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Saturday 15 February 2014

Why Relativism in the American Schools

http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/

Just a reminder that the movement of relativism in our schools, including Catholic schools, has been a long time coming. And remember that Dewey was an aetheist who wanted to separate religion from education.

I see this is Catholic schools, other than NAPCIS schools...

One traditional question that Dewey addressed in a series of essays between 1906 and 1909 was that of the meaning of truth. Dewey at that time considered the pragmatic theory of truth as central to the pragmatic school of thought, and vigorously defended its viability. Both Dewey and William James, in his book Pragmatism (1907), argued that the traditional correspondence theory of truth, according to which the true idea is one that agrees or corresponds to reality, only begs the question of what the “agreement” or “correspondence” of idea with reality is. Dewey and James maintained that an idea agrees with reality, and is therefore true, if and only if it is successfully employed in human action in pursuit of human goals and interests, that is, if it leads to the resolution of a problematic situation in Dewey’s terms. The pragmatic theory of truth met with strong opposition among its critics, perhaps most notably from the British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Dewey later began to suspect that the issues surrounding the conditions of truth, as well as knowledge, were hopelessly obscured by the accretion of traditional, and in his view misguided, meanings to the terms, resulting in confusing ambiguity. He later abandoned these terms in favor of “warranted assertiblity” to describe the distinctive property of ideas that results from successful inquiry.