The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead 9780226377131

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The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead

The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead

Edited by Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

The University of Chicago Press chicago and london

Hans Joas is the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin and professor of sociology and social thought at the University of Chicago. Daniel R. Huebner is assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978- 0-226-37694-3 (cloth) isbn-13: 978- 0-226-37713-1 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226377131.001.0001 Chapter 5 originally published as Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Die Theorie der Intersubjektivität als eine Lehre vom Menschen. George Herbert Mead und die deutsche Tradition der‚ Philosophischen Anthropologie,‘” in Das Problem der Intersubjektivität. Neuere Beiträge zum Werk George Herbert Meads, ed. Hans Joas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 60– 92. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1985. All rights with and maintained by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. Chapter 15 originally published as Timothy J. Gallagher, “G.H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42, no. 1 (2012), 40–62. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Joas, Hans, 1948– editor. | Huebner, Daniel R., editor. Title: The timeliness of George Herbert Mead / edited by Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016001712 | ISBN 9780226376943 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226377131 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Mead, George Herbert, 1863–1931. | Pragmatism. Classification: LCC B945.M464 T56 2016 | DDC 191—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001712 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Table of Contents

Introduction

1

Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

Part I: History, Historiography, Historical Sociology 1.

Changing “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century”: Historical Text and Historical Context

15

Charles Camic

2.

On Mead’s Long Lost History of Science

40

Daniel R. Huebner

3.

Pragmatism and Historicism: Mead’s Philosophy of Temporality and the Logic of Historiography

62

Hans Joas

4.

George Herbert Mead and the Promise of Pragmatist Democracy

82

Robert Westbrook

5.

The Theory of Intersubjectivity as a Theory of the Human Being: George Herbert Mead and the German Tradition of Philosophical Anthropology

92

Karl-Siegbert Rehberg

Part II: Nature, Environment, Process 6.

Naturalism and Despair: George Herbert Mead and Evolution in the 1880s Trevor Pearce

v

117

7.

George Herbert Mead as a Socio-Environmental Thinker

144

Bradley H. Brewster and Antony J. Puddephatt

8.

Social Worlds: The Legacy of Mead’s Social Ecology in Chicago Sociology

165

Daniel Cefaï

9.

Mead, Whitehead, and the Sociality of Nature

185

Michael L. Thomas

Part III: Cognition, Conscience, Language 10.

Mead, the Theory of Mind, and the Problem of Others

209

Ryan McVeigh

11.

Imitation and Taking the Attitude of the Other

231

Kelvin Jay Booth

12.

Mead Meets Tomasello: Pragmatism, the Cognitive Sciences, and the Origins of Human Communication and Sociality

252

Frithjof Nungesser

13.

Conscience as Ecological Participation and the Maintenance of Moral Perplexity

276

Joshua Daniel

14.

Presentation and Re-Presentation: Language, Content, and the Reconstruction of Experience

296

Roman Madzia

15.

G. H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research

315

Timothy Gallagher

List of Contributors Name Index Subject Index

337 341 347

Introduction Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

T

he fi rst philosophical book ever to bear George Herbert Mead’s name on its cover was published in 1932, one year after his death. It presented a series of lectures Mead had given at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association at Berkeley in December 1930. Although of great ambition and apparently planned as a systematic presentation of Mead’s later thought, the lectures were only in a provisional form. The editor of the book, Arthur Murphy, says in his preface that they “were written hurriedly, in large part on the journey from Chicago to Berkeley” (Murphy 1932, vii). To a large extent, the topic of these lectures is the problem of our understanding of time—and there is some bitter irony in the fact that Mead did not have enough time to complete the text of his lectures and that his lifetime ended before he could return to the task of elaborating what he had presented in California. The title of this book, The Philosophy of the Present, is deliberately ambiguous. On one level, it simply refers to a statement about contemporary philosophical thinking, its achievements and deficiencies. On another level though, and this is intellectually much more relevant, the title also signals the subject and main thesis of the lectures. Lecture 1 starts with the strong claim: “The subject of this lecture is found in the proposition that reality exists in a present. The present of course implies a past and a future, and to these both we deny existence” (Mead 1932, 1). In the larger part of the lectures Mead relates this claim to the epistemological problems of the natural sciences, particularly with regard to Darwin and Einstein. But in a fragment incorporated into the text by the editor and considered to be the result of a critical discussion of Mead’s views in Chicago in early 1931, Mead also attempted to explain the relationship of his understanding of temporality to the humanities and the 1

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Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

self-understanding of practicing historians. He emphasized that historical research should not be guided by the ideal of approximating the past “how it actually was,” purified of all traces of the present. What we need instead is a reconstruction of the past as conditioning the present—a reconstruction that enables us “to interpret what is arising in the future that belongs to this present” (Mead 1932, 30). It is an implication of this view that there is no fi nal past; rather, every reconstruction of the past is “a truth which belongs to this present,” and “a later present would reconstruct it from the standpoint of its own emergent nature” (Mead 1932, 31). It is obvious that this insight—on which Mead put such great emphasis—must also guide our attempts to interpret a thinker of the past such as Mead himself. Every interpretation of a thinker and his or her work has to be guided by the ideal of being fi nal for the time being, for the time in which it is being developed—but it will always be fi nal only for the time being. As Max Weber (1946) argued in his famous address of 1917 “Science as a Vocation,” all scientific research is part of a process we call “scientific progress.” What is true for more or less cumulative progress in certain scientific disciplines is even more the case in less cumulative disciplines in which historical change always produces new challenges that guide the striving for knowledge. There is a certain melancholy in this insight. Authors and writings that were crucial for a particular epoch may radically lose their appeal in the eyes of a younger generation, while others who did not receive great attention during their lifetime may become more attractive after their deaths. George Herbert Mead is a particularly spectacular case in this regard. One of the editors of this volume (Daniel Huebner) recently devoted a whole book to the social processes that turned Mead, a relatively obscure philosopher at the University of Chicago in the fi rst decades of the twentieth century, into one of the great figures of American pragmatist philosophy and a classic of the sociological discipline (Huebner 2014). Both authors of this introduction are deeply convinced that Mead’s writings are so original and profound that he fully deserves this status, but the contingencies of the history of his reception are nevertheless remarkable. For many years the answer to the question of why Mead’s writings are timely would have been very clear. It was mostly his social psychology and particularly his analysis of the symbolically mediated character of specifically human communication that was mentioned in the literature and taken up in empirical research and theory construction. Mead’s relevance for the developmental psychology of the self and for educational questions was closely related to this interest. Other parts and aspects of Mead’s work

Introduction

3

were almost completely ignored by sociologists and in the influential interpretation that Jürgen Habermas gave of Mead’s work in his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action. Mead’s relevance for moral philosophy was the main area where Habermas stepped beyond the limitations of most previous attempts. Some phenomenological philosophers had demonstrated an interest in other parts of Mead’s work, but they frequently used their phenomenological point of departure as a yardstick for evaluating Mead. Mead the pragmatist was, therefore, often not discussed in a way that took the possible merits of his pragmatism—even in comparison to phenomenology—seriously. For the present volume the editors have chosen a quasi-inductive approach. We did not prepare a list of Mead’s areas of study and then invite authors to contribute articles on each respective area; rather, we tried to identify those areas of contemporary debate where—frequently younger— authors from different disciplines have shown new and creative ways of making Mead’s thinking fruitful today. If we have succeeded in this endeavor—that is our hope—then the result will also bear witness to the timeliness of George Herbert Mead. There seem to be three main areas in which Mead’s thinking is currently inspiring contemporary work. The fi rst is the area of history, historiography, and historical sociology (and the possible relevance of Mead’s philosophy of temporality for this area). The second follows from one of the fundamental reorientations of intellectual and political life in recent decades: the turn to a greater awareness of environmental problems, both in an empirical and in a normative sense, and the rethinking of earlier assumptions about “man and nature” in light of this turn. And the third has to do with the outburst of new research in neurobiology, brain studies, and evolutionary psychology, which has led a considerable number of contemporary writers to see in George Herbert Mead, to put it loosely, an early prefiguration of much-acclaimed contemporary thinkers such as Michael Tomasello. These three areas, therefore, constitute the structure of the present volume. Part 1, History, Historiography, Historical Sociology, presents five contributions on diverse aspects of Mead’s work. Three of the chapters deal with the potential of Mead’s work for fields of historical research, whereas two others are devoted to new historical contextualizations of Mead’s thinking. The sociologist Charles Camic, well known for his meticulous research on the intellectual biographies of Talcott Parsons and Thorstein Veblen and a crucial figure in the empirical study of social knowledge

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Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

making, examines Mead’s neglected posthumously published Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, a book that is based on notes from a course of the same title, and shows how it relates to the intellectual context of the University of Chicago in its early years. Camic considers several offerings of the course fi rst by John Dewey and then by Mead not so much to contrast the two thinkers as to trace the increasing emphasis on research science and evolution and the diminishing emphasis on nineteenth-century social sciences in Mead’s accounts. Camic’s study applies Mead’s views on the historicity of mind to Mead’s own work and shows how Mead’s own contexts, in this case specifically local contexts, shaped his historical narratives. This study shows that Mead gradually replaced a Hegelian-teleological account of history with a pragmatist account of historical contingency. Further studies on Mead’s interpretations of the history of philosophy and science, particularly on his extensive presentation of French nineteenth-century philosophy in the appendix to the Movements, remain a desideratum. Daniel Huebner’s chapter deals with Mead’s relevance for the history of science. He utilizes newly discovered student notes from Mead’s courses and other historical data to make the case that Mead was an expert in the history of science, that he contributed self-consciously to the formation of the history of science as a field of inquiry, and that he had a thoroughly social account of the development of scientific knowledge. Mead’s strong interest in ancient Greek philosophy and science and the complex relationship between this area of his work and his social psychology thus become evident. Huebner documents the wide variety of Mead’s courses and papers in this area, his attempts to institute a society and book series for the history of science, and the criticisms leveled at him at the time. Hans Joas explores the similarities between American pragmatism and (mostly German) historicism in the nineteenth century—similarities that were often ignored because of cultural differences between the United States and Germany and the different status of the natural sciences and humanities in the two cultures. But the main claim of this chapter is that American pragmatism developed ideas that allow us to overcome the dichotomy between objectivism and relativism in historiography. Joas identifies conceptual tools in the works of Josiah Royce, Mead, and Dewey that can account for the intersubjective and the temporal nature of human experience as well as for the processes of the formation of ideals. By bringing Ernst Troeltsch, the most sophisticated thinker from the historicist tradition, into the picture, Joas demonstrates that in the 1920s one could almost speak of the beginning of a convergence of Mead’s tempor-

Introduction

5

alized pragmatism and Troeltsch’s existential historicism. For contingent reasons, this convergence never took place, but it remains a challenge to which this paper responds. The intellectual historian Robert Westbrook, author of a magisterial biography of John Dewey (Westbrook 1991) and other writings on democratic theory, makes the observation that Mead has remained neglected in the renaissance of interest in Dewey. However, Westbrook goes on, Mead was not “merely a friend and colleague who shared Dewey’s views, but . . . one who substantially and productively enlarged them.” Without going through the whole corpus of Mead’s writings in political theory and rather focusing on just one of the pieces (i.e., Mead’s 1923 “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences”), Westbrook argues that Mead pioneered a defense of democratic inclusiveness against the challenge of so-called realist critics—a defense based on demonstrating that more inclusiveness leads to “smarter” polities  that is superior even to Dewey’s attempts. Again, if Westbrook is right, further studies on Mead’s relevance for democratic theory would be useful. The author of the next chapter is Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, a leading German cultural sociologist and the foremost authority on the work of Arnold Gehlen. Gehlen was, like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, deeply involved with Nazism. But while Heidegger and Schmitt are internationally debated today, Gehlen, who many Germans consider to be of equal intellectual significance, has not received much attention in the Englishspeaking world. In connection with Mead, it is worth mentioning that Gehlen was the fi rst major German author to recognize Mead’s importance and to refer to him in his own creative work. In his chapter Rehberg is driven by an interest in understanding how thinkers of such different attitudes toward democracy can nevertheless show profound affinities in their understanding of human action. In his essay Rehberg provides a novel reevaluation of the relationship between Mead and the broader intellectual tradition that includes Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Dilthey, and he introduces previously unpublished documentation on Gehlen’s study of Mead. One of the great achievements of the American pragmatists has always been that their understanding of the history of mankind remained part of a wider conception of history—namely, natural history in the sense of both organic evolution and the history of the cosmos. In pragmatism this wider conception of history has never been reductionist; that is, it has never been based on a neglect of the specificities of human action and human sociality. But this wider conception has allowed the pragmatists

6

Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

to see human history as a part of natural history with all the effects and counter-effects that thus come into view. Part 2 of this volume, Nature, Environment, Process, brings together four innovative studies on Mead’s relevance for the history and philosophy of nature. The philosopher Trevor Pearce, whose research is focused on the history of interactions between philosophy and the life-sciences in nineteenth-century America, concentrates on Mead’s early intellectual development and shows in detail how difficult it was for a young Christian at the time to integrate Darwin into his worldview and explores what a deep existential crisis could result from these difficulties. Based to some extent on new biographical material, Pearce traces the development of Mead’s views through his years in college, in a longer phase of existential reorientation, and as a student of philosophy and psychology. Pearce also shows how Mead’s education with Josiah Royce at Harvard and Wilhelm Dilthey in Berlin—both authors who saw the doctrine of evolution as a means to come to a better understanding of the human being’s “spiritual” nature—was key to resolving his early intellectual and personal problems and continued to form the center of his later work. Mead’s deep debt to biology, demonstrated by Pearce, gives additional plausibility to the main thesis of the following chapter. The sociologists Bradley Brewster and Antony Puddephatt see Mead as “one of the most thoroughgoing bio-social thinkers in the classical sociological canon” and criticize those who lump him together with some of his later followers who indeed showed little interest in the natural world and the relationships between the human organism and its environment. This relationship, according to Mead, can be understood neither as a determinism where all the causality lies on the side of the environment “nor as an unfettered construction of environment by organism.” Like David Miller, one of Mead’s last students and author of one of the best books ever written on Mead (Miller 1973), Brewster and Puddephatt see Mead in a “revolt against dualism and idealism.” The authors propose that Mead’s theory of fundamental sociality and the objective location of perspectives in nature provides an avenue for linking the social sciences with environmental studies. There are affinities of Mead’s theory to the thinking of early conservationists. They clearly fi nd anticipated in Mead what is presently debated as a new view of the social—that is, a view that includes nonhumans. Mead’s theory could, therefore, provide the foundation for contemporary claims about the obligation of human communities to multiple forms of ecology. Terms like “environment” and “ecology” are not unambiguous because

Introduction

7

they can refer to relations between human beings or relations between humans and nonhumans. The French sociologist Daniel Cefaï—who together with Louis Quéré translated and co-edited the 2006 French edition of Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society and is a creative continuator of the Chicago school ethnographic research tradition—deals less with Mead’s own writings than with the research of major and minor figures of the Chicago School. He traces the importance of Mead’s examination of fields of experience organized by universes of discourse to the development of so-called social worlds in that school—for example, in the works of eminent sociologists Tamotsu Shibutani, Anselm Strauss, and Howard S. Becker. Cefaï utilizes the numerous (often unpublished) dissertations of sociologists trained at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to present a novel, detailed analysis of the theoretical complexity of ecologies of social worlds, including their multiplicity, their various forms, and their intersections. He fi nds in Mead’s understanding of ecology an important counter point to the human ecology practiced in Chicago in the 1920s and, like Brewster and Puddephatt, an important contribution to the rethinking of the place of objects in social theory. The last chapter in this part provides a fresh analysis of the relationship between Mead and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The author of this chapter, Michael L. Thomas, has done extensive research on the reception of Whitehead’s philosophy in social theory in general. There can be no doubt that in the last years of his life Mead grappled with Whitehead’s thinking more than with any other philosophy, and John Dewey already made it clear why this was the case. In his prefatory remarks to Mead’s Philosophy of the Present Dewey recognized that Mead shared with Whitehead “the effort to include matters usually relegated to an exclusively subjective realm within the constitution of nature itself” (Dewey 1932, xxxviii). The expression “objective reality of perspectives”—the title of one of Mead’s (1927) essays—conveys the basic idea behind his effort very well. Perspective alludes to subjectivity, but every subjectivity is itself part of an objective reality. Instead of yielding to a bifurcation of nature into an objective and a subjective realm, both thinkers view “reality as a temporal, constructive process in which the subjectivity of individuals . . . plays a role in its construction.” But Thomas—like Gary A. Cook, author of another major book on Mead (Cook 1993), before him—also insists on the differences between the two thinkers. Mead saw himself as being more consistent in this shared effort and better able to prevent any recreation of the bifurcation they were both struggling to overcome. Thomas sees Mead as focusing on the scientific understanding of reality

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Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

and Whitehead as more interested in an aesthetic project. But these two projects do not necessarily contradict each other, and it is Thomas’s ambition to outline possible avenues of synthesis. The chapters of part 3, Cognition, Conscience, Language, make substantial contributions to cognitive science and moral philosophy. The authors of these papers each work in different ways to clarify and develop the social and embodied conception of the mind sketched in Mead’s writings and lectures a century ago and to show how this view offers a unique avenue for synthesizing existing research and overcoming persistent problems. Each chapter takes up a unique focal point in these disparate but interconnected literatures, and as a result the reader can trace the ways in which the chapters mutually support one another without being redundant—as, for example, certain authors (e.g., Tomasello), themes (e.g., embodiment), and concepts (e.g., imitation) examined in detail in one paper tie into the argument of others. Together these papers represent a sustained and articulate evaluation of Mead’s relationship to contemporary understandings of the nature of the mind. Ryan McVeigh, a Canadian sociologist, lays out some of the fundamental philosophical issues at stake with his evaluation of the so-called problem of other minds. In the contemporary cognitive sciences, the dominant views emphasize cognition as a phenomenon internal to the individual organism, and this ontological priority of the individual—hegemonic in theorizing this problem from Descartes to the present day—makes it difficult to explain the reality and necessity of our understanding of others. Even perspectives that draw on research on mirror neurons and other possible neurological mechanisms by which the individual may simulate the behaviors of others ultimately fail to resolve this problem. McVeigh argues that Mead’s perspective, in contrast, dissolves the very problem itself by showing how the self only emerges as the result of the individual developing in a pre-existing world of social others. Instead of taking the individual’s sense of self as a starting premise and asking how we can be logically sure others exist, we can take up the charge from Mead and reorient research to investigate how we personally come to exist as selves among others. A unique vantage point for considering this relationship between the self and others is found in the critical analysis by Kelvin Booth, a philosopher who has contributed to work on embodied cognition. Booth carefully dissects the fi ndings of research that claims to show the extent to which apes understand the intentions and experiences of others, and he argues that there is no clear evidence of defi nite imitation or “mind-reading” abil-

Introduction

9

ities in these cases. Research on human infants demonstrates the range of behavioral mimicries they exhibit early in development, but Booth argues that these behaviors develop from a tendency of infants to synchronize activities with others, not to intuitively take the role of others and truly imitate their intentions. In this chapter Booth reaffirms the importance of Mead’s efforts to distinguish the role-taking abilities that humans develop from seemingly analogous behavior of other animals and human infants. And by building on the notion of synchronizing behaviors, Booth contributes an explanation of why humans are the only animals that imitate in a strict sense, which both lends further support for Mead’s overall theory of mind and makes a novel contribution to the literature on comparative behavior. A key figure working to reorient comparative and developmental research in cognitive science around social and cultural issues is Michael Tomasello, whose work includes references to Mead. German sociologist Frithjof Nungesser takes up a systematic comparison of Tomasello and Mead, focusing especially on the evolutionary development of humanspecific features of communication. Both authors agree that the key transition between animal and human communication is in gestural interaction and that humans have developed unique role-taking abilities that transform cognition into internal dialogue. Their differences of emphasis, however, are instructive. They choose different reference species with differing types of social skills to compare with humans, and they place different emphases on verbal and manual communication in evolutionary development. Although Tomasello provides a more up-to-date analysis of the evolutionary development of human communication, Nungesser argues that he ultimately fails to fully incorporate Mead’s pragmatist principles, which both recognize the evolutionary continuity of human and animal sociality and at the same time stress the change of existence as a whole—the emergence of a qualitatively new intersubjective space affecting all human motivations and behaviors—that results from biologically evolved human specific capacities. Ethicist Joshua Daniel takes up the moral implications of Mead’s anthropology in order to investigate the nature of conscience. Modern conceptions of conscience, Daniel shows, emphasize its function as either the voice of society’s moral conventions or of personal moral discernment, which results in a fundamental tension between the individual and social aspects of conscience. Daniel derives from Mead’s notion of the self, especially the distinction between the I and the me, an ecological view in which the embodied self engages in interactions with various social en-

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Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

vironments, both performing social roles and responding individually to social demands. The real advance of Mead’s view over current moral philosophy is showing that moral confl icts are not fundamentally between the individual and society but between competing socially funded consciences and that the work of the individual’s conscience is not in punctuated moments of judgment but rather in continually negotiating between multiple ecologies of social roles. On the basis of this formulation Daniel proposes that conscience does not serve simply to resolve moral perplexity once and for all but to allow individuals to rationally maintain perplexity and to participate successfully in a variety of morally ambiguous roles. A persistent theme of Daniel’s and others’ papers is Mead’s embodied and situated concept of the mind, and Czech philosopher Roman Madzia focuses on this issue in order to examine a central problem for modern thought—specifically, the relationship between experience and language. Madzia argues that modern philosophies—including so-called neo-pragmatists—view language as a necessary mediation through which humans experience the world, but this common view has resulted in fundamental problems. Mead, in contrast, developed a theory in which our primary relation with the world is absorbed skillful coping with an engrossing and unproblematized realm of objects, not an objective world mediated for an actor by propositional content. On this basis, Mead develops a theory of the emergence of linguistic communication in which symbols enable humans to systematically reconstruct their habits in response to practical problems. Thus, Madzia argues, the linguistic mediation of the world is a second-order attitude situated within a larger theory of direct, unmediated action. The apparently problematic features of linguistic representation of the world are resolved into transitory but necessary phases in the action of the body as it attempts to restore the direct unity of experience—to re-present a unified field of action. Mead’s theory of the nature and development of language is thoroughly evaluated in light of subsequent research in the fi nal chapter by the late sociologist Timothy Gallagher. The chapter is structured as a response to ethologist Niko Tinbergen’s well-known four questions in the explanation of behavior: How does it work (mechanics)? How does it develop in the individual (ontogeny)? How did it emerge in history (phylogeny)? And how is it adaptive for survival (function)? Mead, Gallagher shows, fares well on each of these questions, and his writings exhibit an explicit awareness of features of language that have received confi rmation in recent scholarship, including its neuro-physiological apparatus, its complex development that is dependent on features of human biology and social learning, its evolu-

Introduction

11

tionary relation to and advance over non-symbolic gestures, and its role in producing flexible and dynamic coordination of social activities. Ultimately Mead goes beyond these questions by developing a non-dualistic theory of the relationship between language and consciousness—a problem not considered by Tinbergen’s reductive questions. Together, the contributions to The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead attempt to bring scholarship on George Herbert Mead up to date and to introduce new directions in the understanding of this influential author and contemporary scholarship. Perhaps most importantly, the contributions provide detailed analyses of Mead’s importance to innovative fields of scholarship, including cognitive science, environmental studies, democratic epistemology, social ethics, non-teleological historiography, and the history of the natural and social sciences. Through their rigorous analyses the authors of these chapters develop a coherent statement that places Mead in dialogue with current research, pushing these domains of scholarship forward while also revitalizing the growing literature on an author who has already had a major influence on sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Many of the authors and ideas of this volume were fi rst brought into dialogue at a conference celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of George Herbert Mead, organized by Hans Joas, Andrew Abbott, Daniel Huebner, and Christopher Takacs and held at the University of Chicago in April 2013. That conference was generously sponsored by the John  U. Nef Committee on Social Thought (chaired by Robert Pippin), with supplemental funding from the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. The conference provided a venue in which emerging scholars from several countries and new fields challenged the assumptions of Mead and his legacy, and the striking themes that emerged from that conference provided a major impetus for this collection. The present volume also provides the unique opportunity to make visible to new audiences updated versions of some important contributions previously published elsewhere. These pieces benefit especially from being paired with the other chapters in this volume that bear on common themes. An earlier version of Timothy Gallagher’s chapter was published as “G. H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research” (Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41 [2011]: 40– 62). Karl-Siegbert Rehberg’s chapter is a revision, translated by Alex Skinner, of a piece that appeared as “Die Theorie der Intersubjektivität als eine Lehre vom Menschen. George Herbert Mead und die deutsche

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Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

Tradition der ‘Philosophischen Anthropologie’” (in Das Problem der Intersubjektivität: Neuere Beiträge zum Werk George Herbert Meads, ed. Hans Joas [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985]). Finally, the editors would like to thank Christian Scherer for his assistance with proofreading and preparing the index.

REFERENCES Cook, Gary A. 1993. George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Dewey, John. 1932. Prefatory Remarks to The Philosophy of the Present, by George H. Mead. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Gallagher, Timothy. 2011. “G. H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41: 40– 62. Huebner, Daniel R. 2014. Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, George H. 1927. “The Objective Reality of Perspectives.” In Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Company. ———. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. ———. 2006. L'esprit, le soi et la société, edited by Daniel Cefai and Louis Quéré. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Miller, David L. 1973. George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World. Austin: University of Texas Press. Murphy, Arthur E. 1932. Preface to The Philosophy of the Present, by George H. Mead. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. 1985. “Die Theorie der Intersubjektivität als eine Lehre vom Menschen. George Herbert Mead und die deutsche Tradition der ‘Philosophishen Anthropologie.’” In Das Problem der Intersubjektivität: Neuere Beiträge zum Werk George Herbert Meads, edited by Hans Joas. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Weber, Max. 1946. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–56. New York: Oxford University Press. Westbrook, Robert. 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Ch apter One

Changing “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century”: Historical Text and Historical Context Charles Camic

T

hat mind—human thought—is a social product is among the core tenets of George Herbert Mead’s work. It has been a central theme in the interpretive literature on Mead going back to the fi rst entries in that literature. To say “social” is, from Mead’s point of view, also and necessarily to say “historical,” as students of Mead’s work would unanimously agree. Nonetheless, this aspect of his work—the historicity of mind—has received relatively little attention, in part because of the neglect by Mead scholars of the text most relevant in this regard, Mead’s Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Further, Mead’s claims about the historicity of all human thought have rarely been applied reflexively—that is to say, to the development of his own ideas. Even so, Mead’s position was clear. In his course on Greek philosophy, for example, Mead states: “a legitimate method for the history of thought then must fi rst of all determine the movement which any period represents and then fi nd the place of thinkers whose systems it studies in the movement—not treat their systems as independent reactions upon the forces represented in this movement but as moments within that movement.” Continuing, he ridiculed the historians of philosophy who viewed the past from the narrow point of view of the present and interpreted the ancients as if they were contemporaries: that is, in terms of “conditions under which we [now] live.1 As examples we may offer the anachronisms of [Benjamin] Jowett’s English gentleman in the Platonic Academy or [Eduard] Zeller’s German philosopher in the Schools of Miletus or Abdera.”2 This chapter is an effort to heed Mead’s call to understand human thought historically, situating it in its social-historical context.3 The chapter pursues this aim by offering a modest historical “case study” of Mead’s 15

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own thinking—or, more accurately, of one aspect of Mead’s thinking, an important aspect that Mead scholars have generally overlooked. Specifically, the chapter examines the text and the context of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, a text assembled after Mead’s death from notes taken in a course of lectures that he gave at the University of Chicago in 1928. My analysis has two main parts. The fi rst part attempts to historicize this lecture course itself, while the second part focuses on the immediate historical context of the course. In the fi rst section I describe the transformation of the course from John Dewey’s 1891 version to Mead’s own 1915 version to Mead’s fi nal 1928 version. In the second section I briefly consider this transformation in relation to the specific historical setting—that is, the local discursive context—in which Mead developed and taught the course. I precede these two sections with a short prologue about previous Mead scholarship on these topics.4

PROLOGUE: A LACUNA While books and articles on the thought of George Herbert Mead currently number into the thousands, one searches this literature, almost in vain, for writings that deal with Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (hereafter, Movements). For this particular text, the relevant items can be counted on two hands. Among these, there is actually no article or chapter devoted to an explication of Mead’s text or to an analysis of the historical context in which he developed the views he expresses there. The fullest treatments of Movements have used it for more specific purposes: Joas ([1980] 1985) to illuminate Mead’s “early philosophical writings” (see also Joas 1991) and Shalin (1984) to describe the “romantic antecedents” of Mead’s social psychology. Cook (1993), Silva (2008), Decker (2008), Fairfield (2010), Pearce (2014), and Shalin (1988) offer remarks that are briefer still. What is more, insofar as there is a common thread in these contributions, it has been the evaluation of the adequacy of Mead’s account of his subjects, with Mead earning high marks for his treatment of Fichte and Bergson (Joas 1991, 68; see also Koopman 2010, 211) but criticism for his characterizations of Hegel, Schelling, and Marx (Decker 2008, 470–71; Joas 1991, 69–73). Aside from these brief commentaries, one must look back to the original reviews of Mead’s volume for discussion of the text as a whole (Barnes 1937; Bugg 1937; Castell 1937; Pape 1936; Randall 1937). In part, scholars’ reluctance to tackle Movements appears connected with the fact that it is not a text that Mead himself composed as a book but

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rather a posthumous compilation of notes based on lectures that he gave in a course with the same title, which the philosopher Merritt H. Moore subsequently edited into book form. Since Mind, Self, and Society ([1934] 1962) is likewise the result of edited course notes, however, this particular circumstance would hardly seem enough to relegate Movements to the interpretive sidelines. In the case of Movements, moreover, the existing lecture notes are “stenographic notes” which, according to Moore, provide a nearly “verbatim recording of Mr. Mead’s lectures” (Mead 1936, vii–viii). Still further, to the extent that the materials can be compared, Mead’s statements in this text are consistent with statements he makes in his other work. Uncertainty about the reliability of the text of Movements is not the crux of the matter, however. The larger reason for the virtually nonexistent secondary literature lies in the book’s seemingly small payoff for readers interested in the basic Meadian topics of the self, the inter-subjective foundations of the social self, the role of language in social interaction, and so on. Opening to the book’s table of contents, one notices that more than half of this dense five-hundred-page text deals with subjects that seem remote from these canonical topics. Chart 1.1. G. H. Mead, MOVEMENTS OF T HOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1936), Table of Contents [Mead-2] Based on spring 1928 lectures Chapter 1. From Renaissance to Revolution 2. Kant—The Philosopher of the Revolution 3. The Revolution Breaks Down; Romanticism is Born 4. Kant and the Background of Philosophic Romanticism 5. The Romantic Philosophers—Fichte 6. The Romantic Philosophers—Schelling 7.

