PRAGMATISM AND THE COGNITIVE AND NEURAL SCIENCES

Two prominent intellectual disciplines dominate the discipline of psyc hology, the cognitive and neural sciences. Separate departments for bo th are now commonplace at major universities across America. I suggest , however, that the discipline of psychology asks key questions about experience, mind, or central stales not found in other disciplines. Ps ychology is embodied in both the cognitive and neural sciences, and an important common thread is the Jamesian-Deweyian emphasis on experien ce. The Jamesian-Deweyian tradition emphasized the sense of experience in problem-solving and functional adaptations. The pragmatists' sense of experience is the way by which one engages the world, is inherentl y cognitive, and orchestrated by central states of the brain. Any atte mpt within the neural and cognitive sciences to capture human experien ce will need to resurrect this tradition.