Abstract

Although the writings of John Dewey are among the most studied in twentieth-century philosophy, one topic he considered extremely important appears to have been comparatively neglected by subsequent scholarship: the relationship in human behavior and interactions between thinking and valuing as Dewey portrays it. This condition has been aggravated to the extent that students of Dewey who did address the question of the relation between knowing and valuing in his works almost unilaterally misinterpreted it. ;The dissertation then is an attempt to examine afresh that relationship between science and value as conceived by Dewey without prejudicing the issues with concerns of secondary sources . Inquiry then is divided into three major parts, the first of which is in the main expository. The introductory chapter contains an explication of the issues involved--Dewey's distinctions which thereafter are referred to as normative-descriptive or cognitive-affective. In Chapter II the larger context of moral philosophy and philosophy as criticism are examined in order to set the stage for an exposition of the roles Dewey ascribes to knowing and valuing, to describing and evaluating, qua functional distinctions within practical decision-making. ;Following the "mention" of the normative-descriptive distinction, Part Two turns to an investigation of his "use" of that distinction. In particular, twelve key concepts in the broad areas of human nature and social-political thought--such as freedom, intelligence, growth, democracy, shared experience--are critically analyzed as a means of determining how consistently he employs his own distinctions and of illustrating more concretely points made in the first part. ;The third and concluding part of the study takes up two lines of inquiry. The first involves an assessment of Dewey's characterizations of science and value and the setting in which they occur by using the criteria Dewey himself proposes for testing such ideas . The second mode of criticism, comprising the last chapter, makes use of limited comparisons between Dewey's position and those of C. L. Stevenson and John Rawls in order to test the comprehensiveness of Dewey's ideas.