The Romantic Philosophers—Hegel

8. Evolution Becomes a General Idea 9. The Industrial Revolution—The Quest for Markets 10. The Social Renaissance—Utilitarianism 11. The Social Renaissance—Karl Marx and Socialism 12. Industry a Boon to Science—Mechanism the Handmaid of Finality 13. Modern Science is Research Science 14. Science Raises Problems for Philosophy—Vitalism; Henri Bergson 15. Science Raises Problems for Philosophy—Realism and Pragmatism 16. The Problem of Society—How We Become Selves

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17. Mind Approached through Behavior—Can its Study be Made Scientific? 18. Individuality in the Nineteenth Century

Further, when one turns to the few chapters (chapters 16 and 17) that, by their titles, seem to be more on topic, one realizes that the titles are not Mead’s but those of his editor, who (perhaps to attract a larger readership) resorted to some deceptive packaging. Given all this, Gary Cook’s judgment that Movements is “not . . . particularly useful” (1993, xv–xvi) sums up how the volume is perceived by scholars concerned with the standard Meadian subjects but not concerned with considering these subjects in relation to Mead’s claim that human thought is fundamentally historical. As a result, thirty years after Shalin’s characterization of Movements as “a much neglected book” (1984, 44), virtually nothing has changed in the secondary literature on Mead.

“MOVEMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY” IN HISTORICAL MOTION It is a familiar rule of research method that one useful way to understand a particular historical case is to locate that case with reference to the larger family of cases of which it is a part. Doing so enables the researcher to determine where the case under consideration resembles and where it diverges from other family members. I mention this practice because it is the procedure that I will use with regard to Mead’s Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. I am going to consider some of the historical ancestry of the 1928 course from which Mead’s text derives with the objective of identifying what is historically specific about this course and what we can learn by homing in on its historical particularities. Without going backward too far chronologically, the genealogy that I want to sketch traces back to the 1880s and a philosopher one generation older than Mead: George Sylvester Morris. (This Morris has no known family relation to Mead’s future student, the philosopher Charles W. Morris, editor of Mind, Self, and Society.) At the point when he enters my narrative here, G. S. Morris was one of the major figures in American academic philosophy, a staunch Hegelian idealist whose career marked a shift away from old-time clergymen-philosophers to the new era of philosophers as professional scholars (Kuklick 2001; Wenley 1917). At the center of this shift was, as John Dewey later wrote, Morris’s emphasis on the history of philosophy. In Dewey’s words: Morris “never sur-

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rendered the belief that . . . philosophic conviction must be based upon a knowledge of philosophy in its historic development. [His teachings were based] upon the idea that the main thing [is to get the student] out of his restricted ways of thinking and in contact with the stream of reflective thought that had been flowing on well-nigh twenty-five hundred years” (quoted in Wenley 1917, 309–10). Consistent with this belief, Morris wrote books on Kant (1882) and British thought up to the time of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer (1880), and he also produced a thousand-page translation from German of Friedrich Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy from Thales to the Present Time (Ueberweg [1871] 1874). Dewey was the most renowned of Morris’s many distinguished students. His graduate work at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1880s was done under Morris’s direction, and when Morris became the chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Michigan in 1885, he insisted that Dewey receive a faculty position there. Molding the Michigan philosophy department to fit his commitment to the history of philosophy, Morris instituted a program heavy with courses on the history of ancient and modern philosophy; and when Morris died in 1889, Dewey, who had since moved to the University of Minnesota, returned to Michigan to succeed Morris as philosophy department chairman—using the occasion to assign some of the history of philosophy courses, which he had previous taught, to his new faculty assistants, one of whom was George Herbert Mead (Dykhuizen 1973). Even so, Dewey’s own interest in the history of philosophy continued. As late as the fi rst semester of the 1891/92 academic year, Dewey was still teaching in this area, offering a course with the title “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century”—a course he apparently gave several more times. Conveniently (for the purposes of this chapter), student notes from Dewey’s course survive in the University of Michigan Archives, and they are revealing with regard to Dewey’s approach to the subject in the early 1890s.5 To see this, we can look at Chart 1.2, which lists the topics of Dewey’s lectures—as I myself have interpolated the lecture titles, since Dewey did not give titles to his own lectures.6 Chart 1.2. John Dewey, “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century” [Dewey-1] Based on lectures of 1891–92 Lecture 1. 18th- Century Background 2–4. The French Movement, Rousseau

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5–9. The German Movement: Goethe, Schiller 10–11. The Enlightenment: Rousseau, Voltaire 12–14. Kant 15. Fichte 16. Fichte, Herder, Hegel 17–19. Hegel 20. Romanticism 21. Industrial Revolution and Socialism 22. Saint-Simon 23–24. Comte 25. Failure of “1848,” Scientific Movement, and Evolution 26. Carlyle, Bentham, J. S. Mill

The short titles in the chart, however, capture the range of topics that Dewey covered, a range that extends from the greats in the philosophical pantheon, Kant and Hegel in particular, to broad movements such as romanticism and socialism, as well as to a wide array of social thinkers, among them Rousseau, Herder, Saint-Simon, Comte, Bentham, and J. S. Mill. This list of topics is a revealing one, but even more striking is the historical narrative that Dewey constructs to link these thinkers together. Teaching this course at the stage in his career that scholars generally regard as his “Hegelian” phase, Dewey’s lectures present a strongly teleological account: a narrative of an unfolding and directional historical process in which some one-sided intellectual development inexorably calls forth an opposing one-sided development, both of which thereafter either combine into a moving synthesis or, failing that, temporarily slide back into a previously superseded state. Dewey stresses this theme again and again. In lecture 20, for example, he tells his students: “The Romanticist movement was the other side of what we had in the early 19th-century artistic and philosophic movements. The latter started with the objective side of life . . . but ended with the subjective life of feelings and emotions. The Romanticists began with subjective states, but ended with objective authority. . . . Each had a half-truth, and when this half-truth failed to develop the organic character of . . . life, each went back to a historic form in which such coordination had existed.” Shortly, I will make some further observations about Dewey’s lectures. Their significance for understanding the published text of Mead’s Movements will become clearer, however, if I fi rst complete the backstory of the text. For, not long after Dewey offered his “Movements” course at the University of Michigan, a course with the same title appeared in the program

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of the University of Chicago. This reappearance coincided with Dewey’s departure from Michigan in 1894 to become chairman of Chicago’s newlyfounded philosophy department—a geographical move that involved the transplantation not only of Dewey’s faculty assistants at Michigan, Mead included, but also of courses from Michigan’s curriculum. Among these transplanted courses was one on “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” and this course subsequently became a department staple; the University Register advertised it regularly as “a nontechnical course, tracing the leading principles expressed in the literary, scientific, philosophic, and social movements” of the age. Under this description, the course was taught alternately in the mid- to late-1890s by James Tufts and Mead. Then, after the turn of the century, Mead essentially took the course over, teaching it at least twenty-six times in his thirty-seven years at Chicago—a fact that should caution us against regarding the course as a brief episode in Mead’s intellectual career. The published volume entitled Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century is based on one of the last iterations of the course—Mead’s 1928 lectures. For historical and comparative purposes, it would be ideal to have iterations of the course going back to the 1890s. What is available, however, is a record of the Mead version of the course as it was in 1915, a date that is a rough midpoint between Dewey’s 1891/92 version of the course and Mead’s 1928 version.7 The true midpoint is 1910; but for understanding the historical development of Mead’s thinking, 1915 may actually be a preferable date since it comes immediately after the fundamental changes in Mead’s social-psychological ideas which (as scholars have documented) entered their “mature” phase around 1912–13 (Cook 1993, 66; Joas [1980] 1985, 10). Regardless, what has survived is Mead’s 1915 version, as shown in the lecture outline in Chart 1.3.8 Chart 1.3. G. H. Mead, “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century” [Mead-1] Based on Spring 1915 lectures Lecture 1. From Antiquity to the 18th Century 2. Early Modern Political Theory and Political Economy 3–4. English and French Revolutions: Hume, Rousseau, Kant 5–6. Kant, Romanticism 7–8. Kant 9–13. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel

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14–15. Hegel and Idea of Evolution 16. Industrial Revolution and Modern Science 17. Carlyle, Bentham 18. 19th- Century Background 19. Comte, Marx, Socialism 20. German vs. English Social Conditions 21. Carlyle, Coleridge, Bentham, J. S. Mill 22. Comte, J. S. Mill 23–25. J. S. Mill 26. J. S. Mill, Spencer 27. Idea of Evolution, Spencer 28–29. Spencer 30–32. 19th-Century Psychology: Bain, Ward, Stout, Wundt 33. Bergson 34. Condition of the Social Sciences 35. Scientific Method 36. Social Reform

Including this version along with the other extant versions, what we have then are three iterations of the course “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” one by Dewey and two by Mead. Table 1.1 presents outlines of these three iterations side-by-side. For the sake of simplicity in distinguishing these different iterations throughout the analysis that follows, I give them abbreviated names, referring to Dewey’s 1891/92 version as Dewey-1; Mead in 1915 as Mead-1; and Mead in 1928 as Mead-2. When direct reference to the Mead 1928 version is made in the following, citations are given to page numbers of the published (1936) text. Juxtaposing the versions in this way facilitates comparing them and, by so doing, makes it possible to cut through the density of Mead-2 to bring to the surface the distinctive way in which Mead here understood the principal movements of modern thought and historically situated himself and his students in relation to those movements. In comparing the three versions of the course, however, I want to stress that my guiding concern is to understand, by identifying the changes over time in the content of “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century,” the position that Mead arrives at by 1928. My goal is not to draw out some larger contrast between Dewey and Mead either as philosophers or as social thinkers. This kind of contrast would be meaningless here because both Dewey and Mead were thinkers whose ideas (on epistemology, social psychology, social reform, and a score of other subjects) underwent

16

22

Saint-Simon

Failure of “1848,” Scientific Movement, and Evolution

25

23–24

21

Industrial Revolution and Socialism

Comte

20

Romanticism

17–19

Fichte, Herder, Hegel

Hegel

15

12–14

Kant

Fichte

10–11

5– 9

The German Movement: Goethe, Schiller

The Enlightenment: Rousseau, Voltaire

2–4

1

Lecture

The French Movement, Rousseau

18th- Century Background

Dewey-1 (1891–1892)

Carlyle, Coleridge, Bentham, J. S. Mill

German vs. English Social Conditions

Comte, Marx, Socialism

19th- Century Background

Carlyle, Bentham

Industrial Revolution and Modern Science

Hegel and Idea of Evolution

Fichte, Schelling, Hegel

Kant

Kant, Romanticism

English and French Revolutions: Hume, Rousseau, Kant

Early Modern Political Theory and Political Economy

From Antiquity to the 18th Century

Mead-1 (1915)

Table 1.1. Comparison of Dewey-1, Mead-1, and Mead-2

21

20

19

18

17

16

14–15

9–13

7–8

5– 6

3–4

2

1

Lecture

Modern Research Science

Industrial Revolution and Modern Science

Marx; Socialism

Carlyle, Bentham, the Mills

Industrial Revolution

Idea of Evolution

Hegel

Schelling

Fichte

Kant, Romanticism

French Revolution Breaks Down

Philosophic Background, Kant

Renaissance, Enlightenment, Revolution; Rousseau

Mead-2 (1928)

(continued)

13

12

11

10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Lecture

26

Lecture

33 34 35 36

Bergson Condition of the Social Sciences Scientific Method Social Reform

30–32

19th- Century Psychology: Bain, Ward, Stout, Wundt

27 28–29

Idea of Evolution, Spencer Spencer

26

23–25

22

Lecture

J. S. Mill, Spencer

J. S. Mill

Comte, J. S. Mill

Mead-1 (1915)

16

15

14

Lecture

Scientific Method

18

Behaviorism and Pragmatism 17

Scientific Method

Realism and Pragmatism

Bergson

Mead-2 (1928)

For convenience, the lectures in Mead-2 are numbered to correspond with the numbering of chapters in Merritt Moore’s 1936 published version of Mead’s 1928 lectures. This fi gure also preserves Moore’s chapter divisions, although it is likely that each “lecture” includes the substance of several actual lectures that Moore combined into single chapters. Moore’s titles have been modified, however, to better fit with content of the lectures.

Carlyle, Bentham, J. S. Mill

Dewey-1 (1891–1892)

Table 1.1. (continued)

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significant transformations between the early 1890s and the late 1920s, as both men turned away from their early Hegelianism in order to develop the principal tenets of pragmatism. Dewey-1 clearly predates this change in the intellectual careers of both thinkers, however. Accordingly, it is easy to imagine that, had the two of them traded their 1891 course assignments, so that Mead was the one who ended up teaching “Movements of Thought,” Mead’s lectures at that point would not have been dissimilar from Dewey-1. Conversely, had Dewey returned to teaching this course around 1915, his lectures then would likely have borne little resemblance to Dewey-1 but may well have come closer to Mead-1. Given this, what I will be doing here is using Dewey-1 as a historical baseline from which to understand how the course changed in Mead’s hands in connection with various contextual changes that occurred (for Mead and Dewey both) in the years after Dewey-1. From this point of view, what the different versions of the course speak to are not any fundamental differences between Dewey and Mead but rather the historical metamorphosis in the form and content of the “same” philosophy course. For this purpose, consider the three columns of table 1.1. In terms of format, these columns are not comparable directly since these different iterations of the course were neither taught for the same number of hours nor divided up into an equal number of lectures. Further, although both of Mead’s versions were taught at the same university during the spring quarter of the academic year, Mead-1 consists of twice as many lectures as Mead-2—either because the earlier iteration met twice as often each week for class sessions that ran for half the number of minutes, or (more likely) because Merritt Moore combined several lectures together when he published the 1928 lectures. Obviously these are minor issues, and the same holds for the exact wording of the titles that I have assigned to the individual lectures. What matters here is what is inside these lectures, and to this question the titles shown on table 1.1 are only an initial point of entry. Bearing these qualifiers in mind, one of the fi rst things one notices in table 1.1 is that there are continuities across the three versions of “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century.” In all versions of the course, one fi nds not only the philosophical giants, Kant and Hegel, but figures of more modest stature such as Rousseau, Bentham, and Carlyle. This point is noteworthy because, when these particular names appear in Mead-2, what we are probably observing is Mead’s adherence to conventions that had grown up around the course. Another significant continuity is that all versions of this course on nineteenth- century movements of thought devote several lectures to eighteenth-century intellec-

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tual developments—in further evidence of the strong historical sense that Mead and Dewey share. More striking than these similarities, however, are the changes in the course over time. Among these, what is most apparent is a fundamental shift in the way that history itself is construed and narrated. For, in both Mead-1 and Mead-2, the teleological narrative of Dewey-1 vanishes, removing all the Hegelian talk about opposing one-sided intellectual movements combining into a fuller synthesis (or retreating backward to earlier epochs of thought). Replacing this basic narrative structure is an account cast in terms of historical contingency and structured in terms of the pragmatist view of history. Shown through examples in Mead-1 and stated explicitly in Mead-2, Mead’s pragmatist premise is that “progress”—whether in thought or in any other domain of social life—“is not toward a known goal, [because] we cannot tell what the goal is toward which we are moving” (1936, 359). Rather, “the development of our knowledge  .  .  . takes place through the appearance of problems and the solution of these problems” (135). These solutions derive from the “inventive genius [which] belongs to one community as much as to any other” (173), but which “branches off” in diverse ways that are contingent on the “creative” capacity of human agents (103). In addition to this overarching difference in narrative form, there are also major changes in content from Dewey-1 to Mead-1 and then to Mead-2. Of these, three changes, closely interconnected to one another, are especially illuminating of Mead’s developing ideas regarding the history of modern thought. A fi rst change across the three versions of the lectures is the significantly increasing role occupied by science, as a research-based activity, among the principal movements of modern thought. In Dewey-1, one has  to wait all the way until lecture 21 (of 26 lectures) for any reference to the “development of science” or to the “immense distribution of scientific results” produced by that development; and one has to wait until lecture 25 until Dewey speaks of “the scientific movement” and how “the organized unity of intelligence has largely given way to specialized scientific research”—a theme that then exits his narrative as quickly as it had entered. In marked contrast, both the “method” and the “concepts of modern science” are the fi rst topics on the agenda of Mead-1. Consistent with this change, various aspects of ancient and modern science weave their way in and out of Mead’s lectures until modern science takes over the center stage in lecture 16 (of 36 lectures). At this point, Mead provides the at-

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tendees in his course with a lengthy exposition of the research of natural scientists such as Laplace, Carnot, and Darwin; and from this lecture onward, scientific research (as represented by these names) constitutes for Mead the gold-standard of modern knowledge. In lecture 35 Mead draws out the implications of the movement of scientific thought in the nineteenth century by explaining that “the emphasis in modern philosophy is on method, not on metaphysics,” and that “pragmatism makes a system of philosophy out of scientific method.” Mead-2 carries this elevation of research science to a still higher plane, trumpeting the importance of “modern science” to modern life as early as lecture 1 (1936, 6), and proclaiming that “scientific knowledge [is] the surest knowledge that we have” (91– 92). At almost every turn, Mead reiterates these claims, to the point of devoting four separate lectures (out of only 18) to detailed discussions of scientific knowledge (lectures 12, 13, 16, 18). From Mead’s 1928 standpoint, “science . . . is the outstanding fact not simply of the nineteenth century, but of all thought since the Renaissance” (259). Further, “the history of science since the Renaissance is really a history of the research process” (353, emphasis added). The italicized expression here is a loaded one because Mead-2 insists on a distinction that is only fleeting in Mead-1 (and absent in Dewey-1). This is that there “lies [a] vast difference between a research science and any dogmatic statement of the world,” since every “dogmatic theory [stands] in confl ict with the scientific method” (258–59). As it is exemplified in the modern “biological sciences in particular,” but shows itself in “all modern science,” the scientific method is the procedure whereby “the research scientist starts,” in good pragmatist fashion, “from a specific problem that he fi nds as an exception to what has been regarded as a [scientific] law,” and which he then solves by undertaking “to reconstruct [his] theory to deal with these situations” of exception (264, 258). Virtually hammering this message home to his students, Mead-2 leaves not the slightest doubt that the growth of research science constitutes the paramount movement of modern thought. A second striking change across the three different versions of the lectures is the growing presence and increasingly positive evaluation of the Darwinian idea of evolution. In Dewey-1, “evolution” goes almost entirely unacknowledged, hovering around the margins of a few incidental passages, but discussed head-on only once. This occurs in lecture 25 (out of 26 lectures) where Dewey offers the following idealist rendering: “Science gave birth to the idea of evolution and thus started on a movement toward Philosophy; the root of the idea of Evolution is the highest attempt of the mind to connect together unity on one side and diversity on the other.”

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Whether this is an allusion to Hegelian notions of the evolution of Spirit or to Darwinian arguments about the evolution of species, Dewey does not say. Regardless, Dewey-1 makes no specific mention (so far as I have been able to determine) of Darwin or of any of his central ideas. In Mead-1, however, we witness a substantial transformation. Midway into the course (lectures 14, 15, 16), “evolution” steps forward as one of the main intellectual currents of the nineteenth century. Viewing it in this way, Mead describes Hegelian and Darwinian ideas of evolution, expositing Darwin’s concepts of “variation and natural selection” and (according to my own reading of the course notes) accepting Darwin’s views over those of Hegel, which Mead presents in a more critical light. In these respects, however, Mead-1 is only an adumbration of Mead-2, where “evolution” becomes even more fundamental to the picture Mead draws. In presenting this picture, Mead now makes explicit what he regards as “the essential thing” about the “doctrine of evolution” (1936, 166). This is: the recognition that the [life] process takes now one form and now another, according to the condition under which it is going on. . . . If the conditions call for a certain type of organ, that organ must arise if the form is to survive.  .  .  . The acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis is simply the acceptance of Darwin’s view that selection under the struggle for existence would pick out the organ which is necessary for survival. (166)

Linking this description to what he has already said (in Mead-2) about the role of research science in modern thought, Mead now goes further to single out Darwin’s “doctrine of evolution” as the principal result of the application of proper scientific method. He characterizes the doctrine as “the guiding idea in practically all investigations” that modern science has undertaken (160)—and he offers a glowing assessment of Darwinian ideas. Indeed, Mead-2 declares “that Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest . . . is one of the most fruitful and important ideas that has come to man” (196– 97, emphasis added) in the long history of mankind’s efforts to solve the problems posed by efforts to understand nature’s workings. The third and fi nal change that becomes apparent as one moves from Dewey-1 to Mead-1 and then to Mead-2 is the declining stature of past efforts to produce knowledge of society. While Dewey-1 takes a critical stance toward the ideas of certain individual figures in the history of social thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there is nothing in the lectures to convey a blanket dismissal of the efforts of previous

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thinkers to understand the social world. Rather, aside from lectures on the usual philosophical greats, Dewey-1 is all about past social thinkers. In this respect, Dewey follows the example of George S. Morris, whose books were likewise a detailed discussion of earlier philosophers and social theorists. Accordingly, in taking stock of the major movements of nineteenthcentury thought, Dewey gives over four entire lectures to two figures (nowadays nearly forgotten) in the history of sociology, Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte—the same number of lectures that Dewey devotes to Immanuel Kant! And in approaching the various earlier social thinkers who he deals with, even those whose views he objects to, Dewey’s tone is respectful, not derogatory or even supercilious. But Mead-1 is more equivocal. It devotes roughly the same proportion of lectures as does Dewey-1 to past social thinkers, but in doing so it begins to sound a different note—namely, that works of social theory produced in the nineteenth century (or earlier) fall short when measured against the gold standard of modern knowledge: science. When discussing Herbert Spencer, for example, Mead comments that, although nominally an evolutionist, what Spencer actually offered was “a philosophy of evolution.” Further, while observing that the nineteenth century “got rid of metaphysics in the physical and biological sciences,” Mead holds that “social science is not yet out of the field of metaphysics,” even as he is speaking. Mead-2 completes this devaluation of nineteenth-century social thinkers. In this iteration of the course, not only does Mead reduce the number of lectures focused on social thought (to the point of almost eliminating Spencer and Comte); he also makes use of his distinction between a “dogmatic theory and a modern research science” to relegate most previous writings about society to the ash heap of dogma—as one sees, for example, in his dismissive statement that “Marxian doctrine . . . is very defi nitely economic dogma, [which, for this reason,] lost its hold throughout Europe” (1936, 233). Taking a wider angle, lecture 16 of Mead-2 asserts: “up to this period, the so-called ‘social sciences’ have been gathered about . . . more or less dogmatic theory” (367). This defect has kept them in the shadowlands of the “dogmatic disciplines,” where contending theories flail against one another in disregard of proper scientific method, which “does not set up one dogma in place of another” (289). The phrase “the so-called ‘social sciences’” speaks volumes about the attitude that Mead-2 holds toward theories of the past. It is important to emphasize, however, that this attitude is not the only attitude that Mead expresses. The viewpoint that I have just described ap-

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pears in lectures on the history of nineteenth-century thought, not as part of some general statement by Mead about the inherent limits of efforts to produce social knowledge. And, for the very reason that his approach to human thought is so resolutely historical, one must be cautious in extrapolating what he says about the past forward into the future. Doing so would be particularly mistaken in this case because, as Mead makes plain in other writings, he is a fervent believer in the future scientific prospects for social knowledge (as Mead scholars have frequently stressed). Seen in this light, Mead-2’s dismissal of earlier social thinkers is Mead’s way of actually promoting the social sciences, his way of sweeping aside the pseudo “social science” of the past, so as to clear the ground for the genuinely social-scientific work that is on the horizon. In Mead’s view, however, this turnabout depends on the extension of the scientific method to the study of the social world, an extension that will not be easy because the objects of study are “different”—that is, far more complex— “in a human society than in simpler situations” such as those encountered in the natural sciences (Mead 1936, 376). Even so, Mead avers—at the end of lecture 8 of Mead-2—that “there cannot be any narrow provincialism or patriotism in science. Scientific method makes that impossible. Science is inevitably a universal discipline which takes in all who think” (Mead 1936, 168). This is the reason, according to Mead, that “the scientific method [has lately been] brought into the problems of psychology” (Mead 1936, 386). Moreover, Mead regarded his own social-psychological work as a further step along the same scientific path (as Mead scholars have emphasized)—a path that was now haltingly going forth to encompass “the social organism” and the “social process” (Mead 1936, 373). (Further examination of Mead’s view of these future possibilities lies beyond the bounds of my effort here to historicize Mead’s text.) Stepping back from these particulars, we see that comparison of the three versions of “Movements of Thought” furnishes a valuable key to understanding how Mead characterized and circumscribed the principal movements of nineteenth-century thought. This comparison makes it possible (as the published text of Mead’s 1928 lectures does not) to identify which thinkers and topics were and were not staple components of the course from Dewey-1 to Mead-2. It thus also makes it possible to recognize the course’s moving parts, to recognize what Mead-2 adds to and removes from the edifice of Dewey-1 as Mead’s 1928 lectures construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the history of nineteenth-century thought along the lines that Mead-1 begins to lay out. By the time of Mead-2, Mead’s history is a narrative that foregrounds and celebrates the development of

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research-based science and the development of Darwinian evolutionary ideas, while casting the social thinkers of the past in unflattering roles and setting them apart from these two main plot developments in order to create an opening for later social thinkers to join the scientific mainstream. In lecture 6 of Mead-2, Mead remarks, probably self-reflectively, that “it is not simply the future which is novel  .  .  .  ; the past is also novel” (1936, 117). This is why, in his view, “a different Caesar crosses the Rubicon” with each successive historical telling of the event. “As we look back over the past,” says Mead, inevitably “it is a different past. The experience is something like that of a person climbing a mountain. As he looks back over the terrain he has covered, it presents a continually different picture, [in the same way that] the past is continually changing as we look at it from the point of view” of different historical observers. The insight is an astute one, clearly illustrated by the ways in the “movements of thought in the nineteenth century” are differently identified and appraised as we move from Dewey-1, to Mead-1, to Mead-2. But these changes then raise the question: As Mead rewrites the narrative of recent intellectual history, from which historical mountaintop was he surveying the landscape below?

