problem solving method by john dewey

John Dewey on Education: Impact & Theory

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

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BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Key Takeaways

• John Dewey (1859—1952) was a psychologist, philosopher, and educator who made contributions to numerous topics in philosophy and psychology. His work continues to inform modern philosophy and educational practice today.
• Dewey was an influential pragmatist, a movement that rejected most philosophy at the time in favor of the belief that things that work in a practical situation are true, while those that do not are false. This view would go on to influence his educational philosophy.
• Dewey was also a functionalist. Inspired by the ideas of Charles Darwin, he believed that humans develop behaviors as an adaptation to their environment.
• Dewey’s influential education is marked by an emphasis on the belief that people learn and grow as a result of their experiences and interactions with the world. He aimed to shape educational environments so that they would promote active inquiry but did not do away with traditional instruction altogether.
• Outside of education and philosophy, Dewey also devised a theory of emotions in response to Darwin’s ideas. In this theory, he argued that the behaviors that arise from emotions were, at some point, beneficial to the survival of organisms.

John Dewey was an American psychologist, philosopher, educator, social critic, and political activist. He made contributions to numerous fields and topics in philosophy and psychology.

Besides being a primary originator of both functionalism and behaviorism psychology , Dewey was a major inspiration for several movements that shaped 20th-century thought, including empiricism, humanism, naturalism, contextualism, and process philosophy (Simpson, 2006).

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859 and began his career at the University of Michigan before becoming the chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago.

In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association and became president of the American Philosophical Association five years later.

Dewey traveled as a philosopher, social and political theorist, and educational consultant and remained outspoken on education, domestic and international politics, and numerous social movements.

Dewey’s views and writings on educational theory and practice were widely read and accepted. He held that philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology were closely interrelated.

Dewey also believed in an “instrumentalist” theory of knowledge, in which ideas are seen to exist mainly as instruments for creating solutions to problems encountered in the environment (Simpson, 2006).

Contributions to Philosophy and Psychology

Dewey is one of the central figures and founders of pragmatism in America despite not identifying himself as a pragmatist.

Pragmatism teaches that things that are useful — meaning that they work in a practical situation — are true, and what does not work is false (Hildebrand, 2018).

This rejected the threads of epistemology and metaphysics that ran through modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as an active adaptation of humans to their environment (Hildebrand, 2018).

Dewey held that value was not a function of purely social construction but a quality inherent to events. Dewey also believed that experimentation was a reliable enough way to determine the truth of a concept.

Functionalism

Dewey is considered a founder of the Chicago School of Functional Psychology, inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as the ideas of William James and Dewey’s own instrumental philosophy.

As chair of philosophy, psychology, and education at the University of Chicago from 1894-1904, Dewey was highly influential in establishing the functional orientation amongst psychology faculty like Angell and Addison Moore.

Scholars widely consider Dewey’s 1896 paper, The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology , to be the first major work in the functionalist school.

In this work, Dewey attacked the methods of psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener, who used stimulus-response analysis as the basis of psychological theories.

Psychologists such as Wund and Titchener believed that all human behaviors could be broken down into a series of fundamental laws and that all human behavior originates as a learned adaptation to the presence of certain stimuli in one’s environment (Backe, 2001).

Dewey considered Wundt and Titchener’s approach to be flawed because it ignored both the continuity of human behavior and the role that adaptation plays in creating it.

In contrast, Dewey’s functionalism sought to consider organisms in total as they functioned in their environment. Rather than being passive receivers of stimuli, Dewey perceived organisms as active perceivers (Backe, 2001).

Chicago School

The Chicago school refers to the functionalist approach to psychology that emerged at the University of Chicago in the late 19th century. Key tenets of functional psychology included:

• Studying the adaptive functions of consciousness and how mental processes help organisms adjust to their environment
• Explaining psychological phenomena in terms of their biological utility
• Focusing on the practical operations of the mind rather than contents of consciousness

Educational Philosophy

John Dewey was a notable educational reformer and established the path for decades of subsequent research in the field of educational psychology.

Influenced by his philosophical and psychological theories, Dewey’s concept of instrumentalism in education stressed learning by doing, which was opposed to authoritarian teaching methods and rote learning.

These ideas have remained central to educational philosophy in the United States. At the University of Chicago, Dewey founded an experimental school to develop and study new educational methods.

He experimented with educational curricula and methods and advocated for parental participation in the educational process (Dewey, 1974).

Dewey’s educational philosophy highlights “pragmatism,” and he saw the purpose of education as the cultivation of thoughtful, critically reflective, and socially engaged individuals rather than passive recipients of established knowledge.

Dewey rejected the rote-learning approach driven by a predetermined curriculum, the standard teaching method at the time (Dewey, 1974).

Dewey also rejected so-called child-centered approaches to education that followed children’s interests and impulses uncritically. Dewey did not propose an entirely hands-off approach to learning.

Dewey believed that traditional subjects were important but should be integrated with the strengths and interests of the learner.

In response, Dewey developed a concept of inquiry, which was prompted by a sense of need and was followed by intellectual work such as defining problems, testing hypotheses, and finding satisfactory solutions.

Dewey believed that learning was an organic cycle of doubt, inquiry, reflection, and the reestablishment of one’s sense of understanding.

In contrast, the reflexive arc model of learning popular in his time thought of learning as a mechanical process that could be measured by standardized tests without reference to the role of emotion or experience in learning.

Rejecting the assumption that all of the big questions and ideas in education are already answered, Dewey believed that all concepts and meanings could be open to reinvention and improvement and that all disciplines could be expanded with new knowledge, concepts, and understandings (Dewey, 1974).

Philosophy of Education

Dewey believed that people learn and grow as a result of their experiences and interactions with the world. These compel people to continually develop new concepts, ideas, practices, and understandings.

These, in turn, are refined through and continue to mediate the learner’s life experiences and social interactions. Dewey believed that (Hargraves, 2021):

Empirical Validity and Criticism

Despite its wide application in modern theories of education, many scholars have noted the lack of empirical evidence in favor of Dewey’s theories of education directly.

Nonetheless, Dewey’s theory of how students learn aligns with empirical studies that examine the positive impact of interactions with peers and adults on learning (Göncü & Rogoff, 1998).

Researchers have also found a link between heightened engagement and learning outcomes.

This has resulted in the development of educational strategies such as making meaningful connections to students” home lives and encouraging student ownership of their learning (Turner, 2014).

Theory of Emotions

Dewey vs. darwin.

Another influential piece of philosophy that Dewey created was his theory of emotion (Cunningham, 1995).

Dewey reconstructed Darwin’s theory of emotions, which he believed was flawed for assuming that the expression of emotion is separate from and subsequent to the emotion itself.

Darwin also argued that behavior that expresses emotion serves the individual in some way when the individual is in a particular state of mind. These can also cause behaviors that are not useful.

Dewey, however, claimed that the function of emotional behaviors is not to express emotion but to be acts that value someone’s survival. Dewey believed that emotion is separate from other behaviors because it involves an attitude toward an object. The intention of the emotion informs the behaviors that result (Cunningham, 1995).

Dewey also rejected Darwin’s principle that some expressions of emotions can be explained as cases where one emotion can be expressed by actions that are the exact opposite of another.

Dewey again believed that even these opposite behaviors have purposes in themselves (Cunningham, 1995).

Dewey vs. James

Dewey argued against James’s serial theory of emotions, seeing emotion and stimuli as one simultaneous coordinated act.

William James proposed a serial theory of emotion , in which an emotional experience progresses through several sequential stages:

• An object or idea functions as a stimulus
• This stimulus leads to a behavioral response
• The response is then followed by an emotional excitation or affect

An example would be seeing a bear (stimulus), running away (response), and then feeling afraid (emotion).

Dewey, however, argued that emotion and stimulus form a unified, simultaneous act that cannot be separated in this way.

He uses the example of a frightened reaction to a bear to illustrate his point:

• The “bear” itself is constituted by the coordinated sensory excitations of the eyes, touch, etc.
• The feeling of “terror” is constituted by disturbances across glandular, muscular systems.
• Rather than stimulus → response → emotion, these are partial activities within the one act of perceiving the frightening bear and running away in fear.
• The bear object and the fear emotion are two aspects of the total coordinated activity, happening at once.

So, where James treated stimulus, response, and emotion as sequential stages in an emotional episode, Dewey saw them as “minor acts” coming together in a unified conscious experience.

He maintained James was artificially separating elements that occur as part of one ongoing activity of coordination.

The key difference is that Dewey did not believe it was possible to isolate stimulus, response, and affect as self-sufficient events. They exist meaningfully only within the total act – hence why he emphasizes their simultaneity.

Backe, A. (2001). John Dewey and early Chicago functionalism. History of Psychology, 4 (4), 323.

Cunningham, S. (1995). Dewey on emotions: recent experimental evidence. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 31(4), 865-874.

Dewey, J. (1974). John Dewey on education: Selected writings .

Göncü, A., & Rogoff, B. (1998). Children’s categorization with varying adult support. American Educational Research Journal, 35 (2), 333-349.

Hargraves, V. (2021). Dewey’s educational philosophy .

Hildebrand, D. (2018). John Dewey.

Simpson, D. J. (2006). John Dewey (Vol. 10). Peter Lang.

Turner, J. C. (2014). Theory-based interventions with middle-school teachers to support student motivation and engagement. In Motivational interventions . Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Module 14: Small Group Communication

The reflective-thinking method for decision-making, learning objectives.

Identify the steps of the reflective-thinking method for decision-making in small groups.

The reflective-thinking method originated with John Dewey, a leading American social philosopher. This method provides a structured way for small groups to approach decision-making and problem-solving, especially as people are increasingly distracted by electronics or overwhelmed by access to complex and endless information. Dewey maintained that people need a scientific method and a “disciplined mind” to both tap into the strength of a group and to come up with logical solutions. The term disciplined mind  refers to gaining intellectual control, rather than just being emotionally based. Discipline in this context isn’t seen as restrictive; in fact, Dewey believed that having a disciplined mind offers intellectual freedom. While the reflective-thinking method can be applied to individual decision-making, we’ll apply it here to small group communication. [1] We’ll explore the five steps of the reflective-thinking method below.

• What steps should our planning team take to prepare and execute an appropriate and fun activity for children in foster care? Notice that this statement is specific and unbiased about the problem to be solved and allows for various possible solutions.
• Analyze the problem . Once again, this step preemptively prevents a small group from jumping to solutions. Here, the group needs to explore the problem in depth, which involves gathering material and researching what has been done, if anything, in the past. You need solid evidence, data, and even anecdotal evidence to better analyze what’s going on. The group planning a holiday event for children in foster care might look at what has been done in past years and gather feedback about those events. The group might create and send an online survey to foster parents and ask what types of activities their children are most interested in. The group might consult with a trauma expert about what types of considerations they should take to ensure any activity is safe and inclusive. Finally, the group would likely research its budget, timelines, demographic information of the children, etc.
• The event fits into our budget of $3,000.
• The event is appropriate for ages 2–18.
• The event allows children and foster parents to interact with one another.
• The event feels safe and inclusive for all children.
• The event is held in convenient locations at appropriate times for younger children.
• The event is relatively simple.
• Brunch, Polar Express party, Winter Wonderland theme, gift drive, gingerbread-making activity, hot chocolate bar, lots of lights, live DJ, mariachi band, etc.
• Select the best solution . Finally, you work to ascertain the best solution. You evaluate the merits and feasibility of each proposed solution. Use the criteria established in Step 3 to evaluate each possible solution. How do you define best ? That definition might be the most feasible, the most effective, the most politically viable, the quickest, etc. The discussion for the event planning team might look something like this:

We kept going back to the simple part, so Polar Express and Winter Wonderland themed events were off the table. We decided the brunch idea best fit the criteria for timing, budget, and location. Then, we remembered the kid-friendly and interactive part, and added an element of a gingerbread-making project for children of all ages. To help children and parents get to know each other in a safe, low-key environment, we decided to have each child or family display their gingerbread houses on tables and let others write positive comments about them.

Once the group decides on its final solution, they can continue further planning, or present their decision (when applicable).

Practice Question

• Lucas, Stephen.  The Art of Public Speaking . United States, McGraw-Hill Education, 2020. ↵
• The Reflective-Thinking Method for Decision Making. Authored by : Susan Bagley-Koyle with Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

Education, teaching and discipline are lifelong social phenomena and conditions for democracy, according to acclaimed American philosopher John Dewey.

Education is life itself

One of Dewey’s ideas about teaching and learning is that practical problem solving and theoretical teaching should go hand in hand. This idea has had a huge impact, especially among teachers in the USA. In Denmark, his way of thinking inspired the school system to such a degree that Denmark has been called Dewey’s second home country.

Furthermore, Dewey was sought after in countries like China and Soviet where he was used as a pedagogical consultant.

However, Dewey’s pedagogical philosophy is not just about learning by doing. According to Dewey teaching and learning, education and discipline are closely connected to community – the social life. Education is a lifelong process on which our democracy is built. As he put it: “ Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

Children are not listeners

Dewey was pragmatic and in no way did he agree with the romantic Rousseau that “the untainted nature of the child should be protected from the depraving influence of culture.” Not only did this position make him contradict the traditional concept of learning – it was also going against progressive anti-authoritarian pedagogy.

Traditional schools with practical learning by passive reception he described as “medieval”. Partly because it submitted pure intellectual, detached knowledge that belonged to the past – and partly because it was based on the inaccurate assumption that children are listening creatures. “But they are not,” Dewey emphasised. “Children are first and foremost interested in moving, communicating, exploring the world, constructing and expressing themselves artistically.”

The teacher is the master

Furthermore, he criticized the school for counteracting the children’s ability to corporate, because it was considered “cheating” and “copying”, if the children helped each other. On the other hand, he wasn’t a follower of the anti-authoritarian pedagogy, which in his opinion tended to see any form of pedagogical leadership and guidance as an intervention in the individual’s freedom.

On the contrary he declared that authority is a pedagogical condition for the individual’s development. Of course, he didn’t mean the outer authority of the traditional school, but the one of the “modern human knowledge and skill.”

Learning life skills

In 1896 Dewey founded an experimental school at the University of Chicago. It was shaped by “what the best and wisest parents want for their children.” In Dewey’s opinion that had to be what the community would want for all their children.

Dewey’s own children attended the school and in 1902 – when the number of pupils was at its highest – it had 140 students and 23 teachers, who were occupied with the core of the school’s teaching: Chores.

Good judgement

In a Dewey school the stereotypical gender roles are discarded. Girls participate in crafting equally to the boys, who have as many cooking classes as girls.

However, the children are divided by age, where the youngest do what they know from their home. The six-year-olds build a farm of blocks and plant crops they process.

The seven-year-olds study prehistorical life. The eight-year-olds are occupied by exploring, the nine-year-olds geography, and the older ones by scientific experiments within anatomy, physics, political economics and photography.

Dewey thought that this type of practical learning combines more learning recourses than any other method. Partly because you do something, partly because you do it together and thereby acquire social interest and moral knowledge.

The goal is to make the children want more teaching. That is the only way democracy can function as a lifeform, Dewey thought. And the ultimate goal is to create human beings with good judgement, who can participate in the community to discover the common good.

Still controversial!

What is Pedagogy for Change?

The Pedagogy for Change programme offers 12 months of training and experiencing the power of pedagogy – while you put your skills and solidarity into action.

Studies and hands-on training takes place in Denmark, where you will work with children and youth at specialised social education facilities or schools with a non-traditional approach to teaching and learning.

In short: • 10 months’ studies and hands-on training in Denmark, working with children and youth at specialised social education facilities or schools. At the same time yo will study the world of pedagogy with your team – a group of like-minded people. You will meet up for study days every month.

• 2 months of exploring the reality of communities in Scandinavia / Europe, depending on what is possible – pandemic conditions permitting. You will travel by bike, bus or perhaps on foot or sailing.

