So what was it about Peirce's pragmatism that was so appealing to Dewey? Pragmatism is really more of an anti-philosophy. The prime directive of pragmatism is to look for the way any belief would cash out in real experience -- and this comes with the corollary that if some theoretical novelty has no observable consequences, then it's only so much more verbiage. So at this point, Dewey gets to burn all his old notes (I'm imagining; I don't have a source for this) about Hegelian Absolute Being etc

So let's think more about the trade that Dewey made in this exchange: he gets his powerful anti-philosophy and all he has to do is to think about how ideas bear consequences in the world of experience. Seems reasonable? Remember -- you're looking at a post-Hegelian. For Hegel, every atom of experience can be analyzed and interpreted to find the participation of that atom in a larger ecosystem of consciousnesses driving world-historical revolutions in self-awareness.The part goes up to the whole

The equivalent parallel of this for students of Peirce is that here, too, every atom of experience is processed by the system of meaning managed by some organism -- germ cell, human, Hobbesian leviathan, whatever. And as with Hegel, these glimpses of meaning add up to larger & larger systems -- but in an open-ended sense. No telos. The critical thing here is that there is a definite process that concerns any particular organism capable of winning-through to meaning: viz. the process of semiosis.

I'm going to try to make this intro to semiosis as straightforward as I can, but I want to say straight off the bat that this subject usually requires people to radically reconstrue certain concepts.

The first part of semiosis is "firstness," the direct part of raw experience. "First" experience is going to be the ground of reference later. But for now, "firsts" are pure feeling, pure sense, that kind of thing. For Peirce, the continua of experience (like heat, color, or weight) are fundamental

Organisms experience firstness. It's the stuff experience is built out of, in fact. And for Peirce, the fundamental stuff at the bottom of the universe is "tychic," meaning it's at its root subject to random chance. Quantum mechanics are a pretty good comparison if you want an idea of this sense of a cosmos that is at its base fundamentally chance and inchoate.

Anyway, the thing of it is that those glimpses of "first" experience sometimes get ensnared with each other. This leads us to 2ndness

"Secondness" starts to get a little harder to apprehend. Secondness describes those aspects of experience in which two things create a kind of correlate relation to each other. This dyad of firsts is the basis for brute fact, actuality, singularity, and reaction. Secondness is the domain of cause-and-effect. In the experience of organism, secondness is the base of apprehension of correlates, of causality, of *this* as distinct from *that*. An organism's reflex is behavioral secondness.

Now here's the really fun part: "Thirdness."

You see, some of those tangles of experience that we've identified as secondness also tangle in another glimpse of experience -- and sometimes that glimpse experience actually mediates between the dyad of experiences of secondness. That is, when you get a 3rd bit of experience that also links 1 and 2, this creates the potential for mediated access -- or we might call it "translative" or "interpretive" access. This is where "meaning" starts to enter.

For a Peircean, "meaning" does not involve reference to a Cartesian world of spirit. Quite to the contrary, "meaning" involves little more or less than the translation of a dyad of experiences through a third term. And the relationships between experiences 1 and 3, or 2 and 3, can themselves become the "dyads" for further translation by further "thirds." And from this elemental categorization of the ways experiences stand in as 1, 2, and 3, Peirce can create a larger logical structure of meaning

In case I didn't quite make it clear: these simple stances between experiences can accumulate and create a vast, inter-connected system of meaning. It might be helpful at this point to think about Behaviorist theories of learning, because they are derivative albeit impoverished from this basic approach. The founding text of Behaviorism rejects introspection -- but Peirce went much farther in his "Four Incapacities" argument. Look it up later.
The upshot here is that interpreted life compounds.

So to recap:

1stness = vibez

2ndness = leo_pointing_meme.jpeg

3rdness = pointing_spiderman.png

Semiosis is basically a process by which experiences like these come to bear on each other in these stances.

1st, some experiences serve as "reference" to others. 2nd, some experiences serve as "vehicles" for others. 3rd, some experiences serve as "interpretants" or "translatants" between 1 and 2.

Now if you're paying very close attention, then you've noticed that this is a process by which meaning enters experience. A third experience translates between two others, or provides for mediated and reflexive access.

For Dewey, this caused a revolution in thinking about education. Deweyite education is all about working up from the real experiences of real people and intensifying the meaning they derive from their behaviors: Meeting people where they are, but pushing them to critical thought.

So this meant that Dewey was perfectly comfortable working with vocational education -- even though at first he was only allowed to work with voc-ed students because they tended to be the ethnic underclass. Deweyite education has no chill w.r.t. education that makes no cash-value difference for its students, and it sets the expectation that pragmatic education should deepen and intensify the significance or meaning that people derive from their behaviors -- even behaviors like dry-cleaning.

Deweyite education was a hit, and perhaps more importantly it was backed with a generally progressive sensibility that met its moment in the Great Depression. Pragmatists including Dewey believed that this same process of learning could also be applied to organisms greater than an individual human, and so the semiotic process could also be seen at work in the deliberative processes of a free society. The public school, the union-hall, the voting booth are all venues for pragmatic deliberation.

Anyway, this inclusive and progressive approach was really hunky-dory for New Dealers who were looking for a way to make public institutions relevant to the disaster of the Great Depression.

Dewey predominated in educational theory for decades.

One of the projects in educational research during those subsequent decades sought to create a common vocabulary for describing the types of learning that were happening in higher education. The lead researcher on this was Benjamin S Bloom.

What Bloom created to describe patterns of educational outcomes is now called Bloom's Taxonomy, and if you were taught at an institution run by professionals then chances are that those people are already aware of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Bloom's Taxonomy is most commonly understood as describing a sequence of cognitive skills beginning with the simplest (recall) and advancing to more and more complex skills (creation). Do the simple before the complex: As it's normally taught, the lesson stops here.

But if you recall the predominance of Deweyite approaches to education during the period of Bloom's taxonomy, the taxonomy becomes mildly more interesting.

Bloom's Taxonomy describes stages of semiosis, really. The lowest stages of cognitive skill deal with firstness -- the mere awareness and recognition of experience. The middle stages deal with secondness -- correlative pattern-matching behaviors that develop through straightforward causal chains. The most advanced stages involve thirdness.

"Thirdness" cognitive skills, like critical thinking, are those that involve the recognition of the mediated and reflexive access that we have to our knowledge through symbols.

So let's imagine a Deweyite baker. At the most basic level of learning (firstness) the baker is paying attention to the experiences of baking: smells, feels, time, etc. At the intermediate levels the baker is refining practice, such as by following recipes and techniques. But at the third level, the baker gets weird...