THE TEXT IN ITS LOCAL HISTORICAL CONTEXT To address this question, I propose that we appropriate the method that Mead himself hands to us as the proper way of capturing the mind’s historicity: namely, the “legitimate method for the history of thought then must fi rst of all determine the movement which any period represents and then fi nd the place of thinkers whose systems it studies in the movement” (see the second paragraph of this chapter). Extending this method to Mead’s own work and stating these questions more plainly: In what movements of thought was Mead historically situated? What implication did his historical location have for how he identified and evaluated the movements of nineteenth-century thought? These questions call for an excavation of Mead’s intellectual-historical context; but, like all contexts, this one has no bounds. For present purposes, however, it will be most useful, I think, to focus on the local intellectual context of Mead’s work—that is, on what Mead called (in Mind, Self, and Society) “the universe of discourse, [as it is] constituted by a group of individuals carrying on and participating in a common social process of experience and behavior” ([1934] 1962, 89).9 Equating this “group of individuals . . . participating in a common social process” with Mead’s fac-

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ulty colleagues at the University of Chicago, I want to suggest that there is a direct continuity between the “universe of discourse” present among those in this group, on the one hand, and the three major textual changes that I’ve traced in Mead’s lectures, on the other hand. Indeed, had informed American or European academic contemporaries been asked to name the university whose faculty was the best exemplar of a group committed at once to (1) science as a research-based endeavor, (2) Darwinian evolutionary ideas, and (3) building a genuine social science (as contrasted with failed past attempts to create a “science” of the social world), by far the most common answer would have been the faculty at Mead’s own institution, the University of Chicago, during the four decades following the University’s opening in 1892.10 As evidence of this threefold commitment circulating through the local universe of discourse, consider each of these three points in turn. Take, fi rst, the University’s dedication to research science. To create an institution devoted to scientific research was the explicit mission of the University of Chicago from its founding. At the University’s start, President William Rainey Harper—“the fi rst president of an American university to make research primary” (Pugh 1995, 105)—announced that he would “devote special attention to the encouragement of scientific research” (quoted in Goodspeed 1928, 115). This was a policy that Harper made clear to members of his faculty, adhering to it in his decisions about faculty appointments and promotions in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and even the humanities (see Meyer 1994). And Harper’s successors strictly upheld the same policy (Meyer 1994). As early as 1894, when Dewey and Mead were considering job offers from the University of Chicago, Dewey enthused about “the chance to build up the department of philosophy, to associate with men whose main interest is in advanced research, the opportunity to devote myself to that kind of work” (quoted in Dykhuizen 1973, 543, emphasis added). In the same vein, mathematician E. H. Moore recalled how Harper “made us all feel his conception of a research institution of the highest grade as the goal of our efforts” (Pugh 1995, 108). Not only this, but what held true in the early years grew in significance by the 1920s, as the University successfully competed for the external financial support for scientific research which private foundations were by then making available to universities. Historian Roger Geiger ([1986] 2004, 196– 97, emphasis added) sums up the situation: “By the 1920s . . . Chicago was more single-mindedly dedicated to pure academic inquiry than any other American university. [In this regard,] foundation gifts . . . benefited

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the academic core of the university and particularly its capacity for research. . . . Little wonder, then, that during this golden age, it seemed to Chicago professors that they were on the threshold of becoming a ‘pure’ research university.” But let us turn, second, to the commitment of the University of Chicago’s faculty to Darwinian evolutionary ideas. Here we fi nd a very similar situation. To an extent that academics of the early twenty-fi rst century would scarcely imagine possible, faculty members at the university (in the period under discussion) were in almost unanimous agreement in their acceptance and advocacy of Darwinian principles.11 Darwinian principles were accepted by faculty members at the University from diverse disciplines, including Thomas Chamberlin in geology, John Coulter in botany, Jacques Loeb in physiology, Charles Whitman in zoology, Thorstein Veblen and Carlos Closson in economics, Harry Judson in history, W.  I. Thomas and George Vincent in sociology and anthropology, John Dewey in philosophy, and even Shailer Mathews in the divinity school (see also Mitman 1992; Pauly 1987; Rainger et al. 1988). Every one of these prominent figures (and many lesser-knowns) gave voice to an evolutionary consensus that was probably more pervasive at Chicago than at any other institution. Third, and lastly, there was the shared view among faculty members that, although the work of past social thinkers had been scientifically deficient, the time had arrived for the so-called social sciences to become sciences by adopting the method of the modern research-based sciences. Among those in the University’s social science departments, this view ran so deep that it virtually went without saying. But we see it openly expressed, for example, when Thorstein Veblen raises his famous question of “Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science?”—and then answers his question by proposing that economics embrace the method of the modern biological sciences (Veblen 1898). And we fi nd the same attitude voiced by Albion Small and George Vincent when they insist that the “study of society” should begin afresh using “the method of observation and induction,” as found in the natural sciences: namely, “the method of credible sociology,” as distinguished from the “prescientific rationalizings” of earlier attempts to build a science of sociology (Small and Vincent 1894, 15; Small 1924, v). But perhaps the most famous statement of the widespread faculty belief that the social sciences are late-bloomers which are only now (i.e., in the early twentieth century) taking shape as research sciences appears in Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s optimistically-titled Introduction to the

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Science of Sociology, where the authors speak of three periods in the development of sociology (1921, 44, emphasis added): 1. The period of Comte and Spencer; sociology, conceived in grand style is a philosophy of history. . . . 2. The period of the “schools”; sociological thought, dispersed among the various schools, is absorbed in an effort to defi ne its point of view. . . . 3. The period of investigation and research, the period into which sociology is just now entering.

In this new age, according to Park and Burgess, sociologists will break from their troubled prehistory of confl icts among schools, each one fighting in “support of this or that doctrine”; instead, they will conduct bona fide “social research” by the proven method of subjecting their theory “to a test of negative instances” and then modifying the theory in light of the facts (1921, 44–45). This being so, let modern history begin at last! One will notice that the language Park and Burgess use here to characterize the scientific method closely resembles Mead’s own pragmatist formulation of the scientific method (as cited above). But it hardly matters whether Park and Burgess were following the views that Mead was then espousing; Mead’s ideas were following those of Park and Burgess; or—most likely—Mead, Park, and Burgess were all sounding views present throughout the closely-knit faculty at the University of Chicago. The larger point to appreciate is that the major narrative changes that occur between Dewey-1 (a course given before Dewey and Mead moved to the University of Chicago) and Mead-1 and then Mead-2 (both of them taught at the University of Chicago) are narrative changes directly in accord with the universe of discourse at the university at precisely the time that Mead was working out his reconstruction of “Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century.” Indeed, if we take the central historical themes of Mead’s lectures—especially the Mead-2 lectures (which were delivered right in the middle of Chicago’s “golden age” as a research institution)— and we set these themes side-by-side to a description of the dominant aspects of the University of Chicago’s intellectual context, what we observe is the tight interweave of text and context, as the discourse prevalent at the university corresponds exactly with the principal movements of modern thought as Mead lays them out for his Chicago students.

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CONCLUDING PARADOX To fi nd a text and its local historical context in close correspondence, to fi nd a text part and parcel of a surrounding universe of discourse—these are not unexpected results, either for intellectual historians or for readers of Mead (especially Mead the intellectual historian). The “method” Mead recommends for the study of the history of thought anticipates fi ndings of this very sort. What it does not fully anticipate, however, is how much a fi ne grasp of this historical correspondence serves to enlarge our reading of the text that we have contextualized—and, indeed, to enlarge it even to the point of altering our understanding of the stated argument of the text. The reason we can achieve this enlargement is because the author of a text rarely steps back of his or her own accord to reflect on the correspondence between the text and its historical context. For the author, the universe of discourse that soaks through the pages of his or her text is simply part of “the world that is there”—Mead’s own expression for “all those unproblematic features of the world that are taken for granted in a context of a given inquiry” (Cook 1993, 178). It is because of this takenfor-grantedness that the author’s universe of discourse can seep into his or her text in many different ways, some of which may be paradoxical when they are placed next to the argument that the author explicitly makes in the text. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century vividly illustrates this point with regard to Mead’s own understanding of the history of modern thought. I pointed out above how Mead-1 and Mead-2 both abandon the teleological approach to intellectual history that is so prominent a feature of Dewey-1; they replace Dewey’s Hegelian story of a goal-directed process with an account constructed according to pragmatist principles of historical contingency—principles developed at length in Mead-2. Even as it espouses these principles, however, Mead-2 modifies them in a revealing way when Mead comes to certain particular movements of modern thought—namely, and not coincidentally, the very movements he foregrounds through the three narrative changes that he introduces in Mead-2. When treating these developments, Mead elaborates his pragmatist viewpoint by explaining that, if human history at large has no fi xed endstate, human agents themselves are continually seeking more effective means—a better method—to increase their adaptation to and control over their natural and social environments in order to better achieve whatever purposes they may have. Mead-2 expands this point: “Adaptation . . . car-

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ries with it some degree of control over that environment. And in the case of the human form, of human society, we have that adaptation expressing itself in a very high degree of control. [But] how is society to fi nd a method for changing its own institutions and still preserve the security of those institutions” (1936, 372, 363, emphasis added)? According to Mead-2, society fi nds this better method in the scientific method as it has emerged in the modern research-based sciences, sciences that rest on evolutionary ideas and are extending their reach to address the problems of society. Insofar as problems of adaptation and control are involved, “that is where science comes in to aid society in getting a method of progress; it understands the background of these problems, the processes out of which they have developed, and it has a method of attacking them”—a method that has no superior (1936, 366). For this reason, “society is feeling its dependence upon scientific method more and more and will continue to do so if it is to go ahead intelligently.” In describing this process, Mead shifts, unannounced, away from the language of contingency and back to an almost Hegelian vocabulary. He observes that, in the development of the research method of the evolutionary sciences, there lies “a certain necessity,” “a certain culmination in the evolutionary process” (1936, 365, 262, emphasis added). Or, more unequivocally still: “It has often been pointed out . . . that evolution does not reach any goal”; yet, due to the achievements of the scientific method, “there is, within limits, a development toward complete adaptation where that adaptation expresses itself in control over the environment. And in that sense, I think, we can fairly say that human organization, as a social organization, does exercise control and has in that sense reached a certain goal of development” (372–73, emphasis added). Telling in themselves, these claims about the directionality of the historical process are significant in an even more fundamental respect—one that becomes apparent only when we recognize the changes that occur in Mead’s lectures and situate these textual changes in their historical context. If, according to Mead-2, modern intellectual history reaches a “certain culmination” with the progress of research sciences that are evolutionary and adjusted to the study of society, the apex of this historical development—the apex of the apex—during the years Mead was giving his lectures was none other than the University of Chicago. Here, according to the contemporary discourse, was the world-center of sciences of this type; and here, too, was the taken-for-granted “world that [was] there” for Mead himself. Viewed in this historical light, Movements is a text that quietly

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constructs modern intellectual history from the vantage point of Mead’s own local milieu. In these lectures, Mead identifies the great movements of nineteenth-century thought such that they presage and attain their realization in exactly the kinds of work that his contemporaries at the University of Chicago claimed to epitomize. In this way, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, unwittingly, places Mead and his colleagues on the mountaintop of modern intellectual history.

NOTES 1. We should distinguish, however, between interpreting the past from “the narrow point of view of the present” and less myopic uses of the past. Mead certainly does not deny that those of the present can learn from thinkers of the past—as I hope I myself have done in drawing on Mead’s ideas about intellectual history to understand the history of his own work. 2. Mead’s lectures on Greek philosophy are contained in the George Herbert Mead Papers (Box 10, Folder 20), Department of Special Collections, Regenstein Library, the University of Chicago. Silva (2008, 68– 69) cites these same two passages to argue (correctly, I think) that Mead’s approach to intellectual history “is far from ‘presentism,’ in the sense of the anachronistic study of the past in the light of the present.” 3. In the last half-century, many intellectual historians have, of course, sounded the same call (albeit without referencing Mead’s earlier plea). 4. Before taking up this agenda, I would note that space limits prevent me from pursuing the implications of my analysis either for an interpretation of Mead’s thought as a whole or for understanding more familiar Meadian topics such as the pragmatist approach to social action, symbolic interaction, and so on. 5. The notes are available on microfi lm from the Bentley Library, University of Michigan. The originals are located in the Eliza Jane Sunderland Papers, 1865–1910 (Box 2). As to their reliability, Eliza Sunderland, who took the notes, was then a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy. Her 1892 dissertation was “Man’s Relation to the Absolute according to Kant and Hegel,” a thesis supervised by Dewey. 6. It goes without saying that there are, unfortunately, no hard-and-fast rules for interpolating titles. 7. Notes from Mead’s 1915 course are contained in the George Herbert Mead Papers (Box 14, Folder 6), Department of Special Collections, Regenstein Library, the University of Chicago. In this case, the note-taker was Irene Tufts Mead, Mead’s daughter-inlaw and the daughter of his colleague James Tufts. 8. Because Mead did not affix titles to his own lectures, I have again interpolated titles on the basis of course notes. 9. The few previous contextual analyses of Mead have dealt principally with his formal education and his ties to the Progressive reform movement in Chicago (Cook 1993; Silva 2008; Joas 1980; Shalin 1988)—contexts that are of great importance for understanding Mead’s philosophical and social psychological writings and his political

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activities. Even so, these contexts are too fi xed (during the years I’m studying), and too many steps removed from Mead’s “Movements” lectures, to adequately illuminate the specific narrative transformations that occur across the different versions of the course. 10. This statement is obviously not to deny that the same three commitments existed, in varying degrees, in many other American and European universities as well. 11. This is not to overlook that there were various points of disagreement in the interpretation of these principles.

REFERENCES Barnes, Harry Elmer. 1937. Review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by George H. Mead. Journal of Higher Education 8: 171–72. Bugg, Eugene G. 1937. Review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by George H. Mead. American Journal of Psychology 49: 509. Castell, Alburey. 1937. Review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by George H. Mead. Journal of Modern History 9: 86– 88. Cook, Gary A. 1993. George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Urbana: IL: University of Illinois Press. Decker, Kevin S. 2008. “The Evolution of the Psychical Element—George Herbert Mead at the University of Chicago, Lecture Notes by H. Heath Bawden, 1899–1900: Introduction.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44: 469–79. Dykhuizen, George. 1973. “John Dewey and the University of Michigan.” Journal of theHistory of Ideas 23: 513–44. Fairfield, Paul. 2010. “Dewey, Nietzsche, and the Self-Image of Philosophy.” In John Dewey and Continental Philosophy, edited by Paul Fairfield, 90–110. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Geiger, Roger L. (1986) 2004. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Goodspeed, Thomas Wakefield. 1928. William Rainey Harper, First President of the University of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, Hans. (1980) 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1991. “Mead’s Position in Intellectual History and His Early Philosophical Writings.” In Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead, edited by Mitchell Aboulafia, 57– 86. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Koopman, Colin. 2010. “The History and Critique of Modernity: Dewey and Foucault against Weber.” In John Dewey and Continental Philosophy, edited by Paul Fairfield, 194–214. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Kuklick, Bruce. 2001. A History of Philosophy in America, 1710– 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mead, George H. (1934) 1962. Mind, Self, and Society. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Merritt H. Moore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Meyer, Daniel Lee. 1994. “The Chicago Faculty and the University Ideal, 1891–1929.” 2 vols. PhD diss., University of Chicago. Mitman, Gregg. 1992. The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, George S. 1880. British Thought and Thinkers. Chicago: Griggs. ———. 1882. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Exposition. Chicago: Griggs. Pape, L. M. 1936. Review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by George H. Mead. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 187: 251–52. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pauly, Philip J. 1987. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. Pearce, Trevor. 2014. “The Dialectical Biologist, circa 1890: John Dewey and the Oxford Hegelians.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 52, 4: 747–77. Pugh, Willard J. 1995. “A ‘Curious Working of Cross Purposes’ in the Founding of the University of Chicago.” History of Higher Education Annual 15: 93–126. Rainger, Ronald, Keith R. Benson, and Jane Maienschein, eds. 1988. The American Development of Biology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Randall, J. G. 1937. Review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by George H. Mead. American Historical Review 42: 535–37. Shalin, Dmitri N. 1984. “The Romantic Antecedents of Meadian Social Psychology.” Symbolic Interaction 7: 43– 65. ———. 1988. “G. H. Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive Agenda.” American Journal of Sociology 93: 913–51. Silva, Filipe Carreira da. 2008. Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Small, Albion. 1924. Origins of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Small, Albion, and George E. Vincent. 1894. An Introduction to the Study of Society. New York: American Book Company. Ueberweg, Friedrich. (1871) 1874. History of Philosophy: From Thales to the Present Time. 2 vols. Translated by George S. Morris. New York: Scribner. Veblen, Thorstein. 1898. “Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 12: 373– 97. Wenley, R. M. 1917. The Life and Work of George Sylvester Morris. London: Macmillan.

Ch apter Two

On Mead’s Long Lost History of Science Daniel R. Huebner

G

eorge Herbert Mead taught dozens of classes on the history of science. He wrote several important articles on the topic that influenced other intellectuals. He gave innovative papers and comments on aspects of the field in professional meetings. He served as a reviewer on manuscripts in the history of science. And he supported the efforts to institutionalize the history of science as a field of inquiry. Yet Mead is not often considered a historian of science in current scholarship. The following paper attempts to examine these issues and demonstrates both the contributions Mead made to the history of science and the influence (or lack thereof) of his ideas. In tracing these claims, I draw from newly rediscovered notes from Mead’s courses, from published primary sources, and from a re-reading of some of Mead’s well-known works. This investigation demonstrates that Mead’s understanding of history, itself, has a peculiar history. It was enthusiastically drawn upon by his students, in dialogue with early authors in the history of science, and heavily criticized by other historians and philosophers. In subsequent scholarship it has been thoroughly forgotten, and only his posthumously edited and published lectures on The Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Mead 1936) and disparate passages of his various manuscripts and essays give some indications of his interest in this field. In tracing these questions, we are also in a unique position to reconsider a problematic question in the philosophy of history. Can we build a satisfying and productive understanding of history on the basis of pragmatist philosophy, and what might it look like? As discussed further below, prominent intellectuals have sometimes questioned this possibility, because of the pragmatists’ argument that truth is not fi xed and independent of human action. By tracing the issues mentioned above, however, this pa40

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per offers a practical illustration of how a pragmatist actually sought to investigate these questions.

TEACHING HISTORY OF SCIENCE Some of Mead’s earliest known speeches, to the philosophical societies of the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, were on the nature of ancient Greek abstract thought and its relation to the forms of social life (see Côté 2013).1 These early works were published only as abstracts, so the specific arguments in them are a bit telegraphic, but they are nonetheless notable contributions.2 In one, Mead (1894) argued that the Greek “mysteries” (e.g., Eleusinian Mysteries and Orphic Mysteries) represented a major step away from clan-based cult religious practices in that they increasingly took initiates from various cults into a common worship at a general communal level. The real accomplishment of the mysteries, the way they deepened social consciousness, was in creating a symbolic identification and celebration of the drama of the (non-local) gods’ existence. Further, the emergence of this form of symbolic consciousness presupposed the beginnings of social reorganization into city-communities that brought clans increasingly into necessary interrelations, and in turn reacted back on that social reorganization by generating new notions of collective identity and political constitution. Ultimately, this process of religious consciousness formation was key, Mead posited, to the emergence of a civic religion and to the practical accomplishment of the state as a socio-political form in ancient Greece. In another talk, Mead (1896, 42) attempted to explain some of the conditions for the emergence of Greek philosophy in the seventh century BCE, not in the mainland cities but rather in the centers of the expanding Greek commercial empire in Asia Minor (especially Miletus). It was in this “new world” of rapidly expanding commercial outposts that the mythological worldview of the Greek mainland proved increasingly inadequate to make sense of the pace of discoveries proceeding from commercial and productive expansion (what kind of “discoveries” Mead intended is not made explicit in the abstract, just that the Greeks came face to face with a vast territory outside their “social and spiritual Weltanschauung”). Those who speculated under these conditions were “thrown back upon an animistic statement” that conceived of the physical world in terms of active forces. This was the beginning of philosophical speculation by Thales and other pre-Socratics, who rejected mythological conceptions of the constitution of the world and instead sought to explain its fundamental mate-

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rial constitution in terms of naturalistic processes. The same speculative animism did not emerge on the mainland because society did not develop faster materially (in terms of commerce and production) than their mythology could adapt. They retained “the same naïve unconsciousness of the material means” as in earlier periods, but nevertheless experienced a deepened social consciousness in a different way, as the result of the more “healthful and organic” political and religious growth than in the outlying commercial centers. This consciousness was expressed, Mead proposed, in the flourishing of theology, mystery, and drama. Both of these early pieces have in common the attempt to understand the historical emergence of particular features of abstract consciousness—civic religion and natural philosophy—on the basis of the particular features of social transformations. These were not one-time concerns for Mead, if the courses he taught are any indication. Over his career at the University of Chicago, Mead taught twenty-five courses on ancient Greek science, philosophy, intelligence or courses on particular philosophers or schools, including Aristotle and Stoicism. Even in the most basic descriptions of these courses available from the Annual Register of the University of Chicago there are clear indications of the kinds of socio-historical arguments he made in regard to the development of thought. For example, in the autumn 1896 History of Greek Philosophy, Mead intended to place “especial stress upon the dependence of speculative thought upon industrial, political and social conditions.” In the winter 1898 seminar on Development of Greek Intelligence he proposed to study “the functions of institutions, literature and philosophy in the development of the Greek community and their expression in the Greek individual . . . the social conditions out of which the mental and spiritual products arose, and their value for Greek society will be investigated with the especial aim of stating Greek philosophic thought in terms of Greek life.” For the autumn 1907 History of Ancient Science Mead proposed “the technical skill of the civilizations with which the Greeks came into contact will be presented as the starting-point for their conscious science. Their astronomy, physics, arithmetic, and geometry, their medicine and biology, will be discussed in their genesis and their formulation into a physical theory of the world, and will be interpreted to some extent from the point of view of ancient philosophic doctrine.” And in the summer 1915 The Problem of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Later Skepticism he proposed to examine “Plato’s and Aristotle’s treatment of the practical problems in the relation of the individual and the state; the change in relation

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of the individual and the state in the Hellenic period, and consequent shift in philosophic interest.” Several sets of notes from Mead’s courses on the nature of ancient thought have survived, including at least five sets from courses on Aristotle, a set from a two-quarter seminar on the Development of Reflective Thought, a set from the History of Greek Philosophy, and a variety of notes on Philosophies of Eminent Scientists, Philosophy of Nature, and others that contrast ancient modes of thought with their various modern counter parts (see Huebner 2014 for complete listing). According to the notes for the autumn 1909 History of Greek Philosophy, taken by Maurice T. Price as an undergraduate, Mead began the class by going back behind the earliest surviving Greek speculative thought to the development of mensuration in Egypt and Babylon, both as a practical accomplishment of agriculture and in its more abstract formulations in geodesics and astronomy.3 He apparently argued that, through trade, the Phoenician maritime commercial empire was important in mediating contact between these civilizations and Greece, and thus in providing the Greek communities with a unique position in which they came into contact with the accomplishments of older civilizations without the direct imposition of Egyptian or Babylonian authority or succumbing to the ceaseless “striving” of  the Phoenician traders, themselves. Again Mead emphasized the importance of the Milesian and Ionian natural philosophers. He noted, in apparent echo of his earlier talk on Greek Thought, that expansion and contact with other civilizations freed ideas from the life of the community, in that while the previous ultimate problems for thought had been the Greek “man & his social relations” they became the “world as a whole” and the “forces behind all things.” Price’s notes indicate that Mead treated a wide swath of Greek philosophical thought in detail, with a focus on the ways in which their basic principles and suppositions were related to the problems of social life, including fi nding permanence in a world of changing frontiers and production, the emergence of the problem of knowledge out of the actual interpersonal processes of criticism regarding the controversies of the search for ultimate being, and the development of explicitly moral or social philosophy in the work of the Sophists as a result of confl icts over political control and demands for trained leaders. Skipping thousands of years forward in philosophical and scientific argument, another set of notes helps give specificity to the kinds of historical account Mead tried to work out. One of the major problems Mead addressed throughout his career was the nature and consequences of indi-

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vidual experience in relation to social life—what Dewey (1931, 311) called Mead’s lifelong “problem of individual mind and consciousness in relation to world and society.” Most readers will immediately think of the socialcommunicative genesis and nature of the self as Mead’s defi nitive contribution to this problem, and with perfect reason. What is not well acknowledged, however, is that one of the ways Mead tackled this question was to study how the individual became a problem, historically, to modern thought. Such a focus on the philosophical problems of the individual in modernity as a locus for an understanding of psychology reinforces Mead’s expressed conviction that there are no immutable, absolute distinctions between science and philosophy (see Morris 1934, ix). Mead’s 1899 The Theory of Ethics in Relation to Psychology class, as recorded by Harriet E. Penfield, directly takes up this question.4 Mead pointed fi rst, according to Penfield, to the emergence of modern nation states. Where an external authority was given with a clear system of reward and punishment inscribed in law and ultimately guaranteed by belief in a divine order beyond the given world, there was no systematic problem for a government to demonstrate clear worldly results nor a problem of the ethical responsibilities of the individual.5 But the national (as contrasted with the feudal) state is presented with new problems of creating defi nite earthly results in crafting itself and accomplishing its projects, and to do so necessarily through the large-scale participation of human individuals. Thus, the social control of human conduct became the central problem of the modern state to the extent that such conduct was the means for its own accomplishment, and this problem was perhaps fi rst articulated as such in Hobbes’s work. As a consequence, modern psychology, to no less a degree than philosophical ethics, has as one of its general tasks to attempt to conceptualize human conduct in ways adequate to social control, and psychologists are presented with different problems as the structure of modern society, itself, changes. This process is dialectical in the sense that certain understandings posited of human conduct such as egoism become inscribed in social institutions—an obvious example is in penal institutions—because of the “simplicity of method of control” they give, and hence they “react back upon” the individual and to an extent “make him really so.”6 Of course, the state is by no means the only institution to be necessarily concerned with social control—indeed such problems are ubiquitous in modern society. And the way the problems of human conduct are presented and addressed in modern writers’ work is not, in any merely functional or cumulative sense, predetermined by the structure of society. Instead, Penfield’s notes seem to indicate that Mead attempted to

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trace a subtle argument about how various authors from Hobbes to Spencer presented novel solutions to the problems that conduct presented to them as social individuals. This means that their work depended on their understanding of previous work and on their interpretation of its problems on the basis of their own study and experience in changing social institutions. This formulation of the emergence of psychological conceptions out of the complex historical-social experience of scholars (both those remembered primarily as scientists and those remembered as philosophers), links Mead’s history of science with his own social psychological concerns in several ways. First, many times when Mead gave his social psychology courses, he began with a somewhat peculiar historical preface (the fi rst section of Mind, Self, and Society [Mead (1934) 2015] is primarily drawn from such material).7 In these he often wandered far and wide in giving an account of psychology, sometimes addressing some aspect of ancient thought or recent metaphysics or Darwinian evolution, but never giving something that could be considered a systematic account of psychological history. Instead, in light of his own convictions on the history of thought it is clear that he worked to point out the key problems in psychology as viewed from his own standpoint; or put the other way around, he derived his (more adequate, he thought) standpoint for the examination of the human psyche in such a way that his students would be introduced to its relevance by tracing for them a selective, critical history of problems in which it was located. In this sense, the historical narratives Mead gave in his social psychology lectures were not mere formalities but were rather central to the identification of the problems toward which Mead’s lectures were oriented. Second, scientific problem solving was the model par excellence of human reasoning for Mead, Dewey, and other pragmatists, and it is thus not surprising that Mead made explicit examination of detailed examples from the biographies of historical scientists and philosophers in essays such as “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker” (Mead 1917), discussed below, and in courses like The Philosophies of Eminent Scientists in order to help work out the particular nature of human reasoning and social psychological process. Mead’s courses on the history of science, philosophy, and thought address such a variety of different historical times and problems that it is beyond the scope of this analysis to attempt to adequately characterize them. A couple of additional examples will have to serve. Although there is often an ancient/modern distinction posited in the notes left from Mead’s courses and in some of his published writings, he also examined

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and lectured on the specific forms of medieval thought, highlighting, for example, the problems presented by the innovations in warfare and printing. And in his Philosophies of Eminent Scientists courses late in his career, he was concerned especially with identifying how specific scientific or technological innovations in the work of people such as Galileo and Newton were implicated with modern ontological, epistemological, and ethical views. Mead remained thoroughly engaged in his own assessment of the latest scientific fi ndings throughout his career. For example, when Albert Einstein came to the University of Chicago in early May 1921 and lectured in German, Mead suspended the nominal focus of his courses and instead interpreted Einstein’s theory of relativity to his students.8 He set himself the task of understanding the latest work in relativity theory, which apparently remained an interest of his until his death. It would be impossible to trace the details of Mead’s arguments about the nature of thought from the emergence of speculation up to the present as a single enterprise for several reasons. First, the materials are, themselves, fragmentary at best and often second-hand. Mead did publish several papers that attest to aspects of his knowledge of the history of thought, but a large amount of relevant material exists in his students’ various notes from his courses and in their published and unpublished discussions of his classes. Second, putting such materials together and attempting to make them a coherent history would not guarantee that they represent a systematic body of knowledge on Mead’s part, and not our own attempts to make one. As Mead pointed out, he was committed to a view that the kind of historical account constructed is dependent on the problems to be addressed. This means that as problems change—in the course of Mead’s life and thought or in response to the events in our own time—the kinds of accounts will change without the requirement that they cohere across time and place. Still, there are clearly repeated themes in Mead’s accounts, including the place of evidence drawn from individual experience in scientific thought of different historical periods, the importance of major commercial or political transformation in changing the conditions for abstract thought, and the like.

WRITING THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE Early historian of science Frederick E. Brasch, who was a librarian of several leading science libraries and eventually bibliographer of the Library of Congress, repeatedly pointed to Mead’s early published works, as well as his “excellent series of courses,” as important leads in the history of

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science (Brasch 1915; 1917). In particular, he singled out “The Teaching of Science in College” (Mead 1906b).9 In this piece, Mead (1906b, 394) argued that teaching the “history of science” was an especially productive way of interesting the student in science by showing how it grew “out of the conditions that made it natural and necessary,” providing “inspiration” in the form of the “personalities of the great scientific men,” and showing by the “romance of their struggle with the difficulties that beset their sciences from within and without” how “the conceptions of to-day would be found motived [sic] in the struggles of yesterday.” In this way the problems of science, which in their modern complexity had grown beyond the “immediate experience of the student” and failed to serve as an immediate “source of interest,” could be introduced in a way that drew the student in. “One or two courses” in the history of science, Mead (1906b, 396) argued, would organize the vague information of the student, would correlate it with the political and literary history with which he is familiar, would give him the sense of growth and vitality, would state the problems of science in his own terms, and awaken in him the passion to carry on the investigation himself which might otherwise remain dormant. They would be feeders to the specialized scientific courses that follow. They would break down the prejudice which most students bring against science from the high school. But not least, they would be as educative as any course in history could possibly be. They would serve as valuable a function as those courses which aim to acquaint the student with the social and political forces which dominate the world into which he is to enter.