• Possibility to earn a B-certificate in Pedagogy.

How to tackle intolerance

Being an active bystander means becoming aware that inappropriate or even threatening behaviour is going on and choosing to challenge it. Collective action is the way forward.

Mónica shares her experience

Mónica just finished the Pedagogy for Change programme and we asked her to share some of her considerations and main takeaways from her experience of practising and studying social pedagogy in Denmark.

“Zone of Proximal Development” exemplified

In this blogpost, we exemplify how the theory of the “Zone of Proximal Development” can be implemented in real life when working in the field of social pedagogy.

MORE GREAT PEDAGOGICAL THINKERS

Axel Honneth

Through recognition, human beings develop self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. The theory of recognition was developed by German philosopher and educator Axel Honneth.

Astrid Lindgren

Astrid Lindgren’s thoughts about children were provocative in the 1940s, and her approach to childhood as a phenomenon is progressive, even today.

Lev Vygotsky

Interaction with peers, imitation, collaborative learning and other social interaction is key to how the human mind develops, according to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

Maya Angelou

In times of injustice and hardship, Maya Angelou’s call for humanity, unity and resilience teaches us many important life lessons. Her works inspire hope through action.

James P. Comer

“No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship.” Really? Does Dr. James Comer mean that students need to be close to their teacher to learn something?

Jean Lave is a social anthropologist and learning theorist who believes that learning is a social process, as opposed to a cognitive one – challenging conventional learning theory.

Søren Kierkegaard

Making choices and taking action are at the very core of existentialism. By taking on these responsibilities, as human beings – we find the meaning of life.

Maria Montessori

Children prefer to work, not play. This is one of the main ideas of Maria Montessori, a trailblazers of early childhood education. “The child who concentrates is immensely happy” she noted. 

Sofie ‘Rif’ Rifbjerg

Brought up in the countryside Sofie Rifbjerg knew intuitively that fresh air, free play & a deep respect for children’s own agency was paramount for their positive development.

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Article contents

John dewey and teacher education.

• Margaret Schmidt Margaret Schmidt Arizona State University
•  and  Randall Everett Allsup Randall Everett Allsup Teachers College Columbia University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.475
• Published online: 29 July 2019

John Dewey’s writings on schooling are extensive, and characteristically wide-ranging: teachers are expected to think deeply about knowledge construction, how we think and learn, the purpose of curriculum in the life of the child, and the role of school and societal reform. He worked throughout his life to develop and refine his philosophy of experience, describing all learning as defined by the quality of interactions between the learner and the social and physical environment. According to Dewey, teachers have a responsibility to structure educational environments in ways that promote educative learning experiences, those that change the learner in such a way as to promote continued learning and growth. The capacity to reflect on and make meaning from one’s experiences facilitates this growth, particularly in increasing one’s problem-solving abilities.

While Dewey wrote little that specifically addressed the preparation of teachers, his 1904 essay, “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education,” makes clear that he grounds his beliefs about teachers’ learning in this same philosophy of experiential learning. Dewey argued that thoughtful reflection on previous and current educational experiences is especially important in teacher preparation; teacher educators could then guide beginners to examine and test the usefulness of the beliefs formed from those experiences. Teacher educators, therefore, have a responsibility to arrange learning environments for beginning teachers to promote sequential experiences leading to increased understanding of how children learn, “how mind answers to mind.” These experiences can then help beginning teachers grow, not as classroom technicians, but as true “students of teaching.”

Dewey’s ideas remain relevant, but must also be viewed in historical context, in light of his unfailing belief in education and the scientific method as ways to promote individual responsibility and eliminate social problems. His vision of a democratic society remains a fearless amalgam of human adaptation, continuity, change, and diversity: public schools are privileged locations in a democracy for the interplay and interrogation of old and new ideas. Teacher preparation and teacher wellbeing are crucial elements; they can provide experiences to educate all children for participation in their present lives in ways that facilitate their growth as citizens able to fully participate in a democracy. Despite criticism about limitations of his work, Dewey’s ideas continue to offer much food for thought, for both research and practice in teacher education.

• teacher preparation
• preservice teachers
• learning from experience
• progressive education

Introduction

Few 20th- and 21st-century philosophers have written as prolifically as John Dewey ( 1859–1952 ), capturing ideas in wide-ranging domains such as nature, psychology, science, politics, metaphysics, ethics, and art. Like the ancients Plato and Confucius, Dewey saw philosophy and education as nearly synonymous. And like Plato and Confucius, Dewey sensed the immense power that education could play in shaping not only the individual, but more importantly, the individual in society. Dewey was exceptional in the importance he placed on education, learning, schools, and teachers.

Although practices and beliefs about the preparation of teachers have continued to evolve in the nearly 70 years since Dewey’s death, his writings are regularly referenced among teacher educators. Our intent in this article is to engage with those ideas that have continuing relevance for teacher education, drawing upon the following seminal writings on teachers and teaching: The School and Society ( 1899 ); The Child and the Curriculum ( 1902 ); How We Think ( 1933 ); Experience and Education ( 1938 ); Moral Principles in Education ( 1909 ); Democracy and Education ( 1916 ); “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education” (1904a), and several essays. As practicing university music teacher educators, we will use examples from the world of music education that are general enough for any discipline.

To understand Dewey’s ideas about how teachers may best learn to teach, Dewey’s own starting point is first approached—that education, and indeed all learning, cannot be understood apart from experience. Next, Dewey’s description of reflective thinking, by which all learners make meaning from their experiences, is presented. Dewey’s ideas specific to teacher education follow: his understanding of the relationship between educational theory and educational practice, and the sequence of experiences he proposed for pre-service teachers. Dewey’s ideas about teaching methods and learning in laboratories are then discussed. The article concludes with reflections placing Dewey’s writings in historical context, and questions for continued research and practice in the Deweyian tradition.

Learning and Experience

All learning, Dewey ( 1938 , p. 7) believed, results from experience—not just in school, but in the individual’s life beyond school as well. Due to the “intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education,” he wanted educators to develop deep understanding of the function of experience in learning. Dewey ( 1933 , 1938 ) defined an experience as an interaction between an individual and the environment, suggesting that all experiences—good and bad—involve doing (how the individual interacts with the environment) and undergoing (how the experience changes the individual). Dewey ( 1938 , p. 13) continually emphasized that, while all students unquestionably have “experiences” in schools, “everything depends upon the quality of the experience which is had.”

The quality of an experience can be judged in relation to two simultaneously occurring processes or principles: interaction and continuity (Dewey, 1938 ). As an individual interacts with her physical environment, she creates insights derived from her interests and curiosities (doing). A child playing the piano for the first time will soon discover gradations of high and low, loud and soft. To her delight, she will soon find out that the pedal somehow makes the sound keep going. But from the standpoint of formal education and requisites of growth, a “quality” experience requires that her discoveries become useful to her needs and her community (undergoing growth in understanding). She needs to be given a place to share and test what she has learned with others, thus affording meaningful contributions to the people around her (Dewey, 1916 , 1938 ). Quality experiences require quality interactions, and teachers are tasked with enriching and enlarging the classroom environment, “in other words, whatever conditions interact with personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the experience which is had” (Dewey, 1938 , p. 25).

The principle of continuity states that the effect of a “good” or “educative” experience is cumulative and enriching. Dewey is famously paraphrased as saying that the purpose of growth is more growth. But such an oversimplification ignores the critical role that teachers play in helping the learner make sense of what has been discovered so that further growth is not misshaped. Whether on the playground or from a history book, all teachers know that wrong lessons can be learned. For Dewey ( 1933 , 1938 ), mis-educative experiences result in insights that impede further learning, while non-educative experiences fail to connect one experience with another, leaving the learner unchanged or merely incurious. In contrast, educative experiences live on in further experiences. “Hence, the central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” (Dewey, 1938 , p. 13). A teacher’s work is thus “moral,” because educators are charged with the fraught task of interfering in the incidental nature of most social learning (Dewey, 1909 ). A society trusts teachers to select experiences (via curriculum, via pedagogy) that then produce “quality” growth in “other people’s children” (Delpit, 1995 ). Likewise, according to Dewey, teachers have a moral responsibility to become familiar with their students’ home cultures and design lessons that appeal to their interests (Gay, 2010 ; Ladson-Billings, 1995 ), using conditions in the local community “as educational resources” (Dewey, 1938 , p. 23).

Dewey ( 1938 , p. 5) frequently critiqued what he and others have called “traditional education.” While we admit that the term is both imprecise and problematic, Dewey used it to refer to classrooms where teachers expected students to repeat back whatever isolated knowledge was presented to them for use in some distant future; such experiences, devoid of meaningful connections are at best noneducative, and at worst mis-educative. As music educators, the authors of this article are aware of the many dangers of isolated knowledge; for example, teaching musical notation as if its purpose were self-evident and universal (say), or teaching Western classical art music as if it were a-historical or context-free. As university teacher educators, we have too often seen beginning teachers ask children for solutions to “so-called problems” that are “simply assigned tasks ” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 233) or “activities” (Dewey, 1916 ), rather than genuine problems leading to meaningful insights. Dewey ( 1938 , p. 23, italics in the original) similarly cautioned proponents of “progressive education,” those “parents and some teachers [who seem to be] acting upon the idea of subordinating objective conditions to internal ones.” For Dewey ( 1938 , p. 63, italics in the original), the issue was not “new versus old education;” rather, his concern was “a question of what anything whatever must be to be worthy of the name education .” He believed that a middle, more pragmatic approach could help students use the interactions between their internal inclinations and the external environment to both connect present experiences with past experiences and prepare them for continued future growth. Drawing on the principles of interaction and continuity, teachers could learn “how to utilize the surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worthwhile” (Dewy, 1938 , p. 22; also, see Hildebrand, 2018 , for a summary of how Dewey developed these philosophical ideas over time.)

Making Meaning Through Reflective Thinking

To further develop the educative potential of experience, Dewey believed that quality of thought is the basis of all meaningful learning, both in school and in life. Dewey identifies three types of thinking: idle thought, belief, and reflection. Idle thought is “inconsequential trifling with mental pictures, random recollections . . . [and] half-developed impressions” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 114). Beliefs are ideas that “are picked up—we know not how” through “tradition, instruction, imitation . . . Even when they happen to be correct, their correctness is a matter of accident as far as the person who entertains them is concerned” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 116). In contrast, reflective thought is the “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 118). For Dewey, critical or reflective thinking is the only educational aim that can foster freedom of mind and action; he applied this principle equally to the learning and teaching of everyone involved in education, including students, pre-service teachers, and experienced teachers.

Similar to the consummatory experiences in art described by Dewey in his book Art as Experience ( 1934 ), reflective thinking has a kind of rhythm through which insights emerge. The cycle begins with “a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation,” a deviation from the expected situation, that Dewey ( 1933 , p. 200) identifies as a pre- reflective phase; the cycle concludes temporarily in a post -reflective state, a space of intellectual satisfaction—before a new puzzle or trouble reveals itself:

In between, as states of thinking, are (1) suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution; (2) an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity that has been felt (directly experienced) into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought; (3) the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material; (4) the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense in which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and (5) testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action.

Reflecting mindfully about experiences “done” and “undergone” creates growth-enhancing habits , which for Dewey ( 1938 , p. 19) include emotional and intellectual dispositions, as well as “our basic sensitivities and ways of meeting and responding to all the conditions which we meet in living.” A large part of learning—and learning to teach—involves the development of productive attitudes and habits of thought. Both teachers and teacher educators must actively cultivate reflective attitudes of open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility with their students. Open-mindedne ss, for Dewey ( 1916 , p. 182), is “accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that,” listening to all sides, and considering “the possibility of error even in the beliefs that are dearest to us” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 136). Whole-hearted involvement in finding a solution or creating meaning, a complete absorption in learning, may be cultivated by experiences that create a sense of suspense in learners, an element of story with “plot interest” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 320). Once a pre-service teacher has considered various reasonable possibilities for resolving a problem, an attitude of intellectual responsibility requires projecting and accepting the consequences of a chosen action, “mak[ing] clear what is involved in really knowing and believing a thing” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 186). Together, open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility promote “retention of the capacity to grow” for learners of all ages, as “the reward of such intellectual hospitality” (Dewwy, 1916 , p. 182).

Dewey ( 1916 , p. 183) encouraged educators to welcome diversity of thought, to allow children and preservice teachers time to follow their ideas and make errors, and to resist seeking only “speedy, accurately measurable, correct results”:

Results (external answers or solutions) may not be hurried; processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.

The student’s reasoning while solving a problem was far more important to Dewey than the answer itself. A good math teacher will ask students to show their work. A good art teacher will ask students about their intentions and the problems they encountered along the way. A good teacher educator will ask a preservice teacher to explain her thought process in responding to a child’s unexpected response. Dewey ( 1933 , p. 239) recommended that teachers and teacher educators regularly encourage students to conceptualize their reasoning in words, to check that educative meanings were being formed; “without this conceptualizing or intellectualizing, nothing is gained that can be carried over to the better understanding of new experiences. The deposit is what counts, educationally speaking.”

Dewey ( 1899 , p. 12) firmly believed that individuals learn from “books or the sayings of others only as they are related to [personal] experience;” he regularly criticized efforts to require children to memorize information and facts disconnected from their own lives and culture. Such strategies would lead students to repeat meaningless information in efforts to please the teacher or to avoid punishment. In contrast, an emphasis on reflection or “good habits of thinking” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 159) will motivate learners to understand the purposes for which skills and information could be applied, providing further motivation for learning by “arous[ing] curiosity, strengthen[ing] initiative, and set[ting] up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future” (Dewey, 1938 , pp. 20–21).

For Dewey ( 1916 , p. 166), all children can be creative, no matter the age or domain: “The child of three who discovers what can be done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer.” As learners return to their discoveries, their insights will deepen. Once the child discovers that the pedals on a piano keep the sound ringing, she is likely to explore the very mechanics of the instrument, to lift the lid and look inside. She might even ask a friend to hold down the pedal for her while she touches or plucks the steel wires. Trading places, these intrepid discoverers are likely to create a tentative theory that they bring to the teacher. The music teacher, if she is clever, will help the discoverers find new tricks and delightful problems. “There are no limits to the possibility of carrying over into the objects and events of life, meanings originally acquired by thoughtful examination, and hence no limit to the continual growth of meaning in human life” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 128).

Similarly, beginning teachers must engage in “thoughtful examination” of their educational experiences. For productive reflection, they must reframe a “difficulty or perplexity that has been felt (directly experienced) into a problem to be solved” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 200).

No hard and fast rules decide whether a meaning suggested is the right and proper meaning to follow up. The individual’s own good (or bad) judgment is the guide. There is no label on any given idea or principle which says automatically, “Use me in this situation”—as the magic cakes of Alice in Wonderland were inscribed “Eat me.” The thinker has to decide. (Dewey, 1933 , p. 215)

Unlike the beginning teacher, experienced teachers, in considering children’s conceptual learning, have a store of reflected-upon experiences from which they have learned to predict typical responses. This frees them to focus on surprises that arise in the classroom, and thus they are more likely to be able to frame and reflect on the situation and develop and test hypothetical resolutions. Beginning teachers do not yet have this bank of experiences from which to examine student learning. With so many things happening around them, much of which is surprising, preservice teachers may need guidance to identify or frame a specific problem for productive reflection.

