John
Dewey’s ‘habit’-centered, transactional theory of action gets rid of the
Cartesian mind–world dualism by replacing ‘mind-first’ explanations of action
with ‘action-first’ explanations of the mind. Dewey embraced Darwinian
thinking, and built his theory of action in an evolutionary framework. Of
course, he could not have foreseen all the developments in theory and research
on human evolution that have unfolded since his time; evolutionary theory and
understanding have been elaborated, for example, with the idea of
co-evolutionary niche construction. This chapter outlines an update of Dewey’s
transactional theory of action, drawing on, among others, Daniel Dennett’s,
Andy Clark’s, and Kim Sterelny’s works, and some recent developments in
theories and research on the brain, mind, and the evolution of human culture. A
sort of ‘four E’—extensive, enactive, embodied, and embedded—notion of the mind
is considered, as well as other recent ideas and conceptual tools, such as
(socio-cultural) niche construction, the Sterelnian apprentice learning setup,
the Clarkian conception of predictive processing as a central function of the
brain, affordances of action, and the Dennettian understanding that in
evolution, competence comes before comprehension, and the latter could arise
only with culture.