How We Think by John Dewey: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Philosophy · Education

How We Think

By John Dewey · (Published 1910) · All John Dewey books

Word Count ~63,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 3.5 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #37423

Source Edition Project Gutenberg #37423

Direct Free Downloads:

Download EPUB Download AZW3 Download KEPUB

✦ DRM-Free & unabridged. If you appreciate these custom e-reader editions, consider supporting our cloud hosting on Ko-fi to help keep this library open to all.

📖 Click to Read the Opening Pages Online Preview

Chapter One Asks What We Mean by the Word Thought

No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them. The aim of this chapter is to find a single consistent meaning. Assistance may be had by considering some typical ways in which the terms are employed. In the first place thought is used broadly, not to say loosely. Everything that comes to mind, that “goes through our heads,” is called a thought. To think of a thing is just to be conscious of it in any way whatsoever. Second, the term is restricted by excluding whatever is directly presented; we think (or think of) only such things as we do not directly see, hear, smell, or taste. Then, third, the meaning is further limited to beliefs that rest upon some kind of evidence or testimony. Of this third type, two kinds—or, rather, two degrees—must be discriminated. In some cases, a belief is accepted with slight or almost no attempt to state the grounds that support it. In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is deliberately sought and its adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called reflective thought; it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms, accordingly, the principal subject of this volume. We shall now briefly describe each of the four senses.

I. In its loosest sense, thinking signifies everything that, as we say, is “in our heads” or that “goes through our minds.” He who offers “a penny for your thoughts” does not expect to drive any great bargain. In calling the objects of his demand thoughts, he does not intend to ascribe to them dignity, consecutiveness, or truth. Any idle fancy, trivial recollection, or flitting impression will satisfy his demand. Daydreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux of casual and disconnected material that floats through our minds in relaxed moments are, in this random sense, thinking. More of our waking life than we should care to admit, even to ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope.

The excerpt stops with the first of the four senses, the loose one in which thought is whatever drifts through the mind, and leaves the remaining three senses, and the definition of reflective thought, for the pages that follow.

Download Full EPUB

Further Reading

Read next: two classics of liberal education

Free edition

Democracy and Education

By John Dewey · Dewey’s larger argument, of which this book is the method

Free edition

The Republic

By Plato · The oldest sustained account of education by a philosopher

How We Think by John Dewey: Summary, Ideas & Arguments

How We Think is John Dewey‘s short treatise on reflective inquiry. This summary and analysis follows the text as he published it in 1910: a preface, three parts, sixteen chapters, and an index. Dewey writes as a philosopher of education, not as a designer of lesson plans. His subject is the conduct of thinking itself, and his measure of any proposal is whether it makes reflection more patient and more responsible. The opening chapter sorts the several senses of the word thought until one of them stands out, the sense in which a belief is held up and its grounds examined. Everything after that chapter works out the consequences: what such thinking requires of a person, what logic contributes to it, and what schools must do if they are to encourage it rather than merely reward recitation. The argument is cumulative, since each chapter supplies a distinction that the next one uses, and the book reads as one long demonstration.

Part One, on the problem of training thought, sets the terms. Dewey describes the values of thought, its power to lift action out of impulse and routine, and the tendencies that constantly pull inference away from evidence. He then names three natural resources, curiosity, a flow of suggestions, and orderliness, and asks how school conditions help or harm them. The habits of the people around a child, the character of the studies, and the aims that dominate the classroom all shape what a pupil comes to accept as proof. His criticism of formal discipline and of information stored for its own sake belongs here, and it is not a complaint that schools teach facts but that they teach them in isolation from the problems that give facts their point. Readers who want the social side of his educational thought should turn to Democracy and Education, where the school appears as an institution of shared life.

Part Two, on logical considerations, is the analytical core. A complete act of thought is broken into five steps, from a felt difficulty through its location, the suggestion of a solution, the reasoning out of that suggestion, and the testing that closes it. Dewey then treats induction and deduction as two phases of one movement, judgment as the interpretation of facts, and meaning as the capital on which inference draws. Two chapters separate concrete from abstract thinking and empirical from scientific thinking, and both distinctions turn on the same question: whether an idea is used as a tool of further inquiry or merely repeated. The discussion of definition, of denotation and connotation, shows how meanings acquire the precision that argument requires, since a definition is not a verbal exercise but the instrument by which a class of things is held steady long enough to be reasoned about.

