Dewey and Ends

One recurrent project in Dewey's long and multi-faceted career is his development of Peirce's pioneering Pragmatist Logic. The pivotal innovation for both is the introduction of the Conditional, 'If A, then B', which, especially for Dewey, facilitates, first, the Logical accommodation of Causal propositions, 'A causes B', and then translation of them into behavioral terms, 'A is a means to B'. But later in his career, the influence of Darwinism on Dewey's thinking begins to come to manifestation, primarily in the form of a concept of Experience as adaptive behavior, a process which Dewey sometimes calls 'Reconstruction', and sometimes characterizes as a process of harmonization. By the work Art as Experience, the combination of his two main influences comes to its most mature expression, in a concept of Experience perhaps best epitomized by his presentation of three distinct senses of 'End': End as terminus, End-in-View, and End as culmination. End as terminus is the final moment of an Experience; End-in-View appears at the outset of the Experience, as the imaginative projection of the terminus; and End as culmination is the final moment, as an accumulation of what has preceded. With these distinguished, Dewey is equipped to argue that one of the limitations of Peirce's Pragmatism is that its only notion of End is End as terminus, with respect to which his concept of Experience as aesthetic experimentalism is a further advance. Now the Evolvemental concept of Experience, while developed independently of Dewey's views, agrees with Dewey's in many respects, especially that Experience is cumulative. But, one crucial difference pertains to a facet of the notion of Evolution that Dewey inherits from Darwin--that all Experience is a response to some environmental disruption. In Evolvementalism, de-stabilization, i. e. Variation, is an internal Principle, so an Experience need not wait upon some external challenge, as e. g. boredom demonstrates. At one point, Dewey does observe that Experience is expansive, but he falls short of characterizing such expansiveness as internally motivated.