Not Theory Versus Practice: Theory and Practice

The principles of experiential learning and reflection apply equally to teachers working with children and to teacher educators guiding preservice teachers’ learning experiences. Dewey’s important essay, “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education,” is one of his few that specifically addresses the problems of preparing teachers to do the work of teaching. Dewey ( 1904a , p. 247) “assumes without argument” that both theory and practice are necessary components of teacher preparation; the question in his mind was the purpose of “practical work.” He criticized the apprentice model that was practiced in many programs during his time (and has continued to remain popular) because it too often focuses the apprentice on the immediate results of instructional practices, rather than on long-term growth. Dewey ( 1904a , pp. 255, 251, italics in the original) proposed instead a “laboratory view” of practice, where theory and practice “grow together out of and into the teacher’s personal experience,” and where beginners acquire “ control of the intellectual methods required for personal and independent mastery of practical skill, rather than at turning out at once masters of the craft.” This creates a challenge for teacher educators, as preservice teachers are more interested, at least initially, in “what works” and “what doesn’t” than in general “intellectual methods.” Dewey ( 1904a , p. 256) argued that an early focus on acquiring technical skills is a dangerous shortcut, helpful at the beginning stages of one’s career, but harmful in the longer term:

For immediate skill may be got at the cost of power to go on growing. The teacher who leaves the professional school with power in managing a class of children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital command of the psychology, logic, and ethics of development. But later “progress” may with such consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching . . . Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he can not grow as a teacher, an inspirer and director of soul-life.

Dewey ( 1904a , p. 258) suggests that teacher education classes begin with critical reflection on preservice teachers’ own “direct and personal” learning experiences, both within and outside school, as “the greatest asset” in their possession. This store of experiences provides preservice teachers with “plenty of practical material by which to illustrate and vitalize theoretical principles and laws of mental growth in the process of learning,” as well as “plenty of practical experience by which to illustrate cases of arrested development—instances of failure and maladaptation and retrogression, or even degeneration” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 258). Through guided reflection about the past experiences that most enthused and confused them when they were young learners, preservice teachers might better connect educational theory with actual practice, becoming better equipped to test out their insights in their current setting.

The principle of continuity suggests both the importance and the possibility of guiding preservice teachers to transition from a student’s perspective on schooling and learning to a teacher’s perspective on education and teaching .

Only by beginning with the values and laws contained in the [preservice teacher’s] own experience of his own mental growth, and by proceeding gradually to facts connected with other persons of whom he can know little; and by proceeding still more gradually to the attempt actually to influence the mental operations of others, can educational theory be made most effective. Only in this way can the most essential trait of the mental habit of the teacher be secured—that habit which looks upon the internal, not upon the external; which sees that the important function of the teacher is the direction of the mental movement of the student, and that the mental movement must be known before it can be directed. (Dewey, 1904a , p. 262)

By focusing preservice teachers’ attention on “how teacher and pupils react upon each other—how mind answers to mind” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 260), the function of practical experiences becomes enriching their understanding of “the knowledge of subject-matter and the principles of education” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 249). Dewey believed that practical experiences could offer a rich source from which to develop, through reflection, a broad understanding of educational psychology and curriculum development, with a goal to develop “intellectual responsibility” and become independent practitioners, not just masters of a craft of teaching.

Sequence of Experiences in the Teacher Education Program

Dewey believed the popular apprenticeship model of learning through “cadetting” or student teaching was not adequate to meet the long-term well-being of future teachers. He developed many of his ideas about teacher education in the context of the laboratory schools he helped found at the University of Chicago ( 1896–1904 ), with later refinements as professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Dewey ( 1904a ) outlined a sequence of experiences that, in conjunction with a laboratory school, could help preservice teachers integrate their theoretical studies with their teaching practices.

Dewey ( 1904a , p. 268) recommended that preservice teachers’ reflection on their own past experiences be supplemented with initial observations in a school classroom—not so much to see how teachers teach, but “to get material for psychological observation and reflection, and some conception of the educational movement of the school as a whole.” According to Dewey ( 1904a , p. 260), these early observations should be focused “to see how teacher and pupils react upon each other—how mind answers to mind. . . . What the student needs most at this stage of growth is ability to see what is going on in the minds of a group of persons who are in intellectual contact with one another.” Only then, after developing a richer understanding of the workings of the school through reflective writing and observation, could preservice teachers begin to serve as assistants for “more intimate introduction to the lives of the children and the work of the school” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 268).

When preservice teachers are ready for the next challenge, after assisting the cooperating teacher with small tasks and putting theory and practice together through observation and reflection, they may begin to select and arrange subject matter. In typical Deweyian fashion, this third stage is pragmatically considered. Dewey believed that initial curriculum-making should not include the common task of writing isolated make-believe or “practice” lesson plans. Rather, the preservice teacher should focus on one subject area across grade levels to develop “the habit of viewing the entire curriculum as a continuous growth, reflecting the growth of mind itself” (Dewey, 1904a , pp. 267–268). In this third sequence of development, the prospective teacher co-participates in lesson planning by helping the cooperating teacher find supplementary materials, creating authentic discipline-specific problems, or developing a “scheme of possible alternative subjects for lessons and studies” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 269).

Once the preservice teacher is deemed ready, she may move to the fourth stage, actual teaching. Interestingly, in this penultimate period of preparation, the prospective teacher is “given the maximum amount of liberty possible” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 269).

Students should be given to understand that they not only are permitted to act upon their own intellectual initiative, but that they are expected to do so, and their ability to take hold of situations for themselves would be a more important factor in judging them than their following any particular set method or scheme. (Dewey, 1904a , p. 269)

Dewey ( 1904a , pp. 269–270) recommended that supervisors keep observation and feedback to a minimum, thereby allowing the preservice teacher time to overcome the “shock” of being newly in charge of a classroom, and “to get enough experience to make him capable of seeing the fundamental bearing of criticism upon work done.”

At this fourth stage, only when the preservice teacher begins to feel comfortable, may the instructor or supervisor offer suggestions. But rather than criticizing specific elements of the teaching or lesson planning, the supervisor should guide “the student to judge his own work critically, to find out for himself in what respects he has succeeded and in what failed, and to find the probable reasons for both failure and success” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 270). Building on a similar process from the third stage, Dewey ( 1904a , p. 270) recommended allowing the prospective educator to “assume responsibility for the development of some one topic . . . [rather than] to teach a certain number (necessarily smaller in range) of lessons in a larger number of subjects.” This posture would afford student teachers a deeper understanding of the principles of teaching, with less focus on the methods of teaching. “No greater travesty” could happen in a preservice teacher’s development than for the supervisor to assign “a brief number of lessons, have him under inspection in practically all the time of every lesson, and then criticise him almost, if not quite, at the very end of each lesson.” Such oversight might give the person “some of the knacks and tools of the trade,” but would not “develop a thoughtful and independent teacher” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 270).

Dewey’s fifth and final stage is actual apprenticeship. He insists that apprenticeship is only useful if the program is long enough for the beginning teacher to be grounded in “educational theory and history, in subject-matter, in observation, and in practice work of the laboratory type” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 271), and if the “practice schools are sufficiently large to furnish the required number of children” to offer all prospective teachers this opportunity (Dewey, 1904a , p. 270). Even here, Dewey ( 1904a , p. 271) recommends limiting oversight and criticism, while allowing the apprentice teacher “as much responsibility and initiative as he is capable of taking.” Preservice teachers’ reflective thinking about their teaching experiences remains critical here. The goal of supervision in this period is not for supervisors to “turn out teachers who will perpetuate their own notions and methods, but in the inspiration and enlightenment that come through prolonged contact with mature and sympathetic persons” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 271).

Dewey ( 1899 , p. 39) believed that this could be accomplished best by “getting things into connection with one another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully.” He advocated for more connection at all levels of education from kindergarten through college, connection among content areas, connection of theory and practice, connection of school with life; failing such relationships, “each side suffers from the separation” (Dewey, 1899 , p. 43).

Developing Teaching Methods

Dewey was consistent in his aversion to binary thinking. A concept like method (Latin methodus /Greek méthodos = pursuit) is neither inherently good, nor inherently evil—it is merely a strategic pursuit. A method, after all, is a natural aspect of life and living, defined in this article as the application of intelligence to the contingencies of an ever-changing world. Teaching methods are rightly criticized when they act as proxy for teacher strategy (Allsup & Westerlund, 2012 ; Dewey, 1916 ). In Deweyian logic, the most effective methods are funded by experience and self-reflection. For example, when introducing a new plant to a flower garden, the savvy gardener will call upon her past experiences to forecast how her new addition will thrive. Likewise, a music teacher will draw upon past experience to create interest in an unsuspecting but enthusiastic beginner who wants to play an instrument. In either situation, she knows that flourishing is never guaranteed. In these examples, our hypothetical methodologist will observe and take note, but be ready to make changes should her strategy require it.

In Dewey’s ( 1916 , p. 177) vision for teacher preparation, methods arise from a thorough understanding of one’s disciplinary domain, but subject matter is always balanced by a deep understanding of the principles of learning and teaching: “In brief, the method of teaching is the method of an art, of action intelligently directed by ends.” Using aesthetic language, teaching methods are never counterfeits or copies from fellow artists, but sincere forms of self-expression: “an expression of [teachers’] own intelligent observations” of children. Dewey ( 1916 , p. 177) argues that artists both follow their own inspiration and “study the operations and results of those in the past who have succeeded greatly.” The art of choosing an appropriate method is “the problem of establishing conditions that will arouse and guide curiosity ; of setting up the connections in things experienced that will on later occasions promote the flow of suggestions , create problems and purposes that will favor consecutiveness in the succession of ideas” through productive reflection (Dewey, 1933 , p. 157).

Dewey ( 1916 ) distinguishes “general method” from “individual method.” Preservice teachers can and should learn general methods from a more experienced teacher, including “knowledge of the past, of current technique, of materials, of the ways in which one’s own best results are assured,” supplemented with “child-study, psychology, and a knowledge of social environment” and a thorough knowledge of subject matter (Dewey, 1916 , pp. 177, 180). An understanding of general methods alone, however, is “worse than useless”—or even harmful—if it “get[s] in the way of [the teacher’s] own common sense” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 179). For example, Dewey ( 1933 , p. 207) suggests that there is “nothing especially sacred about the number five” in the phases of reflection that he outlines; depending on the situation, two phases may run together or a phase may be expanded to include more small steps. Dewey ( 1916 , pp. 178–179) viewed general methods, not as “ready-made models” for instruction, but as “aids in sizing up the needs, resources, and difficulties of the unique experiences” of individual learners.

As young teachers develop “the working tendencies of observation, insight, and reflection” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 256) of their students, and of themselves as educators, they may gain confidence and be freed to create their own individual methods as needed for different learners in varied social settings. As preservice teachers deepen their understanding of curriculum and educational theory, they may become more like jazz musicians, more improvisatory—more capable of allowing “these principles to work automatically, unconsciously, and hence promptly and effectively” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 256). The specific methods used by individual teachers with particular students thus “will vary as [their] past experiences and [their] preferences vary . . . [thus] no catalogue can ever exhaust [the] diversity of form and tint” of methodological approaches (Dewey, 1916 , p. 180).

Conceptualizing method as “a statement of the way the subject matter of an experience develops most effectively and fruitfully” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 186) can help young teachers to understand how to sequence problems for children’s experimentation and reflection in ways that, through continuity of learning, build deeper and deeper conceptual understanding of various subjects. Dewey ( 1916 , p. 164) suggests that “a large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring” to connect with prior learning.

As mentioned, for Dewey ( 1916 , p. 160), the basis of any method (as with all learning) is experience. He suggests that “the first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever age of maturity” and no matter the subject matter, must allow children opportunities to experiment with material through trial and error, taking action (doing) and observing the consequences of the actions (undergoing), “trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly do something to one in return.” Once students have sufficient experience with an object or concept, “memory, observation, reading, communication” may all become “avenues for supplying data” for reflection and problem solving (Dewey, 1916 , p. 164).

Dewey warns that preservice teachers are likely to teach the way they were taught; they may fail to recognize that a new generation of students will always bring new problems to the classroom, or that a different social environment requires different considerations. He believed “thoughtful and alert student[s] of education” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 256) have a moral duty to learn about their students’ interests and prior experiences in order to design appropriate and effective learning experiences for them. The more teachers know about their students’ world, the better they may “understand the forces at work that need to be directed and utilized for the formation of reflective habits” (Dewey, 1933 , pp. 140–141). The teacher should “give pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally results” (Dewey, 1916 , p. 161).

To emphasize, Dewey ( 1933 , p. 157) saw the concept of “method” as richer than a pedagogical technique or the sequence of a lesson plan. Method must be understood in its very broadest sense:

Method covers not only what [the teacher] intentionally devises and employs for the purpose of mental training, but also what he does without any conscious reference to it—anything in the atmosphere and conduct of the school that reacts in any way upon the curiosity, the responsiveness, and the orderly activity of children.

Dewey calls this unconscious transmission “collateral learning,” a notion that predates current ideas about the “hidden curriculum” (e.g., Apple, 2004 ; Eisner, 1994 ; Giroux & Penna, 1979 ). Students will learn many things in a classroom, intended or not. For example, methods that require a student to memorize “predigested materials” might inadvertently teach the student that school is not a democratic space, nor one concerned with justice. Dewey ( 1938 , p. 27) believed that inappropriate collateral learning would dull the child’s innate curiosity, and might cause her to engage “in the mental truancy of mindwandering” or to build “an emotional revulsion against the subject” or schooling in general. Collateral learning may be educative or mis-educative, but it appears to be a constant in education.

Everything the teacher does, as well as the manner in which he does it, incites the child to respond in some way or other, and each response tends to set the child’s attitude in some way or other . The teacher is rarely (and even then never entirely) a transparent medium of the access of another mind to a subject. (Dewey, 1933 , p. 159, italics in the original)

Committed and ongoing reflection, Dewey believed, helps teachers, preservice teachers, and teacher educators remain alert for the development of their students’ attitudes toward learning.

Learning in Laboratories

Dewey is sometimes referred to as America’s first postmodernist because of his deep antipathy toward dualistic thinking (Hickman, 2007 ). Dewey was specifically worried that binaries misdirect the focus of our attention. The child, for example, should never be defined in opposition to the curriculum, or seen as an unformed or “miniature” adult (Dewey, 1902 ). Importantly, for Dewey, the public school must never be viewed as somehow isolated from the larger community in which it is located. Referring to the classroom as a “laboratory” was one way that Dewey could skirt the easy dualism that most people associated with schools—those all-too-familiar spaces that, with their tiny desks and green chalkboards, do not resemble much of anything else in society. Rather, the public school in a democracy is embryonic : a nondualistic metaphor that suggests an environment that is both safely apart and protected, but also incorporated into the “body” of society.

To do this means to make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history, and science. [Hence] the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction. (Dewey, 1899 , pp. 19–20)

Set apart, protected, and incorporated, “the school in turn will be a laboratory in which the student . . . sees theories and ideas demonstrated, tested, criticized, enforced, and the evolution of new truths” (Dewey, 1899 , p. 56).

In contrast to the factory model of education, Dewey believed that the public school could be a place where the violence of industrial life (e.g., slaughter houses, iron foundries, railroad work, indentured servitude) is remedied and remediated, where displaced persons could be taught new life skills. Jane Addams in Chicago and Grace Dodge in New York City envisioned the school as a community hub—part library, museum, gymnasium, hospital, clubhouse, and savings bank—one that was centered around learning through community-building (Addams, 2002 ; Lagemann, 1979 ). Evelyn Dewey, writing with her father, makes a case for the school as a “social settlement,” a set-aside place that is deeply committed to the unique concerns of a particular neighborhood:

Schools all over the country are finding that the most direct way of vitalizing their work is through closer relations with local interest and occupations. That period of American school history which was devoted to building up uniformity of subject matter, method, administration, was obliged to neglect everything characteristic of the local environment, for attention to that meant deviation from uniformity . . . in aiming to hit all children by exactly the same educational ammunition, none were really deeply touched. Efforts to bring the work into vital connection with people’s experiences necessarily began to vary school materials to meet the special needs and definite features of local life. (Dewey & Dewey, 1915 , p. 339)

So integrated did Dewey ( 1899 , p. 45) consider the relationship between the school and democratic society that he composed a blueprint—a visual thought experiment—of the school’s relationship to community stakeholders, as well as disciplinary boundaries to each other. On the north side of the re-imagined school are openings to commercial businesses, on the east one sees arrows pointing to home and family life. In this metaphorical blueprint, a garden is located on the school’s south side, and the local university interacts with the school through its westward opening. In another chart, the school houses a museum at the center of the building with openings on four sides leading to chemistry, biology, art, and music labs. On another floor, one finds a library that is provocatively connected to the kitchen, the dining room, the shop, and the textile industries ( 1899 , pp. 52, 49).

