Judgment and Responsibility in Wandering in the Wilderness

On the Logic and Action of Deweyan Pragmatism

Abstract

Philosophy of education is often defined as a practice of “critique.” It follows our expectation that criticizing education allows us to call into question the one-sidedness of our framework of educational thinking. According to Michael Walzer’s Interpretation as Social Criticism, criticism is a kind of social action. If our criticism of education can be equally regarded as social action, it will play a social role and have social relevance as well as educational effects. The educator is, however, not a philosopher. Consequently, some educators would say that philosophy as criticism makes our educational situation worse rather than better. They argue criticism cannot show any relevance to our education and society, because philosophizing about education has a possibility not only to destruct the existing institutions but to demoralize educators and work against everyday educational practice in an offensive or harmful manner. In this article, I reconsider such a basic dilemma, one which educational philosophers tend to face. To measure the distance between philosophy as a criticism and its social relevance, I reread John Dewey’s logic and action of social inquiry. Dewey left a meaningful phrase in his Art as Experience, that is “criticism is judgment.” He explained that the philosophy as “a criticism of criticisms” is nothing less than “judgment” and then proposed to understand the place of “judgment” firstly to grasp the nature of “criticism.” Through interrelating the idea of criticism as judgment with his examination of factors and functions of “judgment” in social inquiry explored in his other works, I reconstruct a vision of the philosophy as “judgment” and reinterpret his life and mind as philosopher of pragmatism against two kinds of critique, which were hold by revisionists and new pragmatists respectively. I conclude that, although the Deweyan version of pragmatism had difficulties in maintaining critical distance in relation to “corporate capitalism” and “social control” and to offer epistemic legitimacy based on the truth as an “ideal limit of inquiry” as Peirce expressed, Dewey presented that we must spend time “wandering in the wilderness,” and criticism as judgment need the courage and responsibility to find a way of inquiring pragmatically in the wilderness.