Place and time of the mind. Dewey and the adverbial analysis of human conduct

Where is the mind? The debate is no longer reducible to a simplistic opposition between internalism and externalism, as a fair amount of cognitivist work now takes in the irremediably embodied and embedded character of intentional manifestations. This paper aims to tackle the issue of their localization from a pragmatist point of view, particularly with John Dewey’s contributions, which are more and more mentioned in contemporary debate, albeit frequently in passing. It is shown in four steps how the pragmatist characterization of mind radically drops the classical issue of its localization in order to understand the way an intelligent conduct emerges in time. The mind is not to be conceived as a container or as a content, but appears here as a quality of conduct, as a way of doing and behaving. In its concluding part, the paper brings together this analysis, which treats mind as a verb or as an adverb (and not as a substantive), with other adverbial conceptions of mind or experience (Ryle, Sellars).