Chicago Pragmatism and the Extended Mind Theory. Mead and Dewey on the Nature of Cognition
July 16, 2013 Roman Madzia
Cognition is not confined to the brain but emerges from the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment, according to both early 20th-century Chicago pragmatists and recent cognitive science. The paper examines how George H. Mead and John Dewey anticipated key ideas of embodied and extended mind theory, particularly their treatment of perception and action as interdependent phases within an organic circuit. Mead's four-stage theory of the act—impulse, perception, manipulation, and consummation—reveals surprising similarities with contemporary extended mind theory, which also views cognition as an objective relation between organism and environment rather than an exclusively internal process.