Pragmatic Theory of Truth - Dewey

Dewey

John Dewey, less broadly than William James but much more broadly than Charles Peirce, held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is self-corrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed truths. In his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), Dewey gave the following definition of inquiry:

Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole. (Dewey, p. 108).

The index of the same book has exactly one entry under the heading truth, and it refers to the following footnote:

The best definition of truth from the logical standpoint which is known to me is that by Peirce: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real . (Dewey, 343 n).

Dewey says more of what he understands by truth in terms of his preferred concept of warranted assertibility as the end-in-view and conclusion of inquiry (Dewey, 14–15).

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