Essays in Experimental Logic Author:John Dewey General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1918 Original Publisher: The University of Chicago press Subjects: Logic Thought and thinking Realism Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of th... more »is book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: VIII THE CONTROL OF IDEAS BY FACTS There is something a little baffling in much of the current discussion regarding the reference of ideas to facts. The not uncommon assumption is that there was a satisfactory and consistent theory of their relation in existence prior to the somewhat impertinent intrusion of a functional and practical interpretation of them. The way the instrumental logician has been turned upon by both idealist and realist is suggestive of the way in which the outsider who intervenes in a family jar is proverbially treated by both husband and wife, who manifest their unity by berating the third party. I feel that the situation is due partly to various misapprehensions, inevitable perhaps in the first presentation of a new point of view1 and multiplied in this instance by the coincidence of the presentation of this logical point of view with that of the larger philosophical movements, humanism and pragmatism. I wish here to undertake a summary statement of the logical view on its own account, hoping it may receive clearer understanding on its own merits. 1 Studies in Logical Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1903. In the first place it was (apart from the frightful confusion of logical theories) precisely the lack of an adequate and generally accepted theory of the nature of fact and idea, and of the kind of agreement or correspondence between them which constitutes the truth of the idea, that led to the development of a functional theory of logic. A brief statement of the diff...« less