This article examines how Modern theories of mind remain even in some materialistic and hence ontologically anti-dualistic views; and shows how Dewey's pragmatism, anticipating Merleau-Ponty, 4E cognitive scientists and especially enactivism, repudiates these theories. Throughout I place Dewey’s thought in the context of scientific inquiry, both recent and historical and including the cognitive as well as traditional sciences; and I show how he incorporated sciences of his day into his thought, while also anticipating enactive cognitive science. While emphasizing Dewey’s continued (...) relevance, my main goal is to show how his scientifically informed account of perception and cognition combats skepticism propagated by certain scientific visions, exacerbated by commonplace notions about mind, that jointly suggest that human beings lack genuine access to reality. (shrink)

In a commentary on Mangan's article about fringe feelings in consciousness, we argue that labeling these experiences as "non-sensory" leads to a problematic conception of consciousness as divorceable from sensation. We then compare and contrast Mangan's development of William James' ideas about fringe experiences with Damasio's development of James' ideas about the body-relatedness of emotion and feeling. We propose that fringe feelings have essential motivational properties that stem from their evolutionary origins in various problems of survival. Finally, we contrast Mangan's (...) notion of the feeling of rightness with our own conception of yedasentience, and we discuss how experiment and clinical investigation of psychopathology can inform our understanding of fringe feelings. (shrink)