 While labels tend to obscure Dewey’s innovations, it is safe say that Dewey had a realist, naturalistic, non-reductive, emergentist, process  metaphysics.[16]  He sought to describe the most general features (“generic traits”) of nature in a way which did empirical justice to the world as encountered, and which could be useful toward future attempts to describe and change the world for the better. Unlike other metaphysics, Dewey explicitly said that metaphysics served something further—criticism. In the end, Dewey wound up describing his efforts both as a “metaphysics” and as a “system”, that is, “the hanging together of various problems and various hypotheses in a perspective” (“Nature in Experience”, LW14: 141–142). He described his enterprise as both informed by “a definite point of view” and by the contemporary, human world (“Half-hearted Naturalism”, LW3: 75–76 ).