Judgments of Practice
Dewey`s concept of judgments of practice has two meanings. The first is related to the resolution through inquiry of
problematic situations in the existential realm of living experience. The second is related to the methodology that
gives shape to the increasingly controlled inquiry that scientists engage in formal investigations.
In either case, the achievement is not the attainment of certainty, but one sufficiently satisfactory based on the
available evidence that brings a close to the case at hand. The close "which will resolve the predicament
in which the agent finds himself involved" (p. 169) will be as precise or as fluid as the situation that
defines the reconstruction as that determinative solution allows. For the field of adult literacy, any definition
of literacy that does emerge as a warranted assertion will most likely represent some combination of a culturally
acceptable interpretation of the meaning and significance of literacy with that of some technological precision in
the progressive capacity to read and write print texts. This at least is my provisional hypothesis, which will be spelled
out in greater detail later.
An analogy, which Dewey frequently draws on, is that of a judgment in a court of law in providing sufficient evidence
to close the case at hand. Although a legal decision is open to further consideration, it has a binding impact that can
only be opened if there is sufficient reason to modify the original verdict that typically requires a formal appeal
process. As in the case of a legal ruling, final judgment "is dependent on a series of partial
judgments" (p. 125) in which the cogency of inquiry all the way through the process inevitability bears
upon the quality of the final resolution. As Dewey more formally describes the means-ends continuum:
Every complex inquiry is marked by a series of stages that are relative (italics in original) completions.
For complex inquiries involve a constellation of sub-problems and the solution of each of them is a resolution of
some tension. Each such solution is a heightening of subject-matter, in direct ratio to the number and variety of
discrepant and conflicting conditions that are brought to unification. The occurrence of these judgments of
completion, not different in kind from those ordinarily called esthetic, constitutes a series of landmarks
in the progress of any undertaking. They are signs of achieved coherence of actual material and the consistency
of conceptual material (p. 178).
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