In the whirling Heraclitean flux which is the pragmatist’s universe, there are
no absolutes. There are no facts, no fixed laws of logic, no certainty, no
objectivity.
There are no facts, only provisional “hypotheses” which for the moment
facilitate human action. There are no fixed laws of logic, only mutable
“conventions,” without any basis in reality. (Aristotle’s logic, Dewey
remarks, worked so well for earlier cultures that it is now overdue for a
replacement.) There is no certainty—the very quest for it, says Dewey, is a
fundamental aberration, a “perversion.” There is no objectivity—the object is
created by the thought and action of the subject.