Abstract
It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one’s own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey’s conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. It claims that Dewey’s anti-substantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey—differently from enactivists—frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings’ interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey’s lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human–environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility.
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Notes
The 1991 volume (Varela et al. 1991) makes various references (in the notes, the bibliography, and part of the text itself) to authors from the heterogeneous tradition of neo-pragmatism, such as Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein and Joseph Margolis, who nonetheless are not identified as pragmatists. As already noted, the text makes not reference to the authors of classical American pragmatism, including William James. On the differences in the use of the adjective “pragmatic” and “pragmatist” in enactivist literature, see the interesting article by Steiner (2017).
See, among other works, Johnson (2010) and Menary (2015). On the mutual engagement between pragmatism and the cognitivist sciences, see too the volumes edited by Solymosi and Shook (2014) and by Madzia and Jung (2016). The topic has also been the focus of an issue of the journal Pragmatism Today (Madzia and Santarelli [Eds.] 2017).
By contrast, here I will not address the thorny issue of the ways in which mental states are correlated with neural processes, which is to say of the way in which semantic contents might be embedded within a syntactic system (on this see Steiner 2014).
I am grateful to Pierre Steiner, who at a seminar he gave in Venice in December 2018 brought to my attention the fact that in current cognitive sciences there are also non-mentalistic representationalist positions, which support an eliminativist approach to the mental and consider contentful states of the brain as having nothing whatsoever to do with representative functions, in the metaphorical sense of the term—insfoar as these states do not stay for or mirror extracranial states of things.
This kind of approach takes as its starting point not a disembodied awareness dealing with a reality that exists out there, even prior to any human intervention, but rather an organism which finds itself in an environment that precedes its individual existence, and of which it is at the same time an integral part. The organism, in turn, modifies this environment and dynamically reconfigures it from within. An approach of this sort allows Deweyan pragmatism to avoid the fruitless opposition between naive realism and idealism. In other words, this perspective makes it possible to avoid the opposition between the assumption of a reality that is already entirely predetermined, and which the knower must strive to faithfully mirror, and the assumption that reality is merely a subjective construct. See Hildebrand (2003). Somewhat similar claims are made in the chapter on “Cartesian Anxiety” in the volume by Varela et al. (1991, p. 133 ff.). Significantly, this formula was first used by Richard Bernstein, who was one of the few pragmatists at a time when this tradition was almost entirely ignored in the United States.
Mead, who had worked closely with Dewey on these issues, also stressed the centrality of inhibition for understanding the specificity of intelligent human behaviour compared to other forms of animal intelligence. See esp. the essays What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose? Emotion and Instinct, and The Child and His Environment in Mead (2011).
On this point see the very clear view of Arteaga: “Obviously, the enactive concept of cognition implies an extension of the common meaning of this term. Cognition in this context is not reduced to the production, development or achievement of an explanation or a skill—in reference respectively to the concept of ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’—about something else: respectively an object or state of affairs or a task. Cognition is not reduced here to a mere question of problem-solving. To solve a concrete problem or to develop the necessary skills to do it configure specific aspects of cognition but define neither exhaustively nor fundamentally this term. The enactive concept of cognition refers to the fundamental activities of being alive, of finding ways to maintain life, to preserve the viability of the living unit’s active-being-in-the-world in and with the worlds that emerge out of life’s own processes, which simultaneously enable living units to achieve and maintain their own selfness” (Arteaga 2017, p. 23).
On this issue see Dreon (2018).
See the 1868 essays Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man and Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (Peirce 1992a, b). The question of whether it is possible to draw a clear-cut distinction between perception and higher cognitive processes is also addressed by Mead in an essay entitled Concerning Animal Perception (in Mead 2011), which ultimately gives a negative answer.
As other scholars have noted, a crucial work on this issue is the essay on the reflex arc that Dewey wrote as early as 1896 (Dewey 1972).
Pierre Steiner defines this approach to the mind as “adverbialist” in Steiner (2017).
See the 1908 essay The Logical Character of Ideas, reprinted in Essays in Experimental Logic in 1916 (Dewey 2004).
