But he also holds that at the start of inquiry our conceptions and commitments are way off.
Investigating teachers' conceptions of inquiry is critical since conceptions of inquiry guide students' experiences of inquiry -based learning in the science classroom (Crawford, 2007).
At the same time, there is a scarcity of research which addresses how the beginning teachers form conceptions of inquiry and how their conceptions of inquiry affect enactment of inquiry (Ozel & Luft, 2013).
Dewey's conception of inquiry, found in his Logic: the Theory of Inquiry is richer and more radical (ED2: 169–79).
In particular, Rorty finds in Dewey an anticipation of his own view of philosophy as the hand-maiden of a humanist politics, of a non-ontological view of the virtues of inquiry, of a holistic conception of human intellectual life, and of an anti-essentialist, historicist conception of philosophical thought.
As the experimentalist conception of inquiry insists, this does not imply that we need a priori criteria in order to establish if this process has been successful.
Dewey's conception of inquiry is intended as a general model of reflective intelligence, and he argues against drawing an a priori distinction between, for example, inquiry in ethics and politics and in the natural sciences.
It is of course crude to see Dewey's political philosophy as the marriage of the Idealist and New Liberal view of liberalism with his pragmatist or experimentalist conception of inquiry.
While the Idealist and New Liberal assault on individualism is one important element of the intellectual background to Dewey's political philosophy, this should also be located against the background of his own mature conception of inquiry.
As we shall see, there are yet other conceptions of what fallacies are, but the present inquiry focuses on the argument conception of fallacies.
