Human skin is the one authentic criterion of the universe which philosophers recognize when they appraise knowledge under their professional rubric, epistemology. By and large—except for a few of the great Critics and Sceptics—they view knowledge as a capacity, attribute, possession, or other mysterious inner quality of a “knower”; they view this knower as residing in or at a “body”; they view the body as cut off from the rest of the universe by a “skin”; all of which holds for (...) philosophizing physicists and physiologists even as for the professionals of the arcanum itself. If this assertion seems crude, one may recall that there are times when a bit of crudity is a fair physic for an inflamed subtlety. In the case before us the factual crudity lies in the use of “skin” for a criterion, not in our calling attention to the fact. The “skin” that is so used is, indeed, that of ancient anatomical schematism, unaffected by the transformation of understanding which modern physiological research has brought about. Yet if philosophers cease thus crudely to employ it, all their issues of epistemology will vanish, and the very type of attack they make on cognition will be discredited; whereupon the task of determining the status of knowledge itself will pass from their hands to those of the scientists who have taken over so many regions of philosophical arrogation in the past. This is what I propose here to show. (shrink)

One is tempted to look upon the positive and the logical somewhat as one looks upon the quick and the dead. Yet the issue is hardly that sharp. Viability has strange possibilities and varied forms, and must often be appraised with an eye directed as much towards the environment as towards the claimant organism. Stretching the application of the word ‘viable’ to complexes of behavior such as the philosophies and theories of knowledge, we may ask: Is the combination of the (...) positive and the logical in logical positivism viable? And is this logical positivism itself as it stands either positive or logical? (shrink)

Most discussions of Dewey's Logic evade what I take to be its main characteristic. This is its crass display of our intellectual activity as a going process—as living inquiry—literally, biologically, as life. It is the blunt, forthright treatment of even our most formal logical procedures as events occurring within that new world of knowledge that Darwin opened up and that Peirce sketched in his fallibilism, his pragmaticism, and his late-life efforts to attain a functional logic. Lacking are the trailing clouds (...) of logical and philosophical glory; present is only the bare body of inquiry. (shrink)

Among the subject matters which logicians like at times to investigate are the forms of postulation that other branches of inquiry employ. Rarely, however, do they examine the postulates under which they themselves proceed. It long contented them to offer something they called a “definition” for logic, and let it go at that. They might announce that logic dealt with the “laws of thought,” or with “judgment,” or that it was “the general science of order“; More recently they are apt (...) to connect it in one or another obscure way with linguistic ordering. (shrink)

When the layman reads a book or two of popularized physics and then moves solemnly forth, as occasionally happens, to expound some comprehensive doctrine purporting to be built directly out of the materials he has picked up, the type of comment which the physicist will make is plain enough in advance. But why does it so rarely occur to the physicist that others may think of his epistemologizing much what he is sure to think of their quantizing?