Science & Tech Quote by John Dewey

Progress, Dewey insists, is less a straight march of facts than a series of imaginative mutinies. The line flatters science while quietly reframing it: the engine of discovery isn’t merely better measurement or stricter method, but the nerve to picture the world differently before the evidence is fully in. “Advance” arrives only after someone risks a hypothesis that feels, at first, slightly improper.

The key word is “audacity.” Dewey isn’t praising daydreaming; he’s praising a kind of disciplined insolence toward the obvious. The imagination he means is practical: the ability to propose a model, an experiment, a connection that the current vocabulary of a field can’t yet justify. That’s why the sentence works rhetorically: it places imagination where modern culture often refuses to place it, inside the lab, as a precondition for objectivity rather than its enemy.

The subtext is a philosophical argument about how humans know anything. Dewey, a pragmatist, distrusted the idea that knowledge is a mirror of reality. Inquiry is an activity: we generate possibilities, test them, revise our tools and concepts. Science, in this view, is not a cathedral of certainties but a workshop of daring proposals subjected to public checking.

Context matters. Writing in an era reshaped by Darwin, industrialization, and the professionalization of science, Dewey pushes back against both romantic anti-science sentiment and positivist self-congratulation. He’s threading a needle: defending scientific authority while warning scientists (and the public) that their greatest moments come from creative risk, not just procedural caution.