Dewey concedes that most people will think of the laboratory as a specialized space, reserved for experts like physicists and physicians. If we leave aside the white-coated scientists in their protected eyewear, what else might we envision?—Activity? Quiet conversation? Focused attention? Group work?

The first great characteristic of a laboratory is that in it there is carried on an activity, an activity which involves contact with technical equipment, as tools, instruments and other apparatus, and machinery which require the use of the hands and the body. There is dealing with real materials and not merely, as in the old, traditional education, with the symbols of learning. (Dewey, 1932 , p. 108)

In this activity-privileged setting, there is a distinction between discovering knowledge and taking information. “I think the laboratory gives a good example of what I mean,” Dewey ( 1923 , p. 176) writes, “The individual has to be using his hands, doing things, but his experimenting in the laboratory is not simply running wild and at random. He has to have enough physical activity to see that his ideas are made definite and precise; that he is getting principles rather than taking information on faith at the word of the teacher or textbook.”

In the early 21st-century context of benchmarks, standards, high-stakes assessment, and accountability, the laboratory provides an antidote to the problem of isolated knowledge and teacher-assigned tasks. Call them inquirers, researchers, or discoverers: laboratory students will necessarily work within and across a discipline’s standards and norms. However, in an authentic laboratory, discoverers are just as likely to reassemble or build new norms and general principles. Dewey would argue that when students test the knowledge that they are given, they will do one of three things: (1) discard that knowledge if it is not useful; (2) alter it to fit a new context; or (3) accept the knowledge as worthwhile for the time being . In this sense, learners—even young learners—are practicing freedom . Standards alone do not fund freedom; that is, they do not inherently enlarge personal capacity or directly aid in problem-solving. But standards that are tested, discarded, altered, or kept in the light of present circumstances are acts of learner agency.

Norms and standards of practice are needed in the laboratory. Indeed, they help us build warranted assertions, which if tested, may assume new forms of knowledge. As Dewey suggests in the previous paragraph, the choices that warrant an assertion, claim, or solution cannot be informed solely by authority, which alone cannot help one make good judgments. Laboratory settings are democratic spaces where debate can occur, where the usefulness or validity of an emerging truth or act of creation is tested and debated with others (Allsup, 2016 ). For all learners who participate in it—students, preservice teachers, and cooperating teachers—the laboratory school, thus, can be characterized as:

a place of creativity, construction, imagination;

a place to test, perform, critique, and verify responses to authentic problems;

a place of warranted assertability; a place of hypothesis-building;

a “real”—but supportive—community, like those that exist outside classrooms, but affording students opportunities to succeed and fail;

a place of knowledge-making, where groups can collectively add to the sum of facts (asserted and tested) and principles (emerging and verified).

Dewey believed that such a laboratory setting within a teacher education program would provide preservice teachers with imaginative experiences that could help them develop understandings of the principles of education in its most ideal sense. Formal and informal settings, no matter the design, might aim for similar ends. Thus, laboratories—in their broadest, most non-binary sense—become both places to test specialized knowledge and everyday settings where (say) a new recipe could be tried out, or a previous lesson plan could be altered and studied for its results.

Dewey’s Work in Historical Context

Dewey’s writings have demonstrated consistent staying power in educational circles, with many ideas that remain relevant well beyond the 70 years during which he wrote them ( 1882–1952 ). His educational work, however, has also been criticized for saying too little about the role of schools and other democratic institutions in addressing social inequities (e.g., Brick, 2005 ; Portelli & Vilbert, 2002 ). It is essential, however, to consider Dewey’s work in the context of his time. Dewey’s ideas about reforming education were in response to the needs of a changing society, one that was undergoing rapid industrialization and mass migration. Electricity, the telegraph, and improved mail service sped communication across great distances. New discoveries in medicine and medical practice helped people live longer. We emphasize, however, that Dewey lived in an era when many in American society, like Dewey ( 1899 , pp. 6–7, 17, 7; see also 1930 , regarding Dewey’s faith in the scientific method), clung to the era’s faith that science could solve problems that were previously intractable.

One can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete. Through it the face of the earth is making over, even as to its physical forms; political boundaries are wiped out and moved about, as if they were indeed only lines on a paper map. . . . Even our moral and religious ideas and interests, the most conservative because the deepest-lying things in our nature, are profoundly affected. . . . Travel has been rendered easy; freedom of movement with its accompanying exchange of ideas, indefinitely facilitated. The result has been an intellectual revolution. Learning has been put into circulation; . . . a distinctively learned class is henceforth out of the question. It is an anachronism. Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. . . . That this revolution should not affect education in some other than a formal and superficial fashion is inconceivable.

This description, written by Dewey in 1899 , bears striking resemblance to social conditions in the first quarter of the 21st century . Writing in 1930 , Dewey (p. 275) recognized that “progress” could have negative effects as well; international tensions fostered during and after World War I meant that “race and color prejudice have never had such opportunity as they have now to poison the mind, while nationalism is elevated into a religion called patriotism.” But there remains a hopeful fascination to Dewey’s tone, an inherent faith in the inevitability of progress and growth that is contradicted by the decades that followed his death. Dewey is often described as lacking a sense of the tragic. Should he have lived to see it, the violence of the latter half of the 20th century may have surprised him, particularly as business interests have remade public education according to market principles. And the promises of progressive education are mostly located in private universities and expensive “independent” schools, undermining Dewey’s democratic ideals. While Dewey’s principles clearly address the 21st century’s global interest in the standardization, privatization, and accountability of education, we believe he would continue to argue against any totalizing, one-size-fits-all approach to any reform movement.

Dewey viewed universities as laboratory spaces for social repair and experimentation. At the end of “Theory into Practice” (1904a), Dewey believed that within “the next decade,” more normal schools would become four-year bachelor’s-degree-granting programs. Dewey was hopeful that extending the teacher preparation program from two to four years, within a model of a laboratory school in conjunction with a university, would provide adequate time for preservice teachers to develop deep understandings of theory integrated with their practice and methods of teaching. Those who would graduate from such a program would become lifelong learners and genuine “students of teaching” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 256).

One fundamental and striking element in the significance of the [University of Chicago] School of Education is the desire and resolute purpose to promote the cause of education, not only here, but everywhere, through inspiring teachers with more vital and adequate conceptions of the nature of their work, and through furnishing them with the intellectual equipment necessary to make them effective and apt in carrying out such broadened and deepened ideals. (Dewey, 1904b , pp. 274–275)

Although this goal seemed tantalizingly close in Dewey’s laboratory school experiments, he admitted the model might be challenging to replicate in other settings. Dewey ( 1899 ) cites critics who accuse him of developing his ideas in the context of ideal circumstances: a small teacher–student ratio, close collaboration between university researchers and K-12 faculty, a teaching faculty sharing common beliefs and focused on learning together in community, among other benefits not common to most educators. Dewey ( 1899 , p. 56) responded that genuine experiments, in education as much as in science and industry, required carefully controlled conditions, “working out and testing a new truth, or a new method,” before “applying it on a wide scale, making it available” to others. Ultimately, he left the lab school after seven contentious years (Knoll, 2014 ), although it has continued to offer learning experiences in the Deweyian tradition into the 21st century (University of Chicago Lab Schools, n.d. ).

We now benefit from far deeper knowledge of psychology, which was a young science in Dewey’s time. Dewey did not have access to 21st-century understandings of the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and class, and the multiple ways these contribute to continued inequities in education and teacher education. We also must admit to a far more complex understanding of educational and social problems, arising from, as in Dewey’s ( 1899 , pp. 8–9) day, an “increase in toleration, in breadth of social judgment, the larger acquaintance with human nature, the sharpened alertness in reading signs of character and interpreting social situations, greater accuracy of adaptation to differing personalities.” We continue to expand our vision of what education in a democracy means, who it is for, and how to work toward Dewey’s vision of education for all, with the goal of citizens prepared to participate fully in a democratic society. We have experienced an additional century of research, with solutions proposed and tried with varying success, yet Dewey’s ideas continue to offer teacher educators ample food for thought and practice.

Questions for Continued Research and Practice

Dewey’s writings remain provocative; even a century later, his insights seem ahead of their time. University teacher educators in the early 21st century , like those in Dewey’s day, are still pressured by myriad stakeholders to provide preservice teachers with predetermined outcomes and conclusions. But over and again, Dewey ( 1916 , p. 183) reminds us that the reflective process cannot be rushed, that knowledge and pedagogy “take their own time to mature.” Recognizing that few preparation programs offer all the characteristics of Dewey’s ideal laboratory school, how can we best incorporate the principles of learning Dewey sets forth? What types of experiences hold the greatest educative potential? How can we include both the breadth and depth of experiences needed to develop theoretical understanding and thoughtful practice? How can university teacher educators help preservice teachers create sustained continuity among all their educational experiences? What learning experiences may guide preservice teachers to enlarge their vision of the goals and practices of education and to reconceptualize possibilities for their work with children?

The authors of this article concede that experiential learning does not present itself as “efficient,” at least not in the short term; and front-loading student teaching through reflection and observation takes more time than the apprentice or “cadet” model. Guaranteed outcomes, furthermore, are prohibited in a Deweyian framework. Learners, including preservice teachers, must always make their own meanings from their experiences, and thus no preparation program or student teaching experience can guarantee skill or expertise in teaching. Dewey wrote about teacher preparation during an era when, like ours, teacher education programs were becoming more standardized and less creative. He would be the first to argue against any single definition of teacher quality or standardized curriculum (see, e.g., Dewey & Dewey, 1915 ). What would he say about 21st-century national standards for content-area learning and teacher evaluation systems that are based on student test scores, all of which consider children and their teachers “ en masse , as an aggregate of units” (Dewey, 1899 , p. 22)? He believed this view was responsible for “the uniformity of method and curriculum . . . [with] next to no opportunity for adjustment to varying capacities and demands.” Such “ready-made results and accomplishments to be acquired by all children alike in a given time” conflicted with Dewey’s beliefs about the growing child or the developing teacher: “The moment children [or teachers] act they individualize themselves; they cease to be a mass and become the intensely distinctive beings that we are acquainted with out of school, in the home, the family, on the playground, and in the neighborhood” (Dewey, 1899 , p. 22).

Substituting “teachers” for “children” in the previous statement may offer some insight into potential concerns Dewey would have with policies that evaluate teachers in light of “ready-made results and accomplishments.” Given the policy climate in the early 21st century , how can university teacher educators meaningfully respond to calls for accountability in the preparation of a student teacher? How can we honor the individuality of a preservice teacher while preparing her to meet mandated standards? After four or five years in a preparation program (or four semesters in some), how can the beginner teacher be “holistically” evaluated and deemed ready, both for immediate placement and for potential for continued growth? What types of experiences might best help her to examine, construct, or reconstruct her experiences and then demonstrate an expansive understanding of educational theory and practice? How can she exhibit this knowledge in a way that is developmentally appropriate? And if a universal benchmark is not possible—at least according to Dewey—how then do stakeholders know when a preservice teacher is ready for her own classroom, or not?

Dewey’s ideas about reflection on experience have inspired a vast body of research in teacher education. Studies have explored various strategies for engaging preservice teachers in reflection on their personal beliefs and lived histories (e.g., Grimmett & Erickson, 1988 ; Knowles, 1992 ; Schön, 1987 ). Drawing on Deweyian premises, researchers have studied educative and mis-educative beliefs and their possible source (e.g., Dolloff, 1999 ; Fives & Gill, 2014 ; Schmidt, 2013 ); the role of teaching experience in teacher development (e.g., Boyle-Baise & McIntyre, 2008 ; Clift & Brady, 2005 ; Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985 ; Miksza & Austin, 2010 ; Tabachnick & Zeichner, 1984 ); and how beginning teachers make meaning in and through content area courses (Amador, Kimmons, Miller, & Desjardins, 2015 ; Floden & Meniketti, 2005 ; Grossman, 2005 ). The authors of this article believe that more research is needed to identify context-specific practices that engage preservice teachers in truly meaningful reflection based on genuine problems, not “so-called problems” or “simply assigned tasks ” (Dewey, 1933 , p. 233).

Most research in teacher education is focused on preservice teachers’ learning and development. But more studies could be designed to examine the experiences that help preservice teachers develop an invested and strategic curiosity about children and how they think and learn, “to see how teacher and pupils react upon each other—how mind answers to mind” (Dewey, 1904a , p. 260). How can beginning teachers, generally very concerned with their own need-to-teach, focus more on the child’s needs and interests, and learn to view their students as multifaceted individuals? As an extension of this question, what experiences might help beginning teachers better understand and serve the needs of underserved students, viewing them in terms of the potential of their minds to answer to educational opportunities, rather than through a deficit lens? Research might help us design courses to better challenge preservice teachers’ perceptions of their own learning as the norm for all students; such classes could help new teachers foster a genuine desire to learn about and understand the experiences that their future students bring to school from their home cultures (e.g., Delpit, 1995 ; Gay, 2010 ; Ladson-Billings, 1995 ; Lind & McKoy, 2016 ).

Researchers could consider more longitudinal studies, following preservice teachers’ growth throughout a program or even into the early years of teaching (e.g., Bullough, 1989 ; Bullough & Baughman, 1997 ; Wetzel, Hoffman, Roach, & Russell, 2018 ). Such studies might provide insights into ways that preservice teachers make connections among their learning experiences both in and out of class, and how they create continuity among their past, present, and future. In an age of teacher de-professionalization, what can we learn about educational experiences that help preservice teachers develop a larger vision of—and a greater commitment to—their own lifelong learning?

It goes without saying that most classic philosophers of education are encountered by contemporary readers in ways that require context and some degree of generosity. Plato’s writings on education should not probably be read too literally, but we can go to The Republic to think deeply about the ways in which a society is strategically shaped through the education of its citizens. We can read Confucius and find new questions about how personhood is shaped through tradition. But Dewey, a classic American philosopher, remains highly relevant to educational concerns in the early 21st century . Indeed, he requires little contextual apology. We can, for example, return to Dewey to find inspiration in his faith in the professional capacity of teachers. He never spoke of children through a deficit lens. Dewey’s abiding belief in hands-on learning—his constant focus on the child and the child’s interests—is a counter-narrative to contemporary educational discourses that see children as future human resources. Given his belief in the power of experiential learning, the lasting influence of his educational writings almost seems counter-intuitive. Yet based on our own experiences as university teacher educators, we have found the principles presented in this article to hold great potential for continued experimentation and reflection in our own practices.

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

• It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
• The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
• The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

• suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
• an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
• the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
• the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
• testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

• Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
• Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
• Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
• Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
• Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
• Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
• Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
• Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
• Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
• Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
• Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

• Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
• Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
• Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
• Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
• Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
• Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

• reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
• distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
• indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
• orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
• being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
• being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
• doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
• reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
• attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
• winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

• Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
• Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
• Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
• In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
• Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

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The Possible in the Life and Work of John Dewey

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The American philosopher John Dewey and the tradition of pragmatism is often connected to the concept of experience. This entry explores John Dewey’s pragmatism with a particular emphasis on experience as transformative events based on two main principles – continuity and interaction. In relation to this we discuss how experience is linked to imagination and seen as a transformative source. Experience can be perceived as a creative process in which the meeting of different experiences creates new ideas and new understandings revealing what is possible. Consequently, experiences do not only form the basis for what we can do and understand, but also what we can imagine and create. Despite the positive and educative associations to the concept, experience is not always an educative phenomenon and Dewey realized that some experiences can also be harmful. Thus, in order to understand the complexity of the concept we also elaborate on educative and miseducative experiences, and the relationship between experience and moral judgement.

