated, disconnected event, but apprehend it in
its connections with other events. We place it, as we say, in the
astronomical system. We respond to its connections and not simply
to the immediate occurrence. Thus our attitude to it is much freer. We
may approach it, so to speak, from any one of the angles provided by its
connections. We can bring into play, as we deem wise, any one of the
habits appropriate to any one of the connected objects. Thus we get at
a new event indirectly instead of immediately—by invention,
ingenuity, resourcefulness. An ideally perfect knowledge would
represent such a network of interconnections that any past experience
would offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problem
presented in a new experience. In fine, while a habit apart from
knowledge supplies us with a single fixed method of attack, knowledge
means that selection may be made from a much wider range of habits.
Two aspects of this more general and freer availability of former
experiences for subsequent ones may be distinguished.
(See ante, p. 90).
(i) One, the more tangible, is increased power of control.
What cannot be managed directly may be handled indirectly; or we can
interpose barriers between us and undesirable consequences; or we may
evade them if we cannot overcome them. Genuine knowledge has all the
practical value attaching to efficient habits in any case. (ii)
But it also increases the meaning, the experienced significance,
attaching to an experience. A situation to which we respond capriciously
or by routine has only a minimum of conscious significance; we get
nothing mentally from it. But wherever knowledge comes into play in
determining a new experience there is mental reward; even if we fail
practically in getting the needed control we have the satisfaction of
experiencing a meaning instead of merely reacting physically.
While the content of knowledge is what has happened, what is taken as
finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of knowledge
is future or prospective. For knowledge furnishes the means of
understanding or giving meaning to what is still going on and what is to
be done. The knowledge of a physician is what he has found out by
personal acquaintance and by study of what others have ascertained and
recorded. But it is knowledge to him because it supplies the resources
by which he interprets the unknown things which confront him, fills out
the partial obvious facts with connected suggested phenomena, foresees
their probable future, and makes plans accordingly. When knowledge is
cut off from use in giving meaning to what is blind and baffling, it
drops out of consciousness entirely or else becomes an object of
æsthetic contemplation. There is much emotional satisfaction to be had
from a survey of the symmetry and order of possessed knowledge, and the
satisfaction is a legitimate one. But this contemplative attitude is
æsthetic, not intellectual. It is the same sort of joy that comes from
viewing a finished picture or a well composed landscape. It would make
no difference if the subject matter were totally different, provided it
had the same harmonious organization. Indeed, it would make no
difference if it were wholly invented, a play of fancy. Applicability
to the world means not applicability to what is past and gone—that
is out of the question by the nature of the case; it means applicability
to what is still going on, what is still unsettled, in the moving scene
in which we are implicated. The very fact that we so easily overlook
this trait, and regard statements of what is past and out of reach as
knowledge is because we assume the continuity of past and future. We
cannot entertain the conception of a world in which knowledge of its
past would not be helpful in forecasting and giving meaning to its
future. We ignore the prospective reference just because it is so
irretrievably implied.
Yet many of the philosophic schools of method which have been mentioned
transform the ignoring into a virtual denial. They regard knowledge as
something complete in itself irrespective of its availability in dealing
with what is yet to be. And it is this omission which vitiates them and
which makes them stand as sponsors for educational methods which an
adequate conception of knowledge condemns. For one has only to call to
mind what is sometimes treated in schools as acquisition of knowledge to
realize how lacking it is in any fruitful connection with the ongoing
experience of the students—how largely it seems to be believed
that the mere appropriation of subject matter which happens to be stored
in books constitutes knowledge. No matter how true what is learned to
those who found it out and in whose experience it functioned, there is
nothing which makes it knowledge to the pupils. It might as well be
something about Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies
in the individual's own life.
At the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to social
conditions. It was a method for systematizing and lending rational sanction
to material accepted on authority. This subject matter meant so much that
it vitalized the defining and systematizing brought to bear upon it.
