In this paper, we provide a pragmatist conceptualization of affective habits as relatively flexible ways of channeling affectivity. Our proposal, grounded in a conception of sensibility and habits derived from John Dewey, suggests understanding affective scaffoldings in a novel and broader sense by re-orienting the debate from objects to interactions. We claim that habits play a positive role in supporting and orienting human sensibility, allowing us to avoid any residue of dualism between internalist and externalist conceptions of affectivity. We provide pragmatist tools for understanding the environment's role in shaping our feelings, emotions, moods, and affective behaviors. However, we contend that in addition to environment, the continuous and recursive affective transaction between agent and environment (both natural and cultural) are also crucially involved. We claim that habits are transformative, which is especially evident when we consider that emotions are often the result of a crisis in habitual behavior and successively play a role in prompting changes of habits. The final upshot is a conceptualization of affective habits as pervasive tools for feelings that scaffold human conduct as well as key features in the transformation of behaviors.

It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one's own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey's conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. It claims that Dewey's anti-substantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey-differently from enactivists-frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings' interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey's lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human-environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility. Keywords John Dewey • Enactivism • Cognition • Experience • Mind A lot of water has flowed under the bridge of philosophical debate since Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch presented their 'pragmatic' conception of embodied cognition as a defining feature of enactivism without ever referring B Roberta Dreon

This paper reconstructs the merits of John Dewey's conception of language by viewing it within the context of communication as the act of making something in common, as social and instrumental action. It shows that on the one hand this approach allows us to avoid the problems of the linguistic turn: the selfentanglement of language, the overemphasizing of language at the expense of the plurality of our world experiences, and the unquestioned, but sterile, supremacy of interpretation. On the other hand, the paper supports the thesis that Dewey's perspective on language does not produce a new form of foundationalism -according to which language itself is founded on experience, liable to be independently designated -by providing some arguments to interpret the relationship between language and experience in non-contrastive ways. In particular, the essay suggests a non-dualistic interpretation of the distinction between immediate qualitative experience and language, that is knowing in actu, by arguing that language cannot be reduced to the ordered discourse of inquiry since it also structurally includes qualitative and aesthetic aspects.John Dewey's conception of language is hardly one of the most studied aspects of his philosophical production. An important exception is represented by Max Black's article, "Dewey's Philosophy of Language", published in 1962. The British philosopher criticizes some important points in Dewey's approach: the fact that he did not have the patience to articulate the various details of linguistic cases -in particular by considering in how many different ways we can interpret the formula "taking the role of the other", central to both Dewey's own philosophy and Mead's, in order to understand language as the act of making something in common; the fact that he traced no distinctions between the meaning of a word and that of a sentence; and, above all, the fact of not having been able to get rid of the ultimate residue of the traditional conception of language, that is of the "dogma of substantive meaning", which still conceives meaning as the non-verbal counterpart of a symbol, liable to be independently designated 1 . Yet, despite these criticisms, Black highlighted how radically Dewey's conception of language broke with the traditional framework, so efficaciously condensed by John Locke: language is not a mere clothing of thoughts, enabling the latter to be transferred from one mind to another (the mind being the proper place for naked thoughts); rather, it is a constitutive condition of culture and society. Furthermore, Black clearly stresses that according to Dewey language is a necessary condition for the individual mind and that it effects the transformation of the biological into the intellectual. Finally, he also emphasizes that a communicative approach to language implies a critique of the idea of private language.What has probably proved most influential, however, for the relatively few later scholars focusing on the subject, are the opinions expressed by Rorty. While pla...

1 Among the most outstanding protagonists of the debate on Wittgenstein's notion of following a rule, I will only mention Winch (1990; 2 nd ed.); Kripke (1982); Diamond (1983) andMcDowell (1984).2 Cometti (2008) characterizes this conception of rules as the «regulist» one, in accordance with Brandom (1994) and his differentiation between regulism and regularism. See also Perissinotto (1997, pp.105-109).

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