But from this it seems Dewey would need to conclude that there is no stable knowledge
available: everything is in flux. This, in turn, would seem to bring Dewey’s thought in line with
postmodernism, which is skeptical about the value of truth and knowledge. Yet in a review of
Dewey’s education and its impact on democracy, Fott concludes instead that Dewey has been
misappropriated by later postmodern pragmatists, such as Rorty, for whom, following Nietzsche,
truth is little more than a“mobile army of metaphors.”By contrast, Fott points out that Dewey,
unlike Rorty, still speaks about the value of knowledge–scientific and experimental knowledge.^41
Dewey’s error, Fott concludes, was only in that he did not attempt to ground his assertions about the
reliability of experimental science as a source of knowledge.
Despite Fott’s attempt to separate Dewey’s conclusions from the destructive consequences of
postmodernist philosophy, Dewey’s perspective eventually undermines the foundation for truth.
Dewey’s perspective eventually unravels knowledge and renders it a social construction which,
from a Socratic perspective, means it is not knowledge at all. Dewey maintains that knowledge is
merely the result of successfully changing one’s environment. In the spirit of the later pragmatists,
knowledge is reducible to what works. It is a temporary product of the will and the imagination
working within some minimal, given restraints, such as the basic laws of physics. Because the path
to a transcendent realm of permanent ideas about good and bad is cut off, it stands to reason that
moral standards must also arise out of our interactions with the world here and now.
But which interactions, which drives we choose to indulge or deploy here and now, are largely up
to us to decide without reference to some permanent standard by which to assess their goodness.
They can be judged only by the real-world standard of their effectiveness to change the present
material and social conditions–a standard dangerously seductive for any democracy, because
democracy always tends to prefer utility to truth (Republic, 527d–e).
The effect upon the theory of knowing is to displace the notion that it is the activity of a mere
onlooker or spectator of the world, the notion which goes with the idea of knowing as
something complete in itself.^42Dewey’s doctrine of organic development means that
the living creature is a part of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes, and making itself
secure in its precarious dependence only as it intellectually identifies itself with the things
about it, and, forecasting the future consequences of what is going on, shapes its own activities
accordingly.^43We can see here why modern education theories, following Dewey, cling to the view that
knowledge is socially constructed. And because nature, according to this view, is at bottom flux and
not stable Dewey recommends immersing the student in the flux of becoming; he cuts off any
pretended ascent to the transcendent realm of Being that Socrates thought was essential. This
explains why Dewey and modern progressive reformers insist students be immersed in the practical
realties of everyday life and learn to manipulate these realities to bring about greater effects. This
imperative gets translated in today’s educational policies as an insistence that students be engaged
foremost in“real-world”problems and in activities that resemble the work-world as closely as
possible. If instead students are encouraged to read great literature that stimulates thoughts about
the“good as such”or“the beautiful,”they are, by implication, not engaged in anything having to do
with the real world.
Yet this also entails that what human beings choose to make of the raw elements of nature,
including their own nature, is guided by will, not knowledge of permanent ends of goals. Dewey’s
thought is a form of historicist thinking about which it has been said that“No objective criterion
henceforth allowed the distinction between good and bad choices. Historicism culminated in
88 David W. Livingstone