Part Three, on the training of thought, moves into the school. Activity comes first, since the child’s earliest thinking grows out of mastering the body and out of play that gradually becomes work. Dewey credits Plato with the discovery, remade by Froebel, that play is the chief, almost the only, mode of education in the years of later infancy, a claim worth setting beside the place of early training in The Republic. Language follows, as the tool that fixes, stores, and transports meanings, and then observation, information, the recitation, and a closing chapter on the balances that good teaching must hold: unconscious habit and conscious analysis, process and product, the near and the far. That last chapter gathers the argument into three balances and refuses to turn any of them into a rule, which is characteristic of the book as a whole. Teaching, on this view, is a matter of arranging conditions rather than delivering conclusions.

The book is written for teachers as much as for philosophers. Its five steps have been widely quoted, though Dewey presents them as a scheme drawn from this text’s cases rather than as a law of mind. The prose is plain and the examples are homely, a clock on Sixteenth Street, a pole on a ferryboat, soap bubbles on a tumbler. For readers coming to Dewey for the first time, this is the shortest road into his central conviction that thinking is a method to be learned, and the one that shows most clearly why he thought the reform of schooling mattered. The book repays a second reading, since the later chapters quietly assume distinctions made early on. The full text is at Project Gutenberg, and further titles are gathered in Philosophy Classics.

Historical Context

How We Think appeared in 1910, when American schools were expanding and argument about their methods was loud. Dewey had spent years at the Laboratory School in Chicago, from 1896 to 1903, and the preface names that experience as a source; it is dated New York, December 1909, where he was professor of philosophy at Columbia University. The preface says that schools were troubled by the multiplication of studies, and that the steadying factor they needed was the scientific attitude of mind, which he describes as close to the native attitude of childhood. It also thanks Ella Flagg Young, a colleague in the University who had become Superintendent of the Schools of Chicago, which places the book close to the practice of a large city system. The book therefore speaks from inside a working school as well as from a university office.

The book’s targets are visible in its vocabulary. Faculty psychology and formal discipline, the belief that particular subjects train mental powers in general, are set aside. The formal steps of instruction associated with Herbart are examined and partly accepted in the chapter on the recitation. Froebel’s kindergarten, object lessons, and the reaction against bookish learning all appear, and are judged by whether they keep a problem alive for the pupil. Object lessons and nature study, popular devices of the period, are criticised not for being concrete but for being disconnected from any question the child actually feels. Dewey’s alternative is a logic of inquiry drawn from experimental science, in which doubt is the beginning and test is the end, and in which the classroom is judged by the habits of thought it leaves behind.

Dewey belongs to the pragmatist generation that included William James, whose comparison of a new fact with a more familiar one he quotes when he explains how meanings do their work. The book is not a treatise on psychology; it is an argument that the method of science can be taught as a habit of mind. That claim, and the five steps, travelled widely in teacher training, and later writers on reflective practice returned to them. The 1910 text keeps the argument at its plainest, before the vocabulary of the later educational writings had thickened, and it is short enough to be read as a single essay on method. Read beside his later books, it shows the questions that stayed with him for the rest of his career.

Key Ideas & Arguments

• Reflective Thought: Dewey reserves the phrase for the deliberate examination of a belief: active, persistent, careful consideration of its grounds and of the conclusions to which it tends. Two elements recur, a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt, and a search for the facts that will settle it, and neither element alone is reflection.
• The Five Steps: In this text a complete act of thought runs from a felt difficulty to its location and definition, a suggested solution, the reasoning out of that suggestion’s bearings, and further observation or experiment that accepts or rejects it. Dewey notes that the first two steps may fuse, and that the order is logical rather than strictly temporal.
• Curiosity, Suggestion, Orderliness: The natural resources of thinking are a fund of experience, a ready flow of suggestions, and the ordering of those suggestions into continuity. Curiosity passes from childish exploration through question asking to intellectual interest, and orderliness grows out of ordered activity rather than direct instruction, which is why occupations matter to Dewey.
• School Conditions: Three influences shape a pupil’s thinking: the mental habits of teachers and classmates, the nature of the studies, and the aims the school rewards. Dewey attacks formal discipline here, and observes that a demand for correct answers teaches dependence on approval rather than judgment about evidence, so that the pupil learns to guess what the teacher wants.
• Judgment and Meaning: Judgment interprets facts, and Dewey models it on a court: opposing claims, the sifting of evidence, a decision that becomes a rule for later cases. Meanings are the working capital of thought, fixed by signs, widened by use, and made precise through definition, denotation, and connotation, so that reasoning can proceed on terms that stay stable.
• Empirical and Scientific Method: Empirical thinking follows conjunctions that experience has repeated, and so cannot tell a real connection from coincidence. Scientific method breaks a gross fact into conditions that can be varied, replaces suction with atmospheric pressure, and so gains both certainty and power over the novel, which is why Dewey treats it as a moral as well as an intellectual discipline.

