Descartes, Dewey and the Question on the Possibility of Knowledge

Abstract: The question about the possibility of knowledge is foundational to the field of epistemology, in
the sense that to investigate the meaningfulness of the question about the possibility of knowledge is to
investigate the need for an epistemology at all. In this paper, Deweys views about the possibility of
knowledge are contrasted with those of Descartes. Research into the early philosophy of Descartes will
show that he is concerned with providing a method for effective enquiry into the Mathesis. The Mathesis
is a body of universal and necessary truths of order and connection between ideas, and it will be
correspondingly characterized throughout the paper. The case of Dewey results more contentious. He
rejects views that are central to Descartes and many other great Modern philosophers; on top of that,
Dewey claims that the question for the possibility of knowledge is wrongly posed and ultimately
meaningless. I will characterize Deweys view as proposing the abandonment of purely epistemological
enquiry, and the transformation of philosophy in a social enterprise for the regulation of conduct.

In this paper I will compare the philosophies of Descartes and Dewey. Though I
focus in their differing views about the possibility of knowledge, I will also offer
remarks and insights that might help us draw other implications about their respective
philosophical positions. First I will illustrate Cartesian epistemology through a careful
reading of his Rules for the Direction of Mind, which provides us a fresher and less
dogmatic image of Descartes than the Meditations. In the second section I analyze
Deweys views by relying in a contemporary selection of his texts. I conclude by
discussing Deweys alleged anti-Cartesianism in light of the anteceding investigations.

1. Descartes: in search for the Mathesis.

In this section I discuss Descartes Rules for the Direction of the Mind. This early
and unfinished piece was not published during the authors lifetime, and it does not
feature any of his later compromises with the dogmas of the Catholic Church. Indeed,
throughout the Rules Descartes shows little interest for issues of an explicitly moral or
existential kind, although he insists, in various passages, on the intrinsic practical and
moral value of the method for anyone who follows it. Not only the method is devised to
avoid the superstitious appeal to authority as well as to increase the power of human
intellect; it also aims at enhancing mutual understanding among humans through the
investigation and uncovering of the Mathesis, which Descartes sees, as soon will be
clear, both as a source of universal truth, and a manifestation of a common core seed of
reason that unites all humankind. My aim here is to provide a succinct, though fair and
clear, understanding of what Descartes was up to in his philosophical project, such that
his views can be faithfully contrasted to those of Dewey. To that effect, I limit my
discussion to rules I to XII, and to rule XVI.
The first four rules are external characterizations of the method. In rule I, Descartes
states that the aim of the method is the direct the mind with a view to forming true and

sound judgments about whatever comes before it (Descartes 1954, 153). He complains
that science has been traditionally understood in the image of the arts. While learning
one skill makes difficult to learn others, however, learning one science does not destroy,
but rather increases the power to learn others (Joachim 1957, 1). Philosophers must
then realize that if only the light of reason can illumine knowledge, and if this reason is
unitary, then the unity of the sciences is possible too. Now, from this possibility springs
its desirability and, actually, a duty for the philosopher. Further, the more the unity of
science is fulfilled, the more the intellect can show the will what it should choose
(Descartes 1989, 62)1. Hence, not only it is convenient to pursue the unity of science,
but to disregard it means to degrade every single bit of knowledge. It follows that the
aim of the method is not simply to learn truths but, rather, interconnected truths, that is,
truths that enable us to compose a unitary, complete and truthful image of the world.
The second rule, where Descartes compels us to occupy ourselves only with those
objects that our intellectual powers appear competent to know certainly and
indubitably, is at once a criterion of scientific knowledge and a principle of intellectual
economy. But, what kind of truths can the individual know with absolute certainty?
that he exists, that he thinks, that the triangle is defined only by three lines, the
sphere by one surface only, and similar things, which are more numerous than most
think (Descartes 1954, 155)

