 Given his Deweyan commitment to socially-engaged philosophy, it is no wonder that in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Hook’s philosophical attention began turning increasingly towards social and political philosophy. Here, too, Hook sought to apply the scientific method. Hook’s writings on educational reform, socialist theory, political protest, academic freedom, civil liberties, segregation, and ideology often engaged with social concerns at a level of concreteness that had eluded Dewey. Though his views on these social issues blend what appear to us today as politically opposed categories, Hook claimed that his views reflected a consistent and univocal philosophical commitment to the epistemic and moral experimentalism that lay at the core of pragmatism. Hook recognized there was ample evidence that different political positions derived from divergent structures of perception which interpreted the empirical data in contradictory ways as well as from fixed attitudes which had been set through a person’s life experience. To a degree, he appreciated the significance of the dissimilarities in the application of scientific method between the confirmation of an experimental hypothesis in natural science by a community of inquiry and the empirical grounds that could be appealed to as providing a justification of a particular social or political policy in the context of decision-making in historical circumstances. Hook continued, both in his explicit thought about the nature of moral or political disagreement and in his implicit practice in discussion, to hold the pragmatic faith that critical intelligence – a generalized form of scientific method – could rationally resolve any conflict of opinion.