Peter T. Manicas

John Dewey and American Psychology

John Dewey is always included as critical player in the development of psychology in America. But his relationship to this development is nearly always misunderstood. I argue that there is a double irony in this. Contrary to the received opinion, Dewey played no role in the development of American psychology. The confusion depends upon the view that American psychology got its mind from Darwin and dealt with a mind in use. It also depends on the assumption, related to this, that Dewey was a powerful advocate of the view that the social sciences would produce the kind of positivist knowledge that could establish rational control over society and history (Ross, 1991). In part I, I reconsider Deweys place in the development of American psychology. In part II, I argue that Dewey came to believe that psychology ill served what became his primary intellectual goal, that philosophy must address not the problems of philosophy, but the problems of humankind. Instead of getting answers from scientific psychology, the problems he was interested in addressing would respond to a new conception of inquiry, work which culminated in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. The second irony then is this: Having abandoned even the more refined forms of behaviorism, the cutting edge of current work in psychology is so-called cognitive psychology. But, remarkably, not only does Deweys Logic give us prophetic insights into the most fruitful of these approaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive science, but shows us decisively why symbolic AI models must fail.