Judgments of Practice

Dewey’s concept of judgments of practice has two meanings. The first is related to the resolution through inquiry of problematic situations in the existential realm of living experience. The second is related to the methodology that gives shape to the increasingly controlled inquiry that scientists engage in formal investigations. In either case, the achievement is not the attainment of certainty, but one sufficiently satisfactory based on the available evidence that brings a close to the case at hand. The close “which will resolve the predicament in which the agent finds himself involved” (p. 169) will be as precise or as fluid as the situation that defines the reconstruction as that determinative solution allows. For the field of adult literacy, any definition of literacy that does emerge as a warranted assertion will most likely represent some combination of a culturally acceptable interpretation of the meaning and significance of literacy with that of some technological precision in the progressive capacity to read and write print texts. This at least is my provisional hypothesis, which will be spelled out in greater detail later.

An analogy, which Dewey frequently draws on, is that of a judgment in a court of law in providing sufficient evidence to close the case at hand. Although a legal decision is open to further consideration, it has a binding impact that can only be opened if there is sufficient reason to modify the original verdict that typically requires a formal appeal process. As in the case of a legal ruling, final judgment “is dependent on a series of partial judgments” (p. 125) in which the cogency of inquiry all the way through the process inevitability bears upon the quality of the final resolution. As Dewey more formally describes the means-ends continuum:

Every complex inquiry is marked by a series of stages that are relative (italics in original completions. For complex inquiries involve a constellation of sub-problems and the solution of each of them is a resolution of some tension. Each such solution is a heightening of subject-matter, in direct ratio to the number and variety of discrepant and conflicting conditions that are brought to unification. The occurrence of these judgments of completion, not different in kind from those ordinarily called esthetic, constitutes a series of landmarks in the progress of any undertaking. They are signs of achieved coherence of actual material and the consistency of conceptual material (p. 178).

The key feature is maximum inference making at each and every stage, in which the ends-in-view are embedded within the various means that are utilized towards its achievement. The problem situation, as a succession of qualitative wholes, moves forward through controlled operations designed both to sift the evidence and to test the various hypotheses formed in the progressive movement toward the desired outcome.

The “judgment,” in short, “is a process of temporal existential resolution” (p. 136). Inference making is a critical aspect in the shaping of such judgments, but only to the extent to which increasingly rigorous conjectures are coordinated to the operations that emerge from and shape the guiding direction of the inquiry process. The “end brought about only by means of existential change” through operations of inquiry, results in “some new situation in which the difficulties and troubles which elicited deliberation are done away with” (p. 163). The ends-in-view, the anticipated desired outcome, provides a general guide to the inquiry project at hand. However, the resulting achievement is not an ideal, but an actual change that, however temporal, resolves the situation at hand and brings a close of some substantive portion to the matter.

However subjective such a view of logical inquiry might seem from a more objectivist epistemology, it is in line with Dewey’s project in the seeking of the intellectual organization of experience and in linking philosophy to the challenges of living experience. Such a philosophy can only be but value laden, which is not to discount the role of science both in defining a problem and in articulating the modes of operation in progressively moving toward its resolution—a science that speaks to the exigencies of the human condition. On Dewey’s reading, the logical forms of such a science itself accrue in the crucible of grappling with the quest to resolve the existential situations of a problematic nature that stimulate the inquiry process. Such forms can only be as precise or as fluid as the human situations under scrutiny allow, as applicable, for example, to working definitions of adult literacy as emerging from the collective influences of those who have the capacity to shape it.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1060