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.
This paper extends these insights regarding the general pattern of inquiry
into Dewey’s comments on social science in the penultimate chapter of the 1938 Logic, ‘Social
Inquiry’. The result is that Dewey’s pragmatic reconstruction of imagination is fundamental
to inquiry, agency, and understanding human agency. The consequences for a pragmatic
philosophy of social science will be sketched briefly in conclusion.