Experience, Language, and the Qualitative. Developing Jean-Pierre Cometti’s Legacy

In this paper, I provide a sketch of Jean-Pierre Cometti’s original interpretation of John Dewey’s approach to language, emphasizing that it is grounded on a continuistic picture of language as a development of human experience, a naturalistic but non-naturalized conception of experience itself, and a strong focus on the primarily social structure of language and its connection to coordinated action. In the meantime, I suggest that Cometti’s continuistic thesis should explicitly address the issue of the “qualitative” in experience, which is a major theme in both James’ and Dewey’s works. I consider the probable reasons for Jean-Pierre Cometti’s marginalization of this issue in relation to Dewey, and suggest integrating his view through a broadly bio-cultural approach to the qualitative dimensions of experience, as distinct from the widespread idea that it is subjective, as well as more primitive and intrinsically foreign to language.