Roberto Frega:

Interest in classical American Pragmatism in philosophy and outside has been growing in the last decade. In particular, it is the once forgotten Deweyan theory of knowledge and thinking that has most attracted scholars from different fields like education, cognitive psychology, theory of organisation and sociology of action. In this paper, I would like to show which are the philosophical reasons that lie behind this interest. 
In particular, my general aim is to show the implications of Dewey’s pragmatism in order to understand the practices that concern the production, distribution and functioning of knowledge in our societies. More precisely, once having proposed an interpretation of Dewey’s theory of thought and knowledge through the concept of thinking in action and through a functionalist theory of knowledge, I claim that on his basis the actual developments concerning the statute of knowledge in organisational and educational theories may be understood as a radical transformation on the logic of knowledge itself. 

Thinking and knowing in the technological age

I here explore the thesis that the idea of a secularisation of knowledge, pursued by pragmatism, has been neglected by the major philosophical schools of the century, while at the same time their interest was focalised on the question of secularising the notion of truth. I will define the concept of secularisation of knowledge in a philosophical, rather than in an anthropological, perspective. I then conclude with the claim that the core concern of Deweyan pragmatism in not technical instrumentalism or technology but the understanding of the role and function of knowledge in contemporary society.

From a technological age to a knowledge society

In this second part I introduce the topic of learning and education as the forms that a fully secularised conception of knowledge should assume. My aims will be to interpret the contemporary interest in learning and knowledge as the consequence of a secularised practice of knowledge and try to sort out the consequences of this transformation for philosophical practice. The main topic here will be to show how the notions of knowledge management, life-long learning, knowledge society, learning organisations, etc. belong to one and the same conception of knowledge and to define a framework for it. This analysis will be the starting point for a reflection on the consequences that all these practices of knowledge bear for a philosophical theory of knowledge and thinking. My claim here is than that the experimentations that are taking place in the fields of vocational training and work experiences are changing our actual conception of what knowledge is and that this feedback is of the utmost importance for philosophy today.

Knowledge society and cognitive democracy

In this third and last part, I will articulate the relation of the notion of knowledge society as theorised above to the philosophically more traditional (at least for pragmatist scholars) notion of cognitive democracy, in order to open up a still broader field of application for my interpretation. The main topic here will be the meaning of a theory of society based on the idea that learning will be the most important way for people of making experience of themselves, of others and in general of their lives. I will explore the Deweyan theory that democracy is inseparable from the idea of a personal self-realisation based on the development of intelligence. I will than show that this idea is already embedded in the concept of a learning society and his practice is in the process of being established in some advanced fields of work and training experiences.
I will end by reflecting on the consequences of this theory for philosophical practice, especially as regards the idea that the aim of philosophy should be to increase the "intelligent behaviour" of people. From there, it’s my claim, theoretical but also practical consequences will follow for the actual practice of philosophers.