Evidently, Mead’s interest in the history of science was never far from his pedagogical convictions, and it is precisely in treating this history as a teaching tool to engage the interest of his students that Mead stressed the links between historical scientists and the social forces that were the conditions of their discoveries. That is, it is in participating in the historical social problems confronting scientists that students gain an understanding of science not possible from memorizing specialized vocabularies, working through problems in abstract (often mathematical) terms, or reading a textbook. If that essay uses history as a tool for science, then his engagement with James Harvey Robinson, the leading advocate of the so-called New History, treated the use of science as a tool in history. Robinson (1912) sought to make history more encompassing and more relevant to the so-

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cial problems of modern life by treating it as the study of the historical progress of mankind rather than as the record of (largely political) names, dates, and facts. This also meant drawing conscientiously from the “newer sciences of man,” the biological and social sciences, in more adequately conceptualizing the nature of human existence and historical progress. Robinson referred explicitly to Mead in making the argument that the human self is a “social product”—a fact which he thought had major consequences for the study of history (Robinson 1911, 153; 1912, 92–4). Mead was one of the official respondents for Robinson’s paper on New History and its relation to the social sciences, given December 30, 1910 in Indianapolis at the meeting of the American Historical Association. In his response, Mead drew attention to a particular “implication” of Robinson’s analysis: history can no longer occupy itself exclusively with the evidence for the existence of the facts, but must consider the nature of the facts as they are presented in the various genetic sciences which occupy themselves with this material, and in particular must recognize the method of these sciences in the ordering and criticism of this material . . . The historian must depend upon other sciences for the interpretation and construction of the facts upon whose records he passes in the capacity of a historian. If we ask the further question: to which sciences will the historian turn for this interpretation? I know of no answer except the pragmatic one, that this will depend upon the problem which mainly occupies the social consciousness of the time.10

Mead argued that, in the previous generation, historians such as Taine, Jaurès, and Aulard were struggling predominantly with “political problems,” primarily the “theory of the state” and the form that “political institutions” had taken in other historical periods. Hence, their “rival” accounts of the same “social upheaval,” namely the French Revolution, were implicated in the “different political points of view which these men take in viewing the panorama of events,” and their accounts were to be debated and disputed by recourse to the conceptual analyses of political science and political economy. But if Robinson and others were proposing to turn toward the “genetic” sciences (those having to do with evolution or emergence) and “social” sciences, it is because different problems have become central in social order. Political forms were being increasingly criticized from the “point of view of their immediate social consequences” and changes were being justified in institutions on the basis of “the functions which they have to perform in society.” In proportion with

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this shift, Mead argued, historians will come increasingly to look for “interpretation of [their] data not to the political sciences but to those social sciences which interpret the social functions of human institutions,” those sciences that “deal with the orig[i]ns and operations and mutual controls which these institutions exercise upon each other.” Or put simply, “it [is] because we are judging religion and government and education and art by their social functions that we must have a history of religions and governments and education and art in terms of the social functions they have fulfi lled,” “the nature of the reform which society demands will determine the sort of content which History will fi nd in its facts.” What counts as history—that is, to what domains historians make recourse in accounting for history—was an inquiry opened by the implications of Robinson’s New History, and its direction was to be sought in the different ways social order became problematic. Among the Deweyan pragmatists, Mead was considered the defi nite expert on the history of science. This is evidenced in the correspondence among the group that compiled the volume Creative Intelligence (Dewey et al. 1917) as a coherent, collaborative pragmatist response to the manifesto of the philosophical New Realists (i.e., Holt et al. 1912). Mead’s student and later colleague, T. V. Smith (1931, 383; 1962, 47) even later referred to this volume as the “Pragmatic Bible.” Dewey, fellow Chicagoan Addison W. Moore, and young pragmatist Horace M. Kallen discussed possible contributors for the volume, and it was suggested that Mead might write a paper on the “Norms in Physical Science” or “a comparison of Norms in Ancient & Modern Phys[ical] Science, bringing out the static character of them in ancient science & their pragmatic character in modern.”11 The paper that resulted from Mead’s acceptance of this charge was his “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker” (Mead 1917), which Herbert Blumer (1929, 935) later called an “unduly neglected” contribution to the philosophy of science. Indeed, Blumer thought Mead’s article was one of only a few pieces, along with works of “Mach, Clifford, and Poincaré,” to “inquire into scientific thought in a scientific manner” by studying scientists “as they are engaged in their scientific work” instead of by formal logic, philosophical presupposition, generalizing from a particular technique, or elaborating some “common aphorism” told about science. Blumer’s (1928) dissertation, a critique of methodologies in social psychology, cited heavily from Mead’s article and apparently derived much of the warrant for his thesis from it (see Huebner 2014, chap. 6). When Dewey had a chance to read Mead’s paper in manuscript, he wrote that it was “very weighty and solid as to scholarship; he has an un-

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surpassed knowledge of the history of science,” but added that his own judgment was biased by being “too ante[c]edently familiar with his ideas to be the best judge,”12 having been his intimate colleague for fourteen years and clearly having discussed some of the issues of the paper with Mead before. Mead’s essay used the history of science as the field in which to examine the nature of science, itself, its philosophy or epistemology. He began with a dense summary of the work done in his classes on Greek science and philosophy, stressing the difficult and immense accomplishment of abstraction in ancient thought, while pointing out that the formulation of the various sciences was such that individual observations or experiences were largely unable to serve as motors of conceptual innovation in ancient sciences. The major historical transformation that defi ned modern science was precisely this re-centering of science around experience. He utilized episodes from the biographies of several prominent historical scientists, especially Darwin, Pasteur, and Galileo,13 in order to illustrate the processes of recognizing problems, working out tenable hypotheses, repeatedly reconstructing new hypotheses and data on the basis of observations, and ultimately attempting to account for all (old and new) observations by a more adequate conception of the “object” under study. The solution to a scientific problem was not one of “subjective attitude” of the investigator but the creation of a new “object” of experience. That is, the scientist, in actual processes of inquiry, neither undertakes “to preserve facts in the form in which they existed in experience before the problem arose nor to construct a world independent of existence or  that will not be subject itself to future reconstructions of experience.” Either of these would be metaphysical statements of science as “analysis of a known world into ultimate elements and their relations”; science was, instead, a pragmatic, “strictly ad hoc” analysis attempting to solve problems as they are presented in experience. This is the sense of Mead’s stress on the “individual thinker” in his title: not the “sense-data of the solipsistic mind” but the “experiences of an individual in a highly organized society” whose “accepted doctrines” may come into confl ict with experience. To say that science is an inquiry into practical problems is to say that the experience of the individual is necessary and intrinsic to the progress of that science. In the fi nal pages of the paper, Mead reflected on the problem of a world “subject to continuous reconstructions,” and thus of the place of inquiry and emergence in relation to the occurrence of practical social problems.

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INSTITUTING THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE Mead remained involved with professional developments in the study of history, especially with moves to organize a society for the “history of science.” A major development in this regard was the proposal circulated in 1917 by pioneer historian of science George Sarton (founding editor of the journal Isis and a recent émigré to the United States from war-torn Belgium) for an Institute for the History of Science and Civilization. This “movement,” in Sarton’s (1917) terms, to create an organization for the history of science was undersigned by many of the most prominent scientists and philosophers of the United States, including George H. Mead and John Dewey.14 When a History of Science group began to hold meetings in the early 1920s, Mead was an early participant. Organizationally, this group began in part as a section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and in part as an outgrowth of the American Historical Association (AHA). At the December 1922 joint meeting of the AAAS and AHA in Boston, Mead presented a paper on “Some Psychological and Social Conditions of the Scientific Attitude of Mind” in a session on the history of science presided over by James Harvey Robinson (Brasch 1922). This paper apparently served as the basis for Mead’s (1923) published “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences.”15 At the meeting there was reportedly also a discussion of the need for wider dissemination of scientific knowledge, led by Robinson, Mead, Sarton, L. J. Henderson, Lynn Thorndike, Mary Hunter Austin, and D. T. MacDougal. The discussion was prompted by the country’s fi rst-ever legislation that proposed to prohibit the teaching of evolution in schools in Kentucky in January 1922 (Bird 1923; Brasch 1923). The History of Science Society was officially founded in 1924 and incorporated in 1925 after several years as a quasi-independent collaboration of the AAAS and the AHA, and Mead was listed among its original dues-paying “foundation members.” From 1924 until near the end of his life, Mead was also on the board of advisors for a proposed series of Source Books in the History of the Sciences through the American Philosophical Association and a Carnegie Corporation grant (Walcott 1952). This board consisted of philosophers and scientists with expertise in some aspect of the history of science, each of whom would advise on the production of volumes of compiled fi rsthand materials from the history of the various sciences. This series eventually became quite productive and successful, especially after World War II, but

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its early years were apparently plagued with difficulties, some stemming from the Great Depression. Mead also served in a de facto advisory capacity on occasion for the University of Chicago Press when their faculty editorial board considered works in the history of thought.16

“UNCLE GEORGE’S VIEW OF HISTORY” If we acknowledge the serious work Mead put into teaching, speaking, and writing on history, and especially on the history of science, we may also be led to ask how this work was received during and after Mead’s lifetime. One perspective on this problem comes from Mead’s niece, Elinor Castle. She married Mead’s legal ward, John U. Nef Jr., who became an economic historian and founder of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Both had long been pupils and participants of the many wideranging discussions at the Mead household. Thus, Elinor evinced a sense of authority when she wrote in her memoirs: All the learned doctors would not say this, it is something so little, it is too simple for them to say: John Dewey has forgotten history. Perhaps under the influence of “Uncle George’s View of History”—to the effect that history is changing with the generations and the historians, which is a way of denying the existence of history—he has forgotten what human beings are really like. He is always talking about the importance of facts and existing conditions, and I sometimes think he does this on that unconscious motivation which makes us prize and long for the things we lack, and praise those very qualities in which we are deficient. (Nef 1953, 417–18)

To Nef, Mead’s “view of history” was no view at all. He (and Dewey with him) apparently denied history and forgot what humans were “really like” by their very insistence on the changeability of what counted as history, and by the insistence on its production by actual human historians who differed from one another. Nef was not alone in this sentiment; she was joined by some of the most prominent realist historians and philosophers of the fi rst half of the twentieth century. A. O. Lovejoy (1939, 486) chose quotes from Mead’s posthumously published Carus Lectures, The Philosophy of the Present (Mead 1932), to criticize what he saw as unfounded leaps in logic among philosophers who took the “presenticentric predicament” (that historians necessarily research the past from the present) and turned it into a “gener-

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alized historical impressionism or relativism.” Mead and others, he wrote, asserted that “‘history’ consists simply in the present ‘emergents,’ the reactions or states of mind evoked in historians when acted upon by those present stimuli which are euphemistically called ‘records of the past.’”17 Donald C. Williams (1934, 200) only slightly displaced the blame when he said that it was Mead’s “disciples” who “expound” such an apparently ludicrous doctrine in the pages of The Philosophy of the Present. He was considerably more fl ippant in asserting that it is neglected in a picturesque way by the new pragmatic philosophies of time which cite the fact that we learn much later about dinosaurs than about our parents as though it had some force against the realistic belief which explains this fact—namely, the belief that the dinosaurs really existed much earlier than our parents. (Williams 1934, 200)

Both Williams and Lovejoy treated Mead’s pragmatic understanding of history as a symptom of contemporary “egocentric” or “subjectivistic” fallacies in the study of the past. Among several of Mead’s former students and junior colleagues in philosophy at Chicago, however, he appeared to be at the forefront of the philosophy of process, time, and relativity at the end of his life. In this regard, his The Philosophy of the Present was referred to approvingly by Charles Morris, David L. Miller, Arthur E. Murphy, Alfred Tonness, Everett  W. Hall, and others. But it was not just the abstract theory of time and process that some of his students found productive; Mead was also cited for points of historical fact and historical method. Charles Morris tried (unsuccessfully) off and on for years to get into print some of Mead’s “historical lectures” (Huebner 2012, 139). In his work compiling Mind, Self, and Society and The Philosophy of the Act, Morris perused a wide variety of lecture notes that indicated to him that Mead had a remarkable range of knowledge about social, economic, and political history and their connection to the history of science and philosophy. Throughout the theses of Mead’s students at the University of Chicago in educational psychology, philosophy, divinity, and sociology, one fi nds explicit references to the students’ indebtedness to his historical knowledge, although considerations of space lead me not to quote these at length. Amplifying some of these remarks, former philosophy student Alburey Castell (1937) found a “method” in Mead’s examinations of history in the course of his review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, a method he characterized as “setting the ‘stage,’ isolating

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the ‘problem,’ noting the ‘solutions.’” That is, Castell (1937, 86–7) proposed that Mead’s “procedure” was: fi rst, to describe some large social or intellectual phenomenon, e.g., the French Revolution or the theory of evolution; second, and it is here that his lectures are most suggestive and profound, to close in gradually on one or two philosophical problems precipitated by the movement in question; fi nally, to indicate the handling which these problems received in the writings of a few outstanding thinkers. Considered as a method, this would seem to defy criticism. It is probable that time will show the importance of these lectures to reside more in the method which they exemplify than in the contribution they make to a detailed knowledge of nineteenth-century thought.

Arthur Murphy (1936) noted further that Mead’s “own thought exemplifies his theory of the way thinking works” in that “his version of the philosophic past” was no “mere reproduction” but rather a “highly selective reconstruction, for present purposes and in the light of present problems.” In pre-World War II Europe, Eduard Baumgarten, nephew of Max Weber and himself a sociologist and cultural historian, was apparently one of the very few scholars to refer favorably to Mead by name. In Baumgarten’s reading, Mead’s “The Philosophies of Royce, James and Dewey in their American Setting” (1930) was an attempt to explain the peculiar features of American philosophy by reference to the features of American democratic political practices, especially its “town meetings” in which the participants understood themselves to be “creating the community in the process of acting together” as they confronted problematic situations (Baumgarten 1936, 83; 1938, 314). That is, Baumgarten treated Mead’s contribution to pragmatism to be, in large part, identifying its historical conditions in social action—a pragmatist history of pragmatism, or Mead as his own historian. To argue that thought was essentially social, as Dewey, Mead, and other pragmatists did, was in Baumgarten’s view also to necessitate addressing the complex implications of such a doctrine for one’s own claims as socio-historical. Regardless of the enthusiasm of many of Mead’s students in his historical courses and in spite of Castell’s assertions to the contrary, Movements of Thought received quite a bit of criticism in reviews and then was promptly forgotten (Huebner 2014, chap. 7). Indeed, this more or less characterizes all of Mead’s historical work, which has been largely ignored after being initially considered controversial, especially in philosophy.

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Despite Mead’s evident focus on the nature of social transformations in conditioning the directions of thought, his body of historical work has almost never been seriously assessed in the social sciences (pace Silva 2008, 67–70), although his broader theory of the past and time has been periodically examined (e.g., Maines et al. 1983; Joas 1985, chap. 8; Flaherty and Fine 2001). Joas (1985, chap. 9) is also one of the only authors to explore seriously the potential of Mead’s philosophy of science as found in his “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker” and other works by comparing it favorably to the work of Thomas Kuhn and others. Only very recently have authors such as Puddephatt (2008) and Baldwin (2008) returned to this issue in order to systematically reexamine Mead’s social views on science and their unique contributions to science studies.

CONCLUSION For Mead there was no absolute distinction between philosophy and science. Both were implicated in attempts to formulate the ultimate character of experience as it became problematic. Mead focused on the nature of the problems as presented in the experience of philosophers and scientists, and treated those problems as, in various ways, social. They depended on the dialogues in which scholars found themselves and in the historical development of material discoveries, cultural contacts, economic production and commerce, and political control and controversy. Again, the problematic social nature of scientific discovery both informed Mead’s understanding of human reasoning processes and served as the occasion for serious self-reflective examination of Mead’s own position. One of the characteristics of Mead’s work explicating the history of thought is an emphatic working through of a situation outside one’s own immediate experience. Mead worked to submit his own speculations to a rigorous sense of the conditions (physiological, social, economic, etc.) as they presented themselves to the experience of historical figures. In this sense it is considerably more challenging than projecting oneself into the place of another person, because it requires a thorough disciplining at precisely those points where recourse to one’s own experience would pre-solve the problems of the examination. This is the same task Mead set himself in pursuing studies on comparative psychology. Instead of treating Thales or Hobbes or Galileo as thinkers in his own image, Mead sought to identify how their particular conceptions were responses to the problems they saw about them utilizing the modes of thought inscribed in their social experience. More generally, Mead did not dismiss the historical nature of

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forms of knowledge but attempted to treat that history as an essential task of the analysis of social progress and scientific knowledge. For all his apparent attention and effort in the history of science, Mead has apparently been written out of its own history as a field of inquiry. It is beyond the scope of this essay to fully address this problem, but several points can be indicated from the analysis above. First, several of Mead’s most prominent and influential interpreters—especially Herbert Blumer and Charles Morris—apparently recognized Mead’s contributions to the history of science. Yet, Blumer seems to have substituted general acknowledgments of his indebtedness to Mead for specific ones to his particular papers in much of his work (see Huebner 2014, chap. 6). And Morris was unable to convince the University of Chicago Press to publish some of Mead’s lectures along these lines because of the conditions of scholarly publishing in the Great Depression (Huebner 2012). Ultimately, this meant that the organic connection between Mead’s philosophy and his study of the history of science, which appeared so apparent and productive to his immediate students, seems to have failed to gain greater notice. Beyond this focus on individual students and the particular circumstances of Mead’s intellectual legacy, however, productive inquiry could also be made into the ways in which the history of science professionalized as an academic field, which seems to have excluded a variety of preprofessional attempts at such a field. The history of science is, in a certain sense, self-exemplifying. In rewriting the historical narratives of science, each new generation also rewrites the field of the “history of science” and makes its own “mythic facts” about the discipline’s origins. This changeability of what counted as history was not a phenomenon that escaped Mead’s notice—indeed, it was the topic of his investigations that caused pointed exasperation from Elinor Castle Nef and others. As a result, a focus on Mead’s work on the history of knowledge exposes him at his most self-reflective regarding the nature and progress of knowledge. Mead was self-consciously oriented to problems of the production of knowledge and sought to ask precisely these self-reflexive questions about the grounding of forms of thought in social practice. In this way, Mead teaches us about knowledge not only by means of the content of the theory he develops but also by his own endeavors studying scientific knowledge.

NOTES 1. In addition to his early talks to the local philosophical societies, Mead gave a large number of speeches to public audiences on historical topics. In February and

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March 1898 he gave a series of talks on Some Great Historic Characters along with Chicago history professor James Westfall Thompson at Hammond School (a public elementary school on Chicago’s west side), including talks on “Socrates, the Philosopher in Ancient Politics” and “John Locke, the Philosopher in Modern Politics.” Mead gave talks on “The World of Thought Before and After the Publication of the Origin of Species” during the fi ftieth anniversary celebrations of Darwin’s book at the University of Chicago in 1909; on “Spinoza” at the Herzl School (another elementary school on Chicago’s west side) in 1918; on “George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne” in Berkeley, California (named for him) in 1929 during the bicentennial celebrations of Berkeley’s arrival in North America; and of course “The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in their American Setting” at the celebration of Dewey’s seventieth birthday in 1929. 2. Silva (2008, 77– 9) and Côté (2013) discuss manuscripts that are clearly directly related to Mead’s interests in ancient Greek philosophy. During Mead’s time at the University of Michigan, he, Dewey, Alfred H. Lloyd, and Fred Newton Scott were reportedly preparing a study on “the psychology of Greek Philosophy” that is likely also related to these materials. Mead told Henry Castle that his particular tasks in the proposed volume were to be “a restatement of Pythagoras and a development of the early Greek idea of space,” and he added, “the latter I fi nd very interesting for they evidently did not in early times have any distinct ideas of space and place and this has had a great deal of influence on the development of their philosophy” (G. H. Mead to H. N. Castle, 12 January 1892; George Herbert Mead Papers [hereafter GHMP], B 1, F 18). There are several manuscripts published in The Philosophy of the Act that also directly comment on the same issues of Greek and other historical social and philosophical development (Mead 1938, 385– 88, 393–403). 3. The notes, labeled “Greek Philosophy,” are archived in the Maurice T. Price Papers (B 1, F “History of Philosophy”). All discussion of the contents of the autumn 1909 course comes from this set of notes. Price’s notes indicate that several scholarly works on Greek philosophy were referred to in the class, including work by Charles M. Bakewell, John Burnet, Theodor Gomperz, Eduard Meyer, Wilhelm Windelband, and Eduard Zeller. The relation of Greek speculative philosophy to Egyptian and Babylonian thought was a controversial topic at the time addressed in several of these works. Mead’s exposition (as related by Price) appears to follow Burnet most closely (and explicitly) on this point. 4. Harriet E. Penfield took down remarkably detailed notes for this course under the title Relation of Ethics to Psychology on 138 closely handwritten pages (Joseph Ratner Papers [hereafter JRP], B 56, F 4). All discussion of the 1899 The Theory of Ethics in Relation to Psychology course is drawn from these notes. 5. Penfield’s notes, 5– 6 (JRP, B 56, F 4). 6. Penfield’s notes, 12 (JRP, B 56, F 4). 7. Besides the 1928 set of stenographer’s notes that make up the bulk of Mind, Self, and Society, several other sets of notes from Mead’s courses on social psychology that I have examined use this same strategy. Van Meter Ames (1931), in his memorial statement for Mead, recalled his strategy of getting a “running start” on his topics by going back, even to excess, to the historical emergence of problems. There are several manuscripts that were published in The Philosophy of the Act that also contribute substan-

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tially to the understanding of how Mead understood his problematics to be motivated by history (esp. Mead 1938, 494–519). 8. Einstein gave three lectures in German on May 3–5, 1921 on The Theory of Relativity at the University of Chicago. Van Meter Ames wrote in a letter to Charles Morris, “I have some notes on Mead’s course on the Phenomenology of Hegel. I don’t think they are very full, partly as that seminar was much interrupted by Mead’s taking time to tell us what Einstein was saying in German in a lecture series on relativity in Mandel Hall at the time” (V. M. Ames to C. Morris, 11 April 1931; Charles Morris Collection B 16, F “1971”). Ames’s notes for the course confi rm this fact, as there are several truncated entries for these days, including one on May 4 that was clearly made in regard to a discussion on Einstein: “motion is the fundamental fact of life & space & time are abstractions from it” (GHMP, B 9, F 6, p. 17). 9. Mead also accompanied this piece with another on “Science in the High School” (Mead 1906a) which was printed along with responses by Chicago-based scientists F. R. Moulton, R. A. Millikan, and C. R. Barnes, who all had significant interests in the history of science and who generally agreed in their comments with Mead’s assessment that one needs to present scientific materials in a way that engages the interest and intellectual abilities of the student. Mead’s series of studies on the teaching of science was part of a larger effort centered at the University of Chicago that aimed at reforming science education and formulating “general science” curricula in schools (Rudolph 2005). 10. Mead’s response is archived in the George Herbert Mead Papers as “Untitled response to a paper by Professor Robinson” (GHMP, B 14, F 1). All quotations from Mead’s response in the text are taken from this archived manuscript. 11. J. Dewey to H. M. Kallen, 13 November 1913 (Dewey 1997, no. 03217). Although the message was conveyed by Dewey, he intimated that the suggested topic for Mead’s paper came from Moore. Dewey was, no doubt, the standard bearer for pragmatism after the death in 1910 of William James (and in 1914 of Charles S. Peirce), but Horace M. Kallen, a late student of James and George Santayana, headed the early organizational work for the volume. 12. J. Dewey to H. M. Kallen, 29 February 1916 (Dewey 1997, no. 03234). Dewey (1932, 32) echoed this sentiment in his preface to The Philosophy of the Present in which he noted that Mead’s “sense of the role of subjective consciousness in the reconstruction of objects as experienced and in the production of new customs and institutions, was surely the thing which lead him to his extraordinarily broad and accurate knowledge of the historical development of the sciences—a knowledge which did not stop with details of discoveries but which included changes of underlying attitudes toward nature.” 13. Dewey specifically asked Mead to “amplify” his discussion of the scientific inquiries of Darwin or Pasteur in relation to the reconstruction of objects of experience, because “this is just the point where the realists shy off & cry subjectivism, & I think that no full clear statement of the point has as yet been given them to face” (J. Dewey to G. H. Mead, 27 February 1916; Dewey [1997], no. 05281). The examination given in the paper to Darwin’s study of earthworms is a likely addition. Mead apparently gave similar analyses of scientists reconstructing the objects of their investigation in his lectures (see Huebner 2015) and in other later articles (esp. Mead 1923).

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14. It was apparently Dewey who recommended to Sarton that he contact Mead in connection with his proposed Institute (J. Dewey to G. Sarton, 14 November 1916; Dewey [1997], no. 03289). Dewey was just then seeing the collaborative Creative Intelligence brought into print, which no doubt made Mead’s contribution to the history of science even more immediately visible in his mind. 15. This assessment is based on comparison of the published work with descriptions of the paper given by Mead, especially as found in the notice “Conference on Historical Science,” Historical Outlook 14, no. 4 (April 1923): 152. 16. See, for example, “Report of Publication Committee” 9 June 1923 (University of Chicago Press Records B 21, F 2). 17. Lovejoy had given the set of Carus Lectures directly previous to Mead’s, and following Dewey’s (which was the fi rst set). In his lectures, published as The Revolt against Dualism, Lovejoy criticized the attempts by the British neo-realists and the American pragmatists to overcome Cartesian dualisms of subjective/objective and mental/material by their demonstrations that all the contents of experience were objective and that the physical world itself is relative to experience. Through sympathetic but critical analysis Lovejoy sought to demonstrate that sense-data and their referents were not ultimately part of one order, but remained in a fundamental sense dual.

REFERENCES Ames, Van Meter. 1931. “George Herbert Mead: An Appreciation.” The University of Chicago Magazine (June): 370–72. Annual Register [University of Chicago]. 1894/95–1930/31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baldwin, John D. 2008. Ending the Science Wars. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Baumgarten, Eduard. 1936. “John Dewey I: Die Idee der Demokratie.” Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehung 5: 81– 96. ———. 1938. Der Pragmatismus: R. W. Emerson, W. James, J. Dewey. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann. Bird, J. Malcolm. 1923. “The Progress of Science.” Current History 17, no. 5: 849–58. Blumer, Herbert. 1928. “Method in Social Psychology.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. ———. 1929. Review of The Scientific Habit of Thought, by Frederick Barry. American Journal of Sociology 34, no. 5: 935. Brasch, Frederick E. 1915. “The History of Science.” Science 41, no. 1053: 358– 60. ———. 1917. “The Teaching of the History of Science: Its Present Status in Our Universities, Colleges and Technical Schools.” Science 42, no. 1091: 746– 60. ———. 1922. “The History of Science.” Science 56, no. 1460: 708. ———. 1923. “Section L—Historical and Philological Sciences.” Science 57, no. 1467: 187– 88. Castell, Alburey. 1937. Review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by George H. Mead. Journal of Modern History 9, no. 1: 86– 88. Côté, Jean-François. 2013. “George Herbert Mead on Ancient Greek Society: An Introduction.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 38, no. 3: 383–405.

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Dewey, John. 1931. “George Herbert Mead.” Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 12: 309–14. ———. 1932. Prefatory Remarks to The Philosophy of the Present, by George H. Mead. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. ——. 1997. The Correspondence of John Dewey. 3 vols. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Past Masters (electronic resource). Dewey, John, Addison W. Moore, Harold C. Brown, George H. Mead, Boyd H. Bode, Henry W. Stuart, James H. Tufts, and Horace M. Kallen. 1917. Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. New York: Henry Holt. Flaherty, Michael, and Gary A. Fine. 2001. “Past, Present, and Future: Conjugating George Herbert Mead’s Perspective on Time.” Time & Society 10, no. 2–3: 147– 61. Holt, Edwin B., Walter T. Marvin, W. P. Montague, Ralph B. Perry, Walter B. Pitkin, and E. G. Spaulding. 1912. The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy. New York: Macmillan. Huebner, Daniel R. 2012. “The Construction of Mind, Self, and Society: The Social Process Behind G. H. Mead’s Social Psychology.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 48, no. 2: 134–53. ——. 2014. Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2015. “Appendix: The Sources of Mind, Self, and Society.” In Mind, Self, and Society: The Defi nitive Edition. Edited by Charles Morris, annotated by Daniel R. Huebner and Hans Joas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, Hans. 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1939. “Present Standpoints and Past History.” Journal of Philosophy 36, no. 18: 477– 89. Maines, David R., Noreen M. Sugrue, and Michael A. Katovich. 1983. “The Sociological Import of G. H. Mead’s Theory of the Past.” American Sociological Review 48, no. 2: 161–73. Mead, George H. 1894. “The Greek Mysteries.” University Record [University of Michigan] 3: 102. ——. 1896. “Some Aspects of Greek Philosophy.” University of Chicago Record 1: 42. ——. 1906a. “Science in the High School.” School Review 14: 237–49. ——. 1906b. “The Teaching of Science in College.” Science 24: 390– 97. ——. 1917. “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker.” In Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude, by John Dewey, Addison W. Moore, Harold C. Brown, George H. Mead, Boyd H. Bode, Henry W. Stuart, James H. Tufts, and Horace M. Kallen. New York: Henry Holt. ——. 1923. “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences.” International Journal of Ethics 33: 229–47. ——. 1930. “The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting.” International Journal of Ethics 40: 211–31. ——. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court. ——. (1934) 2015. Mind, Self, and Society: The Defi nitive Edition. Edited by Charles W.

