  At the core of Dewey’s later work is his pragmatist or “experimentalist” notion of what he calls intelligence or inquiry as problem-solving. This has reached its apogee in the successes of modern science, medicine, and engineering, but in Dewey’s naturalistic and historical view is continuous with, and arises from, mundane processes of inquiry and problem-solving or, as he put it in a text for educationalists, with How We Think (MW6, LW8). The goal of an inquiry is not to arrive at a certain picture of the nature of things, but to come up with an inevitably provisional solution to the practical and intellectual problem that sparked it – to resolve problematic situations. Inquiry should be understood as part of our struggle with an objectively precarious but improvable environment. Inquiry is demanded by what he calls an “incomplete” or “problematic” situation, that is, one in which our inherited habits and standard ways of doing things run into trouble, perhaps through our actions’ having unexpected consequences, through new needs and desires, or through conflict with others. These challenges prompt us to step back, identify the problem we are confronted with, and reflect on what to do next. Modern societies have an awesome exemplar of successful inquiry, in the natural sciences which, Dewey argues, have been progressive and cumulative, giving us greater and greater understanding and control of the natural world. This has above all been the result of their experimental character, in which no intellectual element is taken to be beyond rational scrutiny. Theories and hypotheses are invented, used, tested, revised, and so on. At the same time, new methods for the invention, use, testing and revision of theories and hypotheses are developed and refined, and so are new standards for evaluating theories and hypotheses. What counts as success in inquiry is some practice’s meeting these standards, but these standards themselves may be judged in the light of how they square with ongoing practices of inquiry. In this way, the methods used by science are not fixed but themselves have a history and develop progressively and sometimes in unexpected ways. A crucial dimension of the experience that has established these standards and practices is social or communal, as we must look to the community of our fellow inquirers for testing and confirmation of our findings.