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Fishman. While the likes of Janet Emig and Peter Elbow have
written about Dewey over the years, Jones and Fishman seem to
have put the most concentrated effort behind, as the latter
writes in a 1993 contribution to College Composition and
Communication, “the explication of Dewey’s work and its
consequences for composition” (315), the two having either
published or presented six essays between them towards such an
end throughout the mid-‘90s.
Jones’ essays, for the most part, seek to demonstrate the
roots of the “process” theories and practices of Peter Elbow and
Donald Murray in Dewey’s “non-foundational,” “experimental,” and
“pragmatic” philosophy, whose “series of dynamic relationships
between knowledge, language, and experience” (“A Pragmatic
Reconstruction …” 2) allow for “the assertion of contingent
beliefs possible without promising the final closure of absolute
certainty” (“Beyond the Postmodern Impasse of Agency” 86) and,
through this, offer the potential for “profound philosophical
and social transformations” (88). The purpose for pursuing
those congruities, whether conscious debts or not, is two fold
for Jones: first, to defend through philosophical explanation
the “most effective practices” of those “process” proponents
like Elbow and Murray from the “anti-foundational” critiques
like those articulated by Lester Faigley, Patricia Bizzell, and
James Berlin and, second, to critique the “agentless
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