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Egelandsdal, K., Ness, I.J. (2022). The Possible in the Life and Work of John Dewey. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_199-3

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Home Issues VIII-1 Symposia. Dewey’s Democracy and E... What’s the Problem with Dewey?

What’s the Problem with Dewey?

In Democracy and Education Dewey has a rich conception of educational flourishing that stands at odds with the instrumentalism about learning endemic to much contemporary educational policy. And his vision posits deep dependencies between the different domains in which education is transformative: the transformation of the individual learner into an inquirer equipped to adapt in a changing environment and the transformations in the social world required for the provision of opportunities for such experiences to all. In this paper, I trace the roots of Dewey’s conception in his account of inquiry. I focus on the key concept of a ‘problem.’ For Dewey, inquiry begins with a problem, but his concept of a problem is challenging and lacks an adequate theoretical rationale. Problems start with disruptions in our environmental engagement that figure in non-knowing encounters. Dewey needs an account of these pre-cognitive disruptions and of what constitutes their resolution. I argue that the account can be found in the aesthetics of experience. This draws upon some of Dewey’s insights regarding our experience of art objects and it finds a central role for the aesthetics of experience as not only the prompt for inquiry and the unification of experience that settles inquiry, but also in what I call the ‘craft of inquiry’ – the very practice of inquiring. If this is right, any adequate account of learning, let alone a pedagogy fit to encourage learning, must have a central role for aesthetics as providing the conditions for the possibility of learning. A proper appreciation of Dewey signals the opportunity for a radical re-thinking of how to shape a pedagogy fit for educational flourishing – a pedagogy designed for inquirers. And it helps us understand better the deep dependencies between the projects of individual and social transformation.

Introduction

• 1 References to John Dewey’s published works are to the critical edition, The Collected Works of John (...)

1 In Democracy and Education Dewey presents a vision of a richly liberal conception of education, one that sees education as fundamentally transformative, from the opening naturalistic conception of living things maintaining ‘themselves by renewal’ to the conception of education as “a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience” (MW 9: 82). 1 This is transformative on a number of different levels. It transforms the individual: in ancient Athens “custom and traditional beliefs held men in bondage” (MW 9: 272) and education needs to provide the “reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of consequent experience” (MW 9: 82). However much this requires transformation of the individual, Dewey is clear that there is a social dimension to the transformative role and purpose of education. The ancient Greeks, for example, did not liberate all from the bondage of custom. Our critique of the class divisions in ancient Athens is only honest if “we are free from responsibility for perpetuating the educational practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a cultural embellishment” (MW 9: 265). A truly democratic society is one “in which all share in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure” (MW 9: 265). Education for democracy requires deep immersion in culture for all, for a “democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (MW 9: 93). And, for all this to be possible, pivotally education requires the acquisition of the higher order abilities for learning how to learn, learning how to be an inquirer, for “a society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability” (MW 9: 93-4).

• 2 See Nussbaum 2009 for a recent appeal to Dewey for the resources to combat the instrumentalism ramp (...)

2 Dewey’s vision is extensive and, arguably, prohibitively expensive. It is extensive for its opposition to the sort of instrumentalism about education with which we have become increasingly familiar. 2 For Dewey, education is about equipping people with the experiences and abilities to take part across the board in the shared enterprise of human culture, in exercises of ‘conjoint communicated experience.’ In addition, it is a conception of education that posits deep dependencies between the provision of individual transformation (personal initiative and adaptability) and social transformations (conjoint communicated experience). It is this latter point that threatens the economic viability of Dewey’s vision. In a policy climate in which service provision is measured for its contribution to the economic well-being of society, a Deweyan liberalism about education will always lose out to an economic instrumentalism that accepts a stratification of opportunities in education. Dewey’s requirement that all experience the immersion in culture on which individual adaptability depends will lose out in the competition for economic resources unless it can provide the basis for a fundamental re-thinking of the intrinsic purposes of education. That is the point of Kitcher’s (2009) well-known defense of Dewey. In this essay, I want to develop some of the tools needed for undertaking this re-thinking.

3 A central question must concern the nature and direction of the dependency between individual transformation and social transformation. I do not propose to decide on the issue of which, if either, is basic? There is, however, room for understanding, in a good deal more detail, the key ideas that drive Dewey’s thinking and which might help hold his vision together. A key idea in Democracy and Education is the concept of adaptability. It operates at both the individual and social level. It requires an ability to respond intelligently to novelty, howsoever that may arise. And although Dewey opens the book with a naturalistic sentiment of life as “a self-renewing process through action upon the environment” (MW 9: 4), that process is already conceived as an open-ended enterprise, for he says, “the living thing […] tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence” (MW 9: 4).

4 This suggests the project of timely adaptation to the contingencies met with in the environment is the individual’s project and demands of the individual the wherewithal to respond to happenings with imagination. And that thought is key to the statement of educational values much later in Chapter 18. Dewey there remarks,

play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. (MW 9: 245)

5 He goes on:

The emphasis put in this book […] upon activity, will be misleading if it is not recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral part of human activity as is muscular movement. (Ibid.)

6 I want to suggest that at the heart of Dewey’s key concept of adaptability is the imagination; that the heart of what it is to be an inquirer responding to problems is to be a subject with imagination. It is the imagination that is the key driver to the transformations at stake in education. It is the imagination that holds together the different strands of Dewey’s liberalism.

7 If we endorse Dewey’s rich liberalism, we have a tool for a critique of the managerialism about educational policy found throughout Europe. But with what right can we endorse Dewey’s liberalism? I shall trace the case for Dewey’s liberalism back to his conception of inquiry. I want to argue that a proper appreciation of Dewey’s model of inquiry lays the foundation for a radical underpinning of his richly liberal conception of education.

8 Here is a simple way of setting out the trajectory I want to explore:

For Dewey, learning is the activity of inquiry.

Inquiry starts with a problem (it is historically rooted).

Inquiry ends when the problem is solved.

9 Adaptation is done in response to problems, and comes to rest (for the time being) when the problem is solved. So education should be geared to solve problems, not serve the economy, nor the instrumental targets set by modern managerialism. But what are problems and what are Europe’s problems re education? There are multiple potential answers to the latter question, many of which are important, but I want to concentrate on the former question, for I think that our key theoretical problem is that we have no detailed and cogent account of how to answer that first question:

What is a problem?

10 Furthermore, I want to suggest a reading of Dewey on problems that provides a radical critique of much extant thought on education and the conditions for learning: problems start at a level of experience properly called the aesthetic.

• 3 See Alexander 2012, 2014 and Leddy 2015, although neither quite capture the central role for the ae (...)

11 Others have marked out some of this path, but thus far the role of the aesthetic of experience has not been accorded the full seriousness and importance it warrants. 3 On the approach I pursue, the aesthetic is not merely an important element of experience that figures in both the drive and consummation of inquiry, it is the condition for the very possibility of inquiry. The idea of inquiry does not make sense without an account of its origins, its practice and its resolution in the aesthetic. If this is right, at the heart of any credible pedagogy there must be an account of the role of the aesthetic as the driver, vehicle and consummation of inquiry.

4 See Zeltner (1975: 18-21).

12 Dewey sees inquiry starting with what, for want of a better label, we might call an ‘itch’; it’s the sense of irritation, of things being not quite so. It’s the sense of unease that all is not right, our place in the environment is out of kilter. Inquiry concerns the dynamic that takes us along a trajectory defined by “the rhythm of loss of integration with the environment and recovery of union” (LW 10: 20-1). 4 As Fesmire (2015: 87) explains the dynamic: “Reflective thought is provoked by a hitch in the works, when an unsettled world stops being congenial to our expectations.”

13 The ‘itch’ is the irritation, the sense that things do not fit. It prompts inquiry, which is resolved when a sense of fit is recovered. But the recovery of a sense of fit is also a recovery that equips us with meaning and understanding, a conceptual grasp of how our problems got resolved. The sense of fit cannot, therefore, be wholly isolated from those cognitive processes that provide understanding. We need an account of how the aesthetics of experience, although outwith the range of a conceptual and knowing experience of things, nevertheless provides the condition for the possibility of an inquiry that issues in conceptual knowing, no matter how much we might also want to insist that inquiry’s closure is only properly delivered by a renewed sense of fit that settles the initial itch. On the reading of Dewey I offer, the aesthetic, while not itself part of a knowing experience, is nevertheless the element of experience that makes knowledge gathering possible. The aesthetic needs therefore, notwithstanding its separateness from the field of a knowing experience, to be capable of integration within the whole of the cognitive apparatus (broadly conceived) of the mind’s engagement with the environment. On my reading, the role of the aesthetic in Dewey’s account of inquiry is as a transcendental condition for knowing encounters.

• 5 “There is nothing intellectual or cognitive in the existence of [problematic] situations, although (...)
• 6 Hence Alexander’s (2014) critique of linguistic pragmatism in favour of Dewey’s experiential pragma (...)

14 It is important to Dewey that this sense of itch falls outwith the frame of our conceptual take on things. It is a sense of itch that makes things salient. It is, however, difficult to see how this notion of salience can make sense without the idea of the ‘itch’ being a disturbance within a patterning to experience. At the same time, the sense of patterning is not yet a conceptual patterning. To make sense of this idea we need the resources for attributing a patterning to experience, something that can be disrupted. This is what people mean when they speak of the role of the noncognitive in Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience (Alexander 2014). The label ‘noncognitive’ is, however, unhelpful. If there is a real point to some such element of experience, then it is something that is handled by human cognitive resources. For sure, it is something that falls outwith the scope of conceptual content and to deny that would be to run the risk of over-intellectualising experience – something Dewey repeatedly warned against. 5 That makes the aesthetic difficult to capture in our description of the phenomenology of experience and it can seem to render it invisible to the tools of analytic philosophy. 6 But that last point is mistaken. The idea of a notion of aesthetic experience that falls outwith the conceptual content familiar to our ordinary notion of meaning is challenging to describe, but we should not thereby take it as challenging to theorise. If we do not theorise about it with care and attention, then we forfeit the right to deploy it in an account of the logic of inquiry that informs pedagogy.

15 I take the idea of a trajectory from ‘itch to fit’ as a serious attempt to understand Dewey’s dynamic concept of inquiry. My project is to provide a theoretical account of this trajectory and make it serviceable for a fundamental re-shaping of pedagogy. Before outlining some of the detail of the theoretical account of the trajectory from ‘itch to fit,’ I want to set out the methodological options. Understanding Dewey, let alone learning from him, requires care regarding our methodological assumptions just as much as the assumptions that shape our substantive ideas.

1. Methodology

16 There are two issues on which I want to set-out my stand before embarking on the detailed argument. The first issue concerns the sort of argument that is involved in appealing to the aesthetics of experience. The second issue concerns how my account of the aesthetics sits with the common presumption that Dewey’s theory of inquiry involves a form of social constructivism (e.g. Carr 2003: 123 f.; and Fesmire 2015: 90 f.). I start with the first issue.

17 If we are interested in the aesthetics of experience, here are two key questions: (i) What is the aesthetic? (ii) What’s the argument for this element of experience? On the first point, the aesthetic concerns elements of experience that must not be over-intellectualised, for there is an intrinsic indeterminateness to the aesthetic in experience. The aesthetic concerns the itch that demands our attention, an unsettlingness that demands a response. So we need a theory of the ‘itch.’ For the moment, this is what I mean by the aesthetic in Dewey’s account. For sure, lots of what counts as ‘aesthetic’ gets rendered into the conceptual frame of thought and talk. For now, I use ‘aesthetic’ as a more neutral term where others use ‘noncognitive’ (Alexander 2014). Neither term is fully satisfactory, but ‘noncognitive’ suggests a distance from cognition that renders opaque the idea that the aesthetic of the itch provides a condition for the possibility of cognition’s inquiry.

• 7 For Dewey, problematic situations are “precognitive” (LW 12: 111). And see Alexander (2014: 71): “N (...)

18 The aesthetic itch is what Dewey had in mind when he says that not all experience involves knowing. 7 That can suggest that the answer to the second question is a phenomenological argument. It will be an argument that broadly works along the line of: ‘Look see. This is how it is. Don’t over-describe it or you run the risk of intellectualising it.’ But that is too quick, for our two questions are quite distinct. In terms of what it is, the aesthetic cannot be captured too accurately in the terminology of modern theories of experiential content without losing its phenomenological indeterminacy. But with regard to the argument for it, we need more than a descriptive claim, for we need, as theorists, to be able to give a clear account of the role of the aesthetic. If we can’t deliver that, then we’re just mumbling in the dark. Giving a clear theoretical account of the aesthetic does not mean we over-intellectualise it, but it does mean we have to give an intellectually cogent account of its role and how it integrates with knowing experience and why it is important. Let’s start with that last point.

19 On a phenomenological account, the aesthetic is important because it is required for an account of experience to be full and complete. That is how experience is: it has an aesthetic element. On the argument I want to explore, the aesthetic is important because it provides the condition for the possibility of inquiry; it provides the account of that which renders inquiry possible and which motivates the search for meaning and understanding – that which invites us to adapt. And yet, faithfulness to the phenomenology of the aesthetic means that we owe an account of something that in itself does not provide meaning and understanding. So we need sufficient theoretical granularity to our account of the aesthetic that will support the argument that its existence is a condition for the possibility of inquiry while also accommodating a phenomenology that does not leave it over-intellectualised. We need to talk precisely and with theoretical detail in a way that gives traction to that which is not precise. The theoretical mode of discourse cannot compete with the phenomenological appeal but it needs to legitimise the importance of the phenomenological appeal. Put simply, providing the phenomenology of the Deweyan aesthetic might be an exercise that risks slipping through the net of mainstream analytic philosophy, but providing the theorist’s account of what it is and why it matters is part of the core business of any credible detailed theory of experience. The former project looks to estrange Dewey from the concerns of contemporary philosophy; the latter brings him home.

20 The second methodological issue that I want to note concerns the status of Dewey’s constructivism. There is little doubt that Dewey’s concept of experience is broader than the model of perception as knowledge gathering that dominates contemporary philosophy. As Alexander (2014: 66) notes, “experience” in Dewey’s sense is not “perception” but adaptive existence, which in human existence takes in the form of culture.

21 There are two point at stake here. The first is the point already noted, experience has a dimension that I am calling the aesthetic. This is a dimension that is only problematically captured if one tries to conceive it in terms of contemporary theories of experiential content, regardless of one’s willingness to add ‘nonconceptual content’ alongside conceptual content, or to add a relationalist model of experience to the contentful. One thing that is signaled by ‘culture’ is the indeterminacy of experience that characterises the aesthetic. It’s the point that “not all experience is experience-as-known and that having experience arises and terminates within experience that is not knowing” (Alexander 2014: 71). But there is another element to the appeal to experience as culture, and that’s the social dimension to the construction of culture that many find in Dewey. Alexander again:

We do not begin our inquiries […] except under certain defining situations. Unless one has lived and interacted with others, learning a language and participating in a culture with its stories and traditions, one cannot even begin asking questions. (Alexander 2012: 89)

22 There are a number of issues in this passage. Here are two issues that will dominate in my argument.

23 First, Alexander presents inquiry beginning with questions. That cannot be right, for ‘questions’ do not belong within the domain of the aesthetic. Alexander is well aware of the point and has done much to present Dewey’s concept of inquiry as driven by the non-cognitive. Nevertheless, the use of the idea of ‘question’ here shows the extent of the difficulties we encounter in trying to give a coherent and detailed account of how inquiry starts with the indeterminate ‘itch’ within the aesthetics of experience. I provide a theory of the aesthetic ‘itch’ in the next two sections.