It should be noted that Descartes here grants an equal status to the I exist, the I
think, and truths from arithmetic and geometry. Absolute truths are presented as a
manifold and not as an interconnected whole featuring the peculiar relations between
ontology, epistemology and theology that Descartes will later build in his Meditations.
The need for such systematic derivation is promoted and justified in the Rules, to be
sure; but it is not produced in its precise later and dogmatic form. On the other hand,
Descartes dismisses the merely probable knowledge provided by the syllogisms of
Aristotelian, scholastic science. The legitimate sources of knowledge are, then, two: the
intuition of first truths, which must be simple, clear and distinct; and the deduction of
consequences thereof. This requirement of certainty leaves us with arithmetic, geometry
and, above all, algebra as the main model of scientific knowledge. Now, existing
mathematics owe this role to their being the most visible part of the Mathesis; but the
Mathesis, says Descartes, ought to be distinguished from existing mathematics like the
whole from the parts. Given that philosophers are committed to the unity of science,
their main goal is then to discover all truths of the Mathesis, and even those parts of it
which are yet unknown. Anything else, however, we must refrain from studying.
In the third rule, Descartes performs his idiosyncratic reduction to the moi-mme
(oneself). Only an individual can follow the method, while appeals to authority are
strongly advised against. Descartes concedes that it is good to read ancient books, but
this must be done with moderation and never to fall prey of the principle of authority. In
1

Lacking a full English translation of the text, I have followed a Spanish one. Therefore, all the quotes to
the Spanish edition of 1989 are my own translations.

fact, historical knowledge comes out of testimony, and therefore its status is that of
mere opinion. Science, instead, must always be produced by oneself according to
method: one must only trust the truths provided by natural reason, and deduce their
consequences by a continuous and uninterrupted movement of thought, with clear
intuition of each point (ibid, 156). Actually, the individual performance of this
continuous and uninterrupted movement of thought constitutes Descartes epistemic
ideal. It signals the absolute primacy of intuition and certainty above deduction: while
deduction merely passes on the truth, it cannot provide assent by itself and, additionally,
we rely on our fallible memory for such assent. Genuine evidence, instead, must be
present. Below we will see how Descartes includes some rules in the method, whose
only purpose is to ensure that the mind can produce actual evidence out of mere
deduction. The first part of the Rules concludes by restating, in rule IV, that [t]here is
need of a method for finding out the truth (ibid, 157).
Descartes now sets out to explain the method itself in rules V to VII. First he tells
us what we should understand for method.
[T]he ordering and arranging of the objects on which we must concentrate our
mind's eye if we are to discover some truth. We shall be following this method
exactly if we first reduce complicated and obscure propositions step by step to
simpler ones, and then, starting with the intuition of the simplest ones of all, try
to ascend through the same steps to knowledge of all the rest. (ibid, 157)
Hence, the method has two parts: first, an analysis aimed at finding all the possible
evident and clear truths at hand; second, a synthesis that attempts to compound them all
in a single unity, the uninterrupted train of thought. Inspired by the Mathesis, the
method is itself directed toward the Mathesis, where we can hope to find all absolutely
certain truths. Importantly, however, the method needs not be complete, because it is
grounded in the assumption that the individual already has a prior knowledge of some
truths, and that he is able to make deductions. Therefore, the method is helpful only for
a mind that already thinks more or less correctly. Let us remark this point again: the
method must not be fully specified because it assumes a common and prior substrate of
truths and intellectual principles that can be learned by all human souls by virtue of their
sharing some innate intellectual capacities. On the other hand, the existence of this
common intelligence of humans manifests itself primarily in the intelligibility and
indubitability of arithmetic and geometric truths. The guiding idea of Descartes is, in
consequence, that this common substrate of truths and intellectual capacities that ground
the method and facilitate its application, is itself constituted by the contents of the
Mathesis, to whose study philosophers should be devoted. Therefore, the Cartesian
method is essentially aimed at knowing that which grounds the possibility of method in
the first place: its ultimate object is a body of ordered and interconnected truths which
throws light not only on the knowledge of the particular sciences, but also on the
possibility of knowledge and certainty in general, as well as of mutual understanding.
Thus, I submit that Descartes is hereby opening a space for further enquiry about a
3

special kind of transcendental psychology. According to this, Kant can be seen as

