Dewey's Instrumentalism and Theory of Inquiry

John Dewey (1859–1952) earned his PhD in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1884, studying under the neo-Hegelian George Sylvester Morris, before teaching at the University of Michigan, then chairing the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1904, and finally spending the bulk of his long career, from 1904 to his retirement in 1930, at Columbia University. Dewey named his own version of pragmatism "instrumentalism," a term meant to capture his central claim that ideas, concepts, and theories are not passive mirrors or copies of an antecedently finished reality but instruments, tools forged by organisms to resolve what he called "problematic situations" — moments in which the ordinarily smooth coordination between an organism and its environment breaks down and requires active reconstruction.