• 8 There are many forms of dependency on the social that figure in theories of learning; for a critiqu (...)

24 Second, Alexander here gives clear expression to a sense of dependency on situatedness in culture as a precondition for asking questions and beginning inquiry. Inquiry is always situated in a shared culture. 8 It’s not clear to me in what sense Dewey endorses this idea of inquiry’s situatedness in shared culture. I shall develop a reading of Dewey that sees the shared culture as a construct of earlier phases of inquiry. It is a construct that scaffolds later stages, but the shared culture is the product of a more basic notion of culture that is found in the individual’s aesthetics of experience. That is the order of explanation that I offer in my reading of Dewey. I will note the reasons for this as the argument proceeds, but it is important to mark now that although at any stage of inquiry shared culture scaffolds the following stage, the role of shared culture is not constitutive of inquiry but a result of the basic form of inquiry that is individualistic both in its problems and its aesthetics. The root to culture is individual, not shared and it is due to those roots that we acquire shared culture. Shared culture is an explanandum , not the explanans . I am assuming that individual transformation is the motor of the social transformation, not the other way around.

25 The individualism in my reading of Dewey will jar many people’s sense of his emphasis on the social, the cultural and the intrinsically democratising drive of his vision of education. With regard to the political and social impact of Dewey’s concept of inquiry I have no problem. My emphasis on the individual notion of culture is an explanatory device. The priority I see in the individual is an explanatory one. There is not space in this essay to treat this aspect of methodology in adequate detail, but let me mark one root to a social constructivist account of Dewey with which I take issue.

26 It is tempting to think that there are at least two senses of problem. The individual’s problems and society’s problems. Problems are the root to learning. So what drives an individual’s learning? The answer, presumably, is their problems. If we find the individual’s problems as those that they inherit from initiation into socially constructed problems, then the source of individual learning is simply the problems inherited by their initiation into the current cultural forms. But that hides the following diagnostic possibility – the idea of a meta-problem with educational thinking:

The meta-problem with educational thought and policy is that it is not driven by an adequate conception of the problems that drive individual learners – it has no account of individuals’ problems.

27 If individuals’ problems are socially constructed (what you pick up from initiation into culture) there is no such meta-problem. But that means that the potential for a Deweyan critique of instrumentalism about education is wholly dependent on how you draft the problems you inherit on initiation into culture. And that is highly contentious. One way of seeing the bearing of Dewey on European educational thought in the 21st century is to focus on the issue: what are Europe’s problems? And that takes us into a long, although potentially interesting series of empirical and policy issues about European education. My argument is located in a different set of concerns. My central claim is that there is a fundamental flaw in educational thinking that Dewey can help us expose and that the exposure provides a powerful individualist cognitive account of why the aesthetic matters at the heart of our thinking about and practice of education.

• 9 Although this is individualistic and although I have noted points of contrast with Alexander’s read (...)

28 This is a different route to the familiar broadly social constructivist reading of Dewey. It is the route that takes the meta-problem seriously and finds leverage on the critique of instrumentalism by rooting the critique in an analysis of the concept of ‘problem’ as it figures at the level of the individual learner. My central claim is that Dewey has the resources for a conception of the individual’s problem that drives inquiry. That notion of problem is framed by his account of the aesthetics of experience. Learning begins by confronting a problem framed within aesthetics, an account of experience that is intrinsically open-ended although patterned. This is an account that explains the deep source of Dewey’s pragmatism – the fact that learning is always situated in real historical time. Learning is timely, not timeless. It is the process by which we smooth the itches in current experience and prepare ourselves for what comes next, where what comes next is invariably open-ended and unpredictable. This is a process that we must face not with rules and prior commitments other than a preparedness to interrogate openly and freely in the search for the smoothing that reduces the friction of the next itch wherever it may lie. 9

29 Inquiry starts with a problem. Depending on how we think of problems, this can seem banal and trivial or challenging but elusive. If a problem is identified with a question, the resulting concept of inquiry is trivial and misses Dewey’s main concern. Here’s a first rough way of marking out how the concept of problem can play an important explanatory role in inquiry.

30 Contrast two different models of problem solving:

problem-solving in terms of working out the consequences of what is already known;

problem-solving as learning, as a source for extending cognition.

• 10 It is interesting to note that such problems are not, of course, problems at all, for unless someon (...)

31 The first sense is trivial. It takes problem solving as little more than moving the conceptual furniture into fresh positions. Many of the things we do in education involve conceptual tidying, but this involves a conception of problem-solving in terms of re-arranging of what is already known into a new configuration, a superficial kind of cognitive make-over. Problem-solving in this sense is exemplified in doing basic arithmetic, for example, let the problem be: what’s 68 + 57? 10

32 The contrast between problems in type (a) and (b) might look too binary, for what about ‘real problems’ as, e.g. in ‘real maths’? That’s a good point in the context of pedagogic policy, but the notion of ‘real’ here means roughly ‘matters in some way to the pupil.’ It is true that there is a sense of that which is, in policy terms, important for gaining pupils’ attention, focus in behaviour, commitment to work, etc. There is also, underlying that, the sense of ‘mattering to the pupil’ that I want to get into focus and that’s the sense of mattering in which the pupil is met with a disruption that demands their attention, a disruption that engages them as inquirer, not simply as a task that is interesting. So ‘real maths’ is important if it offers interesting tasks rather than abstract tasks – agreed. But it is theoretically important if those ‘interesting tasks’ are not just interesting because anchored in some concepts that are key to the pupil (counting change due in a purchase rather than just adding numbers in the abstract), but are enthralling because they present to the pupil an experience or set of experiences that disrupt and reveal new domains to experience that in turn produces cognitive growth – learning.

33 The second sense of problem-solving is the challenging and elusive one. It requires a concept of a problem that arises out of a disruption to experience but where that disruption is not presented within the conceptual resources already available to the learner. It requires a notion of a disruption that can unsettle the learner and drive them into the work of inquiry, but the challenge it presents must be one that opens up new experiences and new concepts, otherwise no real learning will take place. I am assuming here that ‘learning’ requires a transition that delivers cognitive enhancement; at its simplest, the acquisition of new concepts. It is the idea of a disruption in experience that demands attention and demands the work of learning that is key to understanding Dewey’s concept of problem. Whatever else we may say about Dewey, it is clear that the notion of problem-solving he requires is type (b) above.

34 Dewey is clear that problem-solving involves more than mere tasks, it is the means for extending cognition. Problem-solving arises from the things that unsettle us:

The unsettled or indeterminate situation might have been called a problematic situation. This name would have been, however, proleptic and anticipatory. The indeterminate situation becomes problematic in the very process of being subjected to inquiry. The indeterminate situation comes into existence from existential causes, just as does, say, the organic imbalance of hunger. There is nothing intellectual or cognitive in the existence of such situations, although they are the necessary conditions of cognitive operations or inquiry. (LW 12: 111)

35 In this passage we have all the key ingredients for understanding Dewey’s concept of inquiry as problem-solving. Problems arise outwith the scope of intellectual or cognitive experience, they arise from a natural imbalance in our engagement with the environment (akin to hunger). This is a problematic situation. Problematic situations demand our attention, our inquisitiveness. Problematic situations are the necessary condition for inquiry. A problem is a ‘partial transformation’ of a problematic situation. As Dewey goes on to say,

A problem represents the partial transformation by inquiry of a problematic situation into a determinate situation. It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved. (LW 12: 111-2)

36 The key concept in all this is that of the problematic-situation. Without that, problems become mere intellectual games with the “semblance but not the substance of scientific activity” (LW 12: 112). It is the concept of a problematic situation that provides the drive to inquiry and identifies the end-point to any given inquiry which is found in conversion of the problematic indeterminacy into a sense of unity. Hence Dewey’s official definition of inquiry:

Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole. (LW 12: 108)

• 11 The challenge is, of course, the one that most contemporary philosophers think is incoherent – the (...)

37 Dewey’s concept of a problematic situation is, in outline, clear enough, but it has an inbuilt imbalance in its conception, reflected in Dewey’s observation that to call the situation ‘problematic’ is anticipatory. He says this, for in calling it ‘problematic’ we have already started to respond cognitively to the disruption and to begin to formulate it as a problem. But the unsettling disruption must be separate from such beginnings of cognitive response, or else the cognitive response, the first formulations of a problem, would not be one undertaken in response to the disruption that the indeterminate situation presents in experience. I think it is clearer, therefore, if we see the initial experience as involving a simple sense of disruption. That is the key to what Dewey calls a ‘problematic situation’; there is something that unsettles us. The unsettling character is independent of how we respond to it and begin to treat it as a problem. Our challenge as theorists is to make sense of this initial unsettling character to experience. 11

38 In summary, we have the following key ingredients to Dewey’s concept of inquiry:

39 Outline of Inquiry:

A situation can be salient to us independent of our knowing/conceptual encounters with it.

Salience arises from a disruption to our expectations, where these are understood as part of a more primitive and natural mode of engagement with things than a knowing/conceptual engagement.

Resolution of such disruptions arises when the situation is rendered into a unified whole.

40 If we can make sense of the ideas of salience and expectations independent of knowing conceptual encounters with things, we will then have a model of inquiry as problem-solving as the source for extending cognition. Problem-solving thus conceived will provide the basis for learning as a transformative enhancement to the expressive repertoire of cognition.

41 What I want to argue is that Dewey’s concept of salience in terms of disruptions to expectations involves operations within the aesthetics of experience. This provides an account of experience more primitive than the knowing conceptual encounters. In addition, although it is not obvious from the summary above, the sense of ‘unified whole’ that is achieved at the resolution of a problematic situation is also a contribution to the aesthetics of experience. Inquiry begins and ends in aesthetics. Once we can see how to make sense of these claims, we will also have the resources to see how the aesthetic figures throughout in what I shall call the craft of inquiry. It is tempting to think that the only role for the notion of a nonconceptual salience is as the kick-start to inquiry. Then, once a disruptive situation takes on a conceptual form as it becomes a problem-situation, concepts take over and the resulting unification is also a conceptual ordering of the initial disruptive experience. That is not, however, Dewey’s position. For Dewey, the aesthetic is not only the necessary condition for inquiry, it is also the underlying background to conceptual encounters. It is what Dewey called, “our constant sense of things, as belonging or not belonging, of relevancy, a sense which is immediate [not] the product of reflection” (LW 10: 198).

12 Cf. Shusterman (2010: 37) for this way of reading Dewey’s notion of our experience of art.

42 This background is in all experience and when it is foregrounded, it provides what Dewey calls ‘an experience’ – that’s the consummatory experience that provides the sense of unity at the resolution of disruption. It is akin to the sense of ‘an experience’ when the background expectations and saliences are foregrounded in works of art. 12 The task then is to provide sufficient detail to the nature of the aesthetic to begin to make sense of how it can play this foundational role without lapsing into yet another flashback to the myth of the given.

3. Aesthetic Salience

13 A good starting point for contemporary debate about nonconceptual content is Gunther 2003.

43 Dewey needs a coherent concept of salience. That much is clear. It needs to provide a means of engaging with situations independent of conceptual engagements that provide the content to cognition. The obvious move at this point is to treat the concept of salience that Dewey needs as either a return to the myth of the given or to see it as an instance of an appeal to a notion of nonconceptual content to experience. 13 Both options are fraught with difficulties not least of which is the familiar conundrum: how can a level of experience that is devoid of conceptual content give rise to concepts? But the familiar problems here arise in part because we have not heeded Dewey’s insights. If you set up the problem in terms of how nonconceptual content gives rise to conceptual content, you have ignored Dewey’s claim about the indeterminacy involved in salience. The unsettlingness of a problematic situation is not just a matter of a content (albeit a nonconceptual one) not being satisfied. The notion of unsettlingness is not so determinate. I prefer then not to try to capture the concept of salience in content terms at all, but simply to say that salience at the level of aesthetic of experience arises when a pattern is disrupted. There are two things that need to hold with respect to the notion of pattern for it to capture the concept of salience that Dewey needs. First, the notion of pattern must make sense of the indeterminacy of disruption that Dewey wants; second the notion of pattern need not itself contribute to the content of experience. It is not necessary to treat the pattern involved here as itself an element within experience; what is necessary is that the disruption is an element of experience. I treat the second point first.

44 If experience can make things salient due to a disruption, an ‘unsettlingness,’ then that must be because a pattern that the subject expects has been disrupted. It is difficult to see how we could make sense of disruption without crediting the experiencing subject with some sort of expectation of a pattern. But that does not commit us to treating the pattern, let alone the subject’s expectation of the pattern, as themselves elements of experience. For example, a loose floorboard is salient when you step on it. It thwarts your expectations about the rigidity of the floor you are crossing, but it is an unnecessary extravagance to make such expectations a component of phenomenology as you walk across the floor. There need be no ‘way that you experience the floor’ as a component of your experience as you walk over a stable floor. It is only when you step on the loose board that experience changes and you become aware of the board. And even then, although the loose board becomes salient because a pattern of expectations regarding solidity has been disrupted, there is no need to treat that pattern (the ‘way the board is picked out’) as itself an element of experience. It is enough if we treat the board itself as the item of awareness and experience; that is, we have a direct relational awareness of the loose board brought about by the disruption to a pattern of solidity. The pattern need only register at the sub-personal level of experience as something that the subject’s cognitive machinery monitors. From the point of view of the phenomenology of experience, the solidity of the floor is silent. We say that the subject expects the floor to be solid, but that does not commit us to thinking the subject’s experience is awash with representations of the floor’s solidity. It is enough if their sub-personal cognitive systems represent solidity and, when the expectations of those systems are thwarted, an alarm is registered in personal experience that makes the loose board an item of awareness. If we reserve ‘content’ for that which is available to awareness, then the representation of the patterns of solidity need not themselves ever become available to experience (cf. Luntley 2010 for this idea).

45 The above suggestion does not take us very far in understanding Dewey. What it does is remove the impulse to treat the patterns implicated in an account of expectations as items of conscious experience. That is an important move, but it does not take us to the heart of Dewey’s conception of disruption. Having patterns monitored by sub-personal cognitive in silence and below the radar of conscious awareness does nothing to account for a sense of disruption that captures the indeterminacy of which Dewey speaks. To make sense of Dewey’s conception of what starts inquiry, we need not just a notion of pattern that is, for the most part, monitored below the level of personal awareness, we need a notion of pattern that, even if it becomes accessible to consciousness, delivers the indeterminacy that Dewey posits. This is the bit that seems difficult, but it is the component of Dewey’s thinking that shows why Kant was right to use the label ‘aesthetic’ for that which is a condition for judgement and also why what is so labeled figures in those experiences characteristic of our engagement with art. The patterns implicated in the notion of disruptive salience are patterns that enjoy an indeterminate open-endedness. We need to turn to sources different to standard theories of non-conceptual content in order to make sense of Dewey’s concept of a problem.

4. The Sense of Fit

14 Cf. Fodor 1975, 2008, and many other places.

46 I want to appeal to recent work in both psychology and philosophy to begin to fill out a theory of the kind of disruption that Dewey appears to have in mind. Carey (2009; see also Carey et al. 2011) has set out a comprehensive developmental account of the acquisition of number concepts. It is a bootstrapping theory. Like any bootstrapping theorist, Carey has been criticised for failing to account for the transformative transition from possession of the pre-cursors of number concepts to grasp of number concepts. Any bootstrapping theory that posits a form of experience that is weaker than a conceptually saturated experience but which, nevertheless, is held to give rise to the latter will be met with the outraged response: ‘How did you get all that out of so little?’ Hence the enduring appeal of those who argue that the bootstrapping problem cannot be solved. 14 But what can make that response look inevitable is, in part, the poverty of our conception of what goes into the form of experience that is precursor to the conceptually saturated one. And it is here that Dewey has suggestions that dovetail with two otherwise separate initiatives in contemporary research.

