Glad to see you are doing something more on Dewey. I had not read him in 2016, and my overall exposure to American philosophers was limited. I hope to read more of his work, time and energy permitting. In reading his How We Think, I was surprised that his efforts as an educator were probably as important to him as philosophy. That was, to me, significant. It seemed to cement his memory as great American. Was he the impetus for the eventual term, public intellectual? Or was that designation prominent, before his time? Public intellectuals may or may not be philosophers, seems to me, but in the broadest sense of the word (or even the narrowest?), all philosophers are.

我不知道杜威是不是美国哲学家，尽管有些人可能这么认为。还有几家我就不点名了——它们都符合一个基模;他们中的大多数人现在已经去世了，一些还活着的人要么受人尊敬，要么被人鄙视;即驳回或全部驳回。我宁愿“草草了事”，保持开放的心态。我发现实用主义者是最有趣的，因为他们有一种实用的方式来看待“事物”和“连接在一起”如何构成哲学研究的基础，在这个术语的最广泛的意义上。过去一些受人尊敬的哲学家被赋予了过多的赞誉，而其他一些人或多或少被遗忘了，他们有重要的观点和/或支持同时代人不认同的观点。我曾说过，在赞扬或谴责这样或那样的哲学思想时，需要考虑所有的情况。试着跳出太空。你不需要告诉任何人你的意图——这样你就可以随心所欲地进行实验，而不需要向同事或任何人解释。 Have some fun, along the way---you only get to do this once.
HGN.

1841年，查尔斯·麦凯(Charles Mackay)写了《非同寻常的流行错觉和人群的疯狂》(Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds)一书，并启发了路易丝·佩妮(Louise Penny)于2021年出版的最新Armand Gamache谜题。

In 1907 Francis Galton published a short article entitled Vox Populi in Nature used by James Surowiecki in his 2004 book The Wisdom of the Crowds.

In between these publications, John Dewey was born.

Dewey’s ideas of the crowd and Democracy, of god and nature, of any dualistic concept, changed in his early works to a holistic vision. I’m totally making this up, but it seems I detect a note of change when he reviews Francis Galton’s book Natural Inheritance in 1889. Maybe it started earlier. There Dewey makes a simple error (that no one seems to catch) reading a table pulled from Galton’s work. That error is excusable as modern statistics was in its first wave – there were three total in Dewey’s lifetime. Dewey spends most of the review talking about what now seem simple concepts of mean and distribution. But he makes a keen insight into the idea that statistics can determine natural kinds.

Galton took this insight into a eugenic social Darwinism that persists. On the other hand, Dewey would transform American politics and economy from a mainly capitalist program to a social democratic view culminating after his death in the civil rights movement.

The basic ideas of Dewey’s philosophy of Democracy were popular in his time. He came down on the wrong side of very few progressive movements in his lifetime. He championed or cheered on every liberal cause that eventually won the day based on the idea that Democracy creates an opportunity for broadspread flourishing.

Dewey’s democratic vision is a holistic and transactional experience (not the Trumpian transactional deal-making or Hobbesian social contract.) Democracy was a fundamental way of living for Dewey. Government is, at best, a tool to this view of everyday engagement.

That people don’t have public spheres today is not a loss because they rarely had them in Dewey’s day. Online social media allows one-to-many and many-to-many forums for Dewey’s ideal Democracy to materialize if we can get this right. Google has already shown the ability to predict flu outbreaks in internet traffic. Terrorist actions are monitored online. Crime can be caught early. The wisdom of the crowds is real.

但是杜威的民主思想还有一个与他的观点同等重要的另一面，那就是自由。这是一个严重的绊脚石，因为不是所有的行动和许多想法都对别人有害，即使一个人的自由思考和行动是有保证的。Facebook的怀疑指向了社交媒体造成的实际伤害。像波斯湾、伊拉克和阿富汗这样的民众战争可能成为民主的噩梦，尤其是当宣传和虚假情报浪费了公众的善意时。

The most promising solutions I see are the radical market strategies put forth by economic philosophers like Eric Posner and Glen Weyl in the PT show of that name. Ranked voting, engaged focus teams empowered to take action, and multiple publics engaged in deciding issue specifics that today are all but intractable to our current democratic systems.

The wisdom of the crowds is seemingly unharnessable when the public will is multimodal, and the winner takes all politics rule the day. Perhaps in a future setting, this will change. The issues at hand can’t wait for incremental solutions.

我对杜威的作品赞赏已久。还有你博客上关于政府的文章。我住在无处不在的中西部……在这个领域，“世界观”一词几乎被忽略了。这些年来，我就各种问题给当地报纸写信。这是一份重要的日报，在全州范围内发行。我的意见书很有礼貌，偶尔也会批评。有时，我希望是深思熟虑的。但是，几年前，我们停止了订阅。结果不太好。 They tried to offer us discounted rates. We declined because their news had too much spin for our taste. We live here for several reasons. Reading skewed news is not on the list.
Anyway, I still write them, time to time. Just to stir the kettle. They do not respond. I wonder if it is thus everywhere in the heartland. I suspect as much. The paper is aimed at a majority. Non-members need not expect recognition. Particularly those who have a broader 'world view'. We are here. They would 'rather 'not notice.. Doubly so if one does not buy their paper. Or their ideology.