Attitudes of knowledge and common sense

remarks on Reid and Dewey

Claude Gautier

in: Pragmatism and common-Sense, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 9 (2), 2017.

Abstract

Throughout his intellectual career, John Dewey was asking the question of relationships between knowledge of common sense and scientific knowledge. We propose to examine these relations in the light of a comparison with Thomas Reid, one of the founding authors of the modern philosophy of common sense. This comparison tries to set up what should be considered as a closer formulation of what knowledge consists in: a matter of attitudes, a set of dispositions. Such a convergent formulation equally means not to bring into conflict or contradiction – in the style of a “dualism” – what are common sense and scientific knowledge. In so doing, it is thus necessary to reshape an operative distinction between those two kinds of “attitudes”; and this distinction is not ontological but decisively methodological, epistemological and, on a practical level, political.

Cited authors

Dewey John

Reid Thomas