Contributions of John Dewey's Functionalist Psychology to Cognitive Neuroscience

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on the relationship between John Dewey's instrumentalist epistemology and cognitive neuroscience, based on his critique of traditional psychology. This study analyzes John Dewey's attempt to relate truth to cognition, highlighting his arguments based on the progress of physiology and psychology, the advances in biology and the development of the experimental method. The text presents possibilities for Deweian pragmatism to contribute to cognitive neuroscience, since the author's naturalistic attitude towards human beings and all their functions reinforces that it is the mind that makes decisions and controls behavior. To resolve the antagonisms that surround the history of philosophy, the solution developed by Dewey is what he called the experiential continuum, or continuity theory, an innovative perspective that relates the continuity of action with the environment.