Dewey's and Mead's social naturalism

Nowadays the social is something to be « naturalized ». Hence the question: “In which sense, social facts are natural facts”? One possible response is the one now given by cognitive sciences. It is often a reductionist one. Another possible response is the one American pragmatists, particularly John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, gave in the first half of the 20th century. This paper tries to reconstruct and evaluate Dewey’s and Mead’s conception of social facts as natural facts. It argues also that this pragmatist response has the advantage of not destroying the specific field of inquiry of the social sciences.