developing more fully and in detail the project originally conceived by Descartes as a
methodic formal enquiry into the Mathesis. In turn, although this idea finds its origin in
pythagoreanism, of course, Descartes extends it to the study of the order and connection
of ideas in general, as can be found in any conceivable system of intellectual contents.
We now come to the VIth rule, where Descartes advises us to serialize the ideas
previously derived by analysis. According to this principle of seriality, we take, as a
starting point and reference, what is more absolute, simple and certain; then we place in
order the progressively more compound and relative ideas, which contain ever more
relations of genera within them. Hence we ensure that we can proceed backwards from
complexity to total simplicity, reaching back from relative ideas to the absolute ones.
In rule VII, Descartes restates the need for achieving truths within comprehensive
chains of truthful reasoning where all our objects of knowledge are scrutinized by a
movement of thought which is continuous and nowhere interrupted (ibid, 158). To this
effect, contents must be included in an enumeration which is both adequate and
methodical. The necessity of this device of enumeration is no other than preserving
certainty in deduction; for, as we saw, deduction alone cannot provide certainty, and
therefore we need to supply our reasoning with a special device that secures it.
Enumeration, says Descartes, must consider as many terms as necessary, and order and
distinguish them as much as possible and necessary, according to genera and species.
However, it only needs to be sufficient, for it is a mere means serving a more
important end.
The fundamentals of the Cartesian method lie in the seven rules already examined.
What Descartes does next is providing us with some extra advice on the details of
application of the method. Rule VIII is a second principle of intellectual economy,
where he asks us to bring the analytical part of the method to a halt when we have
arrived to an intuition of a truth so simple, that it cannot be decomposed further while
remaining apt for intuition. This rule should take us, says Descartes, to study the
faculties of our own mind before any other subject-matter; for only this knowledge,
inasmuch as it makes us acquainted with the limits of human understanding, enables us
to know, beforehand, whether a given research is intrinsically impossible; thus we can,
consequently, refuse to proceed in order to refrain from futile toil (ibid, 162).
Rules IX and X invite us to consider two other subject-matters of similarly great
importance. Our first concern must be with the smallest and easiest points, so that we
get accustomed to behold the truth by clear and distinct intuition (ibid, 162). Next we
must pursue just those inquiries of which the solution has already been found by
others; and it ought to traverse in a systematic way even the most trifling of men's
inventions though those ought to be preferred in which order is explained or implied
(ibid, 162). Therefore, Descartes calls attention to the intrinsic value of reproducing,
among the reasonings of our ancestors, all those that led them to discover truths or to
make inventions which now are regarded as common heritage of all mankind, even if
4

they are basic. The bigger prize is to be found, of course, in those where order is
explained or implied; for here we are probably investigating a part of the Mathesis.
Finally, we will discuss three more rules. Rule XI insists that the individual be able
to produce chains of truth through continuous and uninterrupted acts of thought. In this
sense, a sequence of true propositions is less valuable that a hypothetical set of true
propositions that were altogether intuited at the same time, if such thing was possible,
because the latter would be a way not only of making our knowledge much more
certain, but also of greatly increasing the power of the mind. One must be able, so to
speak, to produce truthful thoughts that can instantaneously and easily be tracked back
to the most simple and certain intuitions. This continued insistence of Descartes in our
producing uninterrupted trains of thought cannot be underemphasized. Not only it
summarizes his epistemic ideal; it also clarifies his ideas about the Mathesis or about
human psychology. For one thing: while in rule XII he recommends us to employ all the
aids that our mental capacities (that is, understanding, imagination, memory and the
senses) provide, he also reckons that our senses and, above all, our memory, are likely
to distract or obstruct our minds toward the production of such continuous train of
thoughts. Now, as we have seen, the production of this uninterrupted train of intuitions
requires us to begin our reasoning from basic and indubitable truths, and recapitulate
from there all the interconnected truths of the Mathesis, thus, from the most simple to
the highly complex, in an indefinitely long series where our certainty would not
diminish even a bit. We must then ask: is there a more visible obstacle in this progress
of thought, than our mnemonic fragility? In fact, long deductive chains become infected
of uncertainty for their necessary reliance on memory.
Although this failure in the automatism of thought already took Descartes to
include the device of enumeration as part of the method (rule VII), he recommends a
number of interesting alternative strategies to safeguard the production of uninterrupted
trains of thought. Thus, not only we must constantly enumerate our achieved truths,
recapitulating forward and backward with the aid of the analytic-synthetic method. It is
also helpful, says Descartes in rule XVI, to make use of ordered dispositions of signs
and sketchy diagrams that briefly represent our ideas, so that our memory is here backed
up by the senses, which now face an environment of pre-selected and ordered evidence
on which we can rely afterwards in order to reduce or eliminate distractions for thought.
This admission of a convenient primacy of the senses above memory as part of a
coherent strategy of epistemic practice is all the more revealing, for it calls into question
some of the stereotypical criticisms that have been customarily issued against Descartes.
In particular, who would deny that his suggestion, that we should make intelligent use
of the surrounding space and of bodily marks for supporting and enhancing the work of
thought, is but a mere (though informal) reformulation of the extended, embodied and
enactive theses in contemporary philosophy of mind? Some of the proponents of the
latter views have occasionally presented themselves, however, in open opposition to
Descartes dualism. The lesson to be learned is: prudence and respect.
5

