Chapter 7 Closing Dewey ’ s Circuit

One hundred and twenty years ago, the American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey (Fig. 1) published his seminal paper The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology in the Psychological Review (Dewey, 1896). In this paper, Dewey challenged the reflex arc, a by-then (and since then, as we will soon demonstrate) consensual unifying framework for action and perception. The framework, advanced by European experimental psychologists, pertains to a general interpretation that was referred to, at the time, as “structural psychology.” Advocates of this framework, which Dewey so fiercely opposed, viewed psychological processes as sequences of distinct steps that are executed in a timely and precise manner. The structure of the system—the identity and location of the elements executing the different stages of the process—is at the epicenter of interest. Dewey, a key proponent of the philosophy of Pragmatism and one of the founders of the Chicago group of psychologists, sought to advance an alternative, “functional psychology,” focussing on system-environment interactions and their value in achieving functionally meaningful goals. Functional psychologists did not ignore or deny the impacts of structures and mechanisms inherent to the individual in the emergence of behavior; likewise, structural psychologists did not ignore or deny the functional attributes of behavior. Rather, the main difference between these two strands of academic psychology pertained to the methods that are most likely to produce understanding of behavior. Structuralists sought to identify program-like processes hidden deep inside the machine, the human brain; functionalists could not see how the emergence of behavior can be understood in isolation from coupled subject-environment dynamics. In this context, Marom (2015) offered to use the more indicative terms structural-programmatic and functional-dynamic to designate the two stances. In this chapter, we juxtapose these two stances, discuss the methodological reasons for the dominance of the structural-programmatic stance in neuroscience, and offer closed-loop methodologies as a functional-dynamic alternative for studying action and perception as a complete circuit.