How We Think

John Dewey

How We Think by John Dewey is a classic book about thinking. The contents of Dewey’s book are applicable to innovation, learning, business management, and many other fields. John Dewey’s view of thinking, and thinking skills, as elaborated in “How We Think” is surprisingly fresh and consistent. Dewey warns against the confusion of mental analysis (looking for the general aspects of an object) with physical analysis (dissection into parts), which leads to the study of living objects as if they were dead. John Dewey’s thought is the essence of systems thinking, which is so fashionable today. In “How We Think,” John Dewey also concludes that we can be taught to “think well” and discusses how. Starting with beliefs and the consequences they bring about, Dewey suggests that knowledge is relative to its interaction with the world, concluding in the end that real freedom is intellectual. According to Dewey, the act of thinking itself is in many cases more important than what is being thought about. Dewey’s analysis of thought will help readers to consider important elements of thinking (and writing) such as: (1) the iterative “ebb and flow” between inductive and deductive thinking; (2) what is necessary to train their minds to think better. Though written years ago, “How We Think” is an easy book to read and well worth the time spent on it.

PREFACE

Our schools are troubled with a multiplication of studies, each in turn having its own multiplication of materials and principles. Our teachers find their tasks made heavier in that they have come to deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass. Unless these steps in advance are to end in distraction, some clew of unity, some principle that makes for simplification, must be found. This book represents the conviction that the needed steadying and centralizing factor is found in adopting as the end of endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call scientific. This scientific attitude of mind might, conceivably, be quite irrelevant to teaching children and youth. But this book also represents the conviction that such is not the case; that the native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. If these pages assist any to appreciate this kinship and to consider seriously how its recognition in educational practice would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste, the book will amply have served its purpose.

It is hardly necessary to enumerate the authors to whom I am indebted. My fundamental indebtedness is to my wife, by whom the ideas of this book were inspired, and through whose work in connection with the Laboratory School, existing in Chicago between 1896 and 1903, the ideas attained such concreteness as comes from embodiment and testing in practice. It is a pleasure, also, to acknowledge indebtedness to the intelligence and sympathy of those who coöperated as teachers and supervisors in the conduct of that school, and especially to Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, then a colleague in the University, and now Superintendent of the Schools of Chicago.

В В В В New York City, December, 1909.

PART ONE:

THE PROBLEM OF TRAINING THOUGHT

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT IS THOUGHT?

§ 1. Varied Senses of the Term

Four senses of thought, from the wider to the limited

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 pr