Inquiry Without End

A Puddle in the Kitchen

Every morning there is a small puddle on the kitchen floor, in front of the sink. Nobody sees it form. The first person up wipes it with a tea towel and forgets about it until the next morning.

After a week, the household starts to talk. One person says it must be the dishwasher, which runs overnight. Another says it must be the fridge beside it, which has a water line for the ice maker. These are guesses, but they are useful guesses, because each one tells you what to do next. If it is the dishwasher, then a night without running it should leave a dry floor. So on Tuesday nobody runs the dishwasher. On Wednesday morning the puddle is there anyway. The dishwasher guess is dropped, and someone pulls the fridge away from the wall. Behind it, a cracked plastic line is dripping.

Notice what happened. Nobody knew the answer at the start, and nobody reached it by thinking alone. The household had a problem. They proposed ideas, tested one against what actually happened, and threw it away. The knowledge they ended with, the fridge line is cracked, came out of that process. It also came out of more than one head. The person who suspected the fridge might never have looked behind it if someone else had not insisted on testing the dishwasher first. I claim that this small scene contains most of what one American philosopher meant by ‘inquiry’.

Who John Dewey Was

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859 and died in New York City in 1952. In the early 1880s he did his graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, where Charles Sanders Peirce was then teaching logic. He later taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, and from 1904 he spent the rest of his career at Columbia University. He wrote for newspapers and magazines as well as for philosophers, and for decades he was one of the best-known thinkers in the United States.

He is worth hearing because he took the pragmatism of Peirce and William James and turned it into an account of how thinking actually proceeds. Peirce asked what difference an idea makes. James asked what an idea is worth in the living of a life. Dewey asked a neighbouring question: what are ideas for?

Ideas as Tools

Dewey’s answer is often called instrumentalism, a name he used himself. An instrument is a tool. The view is that ideas are tools for dealing with problems. We judge a wrench by whether it loosens the bolt, and Dewey thought we should judge an idea in much the same way. An idea is something we pick up to get through a difficulty, and its worth shows in whether it gets us through.

On Dewey’s picture, thinking begins with trouble. When life runs smoothly we act out of habit and hardly think at all. Then something goes wrong, and we no longer know what is going on or what to do. Dewey called this an indeterminate situation, meaning an unsettled one. He defined inquiry as “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, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938, ch. VI). That sentence is heavy going. The kitchen makes it lighter. On Monday the household has a wet floor and a cloud of vague suspicions. By Wednesday the pieces fit together: this line, this crack, this drip. The situation has been settled.

Dewey also stressed that much of the work happens before any answer arrives, in getting the problem into usable shape. “It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved” (Dewey, Logic, 1938, ch. VI). The household made real progress when ‘the floor is wet’ became ‘is the floor still wet on a night without the dishwasher?’ That second question could be tested.

In short, Dewey says: thinking starts when something goes wrong and stops when it is put right, for now.

What, then, of truth? In an earlier book Dewey wrote that “The hypothesis that works is the true one” (Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920, ch. VI). By the late 1930s he generally preferred the phrase ‘warranted assertibility’ for what inquiry produces. By this he meant a claim we are entitled to make, given the testing done so far. Critics, Bertrand Russell among them, argued that this confuses being true with being well supported. Scholars still disagree about whether Dewey meant to replace the idea of truth or only to explain it. I don’t think his texts settle the matter cleanly.

Shared and Unfinished

Two features of Dewey’s account matter most for today’s theme.

The first is that inquiry is shared. The kitchen test was public: anyone in the house could skip the dishwasher, check the floor, and see the result. Dewey took the methods of the sciences as his model because their results are open to checking by other people, and he thought ordinary people use the same methods, roughly, whenever they solve a practical problem well. On this view, knowledge belongs to a group of people who can check one another’s work. A single mind alone does not hold it.

The second is that inquiry is ongoing. Replacing the fridge line settles one problem, and settling it changes the household’s situation. Perhaps the new line drips too, or the floor beneath it turns out to be rotten. Every answer becomes the starting point of the next inquiry. Peirce had written about a final opinion that investigators would reach if inquiry went on long enough. How closely Dewey followed him here is debated, but Dewey’s own emphasis falls on the next problem rather than the last one. This is the sample’s slogan for pragmatism in another form: working hypotheses all the way down.

Dewey carried this view into his work on schools and politics. In 1896 he helped open an experimental school at Chicago, where children learned by working through real tasks together. In Democracy and Education he wrote that “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916, ch. 7). He treated both the classroom and public life as places where people learn to inquire together.

If inquiry never ends, then neither does the argument about pragmatism itself. Tomorrow, in “The Conversation Continues”, we ask who has picked it up since.