 In his chapter on Dewey’s ethical theory in Intellectual Portrait, Hook also stressed Dewey’s belief that since normative ethical statements were cognitive empirical hypotheses, scientific method could be used to mediate between conflicting hypotheses (Hook, John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait, 1939, Chapter VII, “Standards, Ends, and Means”). Thus Hook assumed that there was a method of verification for normative hypotheses by an appeal to their consequences. Hook’s illustrations of this use of scientific method in ethics, however, are characteristically developed for cases of competing social, economic or educational policies. Even in these contexts, the question can be raised whether there is a blurring of the differences between the ways in which verification functions in scientific experiments and the ways verification can function in decisions evaluating social policy. Further, even if it were conceded that it is possible to achieve a kind of “verification” or “disconfirmation” of policy decisions on such issues as the desirability of minimum wage legislation or the prohibition of narcotics in American society, Hook’s critics were concerned about the distance between the notion of “mediation of conflicting opinions by an appeal to consequence” in such contexts of decision among policy options and the contexts of the emerging disputes over practices of racial genocide or the use of concentration camps as instruments of ideological rehabilitation. Consequently, Dewey’s ethical empiricism was subject to continuous challenge during the 1930s and 40s on the charge that it presupposed an optimistic interpretation of human nature which could not be sustained in light of the new realities of totalitarianism and genocide.