Beyond Embodiment: John Dewey and the Integrated Mind

Abstract

In 1916 John Dewey expressed a worry that American philosophy would be relegated to “chewing a historic cud long since reduced to a woody fibre, or an apologetics for lost causes (lost to natural science).”1 In this paper, I will attempt to contribute to a growing body of literature within the classical American philosophical tradition that seeks to avoid this fate by engaging Dewey’s thought with debates in contemporary philosophy of mind.2 To date, the vast majority of this work has centered around Dewey’s notion of embodiment and its relation to the thesis of the embodied mind. In this paper I will evaluate the degree to which the embodied mind thesis (henceforth “EMT”) provides the proper framework for understanding Dewey’s notion of embodiment. In doing so, I will advance a three-stage argument: (1) I will argue that although Dewey did anticipate the positions of many embodied mind theorists—a fact that is now approaching the status of the proverbial woody fiber—a thoroughgoing treatment of the biological/ecological dimension of Dewey’s notion of embodiment entails a more radical position than is traditionally attributed to philosophers of mind working in a Deweyan vein. This more radical position is the extended mind thesis (henceforth “XMT”). After briefly elucidating this thesis, (2) I will argue that, while XMT is compatible with EMT, and while the former does capture more of Dewey’s notion of embodiment than the latter, both theses may still fail to capture the full scope of Dewey’s notion of embodiment. Finally, (3) I will argue that the best solution to the conceptual problems presented in (1) and (2) is offered by Richard Menary’s notion of cognitive integration—a notion that turns on a Deweyan understanding of the organism-environment dynamic emphasized in (1). Thus, the conclusion to be argued for in this paper is that while