Core Arguments & Influence

• Thinking as the Tool of Life: Dewey begins from the practical value of thought. A creature without it is pushed by appetite and circumstance; a thinking creature acts on signs of what is absent and future. Language, tools, warning buoys, lighthouses, weather services, and highways are all devices for making consequences visible in advance. Thought also changes the status of things, since an object that carries a meaning is a different object from one that is merely sensed, and a world of meanings is a world in which action can be planned. From that starting point Dewey argues that training in thought is not an ornament of schooling but its central business, because the alternative is drift, and drift is expensive.
• The Scientific Attitude: The preface names the scientific attitude as the steadying factor schools need. Dewey gives that phrase content in the chapters on empirical and scientific method, where experiment replaces the passive waiting upon repeated cases. Science, on this account, is not a body of results but a way of treating facts: varying conditions, isolating a minute fact that explains a gross one, and using the more familiar fact to interpret the stranger. The attitude is also moral, since it requires the subordination of the loud and immediate to the small and remote, and it underwrites the idea of progress by making improvement a matter of method rather than accident. In the classroom the attitude shows itself in giving pupils something to do as well as something to learn.
• Discipline and Freedom: Dewey refuses the usual opposition. Discipline is a result of interest pursued to its conclusion, not a cause supplied by drill, and freedom is the trained power of thought rather than the absence of restraint. Impulse must be checked long enough for reflection, but the check should come from the demands of the work, not from external authority. The chapter on play and work extends the point: play without regard for outcome becomes fooling, work without interest in its means becomes drudgery, and the healthy attitude holds both together, which is why Dewey calls the ideal both playful and serious. The test of freedom is whether a pupil can carry an idea through to its consequences without being driven to it.
• Language and the Growth of Meaning: Language is not identical with thought, but it is necessary to it, since meanings must be carried by signs. A word selects a meaning out of vagueness, preserves it, and transports it to new cases. Dewey calls the sign a fence, a label, and a vehicle, and each metaphor marks a different service. The dangers are equally clear: words can be repeated without meaning, studies can become verbal, and a school can reward fluency instead of understanding. His remedy is more experience of things, a wider and more exact vocabulary, and practice in consecutive discourse, so that speech becomes an instrument of inquiry rather than a substitute for it.
• Education as the Training of Thought: The last part turns method into teaching. Occupations such as gardening, cooking, and shop work are valuable because they present real problems, not because manual activity is magical. Observation should serve a question, information should arrive as testimony to be judged, and the recitation should be a time for thinking rather than rehearsal. Dewey’s closing chapter sets balances that no rule can fix in advance: the unconscious background and conscious analysis, process and product, the near and the far. Teaching, on this view, is the art of holding those balances while the pupil acquires the habits that will outlast the lesson. It also explains why no method can be applied mechanically, since the balance shifts with the subject and with the pupil.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of How We Think?

This edition gives you the complete 1910 text of How We Think in a clean, reflowable form. The preface, the three parts, all sixteen chapters, and the index are here, with the chapters kept in their original order. The page you are reading summarises each part, so you can move from an overview to the passage you need without losing the thread of the argument. The paragraphs are short and the type is clean.

The book is short enough to read in a few sittings and dense enough to return to. Dewey’s examples, a missed appointment, a pole on a ferryboat, bubbles on a tumbler, make the argument concrete, and the chapters on language and the recitation are full of observation that still fits a classroom. No prior study of philosophy is assumed, and the prose carries its technical terms lightly, defining them as the argument needs them. The argument can be followed by a reader who has never opened a book of philosophy.

Download the epub, kepub, or azw3 file for your reader, or read the chapters here. The text is in the public domain, and this edition is free to keep and to share. If you are teaching, the chapter groups below can serve as a reading schedule, and the questions at the end of the page can open a first discussion in class. Start with the part that answers your present question and let the rest wait.

• Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #37423 supplies the full text of the 1910 edition, including the preface, the index, and the original chapter divisions, and it is the source for this page.
• Complete 1910 structure Three parts and sixteen chapters, from the analysis of what thought means to the closing balances of the classroom. Nothing is abridged, and the chapter titles follow the original wording.
• Readable on any device The epub and kepub files reflow on phones, tablets, and e-readers, and the azw3 file loads directly on Kindle. Notes and chapter breaks survive the conversion, so the reading experience matches the printed book.
• Chapter groups and links Each of the twelve chapter groups below summarises the argument in a few sentences, and the related titles connect this book to Dewey’s longer educational writings and to the older tradition he was answering. The shelf pages also list other editions by the same authors.

Part of: Philosophy Classics · John Dewey