Looking through the index in Experience and Nature, I found that
Dewey mentions correspondence in Ch. 7, "Nature, Life and Body-Mind."
Here Dewey rejects the kind of Cartesian dualism advocated by Herbert
Spencer, which implies that there is a correspondence between an outer
order ("life") and an inner order ("mind"). According to Dewey, "the
genuine correspondence of life and mind with nature is like the
correspondence of two persons who 'correspond' in order to learn each one
of the acts, ideas and intents of the other one, in such ways as to
modify one's own intents, ideas and acts, and to substitute partaking in
a common and inclusive situation for separate and independent
performances. If the organism merely repeats in the series of its own
self-enclosed acts the order already given without, death speedily closes
its career. Fire for instance consumes tissue; that is the sequence in
the external order. Being burned to death is the order of 'inner' events
which corresponds with this 'outer' order. What the organism actually
does is to act so as to change its relationship to the environment; and
as organisms get more complex and human this change of relationship
involves more extensive and enduring changes in the environmental order.
The aim is not to protract a line of organic events parallel to external
events, but to form a new scheme of affairs to which both organic and
environmental relations contribute, and in which they both partake"
(LW1, p. 215-16).
Dewey, I think, reconstructs "correspondence" pragmatically by
making emphasizing its active, processual nature. Correspondence is not
mere copying. It is more like getting in tune with. The Burke quote
about the importance of not mistaking a volcano for a prarie strikes me
as consistent with Dewey here. According to Burke, we must construct our
descriptions so that they correspond with the possible consequences of
future events that nature holds in store. The word "volcano" represents
a potential event and prepares for acting in a particular way toward the
thing so named. (That's poorly stated, but I hope you get my drift.)
When (Deweyan) pragmatists refer, in ordinary speech and not in
any mystifying or technical sense, to "external reality," do they mean
anything beyond "nature" or "the enviroment" or "the world" or "the
Other"? My impression is that they don't, and I'm sure someone will set
me straight if I'm misreading. Is this sense of correspondence in tune
with Rorty and Peirce? Is it convergentism?
Another quote:
"To see the organism *in* nature, the nervous system in the
organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the
answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they
will be seen to be *in*, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in
history, in a moving, growing never finished process." (p. 224)
--Matt
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Matthew Hartman
Department of English
SUNY at Buffalo
mhartman who-is-at acsu.buffalo.edu
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