Dewey's Pragmatism; Continuity rather than Duality

Dewey's version of pragmatism in Chapter 2 of Democracy and Education:

"The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which purposely modifies the environment. It holds that knowledge in its strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual resources—of all the habits that render our action intelligent. Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. Knowledge is not just something which we are now conscious of, but consists of the dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now happens. Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world in which we live."  

I like this version of pragmatism because it applies Dewey's distrust of dualism, bypassing the temporal dualism of traditional pragmatism, which values outcomes over origins. Though this duality is better than traditional notions of knowledge, it benefits from Dewey's concept of "continuity." Rather than dividing the past and the future by the present, continuity focuses on the connections or flow that can be seen in experience, and the possibility that the knower can interact with the environment to modify that environment and its affect on her. Dewey goes into more detail about how continuity is a function of experience in this passage: 

"The advance of physiology and the psychology associated with it have shown the connection of mental activity with that of the nervous system. Too often recognition of connection has stopped short at this point; the older dualism of soul and body has been replaced by that of the brain and the rest of the body. But in fact the nervous system is only a specialized mechanism for keeping all bodily activities working together. Instead of being isolated from them, as an organ of knowing from organs of motor response, it is the organ by which they interact responsively with one another. The brain is essentially an organ for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli received from the environment and responses directed upon it. Note that the adjusting is reciprocal; the brain not only enables organic activity to be brought to bear upon any object of the environment in response to a sensory stimulation, but this response also determines what the next stimulus will be."