CONCEPT
The Problematic Situation
Dewey's technical term for the occasion of all genuine thinking — a situation whose existing meanings have become indeterminate, demanding reconstruction. Without it, nothing calls for thought.
The problematic situation is Dewey's name for the starting point of inquiry: a situation that has become indeterminate, whose familiar patterns no longer serve, whose resolution requires the exercise of intelligence. The problematic situation is distinguished from an ordinary difficulty by its effect on the organism — it generates a felt doubt that cannot be dissolved by the application of habit, that compels the formation of new understanding. In Dewey's framework, genuine thinking begins nowhere else. Without a problematic situation, the machinery of inquiry has nothing to work on. The AI age poses a specific question: when the implementation barrier that constituted the primary problematic situation of software development is absorbed by the machine, what happens to thinking?
In The You On AI Field Guide
Dewey was emphatic that problems must be genuine. A problem assigned by a teacher or mandated by a manager may go through the motions of inquiry without engaging the learner — the motions are empty if the problem