2. The pragmatism of John Dewey.

Pragmatism is a philosophical stance, and a general approach toward theorizing,
which was envisioned and systematically developed by Charles S. Peirce toward the end
of the nineteenth century, thus leading to the first distinctly American philosophical
school. Peirce embraced Kantian philosophy but overturned its system of categories in
order to account for crucial developments in logic, mathematics and the natural
sciences. William James and John Dewey further developed pragmatism as a
philosophy that drew diverse implications from evolutionary theory and from historicist
approaches toward science and philosophy; eventually, this latter brand of pragmatism
was able to attract a much wider social recognition than Peirces own project. In this
section we will examine Deweys pragmatism. We will do this by first presenting his
basic and positive theoretical commitments, and then summarizing his own criticisms to
the philosophy, or philosophies, which he radically opposed to.

2.1. Consequences of Darwinian view of the world.

The biological account of the human being provided by Darwin has, according to
Dewey, radically altered our views about a number of central philosophical problems.
Dewey owes more to William James humanistic pragmatism than to the more logically
minded Charles S. Peirce and, in fact, the psychological investigations of the former had
a great influence in Dewey. This influence is partly due to the fact that James
psychology features a biological, Darwinian conception of man, making it very suitable
for Deweys project of drawing philosophical consequences of Darwinism that could be
used for criticizing Modern philosophers and enhancing our understanding of human
life and human society. In accordance to this, Deweys central concepts will be those of
practice and experiment, which he will discuss critically along the dimensions of
knowledge, aesthetics and ethics, although he refuses to make a clear distinction among
the three.
In what follows I will try to briefly ponder the role of Darwinism in Deweys
philosophy. To begin with, a fundamental tenet of pragmatism, such as that the
relevance of some theory lies in its practical consequences, must be understood against
the background of an instrumental and functionalist account of knowledge. In such a
view thought, and eventually all its products, are to be understood as tools that can be
more or less adapted for our survival and welfare. Knowledge and language, however,
are not tools of the individual but, rather, they are mediated by society. There is a social
production of knowledge and, moreover, as each system of knowledge production
features a preferred social formulae, different views of knowledge will offer different
solutions to the problem of social order. In consequence, ideas and especially,
epistemological ideas- may be false and, additionally, they may be morally or politically
undesirable. Dewey thinks, of course, that the opposite holds for Darwinism. Not only
Darwinism is true; furthermore, if properly interpreted, it can become a pillar of the
6

philosophy most suitable for liberal democracy, which is, in turn, the only political
system where human individuals and societies can flourish.
To see how Dewey interprets the consequences of evolutionary theory in order to
reconceive fundamental philosophical categories, let us consider his criticism of the
concept of experience. Descartes and the empiricists had understood experience
primarily as a knowledge-affair, but Dewey will portray it as an active intercourse of a
living being with its physical and social environment (Dewey et al. 1998, 45). Nor can
experience be understood as the passive reception and registration of some given, which
then becomes the possession of an epistemic subject; it is rather a projection or
anticipation that reaches forward into the unknown; not an adjustment to a given past
reality, but a practical engagement that actively constitutes or changes that very
environment through time. Experience, in fact, is not even a psychical thing that
happens before the theater of the mind like a presentation or a show, but an undergoing
that happens in this genuinely objective environment which we can actively modify by
our doings. The more complex the organism, the more intelligent are its actions and
adjustments, and the more importance it has in the active co-production of its
environment and in the determination of its own needs. On the other hand, experience is
not only about particulars that could be later synthetized by a separate, abstract thought;
rather, it is always pervaded by connections and continuities, full of thought and
inference. In consequence, our views about the activity of thinking need change as well.
Theory is not something entirely immaterial and abstract, but it can and it should be
embodied in order to enhance our practical dealings with the world; indeed, practices do
not take its value from thought but, conversely, the value of thought springs from its
practical consequences. We can no longer speak of a separate intellect preoccupied only
with its own sensational bearings and ideas, but only of more or less intelligent
practices, one of which and not the most important- is mental (internal) reflection
about certain intellectual contents. Truth should then cede its traditionally dominant role
in philosophy to the more fundamental category of success. As Dewey puts it:
Success and failure are the primary "categories" of life; achieving of good and averting
of ill are its supreme interests; hope and anxiety (which are not self-enclosed states of
feeling, but active attitudes of welcome and wariness) are dominant qualities of
experience. (Dewey et al. 1998, 48)

