William James

“ Unlike Spencer, again, Dewey is a pure empiricist. There is nothing real, whether being or relation between beings, which is not direct matter of experience. There is no Unknowable or Absolute behind or around the finite world. No Absolute, either, in the sense of anything eternally constant; no term is static, but everything is process and change.
Like Spencer, again, Dewey makes biology and psychology continuous. 'Life,' or 'experience,' is the fundamental conception; and whether you take it physically or mentally, it involves an adjustment between terms. ”

“ Dewey would reply that the concrete facts themselves are what keep his scepticism from being systematic in any practically objectionable sense. Experience is continually enlarging, and the object-factors of our situations are always getting problematic, making old truths unsatisfactory, and obliging new ones to be found. The object-factors moreover are common to ourselves and others; and our truths have to be-mated with those of our fellow men. ”

“ Then only does the S arrest attention, and its contrast with the self become acute. 'Knowing,' therefore, or the conscious relation of the object to the self, is thus only an incident in the wider process of 'adjustment,' which includes unconscious adjustments as well . [p. 4]
This leads Professor Dewey and his disciples to a peculiar view of ' fact.' What is a fact? A fact and a theory have not different natures, as is usually supposed, the one being objective, the other subjective. ”

“ There is no cosmology, no positive account of the order of physical fact, as contrasted with mental fact, and no account of the fact (which I assume the writers to believe in) that different subjects share a common object-world. ”

“ In brief, S is a stimulus intellectually irritating; P is an hypothesis in response; SP is a mental action, which normally is destined to lead or pass into action in a wider sense. The sense of 'objectivity' in the S emerges emphatically only when the P is problematic and the action undefined. ”

“ They interact and develop each other without end; for each action of E upon O changes O, whose reaction in turn upon ·E changes E, so that E's new action upon O gets different, eliciting a new reaction, and so on indefinitely. The situation gets perpetually 'reconstructed,' to use another of Professor Dewey's favorite words, and this reconstruction is the process of which all reality consists. ”