Dewey's willingness to participate in Neurath's encyclopedia project may seem puzzling. Dewey's lifelong concerns with values and the development of culture seem out of place in the enduring reputation of logical empiricism as a technical, value-free enterprise that took value statements, and ethical theories about them, to be empty noise. In part that reputation derives from Rudolf Carnap, whose early writings, especially, matched Neurath's in their claims for the emptiness of metaphysics and the end of traditional philosophy (see, e.g., Carnap 1959a). While Dewey accepted the movement's rejection of all things unscientific and unintelligent (or “unintelligible,” as he once put it), he was very worried that the empirical, scientific study of values would be mistakenly swept away if logical empiricism came to dominate philosophy and intellectual life. Dewey therefore chose to work with Neurath and the Unity of Science movement in order, he hoped, to prevent such a catastrophe.

In his correspondence with Neurath, Carnap, and Morris about his two contributions to the Encyclopedia, and in those contributions themselves, we can see some of the complexities of this alliance between America's leading philosopher and the new leading philosophers of science. On the one hand, Dewey believed that logical empiricism suffered from certain philosophical faults, but came to learn, it would appear, that his critique was mistakenly based on Ayer's influential Language, Truth and Logic.