The Imaginative Character of Pragmatic Inquiry

Abstract

John Dewey’s lifelong labor to articulate an alternative account of logic from the ‘abstract thought’ predominant in discussions of logic culminates in his 1938 Logic: the theory of inquiry. In this text Dewey argues that all inquiry involves the instantiation of a general pattern of inquiry. Articulating the role of imagination in the general pattern of inquiry is crucial to illuminating the practical character and theoretical scope of this activity. Specifically, the agency of the inquirer as a future directed, project oriented organism highlights the imaginative dimension to problem solving. In addition, Dewey’s theory of concepts as hypotheses whose meaning is practically and experimentally tested and reconstructed is deeply indebted to imagination. This is due to the fact that ideas, concepts, and meanings are not understood from the perspective of speculative or theoretical reason, but rather circumscribed within the practical problem solving context, what Dewey calls ‘the situation’, in which all activity of human being takes place. The meaning of our concepts and scientific achievements is then constantly available for revision. This revision is a practical affair, giving the pragmatic version of ‘the primacy of practical reason’ an overarching scope to intellectual activity. The result is that Dewey’s pragmatic reconstruction of imagination is fundamental to inquiry, agency, and understanding human agency. This paves the way for the final suggestion of the paper, that a pragmatic philosophy of social science is implicitly committed to this pragmatic reconstruction of imagination.