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Critical Analysis of Articles on John Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry

John Dewey is one of the most prominent proponents of the American school of thought that is now recognized as pragmatism. Basically, pragmatism suggests that knowledge is something that gets developed and or acquired and is not innate among human or any other specie thereby rejecting the dualistic metaphysics and epistemology of modern philosophy. Dewey also heavily proposed, during his prime years or the peak of his popularity in the academe, specifically during the first half of the 20th century, a time when the Soviet Union was still on a trend of a continuous rise to power, that the process of knowledge acquisition arises from another process wherein there is an active adaptation of an individual to his environment. This effectively suggests the idea that the mind gets developed and filled with knowledge as an individual passively observes and learns more about the world he is moving in, drawing ideas from the different stimuli and experience that he encounters. Dewey’s high regard on the validity of pragmatism is what led to his future studies on the theory of inquiry, which is, in a lot of ways, based on the original premise of pragmatism.
In 1938, Dewey, published his work on logic about the Theory of Inquiry. His work was divided into numerous parts some of which include discussions on the structure of inquiry and the construction of judgments, propositions and terms, the logic of the scientific method, and the different types of discourses, among others. It is in this work where he stated that “as the methods of the sciences improve, corresponding changes take place” . Basically, this work was a collection of John Dewey’s main arguments about different topics in the theory of inquiry. In terms of the different patterns of inquiry, for example, the author discussed how every idea originates from a simple suggestion which leads to the logical conclusion that every idea can be considered as a suggestion but was immediately countered by the statement that not all suggestion are ideas because some suggestions remain to be suggestions and do not develop into ideas. However, for someone who wants to gain all the information about John Dewey’s theory of inquiry, it would be more advantageous to read the original text published by him and not just summaries.
In another source published in the Journal of Political Economy, author Ralph Lindgren compared the principles of Adam Smith’s version of the theory of inquiry and how it has been generally regarded as a clear example of the enlightenment practice of adapting beliefs in the natural law, Newtonian mechanics, and the benevolent providence to the study of society . The author used an eclectic approach in discussing Smith’s version of the theory of inquiry. In general, the author proposed that Smith’s version of the theory suggests that there is a natural order of things and that human consciousness and intervention would not usually matter.
Thirdly, in an article published in the Journal of Educational Administration, the author examined the philosophic sources of Dewey’s theory of inquiry by means of reflective methods that are pertinent to the educational administration which meant that the research was done qualitatively. In the end, the author concluded that reviewed relevant to the features of Dewey’s philosophy shows significant implications for the use of reflective methods in the field of educational administration .

Draft II: Annotated Bibliography

This source focused on the business ethical implications of some of the most common corporate marketing practices exercised by large scale organizations. The authors argued that ethical practices and other aspects of corporate social responsibility must remain a key aspect of company’s marketing practices among other business operations in order to effectively take into account the institution’s past, present, and future stakeholders. The authors basically focused on discussing, scrutinizing, and elaboration the notion of ethical corporate marketing, based on the argument that it must be a prerequisite for all organizations, with emphasis on BP Deep water Horizon on the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe that happened in 2010. All in all the authors agree that corporate social responsibility and ethics must be one of the top priorities of big corporations.
This article outlines the theory of enterprise entity. The author, Adolf, in his paper, argues that corporations have been previously conceived as an artificial person coming into existence through creation by a sovereign power. However, these conceptions changed as corporations managed to create their own identities. The entity theory also argues that the operations and economic activities of a business can be different, even totally different, from that of its owners. This means that the assets and liabilities of an enterprise may not be considered as the assets and liabilities of its owners but all the people involved in its operations, which is what makes this theory a fundamental to modern accounting.
The objective of the author in this article was to review the existing literatures at the time of writing that link the ownership and location strategies to economic geography and the different theories of globalization, which means that the paper examines globalization considering the possible conflicts between markets and the government’s management of the economy, and other factors that may significantly affect it. Based on the author’s analysis, he was able to discover that globalization is a key factor that affects the occurrence of political challenges, growth in the rate of global capitalism, and the changing moral standards in the business industry; and that all the factors that they discovered were closely intertwined and present a formidable research agenda to which the international business research community is uniquely fitted to respond .
This source was, in fact, a chapter from a large book entitled The Oxford Handbook on Corporate Social Responsibility. It is the fourth chapter and the main point of this chapter is that the true philosophy of sustainability is the interdependence of the community and the enterprising entities and the fact that businesses must be able to make money without doing the members of the community any harm; the same principle applies to the environment, and other things that may get negatively affected as a result of excessive exploitation for corporate purposes. The authors presented different scenarios and cases where corporate social responsibility’s principles may be inserted and applied in order to minimize the corporate footprints that are mostly negative that business activity in the planet would leave, some of which may be present by the time the current generation of people have been long gone. The authors ended by saying that managing any form of business is a complex task but no matter how complex, managers and owners must still be able to make their operations sustainable and not damaging to the community or to the environment.
This article investigates the implications of the BP Oil Disaster that happened in the Gulf of Mexico that also damaged the livelihood of the members of the community living near the area of the disaster, and of course, the environment, on corporate social responsibility. This was essentially a case study that focused on the BP Oil Disaster. The authors identified the elements and factors that played significant roles in the disaster, and how the government and the responsible party responded to the disaster and took responsibility. The authors then proposed that reforms be made focusing on new protections designed to increase corporate social responsibility, root out green washing and formalize the penalization of organizations that fail, especially those that do so continuously, to abide by the established corporate social responsibility standards.
This article examined the business applications of the principles of corporate social responsibility which is largely concerned with the question: what do the business community and organizations get out of CSR. The authors revolved around these types of question throughout the paper, starting off by providing some historical background and perspective and then proceeding to the more specific cases. In conclusion, the authors stated that CSR is an important aspect in the maximization of the companies’ financial well-being.