For Dewey, then, the task of philosophy becomes to discover and develop new
methods by which action can be made progressively more intelligent and successful.
Ultimately the goal is social, i.e. that people achieve their ends, and are actually able to
enrich and enlarge these ends along their moral and aesthetic dimensions.
Now, at this stage of history, the success of modern science and technology cannot
be doubted. They have shown that the experimental method provides experience with a
power to regulate conduct and enhance its consequences. Thus, we, in our daily life, but
also as philosophers, should learn from scientific and technical activity in order to
7

succeed in safely controlling things and, of course, ourselves: it is not the formalistic
and a priori method, but the experimental one, from which philosophy can learn. We
can also learn, however, from the perverse effects that sprang from the isolation
between objects and subjects in Modern philosophy, and to which science has escaped.
Science is a social practice that needs not a permanent reduction to oneself in the
subjective domain; indeed, it is so successful precisely because it has developed social
strategies that are themselves intelligent. It follows that the sheer possibility of moral
progress for society depends on understanding that intelligence essentially emerges in
and through intelligent joint practice. Individualistic and privatistic views of knowledge
or morals cannot be worthwhile inasmuch as they disregard this lesson.
The idea that the sciences provide us with a guide for mastering nature with the aid
of machines could already be found in Bacon and Descartes. Deweys model of
knowledge is, however, much closer to Bacons than to Descartes. This will become
clearer in the next subsection. However, Deweys ideas about the role of the sciences
and, particularly, of philosophy in the regulation of conduct also echo those of Comtean
positivism, according to which the development of scientific Psychology and Sociology
should aim at producing techniques for controlling human behavior, even if we are to
make it not only more intelligent but also freer. Technologies, therefore, do not reduce
to mere art-craft; they involve discussion, criticism and enhancement of intelligent
practices. In this sense, education systems or philosophy should be understood either as
technologies or as technological activities. It follows that philosophers must be
concerned with providing society with tools for achieving more safety, security and
control in the fulfillment of values and social needs through intelligence practice; but
also in the extension of these values and, with it, the extension of our power to enact
and fulfill them. As can be seen, Deweys philosophical ideal is not merely epistemic,
i.e. certainty; rather, it is a technological, experimental reinterpretation of it.

2.2. Epistemology and the consequences of the search for the immutable.
Dewey understands the opposition between his philosophy and philosophies of the
immutable, as analogous to the opposition between the evolutionary theory of natural
selection and fixism. We will now characterize these philosophies of the immutable and
Deweys criticism of them.
Dewey thinks that the rejection of probable and mutable knowledge is a correlate of
the traditional philosophical despise for bodies, materiality and practice for the sake of
theoretical formalism. He sees the origins of the preference for theory and immutability
in the rationalizations of the Greek world carried by Plato and Aristotle. The fixist view
of the world features a number of interrelated mottos and inclinations, which can be
summarized thus: a formalistic approach that ranks mathematics as the highest science;
the setting of certainty as the highest epistemic ideal; the requirement of a foundation
that secures this certainty; the preference for closed and absolute philosophical systems
where certainty propagates from the foundations to the rest of reality; and a contempt
8

