SPECTATOR THEORY AND JOHN DEWEY

We are not spectators.

We are dynamic beings.  We move around.  We engage with the world in three dimensions.  Yet our culture conditions us to be spectators.

Spectator theory insists that the world is observed from a single fixed point of reference.  Think of attending an opera;  you experience the performance from one fixed point.

The thought goes that with fixed viewpoints, we are able to establish facts and truths.  Knowledge, in this mindset, is only possible from single observational frames.  Only by looking at the world from the same pin hole will we be able to make any sense of it.  The scientific method cannot exist without single and repeatable viewpoints.

Our current culture is dominated by spectator theory.  We don’t know how to understand the world unless there is a single reference frame.  The world happens outside ourselves.  We are observers, and generally passive at that.

Another way to understand spectator theory is to recall the renaissance picture plane.  Single viewpoint.  Nobody’s is different.  And when everyone has the same viewpoint, only then is knowledge possible.

John Dewey, writing in the middle of the last century, was one critic of the spectator theory of knowledge.  He sought to replace the single point spectator mindset with something more involving and plural.

“Dewey aimed to displace this conception of knowledge with a notion of inquiry, understood as the struggle of human intelligence to solve problems.  The goal of such inquiry was not to arrive at a certain picture of the nature of things, but at an inevitably provisional solution to the practical and intellectual problem and sparked inquiry”

This quote is taken from Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces.

So Dewey gives us a unique and refreshing view of what we have been hammering at for awhile in these pages.  He, like us, inherently distrusts the one viewpoint world.  He sees the superiority of the development of solutions with plurality.  He is interested in a notion of inquiry that is principally interested in solving problems.

And he has certainly discarded the one viewpoint view of the world.

Thank you, John Dewey!