Under present conditions the scholastic method, for most persons, means
a form of knowing which has no especial connection with any particular
subject matter. It includes making distinctions, definitions,
divisions, and classifications for the mere sake of making them—with
no objective in experience. The view of thought as a purely physical
activity having its own forms, which are applied to any material as a
seal may be stamped on any plastic stuff, the view which underlies what
is termed formal logic is essentially the scholastic method generalized.
The doctrine of formal discipline in education is the natural counterpart
of the scholastic method.
The contrasting theories of the method of knowledge which go by the name
of sensationalism and rationalism correspond to an exclusive emphasis
upon the particular and the general respectively—or upon bare
facts on one side and bare relations on the other. In real knowledge,
there is a particularizing and a generalizing function working together.
So far as a situation is confused, it has to be cleared up; it has to be
resolved into details, as sharply defined as possible. Specified facts
and qualities constitute the elements of the problem to be dealt with,
and it is through our sense organs that they are specified. As setting
forth the problem, they may well be termed particulars, for they are
fragmentary. Since our task is to discover their connections and to
recombine them, for us at the time they are partial. They are
to be given meaning; hence, just as they stand, they lack it. Anything
which is to be known, whose meaning has still to be made out,
offers itself as particular. But what is already known, if it has been
worked over with a view to making it applicable to intellectually mastering
new particulars, is general in function. Its function of introducing
connection into what is otherwise unconnected constitutes its
generality. Any fact is general if we use it to give meaning to the
elements of a new experience. "Reason" is just the ability to bring the
subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the significance
of the subject matter of a new experience. A person is reasonable in
the degree in which he is habitually open to seeing an event which
immediately strikes his senses not as an isolated thing but in its
connection with the common experience of mankind.
Without the particulars as they are discriminated by the active
responses of sense organs, there is no material for knowing and no
intellectual growth. Without placing these particulars in the context
of the meanings wrought out in the larger experience of the
past—without the use of reason or thought—particulars are
mere excitations or irritations. The mistake alike of the sensational
and the rationalistic schools is that each fails to see that the
function of sensory stimulation and thought is relative to reorganizing
experience in applying the old to the new, thereby maintaining the
continuity or consistency of life.
The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may
be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature is to maintain the
continuity of knowing with an activity which purposely modifies the
environment. It holds that knowledge in its strict sense of something
possessed consists of our intellectual resources—of all the habits
that render our action intelligent. Only that which has been organized
into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our
needs and to adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we
live is really knowledge. Knowledge is not just something which we are
now conscious of, but consists of the dispositions we consciously use in
understanding what now happens. Knowledge as an act is bringing some of
our dispositions to consciousness with a view to straightening out a
perplexity, by conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world
in which we live.
Summary.
—Such social divisions as interfere with free and full intercourse
react to make the intelligence and knowing of members of the separated
classes one-sided. Those whose experience has to do with utilities cut
off from the larger end they subserve are practical empiricists; those
who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings in whose active
production they have had no share are practical rationalists. Those who
come in direct contact with things and have to adapt their activities to
them immediately are, in effect, realists; those who isolate the
meanings of these things and put them in a religious or so-called
spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect, idealists. Those
concerned with progress, who are striving to change received beliefs,
emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those whose chief business
it is to withstand change and conserve received truth emphasize the
universal and the fixed—and so on. Philosophic systems in their
opposed theories of knowledge present an explicit formulation of the
traits characteristic of these cut-off and one-sided segments of
experience—one-sided because barriers to intercourse prevent the
experience of one from being enriched and supplemented by that of others
who are differently situated.
In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free
interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of
knowledge which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is
made available in giving direction and meaning to another. The recent
advances in physiology, biology, and the logic of the experimental
sciences supply the specific intellectual instrumentalities demanded to
work out and formulate such a theory. Their educational equivalent is
the connection of the acquisition of knowledge in the schools with
activities, or occupations, carried on in a medium of associated life.
