1 Introduction

In her commentary on our paper, Dr. Saskia Nagel calls for a thickening of the descriptions we give in cognitive science. By thickening she means, …a dense description specifying details and patterns and considering contextual factors, of human experience and cognition. (Nagel this collection, p. 3). Dr. Nagel further asserts that one way to achieve such a thickening is to infuse cognitive science with the views of pragmatism (i.e., John Dewey) and anthropology (i.e., Timothy Ingold). We couldn’t agree more, and we applaud Dr. Nagel’s appeal to Dewey and Ingold as a means of allowing multi-scale contextual factors to play a much larger role in our accounts of cognition and consciousness.

Given our agreement on the important contributions that pragmatism and anthropology can make to cognitive science, we also feel the need to express our belief that WST (Wild Systems Theory) and its conceptualization of organisms as self-sustaining embodiments of context (versus physical-mental, or mind-body systems) actually creates a conceptual framework within which the views of Dewey and Ingold can move beyond the conceptual constraints of contemporary pragmatism and anthropology.