Humanities B Truth Unit Inquiry and Truth
"Warranted assertion" is the term for Dewey’s version of the truth. Inquiry is initiated in conditions of doubt; it terminates in the establishment of conditions in which doubt is no longer needed or felt. It is this settling of conditions of doubt, a settlement produced and warranted by inquiry, which distinguishes the warranted assertion.
In his logic, Dewey gave his general definition of inquiry as "the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole".
For Dewey, the theory of inquiry is a generalized description of the formal conditions of intelligent action. Such action is provoked by problems of diverse kinds – political, ethical, scientific and aesthetic. It is essentially a reflective evaluation of existing conditions of shortcomings and possibilities.