The challenge to which Dewey`s Logic sets out to achieve is to provide a mode of reasoning that accounts for situations, which are shaped by such symbolically mediated discourse. In order to do so, Dewey`s "new logic" needs to fully account for their existential complexity and particularity, while providing a mode of inquiry that brings the desired level of satisfaction that progressively resolves the initial problematic situation in the process of reconstructing a more satisfactory one. The work, which takes place through what Dewey refers to as a "means-ends continuum," brings maximum scientific reasoning through "controlled inquiry" to the process, consistent with the complexity of the problem at hand.

Pattern of Inquiry

Inquiry-based logic is rooted in biology. This is a core axiom of Dewey`s Darwinian-based naturalistic epistemology and that which separates it from traditional schools of logic, whether those more empirically or rationalistically based. It is this assumption that grounds Dewey`s problem-solving functionalism in which the organism transacts life processes through an environmental medium in which privation and danger compel an instinctive search for restoration that typically moves beyond the always tentative equilibrium initially disturbed by the problematic situation. On this view, the requirements of living itself exhibit "a continual rhythm of disequilbriums and recoveries of equilibrium" (p. 34) with the pressing medium of need and the compulsion to survive driving the process of reconstruction.

The "searching activities" (p. 35) that follow are sequenced responses that take on different functions in the various stages in the hunt for satisfactory resolution, which are guided by the qualitative whole that defines the problem situation, on Dewey`s reading all the way through the means-ends continuum. "At each intermediary stage [en route to resolution] there is still tension between contact activities and those responses to stimuli through distance-receptors. Movement continues until integration is established...in the consummatory act" (p. 36) resulting in the resolution of whatever it was that drove the process of active searching. Thus, whether a stimulus or response, various functions of behavior do not stand alone. They are an organic part "of the total coordinated serial behavior" (p. 37) leading ultimately to the resolution of the focused upon problem. The various stages of behavior are instrumental in which their function is defined by what they accomplish at the given time toward the greater whole that is driving the process.

On this biological interpretation, "logical forms" can only but accrue through the process of investigation itself, in the cumulative construction of reality toward the desired restoration. To draw from our example, an understanding of the meaning and significance of literacy may emerge from a systematic examination of the conflicting definitional viewpoints, which propels the research that may bring a sense of resolution to the field missing out of the arguments and sources of evidence that are currently prevalent to this particular arena of investigation (Demetrion, 2004). The process, discussed more fully in later sections of this paper, requires a broad range of methodologies in the pursuit of questions and potentially fruitful lines of research that may come to be accepted as a warranted assertability, which may only open up as the work ensues in which the logic underlying it unfolds through what is discovered.