Felix Kaufmann, “John Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry” (1959)

Felix Kaufmann’s journal article offers a sympathetic but revisionary interpretation of Dewey’s Logic, The Theory of Inquiry. Kaufmann endorses Dewey’s effort to reconcile logical theory with scientific practice, but argues that its methodological achievements do not depend on its genetic explanation of logical forms through habits. Their stronger foundation lies in making explicit the standards presupposed by scientific criticism.

Against realist correspondence theories, Dewey refuses to explain scientific truth through agreement with things-in-themselves. Against rationalists, he denies that inquiry requires immutable logical foundations; against sensationalist empiricists, he denies that isolated experiential data supply indubitable knowledge. Knowledge is contextual: data acquire cognitive significance through their use as signs. Yet Dewey’s naturalism does not reduce inquiry to physical or biological processes; language, community, and transmitted culture remain essential. Kaufmann also identifies affinities with Kant: both clarify the conditions of science, reject rationalist and sensationalist explanations, and resist defining finite human knowledge through infinite knowledge.

The second section reconstructs Dewey’s account of inquiry as action. Inquiry transforms a doubtful situation into a determinate one through coordinated operations on objects or symbols. Instituting a problem establishes a revisable plan; solving it produces knowledge, or “warranted assertibility.” Successful operations become habits and, when formulated, methods. Even deductive rules remain subject to revision:

Rules of inquiry are not ultimately established, but continually on probation.

Kaufmann accepts this rejection of externally imposed, antecedently fixed foundations. His objection concerns the passage from the historical formation of successful habits to their authority as standards. Inquiry includes criticism of both results and procedures; objectivity therefore requires that disputes about inference be answerable through explicit criteria. Two biologists may agree about experimental findings yet disagree about what those findings warrant. Their disagreement calls for clarification of inductive standards, not merely description of their behavior.

To be logically implied in an ideal, or a postulate, is one thing; to be included in habits of observable behavior is something different.

Actual scientific habits can fall short of the clarity scientists acknowledge when submitting their work to criticism. Explaining those habits biologically or psychologically cannot replace analysis of the normative commitments involved. Kaufmann consequently reinterprets Dewey’s determinate and indeterminate situations as questions answerable or unanswerable from an established state of knowledge. The methodological reference is not an individual’s actual knowledge but the ideal of a precisely specified state of science.

The same reconstruction changes how successive operations are understood:

The "dependence" of subsequent steps upon preceding steps is from his point of view not causal dependence, but logical dependence.

For Kaufmann, logic examines the formal relations between steps, not their temporal succession or their causal contribution to an agent’s purposes. Changes in methods likewise require second-order rules by which those changes can be assessed. Success cannot serve as an unexplained external criterion: the standards distinguishing successful from unsuccessful inquiry, especially observational tests, must belong to the system of inquiry itself. This preserves Dewey’s autonomy of scientific procedure while separating it from a biological theory of habits.

The final section argues that variable methods nevertheless share a formal structure permitting general definitions of knowledge, explanation, induction, and related concepts. Its crucial commitment is the revisability of every result. Finite inquiries can reach definite conclusions without claiming final immunity from criticism:

To state that no scientific result is indubitably established is not to declare that scientific problems cannot be solved.

Truth therefore remains meaningful without becoming an inaccessible metaphysical object. Believing an assertion true means believing that it would withstand every possible test; it does not mean that present knowledge creates truth. Kaufmann presents Dewey’s endorsement of Peirce as consistent with this ideal of inquiry, without requiring faith in an already perfectly rational world. The article closes by connecting methodological clarification to Dewey’s ethics, politics, and education: sustained public discussion depends on shared standards for assessing beliefs and actions. Clarifying those standards promotes the mutual understanding and cooperation on which freedom joined with social order depends.