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Morris, annotated by Daniel R. Huebner and Hans Joas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Merritt H. Moore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Charles W. Morris, John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunham, and David L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, Charles W. 1934. Preface and introduction to Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, by George H. Mead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murphy, Arthur E, ed. 1936. Review of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, by George H. Mead. Journal of Philosophy 33, no. 14: 384– 86. Nef, Elinor Castle. 1953. Letters & Notes. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press. President’s Report [University of Chicago]. 1897/98–1929/30. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Puddephatt, Antony. 2008. “George Herbert Mead: An Early Scientist of Scientific Knowledge.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 31: 31– 60. Robinson, James Harvey. 1911. “The Relation of History to the Newer Sciences of Man.” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 8, no. 6: 153–57. ——. 1912. The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook. New York: Macmillan. Rudolph, John L. 2005. “Turning Science to Account: Chicago and the General Science Movement in Secondary Education, 1905–1920.” Isis 96, no. 3: 353–89. Sarton, George. 1917. “An Institute for the History of Science and Civilization.” Science 45, no. 1160: 284– 86. Silva, Filipe Carreira da. 2008. Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics. Lanham: Lexington Books. Smith, T. V. 1931. “The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead.” American Journal of Sociology 37, no. 3: 368– 85. ——. 1962. A Non- Existent Man: An Autobiography. Austin: University of Texas Press. Walcott, Gregory D. 1952. “Source Books in Science.” Science 115, no. 2986: 3a. Williams, Donald C. 1934. “The Argument for Realism.” The Monist 44, no. 2: 186–209.

archival materials Charles Morris Collection. Max Fisch Library, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University/Purdue University– Indianapolis. George Herbert Mead Papers, 1855–1968. Special Collections Research Center, Joseph P. Regenstein Library, the University of Chicago. Joseph Ratner Papers, 1862–1978. Special Collections Research Center, Delyte W. Morris Library, Southern Illinois University– Carbondale. Maurice Thomas Price Papers, 1909–34, 1937–40, 1945–48. University of Illinois Archives, University of Illinois– Urbana- Champaign. University of Chicago Press Records, 1892–1965. Special Collections Research Center, Joseph P. Regenstein Library, the University of Chicago.

Chapter Three

Pragmatism and Historicism: Mead’s Philosophy of Temporality and the Logic of Historiography Hans Joas

I

n 1988 eminent Chicago historian Peter Novick published a magisterial book on the history of American historiography (Novick 1988). His book provides a wealth of material on and interpretations of the historical profession in the United States and its development, its privileged thematic foci and blind spots, and the political prejudices and biases of a purportedly non-political academic field. In epistemological terms, or, better, with respect to the epistemological considerations made by historians themselves, Novick brings out a constant oscillation between the ideal of objectivity—the “noble dream” identified by Charles Beard in 1935—and what is often called relativism. But not all the reviewers of Novick’s book were happy with the way he had structured the field of epistemological alternatives.1 They pointed out that virtually no scholar has ever described her- or himself as an out-and-out relativist. For the most part, “relativism” is not a self-description but one put forward by others, a label that the defenders of a given mainstream eagerly apply to their opponents quite regardless of how the latter see themselves. But the dangers of the dichotomous conceptual schema of “objectivism versus relativism” go beyond a distorted perception of schools of research. This dichotomy itself is also all too easily reified. It then appears to provide an exhaustive description of conceptual possibilities, and the dilemma inherent in it thus seems irresolvable. One of the reviewers of Novick’s text, Harvard historian James Kloppenberg, claimed that Novick’s approach had neither deepened “our understanding of the substantive issues concerning the question of objectivity itself” (Kloppenberg 1989, 1015) nor paid enough attention to the history of attempts to resolve this dilemma. It is true that the most sophisticated efforts in this direction are found not so much in the writings of practicing historians but in other disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, and the62

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ology. Nonetheless, it remains a conspicuous lacuna in Novick’s book that he fails to truly grapple with these intellectual efforts, even when their origins lie in typically American intellectual traditions. In making these remarks and in the present chapter my aim is not, of course, to put forward a detailed critique of Novick’s brilliant book. What interests me is the hypothesis that American pragmatism developed ideas that take us, in a fundamental sense, “beyond objectivism and relativism,” to quote the title of a book by prominent neo-pragmatist Richard Bernstein (1983). In chronological order, these ideas are found primarily in the last major work by Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity ([1913] 1961), in George Herbert Mead’s Philosophy of the Present, which was published as a fragment in 1932, one year after his death, and in John Dewey’s Logic (1938). My primary intention beyond the reconstruction of these ideas is to relate this intellectual tradition to another one that, at fi rst sight, may seem extremely distant from it and of a very different character: historicism, primarily its German variant. I assert that from their very beginnings both these schools of thought, pragmatism and historicism, have had a good deal in common, and in fact grew increasingly similar over time. The scale of this rapprochement was so great that it would be fair to say that the two traditions were beginning to converge in the 1920s. For historically contingent reasons both were subsequently more or less abandoned, pulling the rug from under this convergence. To identify the precise point of convergence—without ignoring the remaining differences between these schools—represents moreover a substantial hypothesis on the logic of historical research and, in particular, the role of values in all historiography. For three reasons a cursory glance will necessarily fail to bring out the profound commonalities of (American) pragmatism and (German) historicism. First, the disciplinary preoccupations of these two schools of thought are different. Pragmatism developed out of the natural sciences, with both Charles Sanders Peirce and William James being practicing natural scientists. It is impossible to achieve an adequate understanding of their philosophical writings if we fail to relate them to the scientific work out of which they arose. The empirical backgrounds of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead were in psychology rather than the “hard” natural sciences—but within this empirical discipline, still young at the time, their main concern was to “naturalize” that which the philosophical tradition had categorized as mental phenomena. That it was a nonreductionist form of naturalization that they had in mind changes nothing about this fact.

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German historicism, on the other hand, grew out of the historical humanities and state sciences (Staatswissenschaften) that burst so vigorously upon the scene at the universities of the German-speaking world in the nineteenth century and enjoyed such international prominence. The foundations of historicism and its field of application were in the disciplines of legal and economic history, historical-critical biblical studies, the history of Christianity and religion, and the history of philosophy and literature. Underlying these differing disciplinary settings we fi nd a cultural difference between Germany and the United States that disguises the common ground between pragmatism and historicism. Both movements of thought were related to what in their respective society constituted the most prestigious and influential academic field. Moreover, both currents had a complex critical, though by no means destructive, relationship with the religious traditions of Christianity. The cultural difference between a progressive optimism in the United States that tended to privilege the natural sciences and a German focus on history that was bound up with the struggle over national identity is another reason why the common features of pragmatism and historicism were hidden from view. A third reason, though one that is perhaps merely an expression of the cultural difference I have just discussed, lies in the differing connotations of the two schools’ names. In Germany, the term “pragmatism” had extremely negative associations for almost every philosopher—from Husserl to Horkheimer. It was identified with a superficial or cynical reduction of the sacred philosophical search for truth to considerations of utility, either within the context of everyday life or the capitalist economy (Joas 1993). In the United States, meanwhile, the term “historicism” was not generally used to mean a radical awareness of the historicity of all human phenomena but as a label for the naive idea that historians can verify their assertions through examination of the past as such. This misunderstanding of “historicism” reached a near-farcical level when Karl Raimund Popper used the term to characterize a vulgar teleological philosophy of history inspired by Hegel or Marx in his 1960 polemic The Poverty of Historicism. The differing disciplinary backdrops to pragmatism and historicism also meant that they were chiefly concerned with different topics. It was a very long time before pragmatists showed any stronger interest in the historical sciences. In the words of Peter Novick (1988, 151), Peirce, James, and Dewey paid “practically no attention to historical issues.” It is true that a number of leading American historians (such as James Harvey Robinson) and historically oriented sociologists (such as W. E. B. Du Bois) studied under William James, or (like Charles Beard) were open to the ideas of

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John Dewey; but it is nonetheless fair to say that “there is little reason to believe that pragmatism had any substantial connection with historical thought until the interwar years.”2 In Germany, meanwhile, the “historicist historians” saw themselves as engaged in a constant defensive battle with materialist and naturalist adversaries. These included not just the Marxists but all those who took inspiration from the natural sciences and expounded such things as an environmentally determinist cultural history. For most of them, this defensive posture killed off any interest they might have had in the undeniably biological foundations of the conceptions of human action constitutive of historicism. Wilhelm Dilthey was an exception in this respect, preoccupied as he was with this very topic, predominantly in his middle period (Dilthey 1924a). 3 But things only really changed with the emergence of the so-called philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner (Honneth and Joas 1988). What exactly was the common ground behind the superficial differences? The simplest way to answer this question is to consider the antiCartesianism characteristic of both schools. Peirce was famously eager to reject the principle of methodological or radical doubt. He sought to replace it with the notion that thought progresses not through philosophers artificially questioning the taken-for-granted features of everyday life but only in the context of real-world, situated doubt, through the genuine questioning of previously taken-for-granted phenomena because they have presented obstacles to action. The solution to such real-world problems of action, according to the basic insight of pragmatism, always lies in creative acts that, if successful, themselves become new habitual actions and expand actors’ problem-solving repertoire. But every creative solution to a problem presupposes that, rather than questioning everything at the same time, we leave the context as such undetermined, as an unproblematized background. George Herbert Mead referred to this unproblematized world as the world “that is taken for granted,” a concept that resembles that of the lifeworld or Lebenswelt in late Husserl, though it actually predates it (Mead 1938). Pragmatist ideas on the resolution of action problems fi nd a counterpart in historicist reflections on how we understand texts. Starting with the work of Schleiermacher and others, but thought through in most detail by Dilthey, the reader’s encounter with the text is elucidated as one that is never presuppositionless. Our meeting with the text always occurs on the basis of a plethora of preexisting assumptions that we are unaware of, assumptions about the world, ourselves, and the text with which we are grappling. In engaging with this text we come up against statements by

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the author that challenge our existing views. These statements may be hypotheses that directly contradict our ideas, but they may also be tacit suppositions held by the author that deviate from our own. Above all, however, we encounter passages that seem obscure and incomprehensible to us. In order to shed light on them, we go more deeply into the text, allow ourselves to be guided by the idea that we can glean their meaning from the meaning of other passages, and we are thus drawn into a back-andforth between an improved understanding of the text and growing selfunderstanding. This back-and-forth is often referred to as the hermeneutic circle, though it is absolutely not a circle in which we merely return to the starting point of our reflections without having gained any insight. This emphasis on the situatedness of all knowledge—when we come up with answers to questions of a technological-scientific character and those located within the humanities of a more interpretive nature—also throws up fundamental doubts about the aspirations of the philosophical tradition. Pragmatists and historicists criticize this tradition for overstating our capacity to undergird our knowledge and values with a rationally acquired foundation. Problems—both camps suppose—are always particular problems, contexts are always holistic, while solutions are creative and lead to new actions. To convey the nature of this common ground, Jürgen Habermas, whom I consider one of the few thinkers to have any feeling for the affinity between pragmatism and historicism, refers (Habermas 1983) to the radicalization of the Hegelian critique of Kant (or meta-critique) and recognizes the epoch-making character of this radical intellectual shift. Ultimately, however, he harbors the suspicion that, in their critique of the rationalism of the philosophical tradition, both schools went too far, or failed to fi nd any means of answering normative questions on this new basis. As we will see, I take a different view here. But like Habermas I believe that the profound intellectual shifts that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, which I refer to here as pragmatism and historicism, brought about an epochal change in the relationship between philosophy on the one hand and the natural sciences and humanities on the other. If all problem-solving is situational, and the dream of the supratemporal rational foundation is over, then philosophy can no longer claim to be the metaphysical or epistemological foundation of the sciences. In this case, philosophy’s only options are either to attempt to conduct itself as a scientific discipline, as in early phenomenology (Husserl’s “philosophy as rigorous science”) and as is generally typical of the style and program of analytic philosophy, or it can content itself with functioning as an elevated

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locus of self-reflection. This includes reflection on the procedures and results of the scientific disciplines, but also reflection on the sources of our knowledge and values in the experiences of everyday life, and in those experiences that transcend this everyday life—“extra-ordinary experiences” (Max Weber) or experiences of self-transcendence. This lengthy exposition of the commonalities of pragmatism and historicism, and the epoch-making significance of the breakthrough of these intellectual currents, was necessary to set the historical stage and intellectual framework for the following interpretations of the pragmatist contributions to a theory of history. As evident in much of the secondary literature, without this background there is a danger to merely produce a shallow reformulation of the relevant texts that would utterly fail to convey their explosive force. So if the pragmatists ultimately reversed their longstanding lack of interest in the specific problems of historical research, what form did this new interest take? In particular, how was the pragmatism of Mead, in other words a pragmatism that underscores human intersubjectivity, corporeal and linguistic interaction, and the development of the self, to impact on the problems involved in formulating a logic of historiography? The fi rst fi nding on this front is rather ironic. The earliest serious attempt to bridge the gap between a pragmatist understanding of intersubjectivity and the problems of historical interpretation is found not in the work of Mead, but in that of Josiah Royce, and it is very different from Mead’s later efforts in this direction.4 Royce, who was one of Mead’s academic teachers at Harvard in the 1880s (Mead 1917a), maintained a decades-long friendship with the two founding figures of pragmatism, Peirce and James. But whatever Royce’s merits and accomplishments, it seems to me that it was only after James’s death in 1910 that he had the crucial insight that I believe makes him one of the leading exponents of pragmatism (rather than neo-idealism). He recognized the greatest weakness of James’s epoch-making contributions to the philosophy and psychology of religion and saw that this weakness could be remedied with the help of Peirce’s semiotics. To put it in more concrete terms: as brilliant as James’s analyses of religious experiences were, he largely lacked the means to go on to analyze how human beings who have had an intensive religious experience integrate this experience into the interpretive patterns of their everyday lives. In James’s work, at least in the Varieties of 1902, it seems as though the subjective interpretation of an intensive individual experience simply grows organically out of this experience, as if it was a mere emanation of it. Only a few passages in James’s book on

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religion display any sensitivity to the difficulties involved in articulating experiences—for example, when he explores the paradox that mystical experiences seem both “ineffable” and overflowing with noetic content. In this sense, James’s phenomenology suffers from a hermeneutic deficit (Joas 2000, 67f.). Royce’s great insight in his late magnum opus The Problem of Christianity (1913) was to trace this shortcoming back to James’s lack of interest in Peirce’s semiotics. Peirce himself also failed to relate his semiotics productively to James’s phenomenology of religion. But Royce now saw the revolutionary implications of this semiotics for our understanding of self and community. That is, if our relationship to the world, as Peirce’s semiotics states, is pervasively mediated by symbols, then subjects have no purely intuitive but only symbolically mediated cognitive access even to themselves. If this is so, then their understanding of others is symbolically mediated and does not involve any kind of analogical discovery of the other based on an originally intuitive access to the self. This would mean that, rather than aggregations of autonomous individuals, communities are the outcome of communicative processes through which both individual and collective identities are formed in the fi rst place. For Peirce and Royce the crucial point is that we must overcome the dualistic Kantian schema of perception and conception, of sensory perception and conceptual schematization, and replace it with a triadic schema: someone interprets something for someone else. This, as Royce states explicitly, also applies to processes of self-reflection through which individuals interpret themselves for themselves. Interpretation thus becomes the category most central to the entire human realm. Every new interpretation becomes a new symbol and the object of new acts of interpretation. One of the key chapters in Royce’s book is titled “The Will to Interpret,” which is no doubt an allusion to the writings of Schopenhauer and to Nietzsche’s “will to power,” both of which Royce had earlier grappled with. It is inconceivable that this process of interpretation could ever come to an end. On the basis of his theory of interpretation, in several chapters Royce goes beyond Peirce to draw conclusions about our understanding of time. “The most general distinctions of past, present, and future,”  he writes, “appear in a new light with reference to the process of interpretation  .  .  . the present potentially interprets the past to the future, and continues to do so ad infi nitum” (Royce 2001, 288). From this perspective, memory and the role of explicit reconstructions of the past take on crucial importance, as does hope and the role of anticipated futures, and this applies both to the individual self and to the community. Royce distances

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himself from James here, criticizing him for placing too much emphasis on those phenomena in which people experience a sense of fusion with the universe and a mystical loss of personhood. Without denying the existence of such phenomena, Royce makes more of the role of the will, even in the development of the self; after all, he asserts, we do make decisions about “how much of the past and the future shall ideally enter into my life, and shall contribute to the value of that life” (Royce 2001, 253). At this point it becomes clear that Royce was concurrently concerned with two dimensions of our understanding of self and community: the temporal and the ideal dimensions. A self, he writes, is not a “mere present datum, or collection of data, but is based upon an interpretation of the sense, of the tendency, of the coherence, and of the value of a life to which belongs the memory of its own past” (Royce 2001, 245). “A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see the self, or its shadow, now moving with the stream, now eddying in the currents from bank to bank of its channel, and now strenuously straining onwards in the pursuit of its own chosen good” (244). Temporality, as I would call this idea, is certainly a constitutive dimension of being a self, but it is inevitably a temporality interpreted in light of ideals. Without what Royce calls “ideal interpretation”—that is, interpretations in light of ideals—our interpreted life would be “a mere fl ight of ideas, or a meaningless flow of feelings” (253). All of this applies to communities and their self-understanding as well. Communities produce ideals—and ideals produce communities. Royce focused chiefly on Christianity in this regard, a topic to which he devoted the above-mentioned book. Like certain German Protestant theologians of the time, specifically Wilhelm Bousset and Ernst Troeltsch, he argues that we should conceive of the Christian faith itself not simply as an emanation of Jesus’s teachings, but rather as the “product of the life of the earliest Christian community itself. But, once established, and then transmitted from generation to generation, this same belief has been ceaselessly recreative of the communities of each succeeding age” (Royce 2011, 256f.). As with active remembering in the case of individuals, acts of remembrance are constitutive of these communities: Hoc facite in meam commemorationem! Do this in memory of me! Equally, the future of the community must be mediated through the individuals’ questions about their own future, including a possible future after physical death. Royce extols Paul’s interpretation of the Resurrection as an ingenious solution to this problem. It is impossible to imagine such remarks coming from Mead the secu-

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larist, but otherwise it is fair to say that here Royce’s philosophy develops all those things one might expect given Mead’s point of departure. So it is surprising that Mead never refers to Royce’s great book of 1913 in his writings. The same applies, as it happens, to John Dewey and the American historians. Peirce’s semiotics and Royce’s philosophy of interpretation are absent from their work, a fi nding I am unable to explain. What is so striking to us present-day readers is that Royce’s theory comes so close to what we would expect from Mead but Mead himself selects a quite different starting point for his philosophy of temporality. His Philosophy of the Present refers primarily to the natural sciences— namely, to the debates on natural history and Darwin’s theory of evolution and to the new understanding of time in physics after Einstein. Furthermore, Mead endows his philosophy of time with a distinct profi le as radical presentism, as the expression of an awareness that our existence is risky and fi nite. The title of Mead’s Philosophy of the Present is, of course, a play on words.5 The apparent meaning is simply a reference to the situation of philosophy around 1930. The deeper significance lies in the presentism that I have just mentioned, in other words in a resistance to a philosophy of the past that conceptualizes the present solely as an outcome of past causes, and to a philosophy of the future that can see the present only as a stage in a process that runs through it, one with a fi xed utopian or apocalyptic goal. Mead and the other pragmatists had perceived Darwinism as a radical temporalization of nature and as the foundation of an anti-deterministic view of the world. But they now found themselves threatened by a new revolution in the scientific worldview. Certainly, they believed that Einstein’s theory of relativity confi rmed their philosophical efforts to overcome the notion of linear time. But they were now confronted with a situation in which, through the concept of a four-dimensional space-time continuum, the dominant philosophical interpretations of Einstein’s innovation once again embraced a conceptual framework in which temporality is a merely subjective phenomenon. Against these philosophical interpretations, Mead drew upon a pragmatist understanding of the practical character of the measurement of time. After Einstein, simultaneity was no longer conceivable, as in the Newtonian worldview, as the purely objective coincidence of two movements in a single moment, independent of all observational perspectives. Instead, the moment emerged as that fi nite span of time in which perceptible signals emanating from a given locus of occurrence come together in the point defined by the observer. By understanding the speed of light, which is once again limited rather than

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infi nite, scientists were forced to recognize that the concept of simultaneity could not be grasped separately from the observers’ distance from events or from their direction and speed of movement. This was more than just a matter of clarifying practical issues of measurement. It had now become essential for every scientific statement about the world of bodies in motion to include objectifying consideration of the corporeality of the investigator himself. Every measurement rests upon the practical actions of cognizing subjects; all scientific cognition must self-reflectively include considerations of the location and perspective of the cognizing subject. Mead believed that the correctness of his approach was confi rmed by the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, whom he saw as attempting to preserve “motion and change within a relativistic universe” (Mead 1932, 43). And here the Whiteheadian idea of an objective reality of perspectives took on key importance for Mead. Perspectives are not just spatial but also temporal. Rather than solely human, they are characteristic of all living beings and perhaps even of all moving bodies. They are evaluative as well as cognitive. And rather than a mere subjective addition beyond the realm of nature, perspectives are part of nature. Reality consists of perspectives. In this comprehensive Meadian sense, perspectives change over time— as a result of events. For Mead, these events are also objective realities, even if they only appear as such to the subject, because subjective experiences are always objective realities as well. In his Carus Lectures at Berkeley on which the book The Philosophy of the Present is based, and in other, sometimes fragmentary, manuscripts written shortly before his death (Mead 1929), Mead related these reflections explicitly to the practice of historiography. Reconstructions of the past are triggered by new events. New events constitute new pasts. A defi nitive reconstruction of the past would be possible only if no new events were to occur—that is, in a state of futurelessness. Historical science is not a matter of mnemotechnics. As Mead writes: If we could bring back the present that has elapsed in the reality which belonged to it, it would not serve us. It would be that present and would lack just that character which we demand in the past, that is, that construction of the conditioning nature of now present passage which enables us to interpret what is arising in the future that belongs to this present. When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then was, without their relationship to what he has become: and if he could, that is if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the

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present within which that use must take place.  .  .  . Another way of saying this is that our pasts are always mental in the same manner in which the futures that lie in our imaginations ahead of us are mental. (Mead 1932, 30f.)

Mead, to sum up, was no historical relativist but rather a temporal relationist (Natanson 1953). It remains unclear, however, how this temporal relationism was related to Mead’s normative universalism. Before turning to this question, I would like to briefly examine the contribution of the third classical pragmatist to address the logic of historicity. In his Logic of 1938, John Dewey dedicated chapter 12 and parts of chapter 22 to this topic, and much of what he says there is identical to some of Mead’s ideas. Dewey fails to mention Mead even once here, though to be fair it should be noted that Mead’s philosophy of temporality must surely already have been developed under the influence of Dewey’s 1925 book Experience and Nature. At an earlier stage of his intellectual development, Dewey had already felt compelled to justify his ideas on the specific features of historical research. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the dispute over the pragmatist conception of truth was particularly heated within American philosophical circles. And during this period Dewey’s idea that it is always present experience that leads to new knowledge and that the verification of validity claims lies in the practical future consequences of this knowledge was attacked as particularly misleading with respect to historical research, since its object obviously lies in the past rather than the present. Dewey defended himself against this critique in several shorter articles published around 1910 (see Dewey 1978, 3–11) by arguing that his critics had ignored a conceptual distinction of key importance to his thinking: that between the “brute existence” of reality and the constructed character of all our statements about it. In Logic he builds on this insight and puts forward what I believe to be a compelling example: Suppose I am in doubt whether I mailed a certain letter after writing it. I assume temporarily that I did mail it, and perform the operation of waiting for the reply which it called for. The consequence serves to determine the correctness of my assumption: I receive a reply or do not receive it. Or, I fear strongly that I did not mail the letter. I perform the operation of looking through all the places where I might probably have laid it. Not fi nding it I still am unwilling to accept as conclusive

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the idea that I mailed it. I write another letter inquiring to make sure that I mailed it. (Dewey 1938, 226)

Robert Westbrook, the great biographer of Dewey (Westbrook 1991), sums up Dewey’s idea as follows: “An historical account is a tissue of inferences from traces left by past events. This is the most important thing distinguishing historical narrative from fiction” (Westbrook 1995, 21). Mead would surely have agreed with this. But Dewey makes it clearer than Mead did that we cannot speak of historical processes without assuming certain processual tendencies. Only in this way can we assert the existence of sequences and trends. Because of this, narration remains an indispensable component of historical research for Dewey. Though Mead’s theory of the self is crying out to be enriched by a theory of narration, there is virtually no sign of one in his work.6 But this seems to me to be a merely thematic rather than systematic omission. From a systematic perspective, it is far more important to return to the predicament with which I concluded my interpretation of Mead’s philosophy of time. I mentioned the fact that it was unclear how Mead envisaged the combination of his philosophy of time and his moral universalism. Put in this way, it may not be entirely clear what is at stake here. What we are confronted with is that which erupted within historicism as the danger of relativism or anarchy, and which found classical expression in Dilthey’s seventieth birthday lecture: A seemingly irreconcilable contradiction arises if we pursue the historical consciousness to its ultimate conclusion. The fi nitude of every historical phenomenon, whether a religion, ideal, or philosophical system, and thus the relativity of every kind of human conception of how things are, is the final word of the historical worldview; everything is fluid process, nothing endures. Conversely, thought requires, and philosophy strives to attain, a universally valid knowledge. The historical worldview has liberated the human intellect from the final chains left unbroken by natural science and philosophy—but where is the means of overcoming the anarchy of beliefs that threatens to erupt? (Dilthey 1924b, 9)

Related to Mead and the pragmatists, this means asking whether a radical presentism in the philosophy of time still permits the assumption of objectively established validity claims within the sphere of cognition, but especially in that of norms and values.

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Mead appears to have been in no doubt that the historicity of all human cognition nonetheless permits the objectivity of cognitive validity claims. This is evident in his almost entirely neglected writings on the history of science.7 There is no space to examine this further here. In the realm of normative validity claims, in any case, it seems obvious to me that Mead did not succeed in combining his normative reference point, in the shape of the idea of universal role-taking, with the insight into its contingent genesis, indeed, the contingent genesis and institutionalization of all values. In empirical terms, this last issue compels us to consider the entire history of moral universalism. Within the history of humanity, when did religion or philosophy fi rst generate ethical ideas about humanity as a whole and about humanity as the most important moral reference point? When were these ideas legally codified, for example in the form of subjective rights on the level of the nation state? When and how did they become established beyond this codification in the laws of states, in other words supranationally? The answers, and again I mean this from an empirical perspective, are to be found by studying the Axial Age, which lay in the middle of the last pre- Christian millennium, and examining the history of human rights, primarily since the eighteenth century. In theoretical terms, however, it seems clear to me that while Mead’s emphasis on the universalism of role taking anchors a universalist ethos psychologically, Mead failed to think this ethos through historically in terms of its prerequisites and conditions of emergence. To historicize things in this way, it is, after all, not enough to illuminate the psychological mechanism underlying such an ethos. What we must do is clarify how this ethos emerged and developed over time. This issue could remain obscure as long as there was an expectation that economic and political processes of universalization would lead to matching ethical effects, at least over the long term. But like many of his contemporaries, the shock of the First World War had deprived Mead of such hopes, and the philosophy of time was an expression of this now vanished faith in history. Faith in progress had always been unsatisfactory, since it was impossible to conceive even of those religious and philosophical forms of moral universalism generated by the Axial Age simply as effects of the formation of archaic empires, or to think of the human rights declarations of the late eighteenth century as the mere result of a “bourgeois revolution.”8 One has to consider how the shattering of historical certainties through the disaster of the First World War was reflected in historicism. For historicism even more than for pragmatism, and for Germany even more

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than the United States, this war represented an epochal rupture, a fatal blow to any belief in historical development. In this historical situation, Ernst Troeltsch developed what has been fittingly referred to as existential historicism (Spranger 1960, 434). I see his 1922 book Historicism and its Problems, which ran to more than one thousand pages, as a defi nitive critique of all teleological and evolutionist philosophies of history that permit human beings to forget history’s dependence on existential decisions. But in contrast to a then younger generation of thinkers in the vanguard of what has been called the anti-historicist revolution, Troeltsch does not rip this factor of existential decision out of history, as if we might ever overcome history through pure decision. “Overcoming history through history” was Troeltsch’s not immediately intelligible way of expressing his existential historicism. In the methodological chapter of my book on the history of human rights (Joas 2013, 97–139), I tried to systematize his arguments, which are sometimes difficult to follow amid the plethora of analyses with competing positions in his book. And I attempted to bring out how, with the “fact of ideal formation” as his starting point, he developed a consistent conception of the conditions under which ideals that have emerged over the course of history can lay claim to universal validity. I will not repeat my account here. But mentioning it helps me to determine the point where pragmatism and historicism converge, the topic with which I began this chapter. Pragmatism started with a conception of the creativity of human action and of the symbolically mediated nature of the entire human realm. Only at a late stage did it develop a philosophy of time and of the historical dimension, but without ever entirely historicizing its universalist normative orientation. Historicism, on the other hand, began with a radical conception of historicity and with attempts to understand creativity and intersubjectivity. But these remained narrower and lacked a foundation in a semiotic anthropology, in a theory of the human being as a being for whom symbolic mediation is constitutive. Furthermore, initially historicism aired the problem of historically generated ideals’ potential claim to universality only very tentatively. On this basis, however, Troeltsch reaches a point where he recognizes that formulating a contingency-aware but universalist philosophy of history requires an anthropology that not only takes account of the creative character of human action but also of its intersubjectivity—in Troeltsch’s language the “knowledge of other minds” (Troeltsch 2008, 991). Like Peirce, Troeltsch denies the possibility of pure intuition. “What remains constant is the binding of such intuitive knowledge to ordinary or inferred sensory mediations” (Troeltsch 2008, 998). Expressed in pragmatist terms, this means

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that human intersubjectivity is necessarily symbolically mediated. The fusion of semiotic anthropology and affirmative genealogy makes the synthesis of pragmatism and historicism possible. Troeltsch saw the need for a semiotic anthropology. But he was evidently entirely unaware of the writings of Peirce and Mead, which is unsurprising given that they were printed in a variety of obscure places or had not been published at all when Troeltsch wrote his great book on historicism.9 Despite the growing interest in the understanding of symbols in Germany (in the work of Husserl and Heidegger), there was nothing that might have substituted for their writings. Troeltsch’s proximity to Peirce and Mead remained concealed because Troeltsch himself—for want of knowing their semiotic anthropology—expected to advance his ideas through recourse to Leibniz’s theory of monads and the philosophy of participation developed by Malebranche. These thinkers appealed to him because he felt kinship with those philosophers who sought to construct their insights into human creativity not in a Promethean, antireligious manner but by viewing the creative accomplishments of the human being as a form of participation in the divine spirit, in the spirit of the Creator. We can indulge in the fantasy of a meeting between Troeltsch and Mead in the late 1920s. The intellectual situation was in fact crying out for a dialogue between existential historicism and a temporalized pragmatism with a sensitivity to history. But no such dialogue occurred.10 Soon after Troeltsch’s death in 1923 and Mead’s in 1931, the intellectual climate was transformed—as a result of the Nazis’ seizure of power in Germany and the dethronement of the temporarily hegemonic pragmatism in the United States. Dialogue of the kind envisaged here was now off the agenda. To conclude I shall briefly mention three fields in which such a dialogue, or the kind of synthesis of pragmatism and historicism that it could have generated, might be particularly productive. The fi rst field begins to emerge when we take account of the fact that, when they referred to history, pragmatists were not thinking solely of the history of humanity. For them, the history of humanity always remained part of natural history, part of the history of the evolution of organisms, but also part of the history of the cosmos. This is of tremendous relevance today. Advances in the field of evolutionary biology are currently inspiring a wealth of efforts to study human cognition and behavior, but also art and religion, in the context of human evolution. In addition, environmental dangers such as global warming make it impossible to exclude from our analyses the effects of human history on other organisms and the climate.