47 Carey does not dwell on the point, but she makes a key observation regarding her account of the experiences that are precursors to grasp of cardinality. She says that before children use numerals to express number concepts, they use them akin to nonsense words in strings like nursery rhymes and similar word games. So the sequence

1, 2, 3, 4…

is learnt as a string akin to

eeny, meeny, miny, mo.

• 15 Ignoring the transition problem might seem an act of outrageous bravado, but the point is simple. I (...)

48 The rhythm, rhyme and repetition of sounds provides the young child with a use of numerals where they serve as ‘placeholders’ for what will become numerical concepts. I shall ignore the issue of what resources are required to pull off the transition from placeholders to concepts. My interest lies in understanding the starting point. 15

49 A child who knows the sequence for the numerals as placeholders has a sense of pattern to their use, a sense that draws upon formal features of strings found in their rhythm and the repetition of this rhythm, often also involving rhyming games. The young child who hears

expects ‘4’ to come next. There is a pattern to their experience. If you said, ‘1, 2, 3, 5’ they would experience it as wrong. But that notion of ‘wrong’ is not a content notion. It is not a semantic sense of wrong; it is not that the sequence is false. The child may yet have no sense of cardinality. Their sense that the sequence is wrong is just like their sense that

eeny, meeny, mo, miny

is wrong. This is wrong, but no semantic error is involved. Both ‘disruptive’ sequences are sequences that are experienced as disruptive. This does not seem like the loose floorboard. The child might be actively playing with rhyming sequences, enjoying the counting rhymes, aware of the rhythms and rhymes displayed in the repetition and when another child presents the disruptive sequence, it sounds wrong. The challenge is to identify theoretically this notion of ‘wrong.’ Carey does not address the issue, but let’s make some obvious moves.

• 16 ‘Brought up,’ for these things are only properly understood in the context of their natural history (...)

50 The first thing one might want to say is that anyone brought up with these rhymes acquires a sense that, e.g., ‘mo’ comes after ‘miny.’ 16 It fits. The word belongs in that position. We might say this: it is what you ‘ought’ to say after ‘miny’ in that sequence. And the same applies to the use of ‘4’ after ‘3’ in the counting rhymes. The concept of ‘fit’ here picks out what Ginsborg calls primitive normativity (Ginsborg 2011). The concept of primitive normativity involves a sense of ‘ought’ that characterises our experience of various patterns. It is a phenomenologically real feature. It is primitive in two senses.

51 First, it contributes to a very basic form of experience involving our engagement with various formal features of things, patterns of rhythm, rhyme, repetition in the case of words; balance of hue and intensity with regard to colours, and patterns of line and shade in graphic forms. These are properties that figure large in our experience of art objects, but they figure in patterns that are importantly subjective. This is the second sense in which the normativity of fit is primitive. The sense of fit that applies to the position of ‘mo’ after ‘miny’ is a sense of ought that lacks generality. It is a sense of how things are experienced as belonging in my experience. That I find ‘mo’ belonging after ‘miny’ does not mean that I thereby have resources for criticising you if you produce the sequence

Eeny, meeny, mo, miny.

52 I will find the sequence disruptive, but not with a sense of error that provides resource for critiquing your performance. Your performance will jar. It will sound wrong, but there is no semantic error involved. The error is an aesthetic error, your performance does not fit in the patterns that I have come to expect in the use of these tokens. It is the lack of generality to the position occupied by ‘mo’ that betrays the fact that whatever pattern is involved here, it is not a conceptual pattern.

17 For the generality constraint, cf. Evans 1982.

53 A defining feature of conceptual content is that the bearers of such content exhibit a generality with respect to the place they occupy within structures that carry conceptual content. 17 The word ‘four’ only carries the concept of the number between three and five in the series of natural numbers when it figures in patterns of use that make its applicability correct of sets of things that share the same cardinality, namely they all have four members. As a concept bearing device, the word ‘four’ carries a conceptual content when it has a role applicable to groups of apples, of people, the suits in whist, the riders of the apocalypse, and so on. The word ‘mo’ exhibits no such generality of application. The sense of ‘ought’ governing the fit of ‘mo’ in the nonsense rhyme is therefore quite unlike any sense of ‘ought’ that might be thought applicable to the use of content bearing words when used in adherence to standards of semantic correctness. The objectivity of such standards is manifest in the generality of application that provides the resources to critique others’ usage if, e.g., they use ‘four’ when only three riders go by.

• 18 Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a path, indeed a garden path, for the idea of a rule: see Wittgen (...)

54 The idea of primitive normativity opens up scope for a rich structure to experience that populates a good part of the things we ordinarily treat within the aesthetic. The idea of the sense of fit as a subjective ‘ought’ captures that part of our experience of things that finds a heftedness, a sense of belonging and order to experience in the absence of rules and objective demands upon patterns. It introduces patterns that, although oftentimes accompanied with a strong sense of ‘fit’ are, by any sense, quite open-ended and amenable to playful imaginative extension. These are patterns with their accompanying sense of fit that are, nevertheless, open to agential modification. Like the paths we tread when walking across open country, these are patterns to which we feel some sense of allegiance – we respect the path as worn by previous walkers – but we are not beholden to them or to anything else to always walk in just the same way. 18

55 In short, the sense of salience that I think Dewey needs is found in the disruption experienced in the sequence

56 The sequence thwarts our expectation. But there is no determinate sense of error here, for the notion of fit that has been transgressed has no generality to it. For sure a sequence that retained the rhyme but replaced the last word,

Eeny, meeny miny, oh

might not jar as much, but it still does not fit; it lacks the repetition of the em sound expected as the lead consonant to the last three words of the sequence. The indeterminacy is manifest also in the adaptability of fit. The disruptive sequence can be rendered fit by adopting the varied rhyming scheme and placing it within an extended instance of the rhythmic pattern with,

eeeny, meeny, mo, miny mine is big and yours is tiny.

19 See Cook 2000 for a good starting point on the literature on children’s language and play.

57 Such examples are commonplace in the playful engagement with rhythm and rhyme found in young children’s early encounters with language. 19

5. Fit, Work, and Closure

58 The appeal to the idea of fit gives theoretical purchase on the ‘itch,’ the disruptive irritant that starts inquiry and which, when attended to, provides us with a problematic situation. With the idea of an experience that jars our sense of fit, we have the starting point to inquiry. There is much more to be said about how to develop the detail of the cognitive dynamics of this reading of Dewey’s account of inquiry. But we have the beginnings of a reading of Dewey that permits theoretical development in laying out the trajectory of an individual’s engagement with inquiry that offers explanatory leverage on what is going on, rather than merely descriptive comfort.

59 Dewey has inquiry starting with an indeterminate situation and resolving when this is transformed into a ‘unified whole.’ Part of what is implicated in the end point of any inquiry will doubtless involve a conceptual unification, but I think Dewey intended the sense of closure and wholeness at the terminus of inquiry to mean much more than that. On the reading that I have indicated, the closure is also part of the aesthetics of experience. The slogan I offered was to consider inquiry as the dynamic from ‘itch to fit.’ The disruptive ‘itch’ is theorised as the loss of fit. It is proper then to see the conclusion of inquiry as the return to a sense of fit. That is the idea that is clear in Dewey’s conception of inquiry as a dynamic that restores a balance to our engagement with the environment that was unsettled by the problematic situation.

• 20 Having the aesthetic order restored is also, perhaps, part of what Wittgenstein meant by bringing p (...)

60 In his account of our experience of art, Dewey makes explicit appeal to the notion of ‘an experience’ and I think that is best understood on the model that I am promoting as an appreciation of fit. There are many ways of responding to art objects and many of them involve ascription of content to the objects, whether words, patches of paint or movements of a dancer. But some of the ways of responding to art objects that seem central to many aesthetic experiences involve the response that comes from an appreciation of the formal properties of fit. Apt vocabulary choices can provide the novelist with a sentence whose individual words are hefted in each other’s company in a way that alerts us to the cadence available when words are handled by writers with a craftiness for finding fit. Or consider the resonance of colours in a Malevich abstract, or the thrum of the etched lines and scratchings in the paint in a Ravilious landscape. There are lots of moments when our experience of art draws upon our sense of fit, when the artist provides an arrangement of words, colour or line that brings to our attention the way some patterns can be enjoyed for their sense of fit, whatever other purpose they may also serve. One of the things art can do when it provides what Dewey calls ‘an experience’ is bring to the surface the patterns that provide some of our most basic expectations in experience, the patterns whose disruption prompts inquiry. How natural, then, that inquiry should end in the resolution of those disruptions, in an experience in which the aesthetic order is, for the time being at least, restored. 20

61 And all this is natural in a sense that is central to Dewey’s philosophy. It is natural, for it draws upon features of our experience that fall within a naturalistic account of inquiry as a dynamic between the rhythm of disruption and fit in our sense of aesthetic patterns. The account is, in this respect, properly on a par with the dynamic from hunger to satiation of need in our pursuit of food. What is natural for our species is the ‘hunger’ for patterns that fit. The idea of primitive normativity is the idea of a sense of ‘ought’ that is subjective. It is, however, not idle. It is not subjective in the way that colour or value are sometimes taken to be subjective in error-theories of those properties. The ‘ought’ of fit is subjective, for it is part of how we respond to regularities, but it is a natural response for creatures like us. And that we have this response does explanatory work in our self-understanding, for it is because we respond to patterns with a sense of fit that we seek out patterns, that we adjust them when they are disrupted, that we create new extensions of them when their course dries up. It is our aesthetic sense of fit that is a key driver in the pursuit of pattern making and pattern sustenance. And that, at heart, is the idea running through Dewey’s theory of inquiry.

62 The dynamic from itch to fit is not, in itself, a knowing dynamic. It is not a trajectory of conceptual organisation. It is a naturalistically conceived dynamic. It is, however, I suggest, the necessary condition for the emergence of conceptual organisation. Making good on that suggestion is work for another occasion, but it is important to note that even if that claim can be substantiated, it does not remove the aesthetic dynamic from inquiry; it does not get supplanted by the conceptual dynamic, rather it contributes to it.

6. The Craft of Inquiry

• 21 “An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of realization of every kind of t (...)

63 I have suggested a reading of Dewey that provides a naturalistic theory of inquiry. I have used resources from contemporary research to provide a reading of Dewey’s concept of inquiry that provides explanatory purchase on the dynamic from itch to fit. The appeal to the aesthetics of experience in characterising the initial ‘itch’ does not exhaust the explanatory project I am grafting onto Dewey’s theory of inquiry. The aesthetic plays an important role in concluding inquiry, but it also figures in the ongoing culture of inquiry. The work of inquiry also has room for the aesthetics of experience. I want to close with some brief remarks on the phenomenology of inquiry. The details of the theoretical model that I am recommending require more space and the explanatory project of working through the detail of the theoretical model sketched must wait on other occasions. But if the approach is plausible, what does it capture in the phenomenology of inquiry? The answer, I think, is that it provides some important observations about what we might call the ‘craft of inquiry.’ It also gives credence to Dewey’s recommendation that it is the imagination that is the hallmark of human action, and the mark of teaching that is more than merely mechanical. 21

64 When confronted with an initial itch, the unsettlingness that once attended to provides the sense of a problematic situation, it is not obvious how one should respond. As Dewey observes, ‘a problem well put is half-solved.’ But what, then, is it to put a problem well? Clearly, at a minimum, it is something like this: it is to frame the question(s) that drive inquiry in a way that permits solution. But that just invites a further question, ‘What is it to frame a question?’ What is the initial move by which an itch is taken up by cognition? There are lots of things to be said about this, but I want to sketch some ideas that seem to me to illuminate aspects of the phenomenology of inquiry that we rarely talk about, aspects that are themselves part of the aesthetics of experience.

65 An itch is a disruption in a pattern of expectations that lacks the generality due to conceptual patterns. We are unsettled by the disruption. So where there’s an itch, there’s a breach in an aesthetic pattern. By its nature, the pattern breached provides no resources for handling the sense of itch, for there is no generality to the position in the pattern where the breach occurs. So if it feels like a breach, we need other resources to heal the sense of disruption. One option is the simple playful one in which we capture the breach and make it a moment within a different sense of fit. This is the move that is rampant in children’s play with words. It is the move that seals the breach in

by offering the new pattern,

eeny, meeny, mo, miny mine is big, yours is tiny.

• 22 The big questions concern how much native ability is required in order to support communication and (...)

66 Many breaches are settled in that way, but that is not the way of inquiry, it is the way of aesthetic improvisation. In inquiry, the task is to repair the breach with a response that offers understanding. Inquiry therefore demands, of the inquirer, some grasp of concepts and some thirst for applying them. 22 That means that when inquiry moves to seal a breach in the aesthetic pattern, the move at stake is to find some general pattern to repair the breach. There is no recipe for selecting the general pattern, other than improvisation, the experimentation with ways of treating the breach as an instance not just of a new fit pattern, but of a pattern that is general.

67 If something like this is right, what moral does it suggest with regard to the phenomenology of inquiry? I think it suggests that we should expect to find the phenomenology of inquiry manifest as an imaginative and oftentimes playful experimentation with the aesthetic forms of experience. Of course, we identify hypotheses, we test them by checking their consequences for observation and the inferential shadow they cast over our web of beliefs. But we also judge them with respect to how well they fit with some of our deepest cultural bearings, the intellectual myths and presumptions that reflect some of the shape of the aesthetics of experience. What does this mean? Here’s a simple example.

68 Think of the experience common to many academics on grading student papers: early on in reading the paper, perhaps as early as the first couple of paragraphs, you form a view about the intelligence on offer and the grade due. Some academics are shy of acknowledging this point, for it might reflect an improper rush bordering on prejudice to admit such views arising so early. I think, however, acknowledging it tells us something important about the culture of inquiry. Our early initial judgement might be due to the fact that the student is posing exactly the right questions and making our favoured first inferences in evaluating them. But I think it is rarely that simple. I suspect there is something real and important to the thought that what you are responding to, what makes you think that there is an intelligent voice present in the paper with an impressive grip on things, is that the writing exhibits a sense of fit in their formulation of the key problem. It is the thought we might express by saying something like, ‘it hangs together.’ If so, I suggest that whatever conceptual unity we might be commenting on, there is also and underlying that, an aesthetic unity. This is something that can be salient early on and, of course, one might later revise one’s view on this.

69 Think of the phenomenology of engaging in inquiry, e.g., the phenomenology of writing a paper. How is for you when you start on a research paper? When I started this paper, I did not know that I would write this section on the craft of inquiry. That came later. Did I not know what I was doing when I started? If so, that might betray a lack of foresight on my part, but I suspect a more honest and interesting answer reflects a common and important way of working. We work in inquiry by playing around with the itch – the sense of what bothers us and we gesture towards a sense of what might settle us. Then we experiment and play around with ways of framing the problem. Sometimes, it comes clear very quickly. We crank the handle and churn out the essay, but most of the time, it is not like that. Most of the time, it takes work, graft and craft that is much more exploratory and playful than simply doing the analysis and running through the inferences. Learning involves a trial and error strategy not just in the narrow analytic sense of conjectures and refutations, but in the adjustments to the aesthetics of experience, the imaginative and playful experimenting with the aesthetic form of things until we arrive at a formulation of a problem that delivers the fecundity appropriate for serious cognitive work (MW 9: 245 f.). Even then, there is a considerable to and fro between careful analysis and derivation of the consequence of assumptions and theoretical posits and the crafty manoeuvrings of the domain of fit.