for the mutable bodies and action as the lowest forms of reality. But, how did this view
of the world develop? Deweys response here resembles to Nietzsches psychologism.
Paraphrasing Goethe, we could say that in the beginning was the failure: people did not
have enough material mastery over nature, either because they did not have powerful
technologies, or science, or rules to put them into practice in order to successfully
achieve their goals; and this led them to reify their goals into an absolute realm of Being
where failure, pains, mutability or falsehood could be completely eradicated. As they
had no chances of controlling their own actions for safely achieving their needs, the
philosophical goal of practical success succumbed to that of truth, and those of security
and precision to that of certainty. Certainty was not something worldly, however, but it
belonged to the other-worldly realm of private, subjective consciousness. It prominently
stemmed from peculiar properties found in mathematical ideas, like simplicity and
clarity but, even more importantly, in the understanding of mathematics as a realm of
eternal, immutable objects with fixed relations. This is the reason why Modern
philosophers and especially those of rationalist inspiration, always relied more in
mathematics as the primary source of truth, as well as in the mechanicist philosophy of
nature that sprang from it.
This is nowhere clearer than in Cartesian philosophy. Despite Descartes offered
many suggestions advancing the logic of change, adaptation and fallibility promoted by
the scientific revolution, and fully developed later by Darwin, he ended up building the
strongest expressions of this philosophy of the immutable. For Descartes, although
certainty had an absolute prominence, it not only stemmed from mathematics, but also
from the intuition of ideas such as that I exist. In his Meditations, all these commitments
result in an ontological and epistemological foundationalism, that is, the doctrine that
philosophy should first find an absolute and indubitable ground, or at least a set of most
intuitive axioms, then to deduce from them all the a priori consequences that follow.
What Descartes actually did was building a machine for producing necessary truths of
order and connection toward the ideal state of complete subjective certainty. The latter
is constituted by the individual possession of indefinitely many interconnected truths
about the world.
Paradoxically, however, we know that this graceful epistemological destiny of
Descartess subject is the outcome of a model of enquiry whose starting point had been
an absolute subjective uncertainty, artificially extended by Descartes methodic and
hyperbolic doubt in a process which could only be brought to a halt by absolutizing the
reality of the human soul and of God. In the Meditations, therefore, the attainment of
absolute certainty about the world is preceded by, and tied to, a state of absolute
uncertainty. Lying in the middle of the two poles, we have the foundations of Modern
epistemology: the human soul delivered to the passively registering of sensations and its
active reflecting about them, God, mathematics and deduction. To put into question
either the validity of Descartes foundational intuitions, or their systematic organization
according to method amounted, then, to casting into doubt the possibility of any
9

certainty at all. This was the road taken by Hume in his criticisms on the possibility of
knowledge, to which Kant would respond with his transcendental philosophy. The
transcendental method was, in turn, an enquiry about the necessary conditions of the
subjective experience of the object, such that the possibility of a concept of the object in
general was possible. In other words: the justification of the possibility of scientific
knowledge in general consisted, for Kant, in a dogmatic psychology that determines
how the faculties of the mind and its products could reduce the sensational manifold to
universally true judgments. The outcome of this enquiry was a transcendental subject
whose necessary forms of the intuition and categories of the understanding allowed him
to build indefinitely many true synthetic a priori judgments about mathematics, but also
about physics; additionally, these a priori forms of the subject constituted the object of
knowledge by providing a frame within which the variable sensational manifolds that
passively impinged on his senses could be organized.
Dewey thinks that Modern epistemology, which starts with Kant and reaches its
climax in Kant, is a failure because the question for the possibility of knowledge in
general is wrongly posed and ultimately meaningless. This is due to the fact that it relies
in a false account of experience, shared by Locke, Hume, Kant and Descartes, where
experience is passive and entirely about particulars (see above). This account, together
with Christian dogmas, helped forge the idea of a psychological subject with inner
states that are his possessions, and who asks for absolutely certain knowledge of the
world and of the other minds. However, the sensory manifolds are abstractions, just as
the transcendental subject is. On the other hand, knowledge is never absolute but always
approximate and about concrete events; likewise, there is no absolute doubt or
uncertainty, but a particular doubt and more or less certainty about something. Dewey
concludes that the possibility of knowledge is discussed only because philosophers had
aimed for unrealistic ideals while they had also developed false concepts of experience
and the subject; of the relations between belief and knowledge; of the separation
between science and the individual; and of the relations between knowledge and action.
In fact, however, this mutual isolation of knowledge and action in idealistic or
rationalistic philosophies qualified theoretical goodness or certainty as superior than
practical goods and achievements, a conclusion which is essentially perverse. In this
connection, let us recall that for Dewey the problems of knowledge and of social order
are inseparable. He contends that intelligence either means intelligent practice or it is an
abstract formalism that merely reflects a division of labor where mathematics occupies
in knowledge the role that the Emperor or the High Priests occupy in practical matters.
In fact, the philosophy of the immutable is a philosophy of the justification of the social
order, a philosophy where one is only free if she conforms to the rules of nature, in the
last instance the laws of mathematics; that is, she is only free when already subject to
law. It is not a philosophy for creating values, for experimentation, for democracy; but a
philosophy of absolutism and fixed relations. Once we live in democratic societies,
where practical matters are dealt socially with the aid of science and technology, these
ideals of knowledge and social order collapse altogether.
10