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The embedding of human history in natural history—as authors such as Michael Hampe have highlighted (Hampe 2006, 141–52)—represents one of the great achievements of pragmatism. The second field that must be mentioned here is historical sociology. Without making any reference to pragmatism (with the exception of Abbott), a number of prominent contemporary social scientists (namely, Michael Mann [1986], William Sewell [2005], and Andrew Abbott [2001]) have sought to develop an event-centered conception of social temporality that is amazingly similar to Mead’s philosophy of time. As empirical researchers pursuing a historically oriented sociology, they, more than most, have abandoned any notion that this research is a matter of discovering laws of social change that would allow us to explain change in the sense of “smooth, gradual, predictable, and linear processes” (Sewell 2005, 9). These scholars are proclaiming what has always been clear to historians, and particularly to exponents of historicism—namely, that “historical temporality is lumpy, uneven, unpredictable and discontinuous” (Sewell 2005, 9). This means that sociological theory will never discover causal laws governing a large number of supposedly similar cases. A reasonable social science informed by historiography will instead merely strive to “generate propositions whose potential generality is tested by their ability to illuminate the conjectural unfolding of analogous causal processes” (Sewell 2005, 121). So it is gradual, case-based generalization rather than hypothetical laws and attempts to verify them empirically that must inform the program of any social science that seeks to build on pragmatism and historicism. Finally, connecting the fact of ideal formation with an understanding of the historicity of every ideal sensitizes us to the specific temporal qualities of our experience of ideals. This is the third field I want to mention here. We experience ideals themselves as timeless; our experience of ideals allows us to step out of the flow of profane time. This experience may last for just a brief moment of physical time, but so intensely is it pervaded with meaning that it protrudes from profane time, remains present to us in scenic memory, and even impacts on the structure of profane time. This sacred or sacralized time is the foundation of our ideas of eternity. The radical temporalization articulated by existential historicism and temporalized pragmatism by no means eliminates the possibility of conceiving of eternity. But it challenges us to think of this eternity not in the sense of a metaphysical alternative to every kind of experienced time but as itself a dimension of our experience.11 Translated by Alex Skinner

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NOTES 1. See Kloppenberg (1989), the review symposium in American Historical Review 96 (1991, 675–708), and Haskell (1998). 2. For a somewhat more “optimistic” evaluation, see Kloppenberg (2004). 3. As Jung (1996) has underlined. 4. I agree with Vincent Colapietro (2004, 2006) that we ought to interpret Peirce himself as a historicist, but I see a considerable difference between this and the thesis that Peirce had given serious thought to the problems of historical research. This more ambitious assertion comes from Maria Liatsi (2006) on the basis of Peirce’s interest in research on ancient Greek philosophy. As I have no space to grapple with these texts in the present context, I am unable to examine Peirce and his relationship to historicism or to historical science in more depth here. 5. In the following, I base my remarks on passages from chapter 8 (“Temporality and Intersubjectivity”) of my book on Mead (Joas 1985, 167– 98). On the same topic, see also Maines et al. (1983), Baert (1989), Leclerc- Olive (2012), and García Ruiz (2013). 6. For an outstanding interpretation of Dewey’s ideas, which I can outline only briefly here, see the recent work by Hutt (2013). He contrasts Dewey’s position with Heinrich Rickert’s Neo-Kantianism and provides his assessment of the very different attempts to build on Dewey’s work (from Richard Rorty to Jeffrey Stout) within contemporary American philosophy. His basic insight here is that “inquiry” in Dewey’s sense is more than “conversation” (Rorty), but is not identical with a methodologically disciplined empirical knowledge concerned purely with factual realities. 7. The most important of which is Mead (1917b). On this entire thematic complex, see Huebner (in this volume). 8. These brief remarks are intended to build a bridge to my empirically oriented studies on the history of moral universalism; my main aim in the present observations on pragmatism and historicism is to reflect upon these studies from a methodological point of view. See Bellah and Joas (2011) and Joas (2013 and 2014). In a sense, the entire present chapter is an attempt to elaborate on a note in my book on the history of human rights (Joas 2013, 137n17). 9. To my knowledge, Troeltsch was also unaware of the writings of Josiah Royce. Royce, meanwhile, knew of Troeltsch’s work through his Social Teaching (Royce 2001, 135f.), which informed his own ideas. 10. Perhaps the only exception here is H. Richard Niebuhr, a thinker who drew heavily on both Troeltsch and Mead. I will refrain from examining, from the perspective developed here, other thinkers of the era such as Paul Tillich and Karl Mannheim, both of whom, each in their own way, found themselves enmeshed in this predicament and looked for possible routes out of it. As Friedrich Wilhelm Graf notes, Troeltsch declared “to colleagues and students from the United States that he would soon take up an invitation made to him in late 1922 to undertake a major lecture tour in the United States” (Graf 2014, 23). This, of course, fuels my fantasy that Troeltsch might have met Dewey and Mead. Troeltsch does not appear to have met with William James, on whose work he drew heavily (Troeltsch 2014, 208f.) during his fi rst journey to the United States in 1904.

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11. Key sources of stimulation in this field are to be found in the work of Charles Taylor (e.g., 2007, 54ff.).

REFERENCES Abbott, Andrew. 2001. “Temporality and Process in Social Life.” In Time Matters: On Theory and Method, 209–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baert, Patrick J. N. 1989. “The Creation of an Invented Future: An Inquiry into G. H. Mead’s Relatively- Open Future with Special Reference to Sociological Theory.” International Philosophical Quarterly 29: 319–38. Bellah, Robert N., and Hans Joas, eds. 2001. The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bernstein, Richard. 1983. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Oxford: Blackwell. Colapietro, Vincent. 2004. “Portrait of an Historicist: An Alternative Reading of Peircean Semiotic.” Semiotiche 2: 49– 68. ———. 2006. “Toward a Pragmatic Conception of Practical Identity.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42: 173–205. Dewey, John. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1978. “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth.” In The Middle Works 1899–1924. Vol. 6. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1924a. “Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Außenwelt und seinem Recht (1890).” In Die geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. Gesammelte Schriften 5. Leipzig: Teubner. ———. 1924b. “Rede zum 70. Geburtstag (1903).” In Die geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. Gesammelte Schriften 5. Leipzig: Teubner. García Ruiz, Alicia. 2013. “The Concept of the Present and Historical Experience.” In George Herbert Mead in the Twenty- First Century, edited by F. Thomas Burke and Krzysztof Piotr Skowrónski, 37–47. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2014. Fachmenschenfreundschaft. Studien zu Troeltsch und Weber. Berlin: De Gruyter. Habermas, Jürgen. 1983. “Die Philosophie als Platzhalter und Interpret.” In Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln, 9–28. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hampe, Michael. 2006. Erkenntnis und Praxis. Zur Philosophie des Pragmatismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Haskell, Thomas S. 1998. Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas. 1988. Social Action and Human Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutt, Curtis. 2013. John Dewey and the Ethics of Historical Belief: Religion and the Representation of the Past. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Joas, Hans. 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1993. Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 2000. The Genesis of Values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. ———. 2014. Was ist die Achsenzeit? Eine wissenschaftliche Debatte als Diskurs über Transzendenz. Basel: Schwabe. Jung, Matthias. 1996. Dilthey. Hamburg: Junius. Kloppenberg, James. 1989. “Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical Writing.” American Historical Review 94: 1011–30. ———. 2004. “Pragmatism and the Practice of History: From Turner and Du Bois to Today.” Metaphilosophy 35: 202–225. Leclerc- Olive, Michèle. 2012. “Les figures du temps dans la philosophie de George Herbert Mead.” In La philosophie du temps en perspective(s), by George H. Mead. Paris: Editions EHESS. Liatsi, Maria. 2006. Interpretation der Antike. Die pragmatistische Methode historischer Forschung. Hildesheim: Olms. Maines, David. R., Noreen M. Sugrue, and Michael A. Katovich. 1983. “The Sociological Import of G. H. Mead’s Theory of the Past.” American Sociological Review 48: 161–73. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mead, George Herbert. 1917a. “Josiah Royce—A Personal Impression.” International Journal of Ethics 27: 168–70. ———. 1917b. “Scientific Method and Individual Thinker.” In Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude, by John Dewey, Addison W. Moore, Harold C. Brown, George H. Mead, Boyd H. Bode, Henry W. Stuart, James H. Tufts, and Horace M. Kallen, 176–227. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1929. “The Nature of the Past.” In Essays in Honor of John Dewey, edited by John Coss, 235–42. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Charles W. Morris, John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunham, and David L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Natanson, Maurice. 1953. “G. H. Mead’s Metaphysics of Time.” Journal of Philosophy 50: 770– 82. Novick, Peter. 1988. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popper, Karl R. 1960. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge. Royce, Josiah. 2001. The Problem of Christianity. Washington DC: The Catholic University of California Press. Sewell Jr., William H. 2005. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spranger, Eduard. 1960. “Das Historismusproblem an der Universität Berlin seit 1900.” In Studium Berolinense. Aufsätze und Beiträge zu Problemen der Wissenschaft und zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Wilhelms- Universität zu Berlin, edited by Hans Leussink, Eduard Neumann, and Georg Kotowski, 425–43. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Troeltsch, Ernst. 2008. Der Historismus und seine Probleme. Kritische Gesamtausgabe 16.1 and 16.2. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 2014. Schriften zur Religionswissenschaft und Ethik. Kritische Gesamtausgabe 6.1 and 6.2. Berlin: De Gruyter. Westbrook, Robert. 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1995. “The Authority of Pragmatism.” Intellectual History Newsletter 17: 16–24.

Ch a pter Four

George Herbert Mead and the Promise of Pragmatist Democracy Robert Westbrook

I

think it is fair to say that George Herbert Mead is among the few major figures in American intellectual history yet to make much of an appearance on the radar of American intellectual historians. The historical/ biographical work on Mead done thus far—much of it quite capable—has been principally the work of sociologists and philosophers.1 This absence of Mead from historians’ accounts of American thought is surprising, not only because he is a figure of such undeniably significant impact on philosophy and social science at home and abroad, but also because he has suffered neglect from intellectual historians despite their great interest in areas of inquiry in which one would think he would have figured prominently. For example, the neo-pragmatist philosophical revival of the last generation in which intellectual historians have played an important role is absent much intellectual history in which Mead figures prominently.2 And perhaps even more peculiar is Mead’s absence from recent work by intellectual historians on the development of a conception of the social self in American social thought at the turn of the twentieth century and its relationship to an emerging consumer culture—even though no philosopher can be more closely identified than Mead with thinking about the social self in this period. 3 My aim here is not to explain this neglect—I have no satisfying explanation to advance—nor is it simply to apologize on behalf of my guild.4 Rather I would like to offer a modest contribution to correcting our failings by placing Mead’s thinking in the context of another important twentiethcentury story that has drawn considerable attention from American intellectual historians, myself included: the preeminence in American political thought since the 1920s of a “realist” democratic theory that accepts, even applauds, an exceptionally modest conception of democratic citizen82

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ship, and the periodic resistance to this constriction of the political role of ordinary citizens by more radically-democratic thinkers. As I have long argued, the most important figure among the latter in the fi rst half of the twentieth century was John Dewey.5 I would also contend that here, as in many other respects, Mead belongs alongside his friend and onetime colleague. And not merely as a friend and colleague who shared Dewey’s views, but as one who substantially and productively enlarged them.

THE REALIST CHALLENGE I will focus my attention on an article that Mead published in 1923: “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences.” But first let me provide what I think is a telling context for it, although perhaps not one of which Mead was himself fully aware. Mead’s article appeared at low ebb for robustly democratic thinking in the United States. A year before Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion, which Dewey aptly characterized as “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”6 Lippmann’s book, one of the landmarks of twentieth-century American democratic realism summarized and extended the work of social scientists who throughout the 1920s raised forceful objections to the sort of full-bodied democracy that Dewey and Mead had called for in the early twentieth century and pursued as Progressive reformers (particularly in educational reform). Drawing on Freudian and behaviorist psychology as well as pioneering studies of voting behavior, these democratic realists focused their criticism of democracy on two of its essential beliefs: the belief in the capacity of most men for rational political action and the belief in the practicality and desirability of maximizing the participation of all citizens in public life.7 Psychological research, realists claimed, seriously challenged a faith in the capacity of ordinary men and women for self-government. It had, Harry Elmer Barnes declared, “given scientific confi rmation to the old Aristotelian dogma that some men are born to rule and others to serve, and makes it clear that we can have no efficient and progressive social system unless we recognize the real value of leadership and make it possible for the actual intellectual aristocracy to control society.”8 Empirical studies of voting behavior further enhanced this portrait of democratic man as irrational man. Social scientists noted the sharp decline in participation of eligible voters in American elections and observed that those who did vote rarely acted as rational decision makers. After

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studying primary elections in Chicago in 1926, political scientist Carroll Wooddy concluded that “voting was indiscriminate and unintelligent, and the primary practically meaningless as an expression of public opinion.”9 Few of the American social scientists who denounced the irrationality and impracticality of democratic government believed that democracy should be totally abandoned. Rather they argued that the role of the public in decision making should be severely restricted and power placed in the hands of those few men who were rational and intelligent (often described as men much like the social scientists themselves). In his presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1934, Walter Shepherd contended that: the dogma of universal suffrage must give way to a system of educational and other tests which will exclude the ignorant, the uninformed, and the anti-social elements which hitherto have so frequently controlled elections. We must frankly recognize that government demands the best thought, the highest character, the most unselfish service that is available. We must admit, as did Aristotle, that an aristocratic as well as a democratic element is necessary in government—not an aristocracy of wealth, or class, or privileged position, but an aristocracy of intellect and character.

Shepard ended his speech by imploring “men of brains” to “seize the torch.”10 The principal problem with American democracy, realists argued, was less with its practice than with its theory. Rather than radical repair, American democracy required a redefi nition of its essentials—a redefi nition that considerably closed the gap between ideal and reality by moving the ideal closer to reality. Democracy should be conceived less as a republic of active citizens than as a system of responsible elites, a system well within reach in the US.

SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS Contemporary democratic theorists might say that the realists of the twenties were, among other things, challenging the epistemic virtues of robust democracy. That is, they were contending that a democracy in which ordinary citizens took an active role in politics would suffer from a severe deficit of the reliable knowledge essential to sound policymaking. This challenge was particularly troubling to Dewey, who had since early in the century argued for the superiority of political communities

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that adopted the modes of inquiry of scientific communities, and had contended that a fully-participatory democracy was the sort of political community in which the virtues of such a scientific politics would be most manifest. For him, as Hilary Putnam has said, “democracy is not just one form of social life among other workable forms of social life; it is the precondition for the full application of intelligence to the solution of social problems.” This “epistemological justification for democracy” was a central element of Dewey’s pragmatism.11 Dewey briefly responded directly to the realists’ epistemic criticism of democracy in The Public and Its Problems (1927), but failed there to develop as full or systematic a response to this criticism as one might hope. The better response (whether intentionally or not) could be found in Mead’s earlier article.12 Mead’s task in linking science and democracy was, like Dewey’s, twofold. First, he had to demonstrate that the methods of science could have any valuable role in the sort of value-laden judgments with which political communities, including those that are democratic, must make. And then he had to show that the valuable role that scientific inquiry might play in such judgments would be most fully realized in robustly democratic political communities. Mead admitted that the role of the methods of science in moral and political deliberation was a limited one, though not as limited as some would have it. Scientific inquiry could arrive at conclusions about planetary motion and other extra-human phenomena, but it could not determine human purposes. “In our moral actions,” he noted, “we control our actions in considerable degree, i.e. in proportion as we are intelligent, by our purposes, by the ideas of results not yet attained, that is, our conduct is teleological. In our comprehension of nature the result is controlled entirely by antecedent causes, that is nature proceeds mechanically, and there seems to be no kinship between such a nature and the intelligence of men seeking for a better social order.”13 When men seek a better social order, they ask “what should we do?” and “how shall we live?” But science cannot answer these questions. It cannot evaluate human purposes nor can it sort out clashes between human purposes. As Max Weber put it at around the same time as Mead: “[Science] is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe. This, to be sure, is the inescapable condition of our historical situation. We cannot evade it so long as we remain true to ourselves.”14

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Nonetheless, if scientific inquiry could not simply determine the ends for which communities should act or step in with a moral algorithm to resolve confl icts between competing values, it could be of inestimable assistance in the formulation of social ends by virtue of its capacity to estimate systematically the consequences of the pursuit of various purposes. “It is to this task that a scientifically trained intelligence must insistently devote itself, that of stating, just as far as possible, our institutions, our social habits and customs, in terms of what they are to do, in terms of their functions.” Science here as elsewhere, for pragmatists, was the exercise of fallible, practical intelligence. “We do not turn to scientific method,” Mead said, “to determine what is a common good, though we have learned to avail ourselves of it in some of our common efforts and practices in pursuit of the good.”15 Mead found one of the principal virtues of applying scientific intelligence to social concerns to be its corrosive effect on taken-for-granted assumptions that had become encrusted dogmas. For the pragmatist, all ends and purposes had to answer for the manner in which they actually functioned in social practice. “Scientific method does not undertake to say what the good is, but when it has been employed, it is uncompromising in its demand that that good is no less a good because the scientific pursuit of it brings us within the taboos of institutions that we have regarded as inviolable.”16 No practice, however settled, was immune from fresh inquiry into its consequences or reconstruction in light of such inquiry. Most realists would probably have gone this far with Mead. Indeed, they might say that the scientific inquiry that they had conducted targeted the taboos that insulated American democratic politics from criticism. And many of them might have said that there was little difference in Mead’s view from their own call for a select elite, “men of brains,” to apply scientific inquiry accordingly. But democracy held a special place in the pragmatism of Dewey and Mead. It was, they agreed with realists, an apt subject for scientific inquiry, but it was also a necessary condition of scientific inquiry, which the realists denied. Mead argued that good science welcomed all interested inquirers to its deliberations, a society that hoped to deploy scientific inquiry on behalf of its purposes would have to do the same; it would, on epistemic grounds, have to be widely inclusive. Effective inquiry required that “all the conflicting ends, the institutions and their hitherto inviolable values be brought together and so restated and reconstructed that intelligent conduct may be possible, with reference to all of them. Scientific

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method requires this because it is nothing but a highly developed form of impartial intelligence.”17 In Mead’s view, a social order that was undemocratic could not hope to make the best use of scientific inquiry to achieve its purposes since it would deny some values and interests (and those wedded to them) a place at the table. As he said: Science does not attempt to formulate the end to which social and moral conduct ought to pursue, any more than it pretends to announce what hypothesis will be found by the research scientist to solve his problem. It only insists that the object of our conduct must take into account and do justice to all of the values that prove to be involved in the enterprise, just as it insists that every fact involved in the research problem must be taken into account in an acceptable hypothesis.18

As Mead saw it, then, pragmatism called for the application of free inquiry to human problems of all sorts. Moreover, effective social inquiry was unavoidably democratic because, if it was to be successful, social inquiry could not be an exclusive, strictly expert practice or a mere element in elite social engineering. Fully democratic deliberation was an essential part of effective social inquiry. Whatever other justifications one might offer for democratic polities, they were, in effect, “smarter” than all others.

CONTEMPORARY RESONANCES As far as I know, Mead did not develop this epistemological justification for democracy much further than this, and Dewey never did either. And their arguments did little to dent realist hegemony in the twenties, or in the subsequent four or five decades. Yet the last four or five decades have witnessed a revival of radical democratic theory, and some of it has intersected in productive ways with the simultaneous resurrection of pragmatism among philosophers and political theorists. And hence not surprisingly one can hear echoes in much of this thinking of the arguments that Mead made in the early 1920s. To offer but one example, consider the work of Cheryl Misak, one of the most significant neo-pragmatist philosophers at work today.19 Misak, who takes her cues much more from Charles Peirce than from Dewey or Mead, nonetheless has pursued in far fuller and more compelling fashion than Mead did in his article much the same path of argument that he did.

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First she makes the case for moral inquiry as of a piece with (if not the same thing as) natural scientific inquiry, and then she demonstrates that communities of inquiry in pursuit of pragmatic moral truth best achieve their goals when they are fully democratic. Pragmatism, Misak says, points to “a kind of radical democracy in inquiry.” If, as it holds, belief is to answer to the experience of a community of inquiry, then no one with relevant experience can be denied participation in it. “Belief involves being prepared to try to justify one’s views to others and being prepared to test one’s belief against the experience of others. Thus, the differences of inquirers—their different perspectives, sensibilities, and experiences—must be taken seriously. If they are not, reaching the best or the true belief is not in the cards.”20 Deliberative, participatory democracy thus has for some pragmatists— Dewey, Mead, Misak, and others—great cognitive significance, and insofar as the political realm is constructed as a community of inquiry (as such pragmatists believe it should be), democracy is essential to the success of such a political community of inquiry. Pragmatists thus argue that “if we are to take seriously the experiences of all, we must let ways of life flourish so that they can be articulated and we must let people articulate them for themselves.” Consequently, “deliberation must be encouraged and political institutions and mechanisms must be as inclusive as is reasonably possible. The pragmatist voices the requirement that we try, at least until such attempts fail, to include rather than exclude others.”21 Of course, constructing such democratic communities of inquiry poses enormous challenges, not only of “institutional design” but also of mobilizing the necessary political power to build and sustain them. As even Dewey admitted, “the conditions upon which depends the emergence of the Public from its eclipse will seem close to the denial of the possibility of realizing the idea of a democratic public.”22 Nonetheless, neo-pragmatists have also been hard at work on this score, and a number of them have begun the difficult work of thinking concretely about what a democratic, pragmatist politics would look like and how to achieve it.23 In sum, the epistemological justification of democracy that Dewey and Mead pioneered has become a central thread in the now long history of American pragmatism. And George Herbert Mead deserves a more prominent place than he now has in the genealogy of this thread. Beyond this, I suspect Mead’s life’s work has a great deal more to offer to theorists and practitioners of pragmatist politics. It is hard to imagine that so astute a student of the social self would not be a helpful ally to those convinced, as he was, that its richest possibilities lie within demo-

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cratic communities. Hence Mead may well come to play a more significant role than he has thus far in the even longer story of the deeply troubled, yet not yet settled, fate of democracy in America.

NOTES 1. This includes Hans Joas, G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1985); Gary Cook, George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Dmitri N. Shalin, “G. H. Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive Agenda,” American Journal of Sociology 93 (1988): 913–51; Filipe Carreira da Silva, Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). Other important work on Mead by philosophers and social theorists includes Mitchell Aboulafia, The Mediating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self- Determination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Mitchell Aboulafia, The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); James Campbell, The Community Reconstructs: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Karen Hanson, The Self Imagined: Philosophical Reflections on the Social Character of the Psyche (New York: Routledge, 1986); J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith, American Sociology and Pragmatism: Mead, Chicago Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); David L. Miller, George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973); Israel Scheffler, Four Pragmatists: A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead and Dewey (London: Routledge, 1986). 2. Louis Menand’s celebrated history of pragmatism, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) only mentions Mead in passing. The most important exception to this neglect by historians is Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). See also Feffer, “Sociability and Social Confl ict in George Herbert Mead’s Interactionism, 1900–1919,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 233–54; and Neil Coughlan’s chapter on Mead in Young John Dewey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). This is not to say many neo-pragmatist philosophers have had much to say about Mead either. As far as I know, Richard Rorty, the preeminent figure among neo-pragmatists, never published a word about Mead. German philosophers and social theorists have been far more attentive to his significance. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 2:1–111. The exceptional, major neo-pragmatist who has made a powerful case for Mead’s importance is Hans Joas, at once a German and American intellectual. See Joas, G. H. Mead; Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Joas, The Genesis of Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 123–29, 500–528. 3. James Livingston is principally responsible for this line of thought. See his Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill:

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University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Here Livingston surprisingly sees William James as the most significant pragmatist proponent of the social self and ignores Mead. I criticize his reading of James in my Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 60–70. In a later related essay on “The Strange Career of the Social Self,” Livingston mentions Mead only as the teacher of Jessie Taft, whose thinking he considers at length: Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 57–83. In The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1829–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Jeffrey Sklansky joins Livingston in conjoining ideas of social selfhood to consumer capitalism, albeit without Livingston’s enthusiastic embrace of the putative consequences. He too slights Mead. Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists is again exceptional in its careful if not always persuasive engagement with Mead. But see also Daniel Borus, Twentieth- Century Multiplicity: American Thought and Culture, 1900–1920 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 130–44. 4. I do not mean to imply that I have myself been any less remiss than other intellectual historians in neglecting Mead. For what little I have had to say, see my John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 72; and Democratic Hope, 12–14. This paper elaborates on the latter. On occasion, Mead himself has been blamed for his neglect because he published no book, let alone one that systematically summed up his thinking. But this shortcoming, if it is one, has not prevented philosophers and social theorists from digging up the many articles that he did publish or from looking into revealing manuscript sources—the sort of thing on which historians usually pride themselves. As philosopher Gary Cook says of his own fi ne book, “My approach here is essentially that of an intellectual historian” (Cook, Mead, xiv). 5. See my John Dewey and American Democracy for a full expression of this understanding of Dewey as a radical democrat. 6. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1965); John Dewey, “Public Opinion” (1922), Middle Works of John Dewey 13:337. Lippmann developed his arguments further in the much briefer Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1925). 7. This account of democratic realism draws on Edward A. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973). 8. Harry Elmer Barnes, “Some Contributions of Sociology to Modern Political Theory,” in Charles E. Merriam and Harry E. Barnes, eds., A History of Political Theories: Recent Times (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 373. 9. Carroll D. Wooddy, The Chicago Primary of 1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), 275. 10. Walter Shepard, “Democracy in Transition,” American Political Science Review 29 (1935): 18–19, 20. 11. Hilary Putnam, “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy” (1990), in Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 180. See Dewey, “Philosophy and American National Life” (1904), Middle Works 3:74; and “Intel ligence and Morals (1908), Middle Works 4:39. 12. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927), Later Works of John Dewey 2:363– 67.

