John Dewey

I agree with the philosopher John Dewey, I liked his views on how people think and the idea of finding the truth. His main philosophies are that people thought becomes fact. As he stated “the world of fact does not stand apart from thought, but is itself defined within thought as its objective manifestation.” He is showing that in order for something to become a fact it has to start off as a thought. I have heard this theory before a couple times, one place I heard this idea was in the movie James and the Giant Peach when they land in New York and James is saying in order for everything to be created it had to be dreamt first. This is slightly different then the ideas of John Dewey but is along the idea that people have to think of something before it can be a fact.

Dewey’s second point is finding the truth; He argues that the truth is found when it agrees with reality. He states “the traditional correspondence theory of truth, according to which the true idea is one that agrees or corresponds to reality, only begs the question of what the "agreement" or "correspondence" of idea with reality is.” He is saying that truth is only something that we believe because it fits in with reality. Something could not be true but because it corresponds with reality we believe it to be true. He also talks about how something is only true if it is successfully employed in the pursuit of human goals.

I agree with Dewey because he uses good points about the truth and how we know if something is really true or just believed to be true. I have talked about this idea of is there anything that is really true in a class I have taken. There are people who come up with different reasons why something is not true and it is interesting to think about, so I enjoyed reading about John Dewey.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/dewey.htm