Draft III: Annotated Bibliography of 10 Sources

This source summarizes some of the major points in Dewey’s famous theory of inquiry. Aside from summarizing what Dewey said in his original paper, the author also presented his own analysis of the theory stating in the end of his argument that Dewey was still very far from endorsing Aristotle’s claim that the pursuit for clarity for its own sake is the higher form of human activity despite significant between the arguments of the two.
In this article, the author discussed the difference between the usual juxtapositions between qualitative and quantitative researches particularly the positivist and interpretative approaches to qualitative methods. Basically, the author compared how these two qualitative methods are applied and tested them in an effort to examine which one is better. After analyzing and testing the two, Lin concluded that a combination of positivist and interpretative qualitative work would be better than one that just specializes in just one method.
This paper presented the results of a custom made content analysis of the titles and descriptions used in 44 graduate programs in different colleges and universities in the U.S. and compared their respective results to the ones obtained from earlier published literatures. The method used was quantitative and the objective was to determine whether quantitative methods are still prevalent in relation to qualitative ones. In the end, the authors concluded based on the results that quantitative methods are still used in a large majority of the courses they studied.
In this article, Marrafino compared the two types of entrepreneurship namely the traditional business entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, how one operates as compared to the other, the principles that one follows compared to the other, among other points of comparison. In the paper, the author also developed a theoretical model which he thought could be applied to both entrepreneurship types. In order to test that model, it was considered against the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation and by drawing on the literature of entrepreneurship as well as data from researches conducted in businesses from other countries and or cities like Spain, and New Mexico.
This was an article published in the New York Times Magazine in 1970 about the then common belief of businessmen about businesses; that it is the social responsibility of businesses to make profits. The author revolves around this topic in the article touching the concepts of capitalism and the free-enterprise system, focusing largely on profitability and its impact on the businesses’ decision making processes.
This was a case study that focused on the determination of the real reasons behind the creation and implementation of the SHP or smallholder program by Monsanto, a transnational biotechnology, chemicals and seeds company. The authors argued that it was unethical for Monsanto to do so without sufficient evidences about the possible negative effects of their business operations.
This source is an essay that showed how venture capital transactions, corporate reorganizations, and other complex corporate practices affect shareholders, and how effective existing corporate laws have been in regulating the entire system. The focuses of the case were the companies Dodge and Ford. The authors concluded that the decision of the courts to implement stricter policies on companies that fail to abide by the corporate was a good and elegant solution to the existing complex legal and policy issue in the U.S.
The focus of this paper was global branding. It outlined and compared the different branding strategies that some of the largest companies in the world economy used to gain an advantage in their respective consumer bases. They authors discovered that it did not matter to consumers whether the brands they bought were American both in American and non-American subjects that they studied.
This paper summarizes the lessons that should have been learned by the governments in Africa from the long existing health problems in their continent, majority of which were caused by worsening economic conditions and reduced public finance for health services. The paper also talked about possible reforms that would have solved the said healthcare problems, noting that there is no other way to change the course of the situation than to make reforms.

References

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Lindgren, R. (1969). Adam Smith's Theory of Inquiry. Journal of Political Economy, 897-915.
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