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13. George Herbert Mead, “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences” (1923), in Andrew J. Reck, ed., Selected Writings of George Herbert Mead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 252. 14. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 152. 15. Mead, “Scientific Method,” 262, 255. Weber concurred (“Science as a Vocation,” 143–45). 16. Mead, “Scientific Method,” 255. 17. Mead, “Scientific Method,” 256. 18. Mead, “Scientific Method,” 256. 19. For a fuller account of the epistemological justification for democracy offered by neo-pragmatists, see my Democratic Hope, 1–17, 44–51, 175–200. 20. Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (London: Routledge, 2000), 194. 21. Misak, Truth, Politics, Morality, 115, 127. 22. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 351. 23. See Christopher K. Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); William R. Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Archon Fung, “Continuous Institutional Innovation and the Pragmatic Conception of Democracy,” Polity 44 (2012): 609–24; and Jack Knight and James Johnson, The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

Chapter Five

The Theory of Intersubjectivity as a Theory of the Human Being: George Herbert Mead and the German Tradition of Philosophical Anthropology Karl-Siegbert Rehberg

PARALLEL ENDEAVORS

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his study examines parallel preoccupations in George Herbert Mead’s (pragmatist) theory of intersubjectivity and in German philosophical anthropology. Both Mead and the leading exponents of this anthropological  approach—namely Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen—drew crucial inspiration from German idealism and its later offshoots, which analyzed the foundations of human action as sciences of reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaften). Both these intellectual traditions were also influenced by the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) and sought to come to grips with Wilhelm Dilthey’s conception of the Geisteswissenschaften or humanities. Another significant factor here is the detachment of modern psychology from philosophy, which was closely bound up with philosophical pragmatism. This shared point of departure clarifies why the works of Mead, the American pragmatists, and the school of thought of philosophical anthropology (see Fischer 2008) feature the same discourse on the human being—and are in this sense systematically comparable. An analysis of different theories or schools must be mindful of the basic pragmatist insight that it is historical-cultural imprints, interests, confl icts, and constraints on action that lead to the formulation of problems and influence how people deal with them both intellectually and practically. While my primary focus here is on systematic comparisons, we should keep in mind the overall frame of reference, which I will be discussing from the perspective of the history of science and the sociology of knowledge. Friedrich H. Tenbruck has shown convincingly that 92

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we cannot achieve a full understanding of different intellectual traditions solely through systematic comparisons. We must also bring out the differing social conditions that underpinned the institutionalization of the social sciences in any given case. This includes the establishment of the department of sociology at the University of Chicago. The social pressures emanating from the major United States industrial centers—to which the churches in particular responded with social work and the pursuit of social reforms—did much to shape social scientific thought in nineteenthand twentieth-century America. Tenbruck took the view that the sources of German social theories, in contrast, lay solely in debates within the academy on the progress of scientific knowledge. But this is only half-true as we discover if we consider, for example, the great influence exercised by debates on social policy in nineteenth-century Germany, in which many of the founders of German sociology (not just Max Weber) were involved. The early interpretation of pragmatist philosophy by Eduard Baumgarten (1938), which was published under the Nazi regime and described the links between pragmatism and American democracy, already included an examination of social influences. The political dimension of “Chicago thought” is also evident in John Dewey’s and Mead’s grassroots reformism and in their sociopolitical engagement, which is closely bound up with the American understanding of politics. This political background, which Hans Joas ([1980] 1997, 10) has chosen as the point of departure for his “political biography” of Mead’s work by portraying him as “a radically democratic intellectual,” differed fundamentally from the political convictions with which German intellectuals responded to the crises of the early twentieth century. This had direct consequences for their theoretical work. By and large, the central theme of pragmatist philosophy, interactionism, the phenomenological schools built on the work of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schütz, and philosophical anthropology is the unity of soul and body, mind and action—that is, it is an anti-dualistic view of the human being. Against the background of natural scientific insights since Charles Darwin, philosophical anthropology aspired to develop a biologically informed philosophy. The German strain of anthropological thinking, in fact, had its own natural scientific underpinning—namely, a philosophy that had grown out of biological research (the vitalism of Hans Driesch [1908 and 1914] being one example). Here, biological insights and philosophical thinking were combined to envisage a being that is determined by nature yet simultaneously contra-natural.

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The leading authors in this new field—Max Scheler (1874–1928), Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985), and Arnold Gehlen (1907–1976)—were stimulated by new scientific research, such as the experiments published in 1911 in which psychologist and primatologist Wolfgang Köhler (1925) demonstrated intelligent behavior among chimpanzees. For all three thinkers, the comparison of man and animal became central to their analyses. The evolutionary development of homo sapiens, however, did not prompt them to conclude that man is merely a more powerful animal. Instead they emphasized his “exceptional position”; because humans are not instinctively bound to a specific environment, they need a special “natural artificiality” (Plessner [1928] 1981b, 383– 96). Man is, in other words, a “cultural being by nature” (see Gehlen [1940] 1988, 72). This, however, raises the question of whether culture is independent of natural evolutionary mechanisms. Even in cases where they contradict one another, these authors agree in assuming that, by highlighting human beings’ self-referentiality, as achieved through action and interaction, the concept of experience opens up a route into a non-dualistic conception—often with an anti-Cartesian emphasis—of personhood. So person and self are central to the approaches discussed here. This generated further parallels between specific theories as they sought to comprehend the constitution of physical objects and the closely associated relationship between Sachwiderstand (when, for example, a routine action goes wrong, when a situation or objective reality resists our attempts to carry out an action: you put your key in your front door as a matter of routine and become consciously aware of the fact only when it fails to open [see Gehlen [1940] 1988, 15 and 32–35]) and the formation of consciousness, to analyze the structures of perception and temporality, and, fi nally, to illuminate sociality—a key anthropological category. The reception of pragmatism—of which I consider Mead an exponent— was long an ill-starred process in Germany, despite the fact that German thinkers had done much to establish crucial prerequisites for a philosophical interpretation of the unity of the human life-nexus as anchored in human action. We need only think of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy and the pragmatist implications of his transcendental philosophy, which sheds light on acts of cognition; the idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, with its focus on action and positing; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy of the realization of reason; Arthur Schopenhauer’s physiologically inspired philosophizing; or Friedrich Nietzsche’s “body as guide” (e.g., Nietzsche [1884] 1980, 249 and 282), which highlights the ancillary role of the intellect and the perspectivity of worldviews that are embedded

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in actions and interests. Karl Marx’s philosophy of practice and his social theory-cum-critique of ideology are located within the same context. It seems likely, in fact, that the widespread German skepticism towards pragmatist ideas is partly due to their inherent materialist dimension. In those cases where pragmatism was acknowledged in Germany, the discussion remained fi xated on the problem of truth.1 The consequences of this new philosophy, meanwhile, for anthropology and the philosophy of action were scarcely considered. As a result, the issues common to pragmatism and philosophical anthropology long remained obscure. A deeper mediating dimension of these schools of thought, which are in many respects very different (and at times virtually antithetical), can be found in the concept of life, which Helmuth Plessner ([1928] 1981b, 37f.) identified as the key concept of the twentieth century in his “philosophical biology,” adding it to the “redemptive words” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—namely, “reason” and “development” (37f.). Henri Bergson’s philosophy of life (which, was similar to pragmatism in some respects) had a significant influence on American pragmatism and on philosophical anthropology. Another source of influence, which underpins the German philosophical tradition and Mead’s work in a similar way, is Wilhelm Dilthey’s ([1883] 1991) program of a system of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), which he developed from 1883 onwards. Mead wished to write a dissertation under Dilthey’s guidance critiquing the empiricist concept of space (see Joas [1980] 1997, 19). Dilthey provided the preliminary anthropological foundation for the discipline of history and the social sciences. On the basis of “psychophysically neutral” concepts of action and in light of analyses of the process of perception (which are of special interest within the framework of a pragmatist theory of intersubjectivity and which Max Scheler also discussed in depth), Dilthey made entities, lifestyles, and cultural systems generated by actions the focus of his concept of the humanities (see Dilthey [1883] 1991, esp. 99–113). This also paved the way for analyses of the lifeworld informed by the philosophy of life (see, as a critique of Dilthey’s dualism between culture and society, Rehberg [1986] 2014).

WILHELM WUNDT AND WILLIAM MCDOUGALL If we center our theoretical comparison on Mead’s core theorem of the “practical intersubjectivity,” as Joas ([1980] 1997) has fittingly called it, that underpins all human experience of world and self, then we may as-

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sume that Mead embraced Wilhelm Wundt’s highly valuable conception of the gesture, which develops through phylogenesis to the point where it attains linguistic and reflexive significance (in other words, until it becomes a symbol). The importance of Wundt’s model to the elaboration of an interactionist anthropology and theory of action lies, fi rst, in his notion of the equiprimordiality of the different foundations of action. He could thus avoid a one-sided theory of reflexes, drives, or discrete groups of motives, freeing him from the need to ascribe clearly circumscribed drive complexes to specific types of movement and expression, which is the main weakness of all classifications of instincts, including McDougall’s approach (for a critique of McDougall see Gehlen 1938 and [1940] 1988, 48 and 322). Wundt ([1911] 1975, 47ff. and 60) came to embrace a psychophysical model of motion sequences, which begins on the level of compulsive acts as the most primordial form of animal and human behavior. Just like pragmatism, which was influenced by the philosophy of life, Wundt works with the dynamic model of a “torrent of feelings” (Wundt [1911] 1975, 60). Second, Wundt also already attributed the human capacity for symbolization to the “interaction of individuals.”2 Wundt explains the special character of linguistic development (as already apparent in the medium of the gesture) and the development of a referential and representational gestural language (scarcely observable in animals but primordial in human beings) as follows: “What separates it [the higher animals’ gestural language] from them [human gestures] is merely the development that the latter undergo under the influence of interaction between individuals. As the expression of affect returns to its author via its addressee, it simultaneously changes its content, and . . . this back-and-forth movement of the play of gestures gradually becomes an exchange of the notions emerging in individuals’ consciousness” (Wundt [1911] 1975, 232). So there is no assumption here of any kind of “communicative” or “imitative drive” as a “homogeneous psychological force,” and Wundt also sees that this interaction changes the motivational structure—that is, the communication and the associated affective impact “become motives in themselves.” This exchange gives rise to “conscious relations and comparisons” and ultimately to “mental life.” In this sense, according to Wundt, “language, and thus gestural language itself, [is] a faithful reproduction of the human being in the totality of his psychological accomplishments” (Wundt [1911] 1975, 254–57). Both Mead and the philosophical anthropologists, particularly Scheler and Gehlen, built on such motifs: for here was a non-reductionist foundation of human culture already inherent in human “nature.” The social psychology of William McDougall was another source of

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influence, one that had an impact both on Mead and on the German debate on interactionist assumptions (particularly in the work of Gehlen, and long before he read Mead—see the fi fth section of this essay). In McDougall’s work—as in that of other American social psychologists such as William James and James Mark Baldwin—we already fi nd, in schematic form, what Mead went on to elaborate in more detail: namely, how the development of the child is linked to learning to “distinguish the objects of the external world as things existing independently of himself,” and the important role played by one’s own body in demarcating oneself from the things of the exterior world as “parts of the not-self” (McDougall 1908, 182), in such a way that one’s conception and perception of one’s own body also emerge through contact with objects. The assumption of roles already occupies a key position in McDougall’s argument when he states that the child adopts “the part of parent or teacher or elder sister” or “makes some smaller child, a dog, a cat or a doll, stand for himself” (185). By performing a role, the child thus perceives the importance of other people’s behaviors. He also attains a conception of his self that is no longer linked solely to his body but also to “a system of relations between his self and other selves.” His self-image thus becomes highly dependent on the notions expressed by others about his personality in such a way that his self-awareness is influenced by “ideas and feelings about him, a light that colors all his idea of his self and plays a great part in building up and shaping that idea.” McDougall applied this schema to the perception of the body, which is supported “by the use of the mirror” on an intersubjective basis among “civilized folk” (185f.).

MAX SCHELER If we compare Mead’s pragmatist interactionism with philosophical anthropology, our starting point must be Max Scheler, who gave the latter school of thought its name, and his paradoxical relationship both to pragmatism and Mead’s theoretical project. Scheler ([1924] 2013, 168) assailed pragmatism as the ideology of the new sub-bourgeois classes, going so far as to refer to it as “proletarian worker-pragmatism,” and he was particularly scathing about social theorists’ attempts to justify human personhood. Yet it was none other than Scheler who did most to think through the problems entailed in the constitution of the person, which was also one of Mead’s lifelong preoccupations. It is, admittedly, the differences between the two that initially stand out. Scheler was unwilling to acknowledge pragmatism’s epistemological and anthropological explanatory aspi-

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rations, instead emphasizing that human beings’ ways of relating to one another (for example, through empathy or through the active forms of love and hate), are in no way derivable from the social world (but nor are they derivable from the psychology of emotions, drives, or the masses). On this view, we cannot understand these ways of relating at all in light of biological and social foundations, of human beings’ vital sphere but only as forms of value and attitude inherent in personhood, forms that are not amenable to analytical disaggregation and are solely explicable in metaphysical terms (see Scheler [1913b] 1973, 371ff., 494–501 and 508–18). Another fundamental difference is Scheler’s layered model of life as he developed it in The Human Place in the Cosmos ([1927] 2009), the book that outlines his anthropological theory. While this model assumes an evolution of the psychological dimension (from emotional urges or Gefühlsdrang through instinct and associative memory to organically bound practical intelligence), Scheler does not derive the mind either from these developmental forms of life (as Plessner does) or from the entanglements of social group action (as every theory influenced by pragmatism does). For him, mind is the counter-principle, the actional center that constitutes the person, the negative usurpation of instinctive and environmental conditions, and the foundation-stone of a human relationship with the world, a relationship that is not to be understood as an organism– environment relationship. We must relate Scheler’s rejection of pragmatism to his metaphysical project if we are to make sense of the fact that despite all this he carried out phenomenological analyses that have much in common with pragmatist approaches, including Mead’s theory of intersubjectivity (Scheler [1926] 1960, 239ff.). This is evident above all in a text that fi rst appeared in 1913 and was published in an expanded edition ten years later under the title The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler [1913a] 1970). The actional forms of love and hate, but also of shared joy and suffering, are derived neither from symbiotic states of emotional unity (Einsfühlung) (18–36) nor from the effects of imitation or emotional contagion. And for Scheler, in contrast to Schopenhauer, attitudes of sympathy and antipathy cannot be derived from a metaphysics of drives. In fact Scheler rejects all natural scientific or metaphysical monism (such as that of Wundt, Bergson, Driesch, Hugo Münsterberg, Johannes Volkelt, Eduard von Hartmann, Jean-Marie Guyau) (55– 68, esp. 62– 65). The ethics of sympathy is not defined as a form of feeling, but as an act, as a motion executed by a “person, which can never be treated as an object” (140f.). The distinction between person and ego leads to an analysis of the relationship of this ego to other egos or to the commu-

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nity (Scheler [1913b] 1973, 389). Here Scheler sees the need for a philosophy of expression and the importance of resolving the problem of the origin of language. Finally, he recognizes the necessity for a philosophy of signs and symbols (Scheler [1913a] 1970, 214f.).3 Scheler certainly upholds the idea that a transcendental psychological grounding of the knowledge of other selves must proceed not from interactions but from personhood. But to render these transcendental categories empirically concrete he turns to the origin of “knowledge of other minds, past, present and future” and the social structures of human co-action (Zusammenhandeln) (216–19). In Erkenntnis und Arbeit, the very text in which Scheler criticizes the conceptual foundations of pragmatism as lopsidedly instrumental and as a means of coping with the mortal world that is geared solely towards the model of mastery of nature, he describes his own conception as “relatively pragmatic” (Scheler [1926] 1960, 242). This is because, as he sees it, the primary relationship of the human being (like all organisms) to the world is a practical one, not amenable to analysis from a materialist perspective or with the irrational tools of intuition and sympathy (as suggested by Bergson) (see Scheler [1926] 1960, 239– 60). If we relate the associated reflections on perception to Mead’s ideas on the constitution of physical objects, social experiences, and the perspectivist view of world and self, we fi nd a large number of problems formulated in parallel ways. Scheler shows that mental functions cannot be analyzed as “instruments of a disinterested theoretical knowledge”; they can only be analyzed in relation to action (Scheler [1926] 1960, 283). And in his analysis of perception he works on the assumption, fi rst, of biological, physical-chemical, and metaphysical “concepts of stimulus” (288ff.) and, second, of given facts of Gestalt and wholeness that underlie the physical world—including the self-givenness of one’s own physicality. Pragmatism is correct, according to Scheler (1960, 351f.) “when it considers the drivers of action, of the human being’s practical attempt to deal with the world, the most significant element in perceptual understanding and its development.” Only in the course of “working on the world,” he tells us, does the human being come to grasp the “random objective world of images and its laws”; it is only when such images, through perception, become for the human being symbols of the “weak points of his action and his mastery” that he learns to “gradually forget [his] drive-based and wishful thinking.” In this way, labor becomes the foundation of an objective approach to the world, and it also becomes the root of all science, all induction, all experimentation. But if we parenthesize the metaphysical implications of Scheler’s phe-

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nomenology, then it is these very aspects of his anthropological analyses of essential being (Sosein) that bring his philosophy into proximity with every theory of intersubjectivity. In fact the dispute over whether priority should be given to interactions or to a primordial subjectivity easily becomes metaphysical, in other words undecidable, itself. Mead’s writings, by contrast, open up a truly dialectical version of the problem—namely, the idea that the personal centers (as forms of the organization of life) are given for themselves in a primordial sense, yet they cannot achieve a direct relationship to others, the world, or even themselves.

HELMUTH PLESSNER This dialectic of the mediatedness of human life was also crucial to Helmuth Plessner’s anthropology, which overlaps with Mead’s concerns in a number of ways.4 In his theory of the human being who is “outside the world” (weltexzentrisch, an expression coined by Scheler [1927] 2009, 64) and also eccentric to himself, the self is, again, not an immediate given. Instead, subjectivity and social field are mutually dependent. This leads to an analysis of the intersubjective constitution of the social dimension and also of subjectification. Crucial for Plessner here is the center of life, even if it is an open and labile center. This center can fi nd its “personal” form only by a circuitous route, since the human being must “fi rst make of himself that which he already is.” From this point of departure, the human mind is anchored in the sphere of the we, in other words there is an emphasis on its—categorical—sociality (Plessner [1928] 1981b, esp. 65ff., 383ff. and 396ff.). Though Jürgen Habermas (1981, 137–40) has criticized Plessner for deriving intersubjectivity from “eccentricity” rather than from language, and while Axel Honneth and Hans Joas ([1980] 1988, 58ff.) reprove him—like Gehlen—for having a limited conception of intersubjectivity, we may nonetheless describe Plessner, with Habermas (1973, 234) as a “kindred spirit” of Mead, who “developed an anthropology at about the same time in his Chicago lectures.” And yet it is above all in Plessner’s work that we fi nd a fundamental difference between philosophical anthropology and Mead’s ideas—namely, the differing models of personhood propagated by the two schools. Unlike William James, John Dewey, Mead, or even Charles W. Morris; Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen are committed to a programmatic social solipsism, which they developed as successors to Nietzsche and under the sway of the bourgeois ideal of the molding and enhancement of life. This is a process

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that can be completed only on the level of the person and that is couched in terms of asceticism, the renunciation of urges, stylization, and distance or the “will to serve.” For Plessner, who formulated a transcendental anthropological approach to establishing the mind with reference to the Mitwelt or surrounding social world, the central point of departure is the boundary, which he explained primarily in biological terms. This enables him to interpret the various forms of the organization of life from the perspective of positionality (see especially Plessner [1928] 1981b). It is eccentricity, which in a sense shifts the human being’s conscious center outwards—that is, the source of its characteristic reflexivity and reciprocity of foci. This is what makes the organization of the objective and subjective body (Körper and Leib) so crucial to the essential structure of personhood, to the capacity for, scope, and limits of bodily expression and the resulting problems of coexistence among individuals in social relationships, as well as the coexistence of individuals and the world.5 The models of personhood and roles, the processes of self-delineation, and the need for distance, which seem to Plessner in his critique of the ideologies of community from the political Right and Left absolutely essential to a form of life determined by boundary problems in this way, are not far from what Gehlen calls character (see Plessner [1924] 1981a; [1931] 1981a; and Gehlen [1940] 1988, 365–76). These elements also recall the metaphysical postulates of a sphere of personhood and “being able to say no” in Scheler’s ethics and metaphysics, which view the human being as hemmed in by the conflicting realities of urges and mind. Comparison with American pragmatism (even with the psychology of William James, which is the form most geared towards the subject and the center) reveals how parallel concerns in different social circumstances may lead to contrary conceptions of the human being: all these concepts of existential tensions are irrelevant to Mead. Instead he is concerned with the interactional and community-based preconditions for human feats of demarcation and self-identification.

ARNOLD GEHLEN Of the exponents of philosophical-anthropological thought, Arnold Gehlen ([1940] 1988, 16) was the only one to place his philosophy explicitly in the context of pragmatist thought by making the category of action central to his view of the human being. On many occasions he linked his approach retrospectively with the achievements of the pragmatist philosophy of

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James and Dewey, with Bergson’s philosophy of life, which he also saw as action-based, and—after explicitly incorporating the concept of role assumption into his elementary anthropology—with Mead’s social psychology. Gehlen, who was the fi rst German philosopher to consider “Mead’s brilliant work” in depth and saw it “essentially as an anthropology,” was mainly interested in backing up his own ideas, which he had developed independently of Mead.6 Gehlen was fascinated by the pragmatist defi nition of truth, according to which a concept is nothing but a consequence of actions, which is why “[pragmatism] has been the only branch of philosophy to view man as an acting being” ([1940] 1988, 288). This dovetailed neatly with Gehlen’s approach (partly formulated in opposition to Scheler) to establishing an empirical philosophy, one which, on account of its “‘pragmatic,’ practicebased” aspect, often met with the disapproval of academic philosophy: “For German philosophers, Socrates had been devoured by Plato, while Hobbes and Hume, W. James and Dewey had all labored in vain” (Gehlen [1936] 1983, 408 and 427). This clear-cut statement (which was perhaps also a rationalization of his positional shift from philosophy to sociology) might obscure the fact that his relationship to pragmatism was by no means always untroubled. It is true that Gehlen ([1927a] 1987a, 100, 108) was already quoting William James, but at the time he identified developments from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to Sigmund Freud and the “pragmatism of interests” all as manifestations of an increasing distrust “in the mind and its motive forces.” He saw this—in the case of psychoanalysis for example—as bound up with the “most brutal reduction of the concept of world” (Gehlen [1927b] 1987b, 27). Gehlen’s ([1931] 1978) rejection of pragmatist philosophy was even clearer in his 1931 habilitation thesis, Wirklicher und unwirklicher Geist (Real and Unreal Mind). Here he identified pragmatism and Bergson’s philosophy of life—particularly its purely purposive, “trite concept of action”—as two variants of the “appalling belief of contemporary civilized man” that grants consciousness “a merely ancillary role in association with quite different vital and unconscious forces.” For Gehlen, these ideas—like Freud’s theory of sublimation—are plausible only “if the mind [has become] truly questionable” ([1931] 1978, 128f.). At this point in time, Gehlen also related the future-orientation of pragmatist instrumentalism to the “inhumanity, indeed bestiality of its consequences: technology, capitalism, and world war” ([1931] 1978, 180f.)—as if the origins of the “Grande Guerre,” as the French called the war of 1914 to 1918, lay in the “ancestral homeland of pragmatism” rather than (primarily) in Germany.

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As he turned away from idealist and existentialist philosophizing, in other words as he abandoned the notion of Erfüllungsglück or happiness through accomplishment inherent in systems thinking, and the subjectivism of a phenomenology attuned to existentialism,7 Gehlen developed his positive assessment of pragmatism. In fact he went so far as to identify with this school of thought, and it provided him with a route into Mead’s work. This process of re-evaluation occurred at the same time as his shift towards an anthropological perspective, in other words from 1935 onward. This is apparent in his study on the “Wesen der Erfahrung” (The Essence of Experience) (Gehlen [1936] 1983). Here, for the fi rst time, he formulated his model of relief (Entlastung) and described the construction of “great symbol fields in vision, language and imagination” through the mechanisms of the higher-level experience of dealing with things and release from the “fundamental burdens” involved in coping with life through language (Gehlen [1940] 1988, 54f.). In Gehlen’s work, pragmatism and theory of intersubjectivity are oddly out of sync: the more he embraced a pragmatist mode of philosophizing, the less he emphasized the intersubjective mediation of human beings’ relationship to world and self. In the preceding existentialist period, conversely, his then opposition to pragmatism was linked with an emphatic model of intersubjectivity—namely, with the conviction that the person can be constituted only interactively, only in light of the other, of “you” (Gehlen [1931] 1978, 159– 62). Nonetheless he asserts that at the time he had already clearly seen that “there is no private psychological realm.”8 As it happens, Gehlen had already gleaned key aspects of the pragmatist concept of roles from McDougall’s (1908) social psychology (see the second section of this essay). While Mead (1908) expressed particular disappointment about McDougall’s chapter on “The Growth of Self- Consciousness” (McDougall 1908, 174-208) in a review, it was this very text that fi rst drew Gehlen’s attention to the mechanism of role assumption in the game. Hans Joas has underlined Gehlen’s sensitivity to the human capacity for relief and achievement, a capacity gained through contact with objects, while also highlighting his analysis of language (Honneth and Joas [1980] 1988, 59–70). On the other hand he has criticized Gehlen for assuming that “actions [are those] of a solitary actor” (59) and for his inability—in contrast to Mead—to move beyond his concept of communication, which is limited “to the handling of things” (65). In this connection, it should be noted that in his later years Gehlen admitted to me that he had not dealt in a sufficiently nuanced way with the “triangular relationship” between (1) the object of action, (2) the objective world of things and objects, and

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(3) the co-action of third parties, which involves observing, commenting, and counteracting, or at the very least creates interpretive conditions. He saw this as an area in which his approach could benefit from conceptual enhancement.

Excursus In an unpublished manuscript by Gehlen, we find an interesting attempt to come to grips with a problem that he believed Mead had failed to solve.9 As Gehlen sees it, Mead’s research program seeks to investigate “fundamental acts,” “without deploying two ways of speaking about physical facts and the facts of consciousness.” Gehlen tries to link his conception of fundamental subject– object communication with Mead’s socialcommunicative explanatory model of the constitution of perspectives. Unlike Mead, he emphasizes that the “imitation of others” not only incorporates “self-imitation” but also “self- enhancement, carving out a path for direct communication with the other on a common level.” In Mead’s work, Gehlen tells us, this fundamental circular communicative process is “reduced to a mere back-and-forth of the same gesture.” This results in the “diminution of the meaning-bearing gesture to the mere experience of communicative concord.” If, going beyond Mead—though with the help of his “deep approach”— we introduce a “two paths principle,” we can explain “how the word comes to entail a factual meaning”; after all, “in order to acquire meaning in the full sense of the term [the vocal gesture (Lautgeste) must] distinguish itself from what it means while nonetheless referring to it.” Gehlen assumes that here too meanings cooperate: “the ‘full situation’ is that at one point in time a word means the same for both partners, and that it refers to a visible thing between them.” He assumes a parallelism of agreements between sound and visible agreements between movements (such as reaching for the same object), in other words a “very elementary, unavoidable situation.” Gehlen continues his thought experiment: “Then the same sound must ‘bring about’ this common movement in both parties, and both series of sounds are soldered into the same social situation: by making the sound, [person] a puts himself into the movement of the other, or, through his sound, puts himself both into the sound and into the movement of the other, so that the fi rst sound takes on a dual value.” More important to him than this model of simultaneity is the fact that the meaning of the sound “is constituted through the intersection of two

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levels.  .  .  . In other words, the fact that a sound means something other than itself presupposes (a) a dual communicative meaning and (b) the—by turns—virtual and real anticipation of the other’s response.” Gehlen then develops his argument in such a way as to posit a “mechanism of relief”— namely, the “transfer of the sound to the thing itself.” The dual communicative movement (Bewegungskommunikation) can be dismantled “if the things of the external world serve as the intersections where the sound gestures of two individuals meet directly, in the context of the dismantlement of the circular processes of immediate sound-based and movementbased communication.” This generates “a direct, objective relationship between the same word and the same thing . . . because this relationship has been detached from the communicative process that it presupposes”; mutual agreement may as it were be abridged via the same “optical thing,” “if only both parties use the same sound for it.” While Gehlen saw “no actual extension of Mead’s theory” in these reflections, he believed that they fleshed out the “overly short sentence” in Mead’s (1934, 89) Mind, Self and Society: “Meaning as such, i.e. the object of thought, arises in experience through the individual stimulating himself to take the attitude of the other in his reaction toward the object.” What is more: the identification of a thing isolates it; in anthropological terms this means that ego indicates a visible feature (thing) “in light of which the other’s response will be given.” In this way, Gehlen thought, objects are (conceptually) isolated yet at the same time attached to “virtually the same behavior” carried out by a number of parties to interaction on the shared level of the sound. “So by identifying an external thing, I establish virtual communication with others beyond the object, communication that merely operates via language, while I am relieved of the need to take the (now excluded) same communicative approach (kommunikativer Bewegungsumgang) to the same thing, which would of course not isolate the thing.”