70 The reading of Dewey that I am offering is not based on the appeal to these phenomenological observations. It is based on the explanatory work that the aesthetics of experience enables in providing an understanding of the dynamic from itch to fit. But that explanatory work gains credence if it offers legitimacy to a phenomenology of the craft of inquiry that, to my mind, rings true.

7. The Problem with Dewey

71 I have outlined a reading of Dewey that takes seriously the project of providing an explanatory account of how inquiry is driven by problems. Inquiry is learning. Learning is driven by, brought to rest by and, arguably, its many modes of operations are replete with, manouevrings in the aesthetics of experience. If that is what learning is, we have no pedagogy fit for learning if we do not place the provision of the aesthetics of experience at the heart of our pedagogy. Engagement with the aesthetics of experience is much more than a motivational ‘extra,’ a boost to the cognitive enterprise, a means for framing interest, attention and motivation in the learner. Engagement with the aesthetics of experience is the condition for the very possibility of learning. The theory of pedagogy needs to start with aesthetics.

• 23 For an implicit grasp of the elusiveness and yet centrality of things that fall under the aesthetic (...)

72 Educators acknowledge this. 23 Policy-makers normally dare not, for the aesthetics is messy, hard to plot, intractable to modern management methods, invariably lost to the schedules of accounting targets, and so on. But if the aesthetics of experience does seem messy to the mindset of 21st century policy makers in education, no matter, for inquiry is, by their lights, messy. That’s the point. That’s the problem with Dewey. And it is perhaps a gesture towards an explanation of why the transformative inquiries of individuals require a transformation in our social spaces so that they provide conjoint common experienes. There is no telling where the messiness of problems will lead, nor where the resources for fit might be found. Such messiness is a problem with Dewey, but it’s a problem we should celebrate and proclaim and by so doing begin to reshape our conception of what pedagogy might become when once we understand how learning happens.

Thanks to the editors of this special volume for giving me the opportunity to expand my initial paper and for their helpful suggestions in this regard.

Bibliography

Alexander T., (2012), John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizon of Feeling , New York, SUNY Press.

Alexander T., (2014), “Linguistic Pragmatism and Cultural Naturalism: Noncognitive Experience, Culture and Human Ethos,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy , VI, 2, 64-90.

Brandom R., (1994), Making it Explicit , Cambridge, MA, & London, Harvard University Press.

Carey S., (2009), The Origin of Concepts , Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press.

Carey S. et al. , (2011), “Symposium on The Origin of Concepts ,” Behavioural and Brain Sciences 34, 113-67.

Carr D., (2003), Making Sense of Education , London & New York, Routledge.

Cook G., (2000), Language Play, Language Learning , Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Dewey J., (1969-1991), The Collected Works, 1882-1953 , edited by Boydston J. A., 37 vols., Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, Southern Illinois University Press.

Diamond J., (2008), Welcome to the Acquarium: A Year in the Lives of Children , New York & London, The Free Press.

Evans G., (1982), The Varieties of Reference , Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Fesmire S., (2015), Dewey , London & New York, Routledge.

Fodor J., (1975), The Language of Thought , Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Fodor J., (2008), LOT2: The Language of Thought Revisited , Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Ginsborg H., (2011), “Rule-Following and Primitive Normativity,” Journal of Philosophy , CVIII, 5, 227-54.

Gunther Y., (2003), Essays on Nonconceptual Content , Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Kitcher P., (2009), “Education, Democracy and Capitalism,” in Siegel H., (ed.), The Oxford Handbook in Philosophy of Education , New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press, 300-18.

Kitcher P., (2012), Preludes to Pragmatism , New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Kitcher P., (2014), “Extending the Pragmatist Tradition: Replies to Commentators,” Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society , 50, 1, 97-114.

Leddy T., (2015), “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Zalta E. N., (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , retrievable on [plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/dewey-aesthetics/] .

Luntley M., (2010), “Expectations Without Content,” Mind & Language , 25, 2, 217-36.

Luntley M., (forthcoming), “Forgetski Vygotsky,” Educational Philosophy & Theory .

Malloch S., & C.  Trevarthen , (eds.), (2009), Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship , Oxford, Oxford University Press.

McDowell J., (1994), Mind and World , Cambridge, MA, & London, Harvard University Press.

Nussbaum M., (2009), “Tagore, Dewey, and the Imminent Demise of Liberal Education,” in Siegel H., (ed.), The Oxford Handbook in Philosophy of Education , New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press, 52-64.

Sellars W., (1956), “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Feigl H., & Scriven M., (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 1, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 253-329.

Shusterman R., (2010), “Dewey’s Art as Experience ,” Journal of Aesthetic Education , 44, 1, 26-43

Wittgenstein L., (1978), Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematic , 3rd edition, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

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Zeltner P. M., (1975), John Dewey’s Aesthetic Philosophy , New York, John Benjamin’s Publishing.

1 References to John Dewey’s published works are to the critical edition, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953 , edited by Boydston J.   A., Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1991, and published in three series as The Early Works 1882-1899 [EW], The Middle Works 1899-1924 [MW], and The Later Works 1925-1953 [LW].

2 See Nussbaum 2009 for a recent appeal to Dewey for the resources to combat the instrumentalism rampant in much educational policy.

3 See Alexander 2012, 2014 and Leddy 2015, although neither quite capture the central role for the aesthetic that I envisage.

5 “There is nothing intellectual or cognitive in the existence of [problematic] situations, although they are the necessary conditions of cognitive operations or inquiry” (LW 12: 111). Alexander (2014: 71) notes: “Not all experience is experience as known […] knowing experience arises and terminates within experience that is not knowing.”

6 Hence Alexander’s (2014) critique of linguistic pragmatism in favour of Dewey’s experiential pragmatism and compare Kitcher’s (2014) jibes against the preoccupations of logic-chopping philosophers who miss the pragmatist drive to “reconnect philosophy with life” ( Ibid . : 99). Note also that Kitcher links this with Dewey’s “worries about the detachment of art from everyday life” ( Ibid . : 100). Similar sentiments run through Kitcher 2012.

7 For Dewey, problematic situations are “precognitive” (LW 12: 111). And see Alexander (2014: 71): “Not all experience is experience-as-known and that knowing experience arises and terminates within experience that is not knowing.”

8 There are many forms of dependency on the social that figure in theories of learning; for a critique of the influential Vygotskian version, see Luntley forthcoming.

9 Although this is individualistic and although I have noted points of contrast with Alexander’s reading of Dewey, I agree fully with the main thrust of his reading that in Dewey we find something usefully called ‘experiential pragmatism’ in contrast to the linguistic pragmatism found in Brandom. And the reason for this lies in the notion of the “irreducibility of the noncognitive” (Alexander 2014: 65). I disagree with Alexander only on the detail of how to make sense of the noncognitive (I prefer ‘aesthetic’), with the need to have a coherent and detailed theoretical account of the aesthetic and the explanatory advantage in seeing the social aesthetic arising out of the individual aesthetic.

10 It is interesting to note that such problems are not, of course, problems at all, for unless someone else asks you the question, ‘What is 68 + 57?,’ it has no obvious appeal; it does not, in the abstract demand attention. This sense of problem-solving is invariably dependent on others raising the question and is, perhaps, one reason for taking the social turn in the account of problems. Dewey contrasts arithmetical examples with real problems, arithmetical problems are, he says, merely “tasks,” things set by others, cf. LW 12: Ch. 6, § II, esp. p. 111.

11 The challenge is, of course, the one that most contemporary philosophers think is incoherent – the challenge of making sense of the ‘given’ as a pre-conceptual input to cognition, for classic treatments see Sellars 1956; McDowell 1994; and Brandom 1994. And that is why Brandom’s version of pragmatism is a linguistic one, he thinks the option of an experiential pragmatism would require returning to the myth of the given. My reading of Dewey is, therefore, a reading that amounts to claiming that the default setting in much contemporary philosophy re the foundational nature of the linguistic needs to be adjusted. There is much at stake here.

15 Ignoring the transition problem might seem an act of outrageous bravado, but the point is simple. If there is an answer to the transition problem, it will arise in the detail of the account we provide in pulling together a staged bootstrapping account of learning. It will not be settled in a single sentence.

16 ‘Brought up,’ for these things are only properly understood in the context of their natural history, something Wittgenstein (2009: § 25) emphasized too: “Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.”

18 Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a path, indeed a garden path, for the idea of a rule: see Wittgenstein (2005: § 90; and 1978: § 163).

20 Having the aesthetic order restored is also, perhaps, part of what Wittgenstein meant by bringing peace to philosophical perplexities. If so, his quietism is momentary, not enduring; it applies to the settlement of a moment in a Deweyan dynamic, rather than an endpoint to philosophy.

21 “An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in teaching” (MW 9: 245).

22 The big questions concern how much native ability is required in order to support communication and the pursuit of inquiry. For an exploration of this in a manner that captures something of Dewey’s insistence on avoiding too intellectualist a view of experience, see Malloch & Trevarthen 2009.

23 For an implicit grasp of the elusiveness and yet centrality of things that fall under the aesthetics of experience as I have been promoting it, see the detailed account of a year in the life of a New York kindergarten class in Diamond 2008.

Electronic reference

Michael Luntley , “ What’s the Problem with Dewey? ” ,  European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], VIII-1 | 2016, Online since 20 July 2016 , connection on 25 April 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/444; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.444

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This research aims to describe the mathematical problem-solving abilities of students with visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles in solving sequence and series questions based on IDEAL problem-solving steps. In this study, the research method used is qualitative. Grouping students based on their learning style through a student learning style questionnaire, namely visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles. Furthermore, data collection was carried out, namely holding a written test with sequences and series material. Then a problem-solving analysis was carried out from the answer data and interviews with the research subjects obtained. Data collection techniques used include Questionnaires, Tests, and Interviews. Meanwhile, in this study, the triangulation technique used is time triangulation. The results of the analysis and discussion show that students with a visual learning style have good abilities in solving mathematical problems. Students with a vimal learni...

Sembodro Ulum

The problem posing ability is making new questions and answers from previous information. Post-solution is modifing a condition of problem solved to submit a new problem. Learning styles in this research is in the form of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. This descriptive research examines the ability of students to post problem solutions based on differences in learning style involving 10 visual’s students, 12 auditory’s students, 9 kinesthetic’s students. Analysis of data in this research is the data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. Test material of the test is cubes. The results of the study show that ability problems of student with visual learning styles in the form of problems that can be solved is shown clear information, changing, varying, restating, and grouping in accordance with information about previous questions, direct and indirect answers are arranged in detail, language structure questions in the form of assignment and conditional propositions...

The Normal Lights

Rene Belecina

The study aimed to determine and describe the cognitive processes and learning styles of 12 eight graders in performing problem-solving tasks. The cognitive processes of students with different learning styles were studied in terms of the cognitive behaviors they manifested as they were given problem-solving tasks. These cognitive processes were understanding the tasks, specializing, generalizing, conjecturing, justifying, and looking back. Forty-one of the original 75 students from two sections of a government-owned secondary school in Quezon City were classified as active, reflective, sequential, and global, based on learning styles as revealed by the Felder and Soloman’s Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire. Consequently, three students from each learning style were randomly chosen as participants of the study. The three phases of the study involved audio taping the students while doing the problem-solving activities and interviewing them afterwards, coding all the transcribe...

Journal of Physics: Conference Series

Laila Fitriana

Problem solving is essential in mathematics teaching and learning. Mathematical problem solving as finding a way around difficulty and solution to a problem that is unknown. Learning style can be used by students in processing information and can help students in learning. Kolb’s learning style characteristic examined include converger, diverger, accommodator and assimilator. The purpose of this study is to describe about mathematical problem solving based on Kolb learning style. This study used descriptive qualitative method. The subject of the study consisted 4 students of National Senior High School Pekalongan which selected using purposive sampling. The research instruments were questionnaire and problem solving task. Data validity used method triangulation. Data analyses were done through data collection, data reduction, data presentation and conclusion. The results show that students with converger and accomodator learning style are better than diverger and assimilator learnin...

Advances in Mathematics: Scientific Journal

Lia Kurniawati

Asking question is an expression of the thought process. Question arises when someone gets new knowledge that is not in accordance with previous knowledge, through the thought process arises the question to get complete information so that the new knowledge he has becomes more meaningful. This study aims to evamine and analyze the ability of students in problem posing based on their learning style. The method carried out in this study was a quasi-experiment on 80 high-school students. The results showed that there is significant difference for the achievement of mathematical problem posing abilities based on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles, contrary there is no significant difference in the improvement mathematical problem posing skills based on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles

American Journal of Educational Research

Elvis Napitupulu

AJHSSR Journal

This research aims to analyze the impact of students" different mathematics problem-solving ability using the problem-solving method, and the relationship between the ability and students" learning styles and initial mathematical abilities. This research is conducted in SMA Negeri 1 Waisala Maluku. The sample comprises 67 tenth-grade students divided into three classes determined by the multi-stage random sampling technique. The method used in this research is pseudo-experiment. To collect relevant data, several instruments are used. They are (1) initial mathematical ability, (2) mathematical problem-solving ability, and (3) auditory, kinesthetic, and visual learning styles. The methods used are problem-solving and expository. Based on the research findings, (1) After their initial mathematical abilities are controlled, the mathematical problem-solving abilities of students taught using a problem-solving method are higher than that of students taught using an expository one; (2) After their initial mathematical abilities are controlled, the mathematical problem-solving abilities of students with an auditory learning are higher than that of students with a kinesthetic learning style; (3) After their initial mathematical abilities are controlled, the mathematical problem-solving abilities of students with an auditory learning are lower than that of students with a visual learning style; (4)After their initial mathematical abilities are controlled, the mathematical problem-solving abilities of students with a kinesthetic learning are lower than that of students with a visual learning style; and (5)After the students" initial mathematical abilities are controlled, there are an impact of the interaction between learning methods with learning styles and students" mathematical problem-solving abilities.

Ansari Saleh Ahmar

Mathematical problem posing plays an important role in mathematics curriculum, since it encompasses the core of mathematics activities, among other things, with students’ activities to construct their own problems as the preliminary step to actual problem solving steps. This study aims at revealing the profile of students’ mathematical problem posing based on their cognitive styles in order to know and understand the learning of mathematics students. As a result of this study, students who have the cognitive style ‘field independent’ (FI) are able to propose a solvable mathematical problem and load new data, and also pose problems categorized as high-quality mathematical problems. Students who have the cognitive style of ‘field dependent’ (FD) are generally limited to solvable mathematical problems that do not contain new data, and mathematical problems of a moderate level. In this study, it is seen how student’s work mathematical problem posing using their cognitive style, resulting in a breakthrough in the process of learning to use students’ cognitive styles so as to increase the quality of learning outcomes.

Silas Sudarman

This study aims to analyze and determine the effect of learning strategies (The differences between Problem Based Learning and Direct Instruction) and cognitive style on mathematical problems solving learning outcomes. This study used a quasi-experimental research design (nonequivalent control group designs) The research subjects were students from state elementary school of V grade in Gading I Surabaya, east java. The totals of elementary school population in east Surabaya were 141 elementary schools. The selected schools are the schools which have some parallel classes, therefore the circumstances are relatively similar. Four classes are selected, they were from SDN Gading 1 state elementary school. These schools were randomly chosen to implement different learning strategies, they are implementing problem-based learning and hands-on learning. The data collection techniques were mathematical problems solving learning pre-tests and post-test, Group embedded figures test (GEFT) for cognitive style, assessment performance for learning achievement. Data analysis techniques in this study use ANOVA technique (analysis of variance) two lines. The results of this study showed that (1) there is a difference in learning achievement between the students' groups who are taught by PBL and direct learning; (2) there are differences in achieving learning outcomes toward students' group and different cognitive styles; (3) there are significant interactions between the use of learning strategies and cognitive style on learning outcomes.

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