3. Conclusion: on Deweys alleged anti-Cartesianism.

It is customary to speak of an anti-Cartesian turn in contemporary philosophy. In
this trend Dewey was not by any means alone: from very different standpoints, thinkers
like Heidegger, Bachelard or Ryle also rejected basic tenets of Descartes philosophy.
To what extent can really be said, however, that Dewey is anti-Cartesian?
Quite obviously, some of Deweys criticisms on the modern concept of experience
expressly address Empiricism specifically, Humean associationism- while others are
addressed, more broadly, to internalist or representational psychology. According to
Dewey, a presentational and internalist gnoseology of the private subject conflates
psychological problems about how ideas are formed with logical problems about how to
better conduct research; thus it prevents understanding the activity of knowing as a
practice among other worldly practices, where strategies are developed in interaction
with our peers and environment. Further, separating theory and practice corresponds to
abstracting the subject from the world and transforming him in a passive spectator
whose only activity is disembodied thinking about immutable, abstract objects such as
abstract moral maxims.
These criticisms seem applicable to Kantian philosophy just as well to Descartes
and other great philosophers. Descartes indeed idealizes intelligence and knowledge in
the abstract, and the Mathesis can be understood as a unitary body of self-standing and
eternal, necessary truth. On the other hand, knowledge of the Mathesis is not praised
with independence of its practical value for the individual, for we must recall that,
according to Descartes, knowledge can show the will what it should choose. Further,
the Mathesis can be understood as a virtual (not yet fully realized) body of truths of
order and connection between ideas, or as a set of intellectual principles that are
innately common to all humankind. Let us develop Descartes idea for a moment.
Knowledge of the Mathesis is always demonstrative and not about single statements,
but rather about interconnected ideas. Truth, therefore, is only granted by the
preservation of certainty through continuous and uninterrupted trains of thought that
demonstrate, according to method, how complex ideas trace back to basic intuitions.
This requirement, together with the possibility of the unity of science, should ideally
take the individual to methodically reproduce all the existing knowledge of humankind
until the full extension of the Mathesis has been uncovered. As a common core of
human reasoning but also a common destination of thought, the Mathesis grounds the
possibility of mutual understanding; of strengthening our mind through the application
of method; and, finally, of passing truth to the next generations while fostering the role
of the individual in this process. Descartes ideal of knowledge production is, therefore,
not merely to preserve the certainty of the individual, but actually to enable him to
reproduce in and by himself all knowledge which is common to humankind. It is a
structuralist notion of knowledge, where the emphasis in structure and unity seeks to
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balance individual independence and coherence with tradition and social needs. The
fundamental difference between Descartes and Dewey can be indicated along these
lines. In his Structure of Evolutionary Theory, S.J. Gould speaks of structuralist and
functionalist styles of thinking as alternative and complementary readings of
evolutionary theory. Structuralism would highlight ideas of formal, organic coherence:
structures are preserved in the face of changes and constrain possible directions of
further adaptation: function follows form. In contrast, functionalist thinking tries to
derive every structure from prior adaptations: form follows function. According to
Goulds portrait of these theoretical interpretations, which echoes traditional pictures of
the opposition between rationalism and empiricism, Descartes can be placed toward the
extreme of the first pole, while Dewey often tends toward the second, and sometimes
radically embraces it. As an empirically-minded philosopher with strong formalist
orientations, Charles S. Peirce could be said to occupy a middle place between them.
In fact, Deweys experimentalism can be read as a functionalist philosophy of
adaptation and creativity that militates against the necessitarist-structuralist demand for
coherence in the reproduction of order and connections. The former primes uncertainty,
openness, contingency and practical continuity while the second is inclined toward
systematic theoretical continuity. Now, because Dewey abhorred the idea of a system of
knowledge, he had to reject foundationalism. Consequently, he aimed at substituting it
for an experimentalism whose purpose is to test foundations and to preserve them only
if their consequences resist their testing. That those foundations cannot be necessarily
true is a corollary of the experimentalist approach, where certainty becomes an obstacle
for action and, in general, for the mind. The structuralist, instead, emphasizes purely
epistemic certainty as can be given within a formal scheme, and he will pose the unity
of science as a necessary goal of rigorous enquiry. Accordingly, he will be more
interested in the production of interconnected truths that preserve already acquired
knowledge with minimal change.
On the other hand, we have tried to show that Descartes Rules, if compared to the
Meditations, prove that Descartes thought evolved substantially over time2. In the
Rules, for instance, no Ego Cogito is postulated which exists with independence of any
other being except for God; nor is the intellect to be treated as a separate substance or a
part of the soul whose workings are completely independent from those of the body.
What the Rules tells us about knowledge and its relation to practice, or mind and its
relation to body, does not contradict his latter doctrine; it shows, however, a less rigid
and dogmatic view of the author toward these issues. Thus, the reduction to oneself is
not yet a reduction to the Ego Cogito, and mathematical truths (or, for the matter, truths
in general) owe their certainty to their being part of the Mathesis, not to the existence of
(an ex machina, good) God. Yet the Rules already show Descartes clear and mature
commitment to some of the central contentions of his later philosophy.

