Democracy as experimentalism and experimentalism as anti-dogmatism: John Dewey and the Theory of Education today

JUAN MANUEL SAHARREA; FABIO CAMPEOTTO; CLAUDIO VIALE

COGNITIO

Centro de Estudos de Pragmatismo

Lugar: Sao Pablo; Año: 2022 vol. 23 p. 1 - 14

2316 5278

(indexado en ERIH PLUS https://kanalregister.hkdir.no/publiseringskanaler/erihplus/periodical/info.action?id=487069; Open Archives, ROAD) Our purpose in this paper is twofold: to reconstruct Dewey’s conception of experimentalism, mainly through his pedagogical writings, on the one hand; and to show the relevance of this reconstruction to current reassessments of Dewey’s political thought, on the other. The grounds for our perspective have a double character, too. Firstly, we reconstruct the links between experimentalism and education on the basis of the first edition of How We Think (1910, MW 6); perhaps one of Dewey’s most noteworthy pedagogical texts. Secondly, we critically address three different reassessments of Dewey’s experimentalism in contemporary political thought, namely: 1) Pappas’s defense of Dewey’s substantive idea of democracy; 2) Forstenzer’s proposal of Deweyan experimentalism as an appropriate methodology for political philosophy; and 3) Anderson’s vindication of Deweyan experimental democracy in the context of social epistemology. We posit that in HWT Dewey places experimentalism as a kind of antidote against dogmatism and unreflective ways of reasoning. As a consequence of that, he links experimentalism with anti-dogmatism placing a special role in schooling for at least two reasons: 1) it is in the schooling phase that children are still sensitive to the development of certain habits; 2) dogmatism seems inevitable in any society but the educational phase is a key instance to try to avoid it. Neither (1) nor (2) are present in contemporary reassessments of Deweyan experimentalism.