Pragmatism and the cognitive and neural sciences

Two prominent intellectual disciplines dominate the discipline of psychology, the cognitive and neural sciences. Separate departments for both are now commonplace at major universities across America. I suggest, however, that the discipline of psychology asks key questions about experience, mind, or central states not found in other disciplines. Psychology is embodied in both the cognitive and neural sciences, and an important common thread is the Jamesian-Deweyian emphasis on experience. 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 inherently cognitive, and orchestrated by central states of the brain. Any attempt within the neural and cognitive sciences to capture human experience will need to resurrect this tradition.