In This Short Excerpt, John Dewey expresses the pragmatist conviction—first stated by Jane Addams in Democracy and Social Ethics—that a society must cultivate dispositions of curiosity and understanding between its diversely situated members in order to sustain a robust and genuine democracy (MW 9:93). It is by our habitual exposure to the experiences of our fellow citizens that we can imagine and understand each other's diverse situations, struggles, and needs. In enabling such imagination and understanding, we create the possibility of fairly incorporating these diverse perspectives into the progressive changes we make to the shared institutions that structure our interactions, opportunities, and lives. It is also through exposure to diverse lived experiences that we can continuously reconstruct our shared conceptual resources for interpreting our social world in fairly representative ways, rather than selectively imposing the assumptions of a society's powerful members.
Non-pragmatist traditions have also recognized...