See esp. the 1917 essay The Need for Social Psychology (Dewey 1980b), from which a very close collaboration with Mead may be inferred.
From this perspective, we find a convergence with the emphasis placed by enactivists (both in Varela et al. 1991, p. 185 ff.; Gallagher 2017, p. 168) on the notion of exaptation and of the reuse of previous resources for new ends of contemporary evolutionist thought. Obviously, Stephen Gould’s work on these issues was unknown to Dewey and the pragmatists, but the reading of Darwin formulated by Chauncey Wright, a former member of the famous Metaphysical Club, already went in this direction. See Parravicini (2012).
This is closely reminiscent of the enactivist emphasis on emergent properties. See Varela et al. (1991, p. 88).
As is known, this label was used to describe James’ and Dewey’s psychological theories. We owe to James Rowland Angell, also a member of the Chicago School, the definition of the term: “The functional psychologist then in his modern attire is interested not alone in the operations of mental process considered merely of and by and for itself, but also and more vigorously in mental activity as part of a larger stream of biological forces which are daily and hourly at work before our eyes and which are constitutive of the most important and most absorbing part of our world. The psychologist of this stripe is wont to take his cue from the basal conception of the evolutionary movement, i.e., that for the most part organic structures and functions possess their present characteristics by virtue of the efficiency with which they fit into the extent conditions of life broadly designated the environment. With this conception in mind he [p. 69] proceeds to attempt some understanding of the manner in which the psychical contributes to the furtherance of the sum total of organic activities, not alone the psychical in its entirety, but especially the psychical in its particularities—mind as judging, mind as feeling, etc.” (Angell 1907, pp. 68–69). Therefore, I believe that the characterisation of Dewey’s philosophy of mind in functionalist terms is not subject to Gallagher’s criticism of Andy Clark’s extended mind approach, which would ultimately weaken the specificity of the human body with respect to the development of cognition (Gallagher 2017, p. 36).
From this perspective, the transition from “suggestions” to “affordances”—the relevance of which for enactivism is well-known—as invitations to act in a certain way does not seem far-off.
Varela, Thompson and Rosch speak of the selection of salient environmental features by organisms as a form of interpretation (Varela et al. 1991, p. 156).
See William James’s emphasis—already in Principles of Psychology—on the plasticity of the nervous system, understood not as a machine with pre-installed programmes that functions autonomously, but as a sound board that configures itself through the reverberation of environmental events (see esp. the chapter on habits and the one on emotions).
In this respect, Dewey and Mead’s pragmatism would appear to foreshadow Tomasello’s conclusions regarding the social dimension of the evolution of human culture, as well as his thesis that human cognitive evolution is largely based not just on biological resources, but also on cultural resources (Tomasello 1999). On this point, see Dreon (2019a).
Dewey’s claims against armchair philosophy did not prevent him, however, from drawing upon Hegel—as well as James. I believe that the influence of Hegelian thought is visible in the passage just quoted, if only in naturalised form (Rorty 1991), whereby the truth is the whole and not the isolated part, which instead coincides with the abstract truth in Hegel’s philosophy. In addition, it is important to recall the notion of Erfahrung, which in the Phenomenology of the Spirit plays a crucial role, to the detriment of the subjectivist idea of experience associated with the history of the term Erlebnis.
It must be recalled, however, that non-representational explanations are possible even in the case of high-level cognitive processes, according to Daniel Hutto. See Hutto (2017) on the role of narrativity in autobiographical memory.
The same doubt is also voiced by Steiner (2014, p. 46).
This is shown not just by Dewey’s pedagogical interests but also by his personal experience, as we read in Dyehouse and Manke (2017).
On Dewey's conception of language see Dreon (2014). On Mead’s view of language see Dreon (2019). When I was correcting the last draft of my text for publication in this journal issue, the promising book Linguistic Bodies. The Continuity Between Life and Language by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Elena Cuffari and Hanna De Jaegher was published. It will deserve great attention in the ongoing debate between enactivism and the pragmatist heritage.
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Dreon, R. Framing cognition: Dewey’s potential contributions to some enactivist issues. Synthese 198 (Suppl 1), 485–506 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02212-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02212-x