The reasons behind the evolution of Cartesian thought could be, of course, matter of further discussion.

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I summarize these commitments thus: in the Rules, Descartes builds a philosophy

of the individual researcher3, who should be able to reproduce all the existing
knowledge of humankind through epistemological immersion in the Mathesis through
method. Dewey, instead, wants to spread the values of scientific practice to democracy.
While Descartes places epistemological certainty as his most precious goal, Dewey
reintegrates certainty in philosophy only by debunking its epistemological character and
subordinating it to the category of success. Hence, we should not pursue certainty but
rather safety and security in attaining our goals; while philosophy is not a subjective
enterprise of contemplation of eternal and absolute truth, but a technology of social
reform whose aim is to regulate our conduct for making it more intelligent and freer.
These remarks are basically to make clear the precise extent to which Dewey can be
deemed anti-Cartesian: even though the contrasts between both thinkers are many and
profound, we must ask exactly to which Descartes we are referring to. Furthermore,
there are also similarities between the philosophies of both authors. In this brief essay I
had space for highlighting only some of them.

Bachelard, G. (1968). The Philosophy of No: a Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind. Orion Press.
Cassirer, E. (1923). Substance and Function, and Einsteins Theory of Relativity. Translated by
W.C. Swabey and M.C. Swabey. Chicago: Open Court.
Descartes, R., (1993). Meditaciones metafsicas con objeciones y respuestas, Traducido por Pea
Garca, Vidal. Madrid: Alfaguara.
-- [1954]. Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in Philosophical Writings (A Selection).
Translated by M.E. Anscombe and P.Geach. London: Nelson.
-- [1998]. Reglas para la Direccin del Espritu. Traducido por J.M. Navarro. Madrid: Alianza
Editorial.
Dewey, J., Hickman, L. A., & Alexander, T. M. (1998). The Essential Dewey. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Friedman, M. (2002), Scientific Philosophy and the Dynamics of Reason," University of
California Los Angeles (as Reichenbach Lecture); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(Chapel Hill Colloquium), Fall 2003; University of California-Santa Cruz, Spring 2004.
-- [2002], Einstein, Kant, and the Relativized A Priori, in Bitbol M., Kerszberg, P., Petitot, J.,
Transcendental Perspectives on Modern Physics, 253-267.
Gould, S.J. (2002). The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, Massachussets: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press.
Joachim, H.H. (1957). Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Greenwood Press.

Kant, I. (2002). Crtica de la Razn Pura. Traducido por Manuel Garca Morente. Madrid, Tecnos,
2002.

Not yet, thus, a philosophy of the Subject.

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