Is John Dewey's Thinking about Social Inquiry a historic Failure?

This paper critically examines the explanation of the failure of John Dewey’s thinking about social inquiry presented by the Deleuze-inspired Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers in her 2006 book The Virgin and the Neutrino (La Vierge et le Neutrino). Despite the fact that Dewey’s thinking about social inquiry has inspired several prominent contemporary social thinkers such as Axel Honneth and Bruno Latour, it has also been documented by Peter Manicas that Dewey’s thinking about social inquiry historically has been a pragmatic failure in the sense that it has been unable to change the direction of mainstream social science. Hence the relevance of Stengers’ attempt to explain the failure of his thinking
about social inquiry. The first part of the paper explicates Stengers’ explanation of Dewey’s failure. First it describes how she takes Dewey’s thinking about social inquiry to be based on the thought that social inquiry should be practiced in a scientific-experimental way as well as guided by a political-democratic telos that transcends this experimental method. Then it explains how Stengers takes even well-intentioned social scientists to have been forced to reject this conception of social inquiry because they are so worried about their public status as real scientists that it is practically impossible for them to accept a conception of social
inquiry which, like Dewey’s, give it an explicitly politicaldemocratic
goal that breaks with the dominant, public image of science as politically neutral. Finally, the first part also describes how Stengers, at bottom, takes the failure of Dewey’s conception of social inquiry to be rooted in a transcendent conception of philosophy according to which it is the job of philosophy to create public peace and order by transcendent means. With Stengers’ explanation of Dewey’s failure in place, the second part of the paper then moves on to evaluate this explanation. Here it is critically pointed out that while it is true that Dewey thought social inquiry should be practiced in an experimental way as well as guided by a democratic telos, he did not take this telos to be one that transcends the experimental method. Instead, he thought of it as immanent within experimental practice. At the same time, it is also pointed out that Stengers’ attribution of a transcendent conception of philosophy to Dewey is based on a misunderstanding. In this way, the paper comes to the conclusion that Stengers’ explanation of the failure of Dewey’s conception of social inquiry should, itself, be seen as a failure, and ends by pointing out that this is a real shame, since it means that her own positive thoughts about how to think about social inquiry does not really confront the important questions that a real engagement with Dewey’s actual thinking about social inquiry would have raised.