Instrumentalism

instrumentalism: see Dewey, John.

---

instrumentalism

 or experimentalism

Philosophy advanced by John Dewey holding that what is most important in a thing or idea is its value as an instrument of action and that the truth of an idea lies in its usefulness. Dewey favored these terms over the term pragmatism to label the philosophy on which his views of education rested. His school claimed that cognition has evolved not for speculative or metaphysical purposes but for the practical purpose of successful adjustment. Ideas are conceived as instruments for transforming the uneasiness arising from facing a problem into the satisfaction of solving it.

---

Instrumentalism 

the subjective idealist doctrine of the American philosopher John Dewey and his followers, a variety of pragmatism.

In the instrumentalist view, consciousness (or intelligence, in Dewey’s terms) is a means of adaptation to changing environmental conditions: logical concepts, ideas, and scientific laws and theories are all simply instruments (hence the name “instrumen-talism”), tools, “keys to situations,” or “plans for action.” In thus rejecting the objective content of knowledge and the view that truth is a reflection of material reality, instrumentalism regards truth in purely functional respects as something that “assures success in a given situation.” Taking the concept “situation” as central, instrumentalism singles out the organism (for example, an animal, a human being, or a society) and the environment as the chief aspects of a situation and declares the central problem to be the analysis of the relations between them. Insofar as the instrumentalist point of view regards environmental features as derivative from the actions of the organism, the organism appears as something primary, a view that makes it possible to characterize instrumentalism as one of the many varieties of subjective idealism.

The leading instrumentalists (Dewey, S. Hook) are active opponents of socialism and of Marxist-Leninist theory.

B. E. BYKHOVSKII