SOURCE: "Primary Experience as Settled Meaning: Dewey's Conception of Experience," in Philosophy Today, Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 29-42.

In the following excerpt, Ryan examines Dewey's views on personal experience, concluding that he never was able to reconcile his seemingly contradictory views.

This essay will examine and attempt to clarify Dewey's conception of immediate or primary experience. In particular, my aim is to extricate Dewey's actual view from an interpretation still popular among pragmatists consisting of: 1) the phenomenology of "blooming, buzzing, confusion" and 2) its ontological correlate designating a "brute" encounter with "primal, pulsative" reality. Dewey himself, to the contrary, is ahead of his contemporary supporters in overcoming this paradigm whose roots lie in Locke and traditional empiricism. His is not the ontology of other versus self, in-itself existential event versus subjective object of experience, even given the "pragmatic" codicil that the latter knows the former by "interacting" with it...