I assume President Obama calls himself a pragmatist, because that’s one of words his advisers use to describe him. Here’s Valarie Jarrett explaining his capitulation to the Republicans on taxes as pragmatic, meaning “He never lets the perfect be the enemy of the good.” If the President had read John Dewey, he would know better than to describe this failure as pragmatic.

I don’t blame him for not reading Dewey, whose prose is impenetrable, at least to me. Fortunately, there is an excellent introduction to Dewey’s thinking, Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide by David Hildebrand. If Obama had read Dewey, or Hildebrand, he might have learned to respect intelligence, which would have led him in completely different directions in the selection of advisors and confidants.

Before Dewey, philosophers taught that knowledge is the representation in the human mind of the underlying reality of the universe. The human mind is a blank slate, the universe is real, and all we mere humans can do is to apprehend it through our feeble senses. The universe acts on our passively waiting sense receptacles and floods us with shadows of the reality we cannot comprehend directly. Beyond our own experience is the real world which we cannot know.

Anyone who has ever watched a baby knows that this is nonsense. From the minute they are born, babies start interacting with the universe. Watch a baby root at its mother’s breast for milk. Nothing passive there as they latch on and suckle. As they grow, they reach out and try to learn what is around them, first with their eyes, then their hands and directly to their mouths. We see them master their bodies, simultaneously reaching out for knowledge with their every muscle and sense organ. Their instincts, like rooting, give way to more sophisticated means of obtaining their desires. Their impulses come under control, slowly, oh so slowly; and gradually they master amazing feats of understanding. It is trial and error, learning by doing, guided by watchful parents and others who teach skills and abilities valued by society.

This experiential picture, the one we adults see repeated in babies and children every day, makes the speculations of philosophers like Decartes seem absurd. Cogito ergo sum? Watch a kid near a hot stove. I bet the kid only touches the burner once before it knows about stoves, whether it thinks or not. Dewey says this kind of experience is one form of knowledge, which he calls direct or immediate knowledge.

He describes a second kind of knowledge as indirect or reflective. Hildebrand says “It abstracts away from immediate feeling due to its abiding interest in relations and connections.” The second kind of knowledge is in part taught by the society in which the person lives, and in part is generated by each of us using methods of understanding taught by our society. It arises from inquiry and reflection, two active processes.

Used this way, knowledge is tentative, subject to correction. The test of knowledge is its usefulness for specific human purposes. For most purposes, it suffices to think of time as constant. But if you want your GPS device to work, you have to consider Einstein’s relativity theories. With inquiry and reflection, we find out what works and what doesn’t. Hildebrand tells us:

With practice, maturity in techniques of selecting alternatives is, for all intents and purposes, the definition of intelligence.

Page 30. Maturity probably means “getting it right a lot.” Let’s apply these ideas to grade the President. Look at his appointee Larry Summers. The most obvious factoid about Summers is that he is great at persuading people to give him stuff, graduate degrees, cool jobs like being President of Harvard and a director of a hedge fund, and governmental responsibilities. If the test of intelligence is getting rich people to give you stuff, Summers is a genius.

If the test is outcomes, Summers is incompetent. He couldn’t execute the minimal societal requirements for being President of Harvard, which include not disrespecting women, and not blowing all the money in badly chosen investments. He was deeply involved in the calamitously bad decision to get rid of Glass-Steagall, ignoring its success in the real world in favor of a theory that ignores human nature: that fear of loss would constrain market activities of the greediest people on earth. He is responsible for the stimulus package, which was poorly designed and badly executed.

He fails miserably at Dewey’s test of intelligence. He is wrong about things he gets paid to be right about, and his failures cause immense suffering to his fellow citizens.

A pragmatic person wouldn’t give Larry Summers any responsibility. You aren’t a pragmatist, Mr. President.