SOME CRITICAL COMMENTS ON MEAD I have sought to demonstrate that Mead’s theory argues in an (implicitly) anthropological way just as philosophical anthropology does (explicitly), while both furnish us with the prerequisites of a sociological theory (see Rehberg 2009). So to conclude I would like to discuss the problem, central to any anthropology, of how normative validity and institutional formations are derived from the basic structures of human nature. Jürgen Habermas ([1981] 1987, 3–42) has put forward fundamental criticisms of Mead

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in this connection, asserting that he failed to convincingly explain, in light of the interpenetration of intersubjective stances, how we get to objective normative views that are nonetheless shared by those interacting. Habermas ([1981] 1987, 2 and 5) believes that there is a phylogenetic “gap” in Mead’s concept but that it can be plugged by Émile Durkheim’s theory of obligation. He thus touches on the problem of the formation of institutions without mentioning that they are derived in a very similar way in Gehlen’s ([1956] 2004) theory of institutions. This Durkheimian “solution” also marks another fundamental difference between Mead’s work and the (politically by no means homogenous) approaches of philosophical anthropology. Be that as it may, unlike Habermas, I do not see the explanatory gap in Mead’s theory as being on the level of the constitution of frameworks of institutional validity. In terms of intersubjectivity theory, it is the problem of the quotidianization (Veralltäglichung) and long-term stabilization of interactively discovered organizational arrangements that remains unresolved. Habermas’s ([1981] 1987, 37) core criticism of Mead was that he had “not yet understood the central element in the meaning of the concept of a norm of action—the obligatory character of valid norms.” If institutional validity is based only on the generalization of rules and referential perspectives, the problem that emerges, as Habermas points out, is that Mead bases the validity of norms solely on agreement between the “participants.” Essentially, for Mead, the problem of the emergence of institutions does not arise. For him they emerge automatically from human beings’ (joint and opposed) action; they are interactional syntheses. Mead draws on the spectator model developed by Adam Smith (1761, 30–36, part I, section 1, chapter V) in the Moral Sentiments and relates this process of selfcontrol (one also described by Freud and Norbert Elias) to the advancing dissemination of normative orientations. The increasing enforcement of democratic principles—a process reinforced at the time by, for example, hopes that the League of Nations would enjoy a form of universal political authority (Mead 1934, 303)—ultimately prompts him to view the development of a universal society as a realistic prospect, the kind of society that would reproduce socially and politically what had long since been brought through the spread of exchange, and through social networks facilitated by money as a means of communication (Mead 1934, 302; see also chapter 41). If we compare Mead’s theory of the constitution of social ordering frameworks with Durkheim’s ([1895] 1964, 89–124) theory of the coercive power of faits sociaux or Gehlen’s very similar philosophical-

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anthropological model of institutions’ inherent validity, it is striking that Durkheim and Gehlen are close to Mead in the sense that they also understand institutions as frameworks of order that have been developed out of the collective interweaving of action, frameworks that are subsequently stabilized (often through rituals). This means that intersubjective hypotheses about the emergence of social order are entirely compatible with institutionalist conclusions. Durkheim and Gehlen, however, differ from Mead in their strict anti-individualism; in other words, in the sense that they comprehend institutions not as contractual entities established through reason but as the products of joint human action that arise independently of intentions and objectives—that is, behind the backs of those involved. Subject to this difference, however, Durkheim and Gehlen also develop a highly dynamic and above all interaction-focused view of the concatenations of human reciprocity and their consolidation in shared organizational arrangements. It is true that we can find certain areas of agreement between Durkheim’s and Mead’s republican perspectives, if, for example, we compare Mead’s grassroots democratic, reformist and sociopolitical engagement in Chicago (see Joas [1980] 1997, 15ff.) with Durkheim’s ([1912] 1915, 427) attempts to promote the moral invigoration of society in response to its tendency to disintegrate as a result of functional differentiation. The idea here is that this disintegration may be mitigated by “reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments” (Durkheim 1915, 427). The consequences of this grassroots orientation in the two authors’ work are, however, very different. Durkheim’s social “synthesis sui generis” in his theory of religion, as mentioned already, has an analogue in Gehlen’s theory of institutions, in which the binding institutions are derived from the dynamics of an “enacted transformation” through ritual interactions such as archaic dances or acts of worship (Gehlen [1956] 2004, 60– 66 and 166–80, and [1940] 1988, 391, see also Rehberg 2014). Experiences of community and ritually produced forms of transcendence of the self are valorized and may culminate in enshrined forms of institutional validity. In contrast to Habermas, then, I see the gap in Mead’s concept of order in his failure to develop a persuasive theory of the preservation, consolidation, and in-built validity of institutional structures. This is also the substantive difference between Mead’s theory of interactively established orders and Durkheim’s theory—also premised on human beings’ joint action—of moral obligation. So the only problem that remains unaddressed by Mead is the point at which interactions switch over into efforts to

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enshrine their results, in other words the establishment of a sanctionsbacked order. Striking in this connection is the failure of institutionalist approaches and their intersubjectivity theory counterparts to consider the problem of power and domination. It is their identification—inspired by a variety of political motives—with the existing order that prevents the theorists of the supremacy, indeed the “sacredness” of institutions that are enforced on the supraindividual level (Durkheim, Gehlen) from building consistently on their fundamental insights into the interactive prerequisites of the constitution of orders. And this makes it particularly problematic that the subjects of order production, the bearers of power, remain hidden from sight: factual constraints (Sachzwänge) can then be transformed into an “unquestionable” reality (as happens constantly in modern-day politics, concealing the true relations of power). But there is also a serious weakness in Mead’s theory, possibly arising from his “anthropological” premises—namely, his failure to capture theoretically the development and conservation of power. This is due to his thesis, pervaded by political hopes, that institutions merely have the compensatory function of holding those people together who are not in fully integrated groups. This is also why, for him, there is always something deficient about both politics and the law. They have to compensate for an “absence of immediate social interrelationship” (Mead 1915, 153; see also Mead 1934, chapters 34 [260–73] and 41 [317–28]).

ON THE CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE OF PRAGMATIST AND ANTHROPOLOGICALPHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES Today, when the life sciences have once again attained a dominant status in the shape of genetics, neurosciences, and brain physiology, it may seem that the kind of problems investigated by phenomenologists, pragmatist philosophers, and philosophical anthropologists have become anachronistic, swept away by the tremendous advance of science. In the case of George Herbert Mead, this applies to the anchoring of his theory of interaction in the concept of the gesture developed in the work of Wilhelm Wundt and to the state of psychology and behaviorism in Mead’s day, fields of research that he distanced himself from but on which his theory also draws (above all through the influence of Charles Morris). In the case of philosophical anthropology, we could make the same comment about its proximity to a philosophical biology, now considered outdated, and repre-

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sented by scientists such as Jakob von Uexküll (1926), Hans Driesch (1908 and 1914), and others, up to and including Adolf Portmann (1990). It would be fair to say that the topics that linked Mead—primarily through Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Dilthey, under whom he studied— with German science are remarkably current (and the same may be said of the key topics in philosophical anthropology). While the advances of the natural sciences are impressive, they have left all the basic questions about the human being’s special status untouched. The human being is dependent on the symbolic processing and regulation of a world that exists and that is at the same time always constructed by him, one that is not, for this very reason, an environment pre-adapted in advance. The task we are faced with today is to ensure that biologists, neurophysiologists, etc., on the one hand, and researchers in the humanities and social sciences, on the other, achieve a new, appropriate perception of each other’s endeavors. The kind of categories developed by Mead and those authors that I have mentioned in this essay for comparative purposes have the potential not only to translate natural scientific fi ndings into a generally comprehensible language but also to help natural scientists to think about the larger contexts of their specialized research. If, for example, we think of the concept of intersubjectivity and the forms of human interaction derivable from it in contrast to animals, we fi nd that similar issues are being dealt with in contemporary primatology. One example is Leipzig-based American psychologist and great-ape specialist Michael Tomasello. The main aim of his comparative experiments on chimpanzees and children is to provide further confi rmation of his observation that while anthropoid apes do indeed cooperate, learn, and—as already demonstrated by Wolfgang Köhler (1925) in the early twentieth century—deal intelligently with situations, there is no sign of empathy among them, especially in the sense of putting oneself in others’ shoes, grasping their intentions and problems. In particular, this is evinced through the function of pointing and the reference to the other or others that it expresses: even three-year-old children demonstrate such shared intentionality. Evidently, then, the natural sciences too can examine differences between human beings and animals or specific features of human living conditions, despite the fact that the gradualist theory of evolution has branded all such questions obsolete. What Mead and the exponents of philosophical anthropology have in common is their attempt to elaborate the special function of human language, particularly with respect to the constitution of significant symbols and shared worlds of meaning. Tomasello (2008) makes the same point. He is in no doubt about the fact that animals are unable to imagine an

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identically structured subject, though interacting animals do perceive the distinctiveness of special behavioral patterns. “Perspective taking” thus becomes the decisive feature of the human constitution of language and cognition. In other words, natural language has an impact on the way in which humans organize the world conceptually (linguistic determinism). This means conceiving of language beyond its communicative function. Human language is the central medium for producing and comprehending the world, as Wilhelm von Humboldt already understood. It is not just that human beings have language, speech and so on. Their drives are also formed by the mental and cerebral interconnectedness of all their experiences with things, beings, and themselves, through the medium of linguistic structuring. Crucially, the brain is able to freely combine all stored sensations and data, which means that language and culture are connected—a connection that cannot even be found in our closest relatives. It may be true that humans and chimpanzees share 98 percent of their genetic material. But the ability to speak and reflect is 100 percent human. Translated by Alex Skinner

NOTES 1. See the highly contentious debates devoted to the pragmatist theory of knowledge at the Third International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg (1908) (Elsenhans 1909, especially. 62ff., 495ff., and 711ff.). Josiah Royce, Mead’s academic teacher at Harvard, and the Oxford-based “humanist” F. C. S. Schiller were among the speakers. 2. See Wundt ([1911] 1975, 232); this no doubt explains Mead’s highly approving 1904 review of the fi rst part of Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie, which can now be found in Mead (1980, 171ff.). 3. Scheler does not mention Charles S. Peirce here, but see Scheler ([1913] 1973, 293). 4. Incidentally, it is striking that as late as 1965, in the detailed foreword to the second edition of his magnum opus Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, Helmuth Plessner ([1928] 1981a, 23ff.) fails to mention Mead, even in those cases where he seeks to relativize Gehlen’s contribution to philosophical anthropology—in terms of the history of influences—by referring to James and Dewey, who expounded an action-oriented human science long before Gehlen. 5. “Objective” and “subjective body” are the most common translation of the linguistic distinction in German between “Körper” und “Leib,” which does not have an analogous form in Latin-based languages or English. In her translation of my paper “Self-reference and Sociality in Philosophical Anthropology,” delivered in April 2014 at the International Colloquium “Pensar el cuerpo” of the Universidad Nacional de San Martin (UNSAM) in Buenos Aires (papers forthcoming), Heike Friauf (Berlin) created

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the analytically more precise formulation “corpus” for “Körper” and “perceived body” for “Leib.” 6. Gehlen described Mead’s magnum opus as “brilliant” in a handwritten comment on an extensive excerpt (see note 9). Gehlen fi rst incorporated Mead’s ideas into his work in 1950 in the fourth edition of his main anthropological work Man (1988, 155, 171, 195f., 253ff., 310, and 391); he had previously quoted at length from Mead’s (1934) Mind, Self, and Society. Under Allied military rule and during the early days of the Federal Republic, pragmatism came to be viewed as evidence that one had understood and accepted the new times, as evident in a number of appointments made during this period (see Rehberg 2013, 18–20). 7. On the existential motifs nonetheless characteristic of Gehlen’s entire oeuvre, see Rehberg (1994). 8. See Gehlen’s Dewey excerpt in his literary remains in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (A I 68). There Gehlen notes, in response to reading Dewey, that he already had “an unclear concept of action (but one that played a crucial role)” at an earlier stage; while he took his lead “from a false idealist monism and existential ideas,” he claims that it was nonetheless very clear to him “that [there is] no private psychological realm.” “I conceived of [this realm] as the ‘interior contest of situations’”: “Dewey’s thesis that mental acts are ‘speech’ would be a necessary supplement to this. I also saw that there is unconditional understanding only through communication . . . [I] fundamentally conceived of understanding and reflection as the precursor to acting existence. The concept of action must be taken beyond Dewey’s notion of praxis and poiesis. Action, elevated long-term interests, and associated ideas of orientation that are no longer questioned, of both an interpretive and mythical character, belong together. The striving for unity characteristic of thought is no mere drive. It serves the needs of the future, corresponding to an ideal, pre-determinative long-term interest.” 9. Gehlen studied Mead in depth between 1946 and 1950, probably using a copy of Mead’s major work from the American Library in Karlsruhe (now part of the local public library). In his literary remains in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (A III 24) there is a twenty-three page handwritten excerpt from Mind, Self, and Society and a seven page handwritten draft, which I discuss in my excursus with quotations from the original.

REFERENCES Baumgarten, Eduard. 1938. Der Pragmatismus. R. W. Emerson, W. James, J. Dewey. Die geistigen Grundlagen des amerikanischen Gemeinwesens. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Dilthey, Wilhelm. (1883) 1991. Introduction to the Human Sciences. Vol. 1 of Selected Works. Edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Driesch, Hans. 1908. The Science and Philosophy of the Organism. The Gifford Lectures Delivered Before the University of Aberdeen in the Year 1907/1908. 2 vols. London: Black.

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———. 1914. The History and Theory of Vitalism. London: Macmillan. Durkheim, Émile. (1895) 1964. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. ———. (1912) 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen and Unwin. Elsenhans, Theodor, ed. 1909. Bericht über den III. Internationalen Kongreß für Philosophie zu Heidelberg 1. bis 5. September 1908. Heidelberg: Winter. Fischer, Joachim. 2008. Philosophische Anthropologie. Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Alber. Gehlen, Arnold. (1927a) 1987a. “Reflexionen über Gewohnheit.” In Gehlen 1978, 97–111. ———. (1927b) 1987b. “Zur Theorie der Setzung und des setzungshaften Wissens.” In Gehlen 1978, 19– 95. ———. (1931) 1978. “Wirklicher und unwirklicher Geist.” In Gehlen 1978, 113–381. ———. (1936) 1983. “Vom Wesen der Erfahrung.” In Gehlen 1983, 3–24. ———. 1938. “Zur gegenwärtigen Amerikanischen Psychologie. Eine Untersuchung über: William McDougall, Aufbaukräfte der Seele.” Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie 12: 94–103. ———. (1940) 1988. Man: His Nature and Place in the World. Introduced by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1956) 2004. Urmensch und Spätkultur. Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen. 6th ed. Edited by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1978. Philosophische Schriften I (1925–1933). Gesamtausgabe 1. Edited by Lothar Samson. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. ———. 1983. Philosophische Anthropologie und Handlungslehre. Gesamtausgabe 4. Edited by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Habermas, Jürgen. 1973. Kultur und Kritik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. (1981) 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2, Lifeworld and System. A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon. Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas. (1980) 1988. Social Action and Human Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joas, Hans. (1980) 1997. George Herbert Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. 2nd ed. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Köhler, Wolfgang. 1925. The Mentality of Apes. Translated by Ella Winter. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. McDougall, William. 1908. An Introduction to Social Psychology. London: Methuen. Mead, George Herbert. 1904. “The Relation of Psychology and Philology.” Psychological Bulletin 1: 375– 91. ———. 1908. Review of An Introduction to Social Psychology, by William McDougall. Psychological Bulletin 5: 385– 91. ———. 1915. “Natural Rights and the Theory of the Political Institution.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 12, no. 6: 141–55. ———. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1980–1983. Gesammelte Aufsätze. 2 vols. Edited by Hans Joas. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1884) 1980. “Nachgelassene Fragmente.” In Sämtliche Werke.

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Kritische Studienausgabe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Vol. 11. Munich: dtv/Berlin–New York: de Gruyter. Plessner, Helmuth. (1924) 1981a. “Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft.” In Macht und menschliche Natur. Gesammelte Schriften 5. Edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard, and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. (1928) 1981b. “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die Philosophische Anthropologie.” In Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Gesammelte Schriften 4. Edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard, and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. (1931) 1981a. “Macht und menschliche Natur.” In Macht und menschliche Natur. Gesammelte Schriften 5. Edited by Günter Dux, Odo Marquard, and Elisabeth Ströker. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Portmann, Adolf. 1990. Essays in Philosophical Zoology: The Living Form and the Seeing Eye. Lewiston: Mellen. Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. 1985. “Die Theorie der Intersubjektivität als eine Lehre vom Menschen. George Herbert Mead und die deutsche Tradition der ‘Philosophischen Anthropologie.’” In Das Problem der Intersubjektivität. Neuere Beiträge zum Werk George Herbert Meads, edited by Hans Joas, 60– 92. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. (1986) 2014. “Kultur versus Gesellschaft. Anmerkungen zu einer Streitfrage in der deutschen Soziologie.” In Kultur- Soziologie. Klassische Texte der neueren deutschen Kultursoziologie, edited by Stephan Moebius and Clemens Christof Albrecht, 367– 96. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ———. 1994. “Existentielle Motive im Werk Arnold Gehlens. ‘Persönlichkeit’ als Schlüsselkategorie der Gehlenschen Anthropologie und Sozialtheorie.” In Zur geisteswissenschaftlichen Bedeutung Arnold Gehlens. Vorträge und Diskussionsbeiträge des Sonderseminars 1989 der Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften Speyer, edited by Helmut Klages and Helmut Quaritsch, 491–530. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. ———. 2009. “Philosophical Anthropology from the End of World War I to the 1940s and in a Current Perspective.” Iris 1: 131–52. ———. 2013. “Vom soziologischen Neugründungs-Pragmatismus zur ‘Anti-Soziologie.’ Helmut Schelskys Position in der Nachkriegsgeschichte des Faches.” In Helmut Schelsky. Der politische Anti- Soziologe. Eine Neurezeption, edited by Alexander Gallus, 17–36. Göttingen: Wallstein. ———. 2014. Symbolische Ordnungen. Beiträge zu einer soziologischen Theorie der Institutionen. Edited by Hans Vorländer. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Scheler, Max. (1913a) 1970. The Nature of Sympathy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. (1913b) 1973. Formalism in Ethics and Non- Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1924) 2013. Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Manfred S. Frings. London: Routledge. ———. (1926) 1960. Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft. Gesammelte Werke 8. Edited by Maria Scheler. 2nd ed. Bern: Francke. ———. (1927) 2009. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Smith, Adam. 1761. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 2nd ed. London: Millar. Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Uexküll, Jakob von. 1926. Theoretical Biology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company. Wundt, Wilhelm. (1911) 1975. Völkerpsychologie. Vol. 1, Die Sprache. 3rd ed. Aalen: Scienti.

Chapter Six

Naturalism and Despair: George Herbert Mead and Evolution in the 1880s Trevor Pearce

INTRODUCTION

N

ever before in history has mankind been so much of two minds, so divided into two camps, as it is today”—the opening lines of John Dewey’s book A Common Faith, published in 1934. For those in the fi rst of these camps, he continued, “nothing worthy of being called religious is possible apart from the supernatural”; for those in the second, “not only must historic religions be dismissed but with them everything of a religious nature.” Dewey attributed the divide at least in part to advances in “geology and biology,” and went on to argue for a compromise position: perhaps we could retain the “religious factors” of experience without the “irrelevant encumbrances” of supernatural commitments.1 Today the divide is still evident, especially around the idea of evolution. One prominent atheist biologist admits the existence of religious scientists but insists that “the incompatibility between science and faith is more fundamental: their ways of understanding the universe are irreconcilable.”2 A third of Americans currently believe that “humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” and they probably believe this not because they are scientifically illiterate but because of the unavoidable “cultural meaning” of evolution. 3 Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Philip Kitcher—a philosopher of science—has recently tried to revive Dewey’s compromise approach, rejecting the supernatural but arguing that secularists need to do a better job at giving our lives “purpose and significance.”4 Dewey detailed a variety of causes of what he called “the conflict of science and religion,” including evolutionary accounts of life: “Geological discoveries have displaced creation myths which once bulked large. Biol-

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ogy has revolutionized conceptions of soul and mind which once occupied a central place in religious beliefs and ideas.”5 Historians of science have by now put to rest the idea—invented in the late nineteenth century—of a perennial and unavoidable confl ict between religion and science.6 But it is undeniable that the religious beliefs of many were shaken by the ideas of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and others. George Herbert Mead, a friend and colleague of Dewey, is one notable example. By the end of his career, Mead was arguing—as would Dewey—that an evolutionary worldview was consistent with the preservation of human values and ideals. Yet in college and for several years afterwards, Mead struggled with depression brought on by agnosticism, in turn produced by his reaction to modern science. This chapter examines Mead’s encounter with evolution in the 1880s, demonstrating that evolutionary ideas could have a devastating effect if they were interpreted as threatening life’s meaning. I argue that Mead could not fully embrace the evolutionary perspective that characterized his mature philosophy until the work of Josiah Royce and Hermann Lotze showed him that evolution and science were compatible with significance and purpose. Mead’s own trajectory suggests that Dewey and Kitcher are  right: we should not assume “that correction of belief about the occupants of the cosmos can automatically be articulated into a satisfying vision of what is valuable in one’s life.”7 In the fi rst section of the chapter, I demonstrate that debates in biology were a part of Mead’s undergraduate education at Oberlin College from 1879 to 1883. I then outline how modern scientific ideas were involved in Mead’s struggle with agnosticism during the mid-1880s, including a minor obsession with criticizing the argument from design. Finally, in the last section of the chapter, I argue that Mead’s course on the philosophy of nature with Royce at Harvard and his reading of Lotze’s book Microcosmus in Germany allowed him to reconcile the notion of evolution with his idealist and spiritual tendencies. I conclude by briefly examining Mead’s mature account of religion and values.

EVOLUTION AT OBERLIN, 1879– 83 In 1869, when George Herbert Mead was six years old, his father—Hiram Mead—took up a position as Professor of Sacred Rhetoric at Oberlin College in Ohio. George attended the Classical School in the university’s Department of Preparatory Instruction from 1875 to 1879 before beginning his four-year undergraduate degree in the autumn of 1879.8 By the late

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1870s, evolution and natural selection were being discussed everywhere: open up any book, magazine, or newspaper in this period and you were likely to fi nd a reference to or an extended discussion of the ideas of Darwin, Spencer, Thomas Henry Huxley, and others. I will show in this section that Mead encountered these ideas in his textbooks, his classes, and his extracurricular activities at Oberlin. The curriculum at Oberlin was similar to that of other American colleges at the time. Everyone in a given cohort took the same classes, which for Mead—over four years—included classical and modern literature (Greek, Latin, English, French, German), History, Economics, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Engineering, Chemistry, Physiology, Botany, Zoology, Mineralogy, Geology, Psychology, Ethics, Art, The Bible, and Evidences of Religion. Mead’s textbooks for botany in 1881 were Asa Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States and Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology, both of which went through many editions.9 The Manual described and classified plants, whereas the Lessons discussed their development and structure. Although Gray was an early defender of Darwin’s theory, he did not discuss evolution in these books. A likely reason for this absence is that the early editions of these texts were published before the Origin of Species. Thus both the 1857 and 1875 editions of the Lessons contain the following declaration: “the Creator established a defi nite number of species at the beginning.”10 In zoology and geology, however, which Mead took in the spring and fall of 1882, evolution did play a major role. His teacher for these two classes, Albert Allen Wright, embraced evolution and did not see any conflict between evolution and religion. Wright was primarily a geologist. He published little, but his various unpublished writings illustrate his evolutionary views. An obituary recalled that, because of his training at both the Union Theological Seminary and the Columbia School of Mines, Wright was frequently “called upon by ministerial associations to address them upon the scientific evidences of Evolution and the bearing of its conclusions upon Biblical interpretation and Christian faith.”11 His endorsement of evolution was unambiguous: in a lecture on Charles Darwin at Oberlin in the autumn of 1882, he praised Darwin’s “inductive method” of developing theories from a great number of facts, and spoke of the “almost universal acceptance . . . by working naturalists” of Darwin’s theories. As mentioned, Wright’s account of evolution did not include a rejection of religion: he lamented Darwin’s inclination toward deism but agreed with his view that religious opinion and scientific knowledge “are not at all necessarily connected to each other.”12 This latter point was emphasized in an

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editorial of the Oberlin Review, the university newspaper edited by Mead’s friend Henry Castle, assisted by Mead himself. The editors reported that the lecture given some weeks ago on Charles Darwin has impressed us more favorably than any. It is pleasing to observe how rapidly the religious craze against evolutionary theories is dying out, and theologians are beginning to discover that science may not after all be their most deadly foe.13

The previous year, in the fi rst of Mead’s two classes on the evidences of religion (titled Answer to Modern Forms of Skepticism), it had been pointed out by the instructor that the “various theories of Evolution do not explain the Universe without a God. Evolution is not a substitute for Creation but only a different mode of Creation + is not necessarily Atheistic.”14 Thus Mead was introduced to the idea that evolution and religion need not be opposed to one another at Oberlin, although as we will see later, this did not prevent his slide into agnosticism. Mead’s zoology class defi nitely covered the topic of evolution, as confi rmed by notes taken by Mead’s friend Castle (Castle and Mead were in the same cohort, and attended the same classes).15 For example, Wright presented Herbert Spencer’s law of evolution as well as Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law at the outset of his lectures: “Simple preceeds [sic] complex[,] or homogeneous by differentiation becomes heterogeneous.  .  .  . Progress in zoology leads us to think there is great correspondence between ontog. of animal + phyl. of race to which it belongs.”16 That the students were familiar with concepts like natural selection is proved by a humorous sketch of a normally legless primitive chordate in Castle’s notebook (Figure 6.1). The parenthetical under the sketch reads “(N.B. These legs produced by ‘natural selection’).”17 Hence Wright introduced Mead to evolutionary ideas in his zoology lectures. Figure 6.1. Castle’s Drawing of Amphioxus

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The textbooks that Wright assigned in zoology and geology also discussed evolution. The zoology book was Henry Alleyne Nicholson’s Manual of Zoology. In a section titled Origin of Species, Nicholson stated that naturalists were divided on the subject but then outlined Darwin’s account of “the development of species by variation and natural selection.”18 For geology, Mead was assigned Joseph LeConte’s Elements of Geology, which made evolution its organizing principle. LeConte defi ned geology itself as “the history of the evolution of the earth and its inhabitants,” though he did not explicitly discuss the origin of species.19 Although these different discussions of evolutionary ideas were in agreement that evolution had happened, they disagreed about its causes. For example, although Nicholson described Darwin’s theory of natural selection in detail, he also mentioned Lamarck’s view, in which “the means of modification” are “the action of external physical agencies, the interbreeding of already existing forms, and the effects of habit.” Following the Duke of Argyll among others, Mead’s teacher Wright insisted that “[natural selection] is merely a preserving force and not an originating force.” As LeConte—author of Mead’s geology textbook—summarized the situation in 1878, there may be, and in fact there is, much difference of opinion as to the causes or factors of evolution . . . but of the fact of progressive movement of the whole organic kingdom to higher and higher conditions . . . there is no longer any doubt.20

Thus Mead’s various sources reflected a debate over how evolution actually worked—a debate that would become even more heated in the 1890s.21 Although we know little about Mead’s personal reading at college, the interests of his close friend Henry Castle show that evolution, psychology, and materialism were attractive topics for philosophically minded students at the time. Castle boasted to his family in 1882 of reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology, Bain’s Mind and Body, and Lange’s History of Materialism as well as works by Huxley, LeConte, Ernst Haeckel, and George Henry Lewes.22 Mead and Castle were sometimes taught Rhetoric by their philosophy professor John Millot Ellis, which explains why Castle’s senior assignment in the latter class was, as he told his parents, “to present the argument of materialism as fairly, as fully, and as strongly as I can.” In his essay, Castle—like Spencer and Huxley—argued against claims of a gap between life and non-life, or between lower and higher forms of life: “Life became

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self conscious by steps as slow as those of the dawn when its light faintly illuminates the eastern skies.” Nevertheless, he reassured his parents, I shall never be a materialist. I have a comfortable door open, just like Huxley. Only my door is not that of wretched agnosticism. I can always take refuge in Idealism, and say that we know nothing of matter except through the agency of mind, so that instead of saying that there is nothing but matter, I shall say that there is nothing but mind.23

This door was not open to all: as I describe below, these choices of materialism, agnosticism, and idealism would haunt Mead for the rest of the 1880s. Mead was thus introduced to biological and evolutionary ideas along many avenues during his college years. His natural history teacher, Albert Allen Wright, favored evolutionary explanations of organic life; his zoology textbook discussed different accounts of the origin of species; and his close friend Castle’s personal reading and school projects focused on contemporary debates over physiological psychology, materialism, and the implications of evolutionary views for religion and philosophy. As he read more and more philosophy in the 1880s, Mead constantly felt the tension between empiricism and spiritual life, directly linked to discussions of evolution by Spencer and others. This tension is the topic of the next section.

AGNOSTICISM AND EVOLUTION, 1883– 87 After graduating from Oberlin, Mead spent four years teaching and tutoring, living for most of that time in Minneapolis. This period was fi lled with what his biographer calls “a great deal of soul searching about a possible mission in life.”24 In this part of the chapter, I will show that this soul searching was in part a result of Mead’s loss of faith in the face of evolution and modern science. He analyzed and rejected religious counterarguments, such as the doctrine of design, and his general attitude remained one of doubt and agnosticism. Like many college graduates, Mead did not know what to do with his life. In a letter to Castle written the year after graduation, he lamented, “I have to[o] feminine a nature to ever become a philosopher. My sentiments . . . are too large a part of my life to admit of that mental abstraction which becomes a lover of truth.” He thought his sentimentality better suited him to missionary work, but this was not possible because of

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his loss of faith.25 In another letter he picked up the same theme: “perhaps I am utterly wrong in my doubts and they are only supterfuges [sic] and I long to throw them all aside and leap with my eyes shut and heart open in Christian work. But I cannot do that.”26 Back in Oberlin a few weeks later, he moaned, “I am wallowing in the depths of Agnosticism.” He raised his doubts with James Harris Fairchild, Oberlin’s president and ethics teacher: I mentioned [to Fairchild] the fact that I saw no reason why the mind might not be a material evolution[,] a later quality of matter. He wanted me to start with the mind a la Spencer. He said that we knew the mind only at fi rst and the not me we know only in its resistance to me, but what this resistance was we could not know and no one could disprove that this external not me was the will of God giving certain qualities of resistance to [illegible] in Space.27

Thus at least one source of Mead’s agnosticism was the materialistevolutionary account of the mind provided by philosophers like Spencer, an account that apparently left no room for spirit. Despite Fairchild’s reassurance, Mead continued to doubt: “My creed is dark and agnostic.”28 Mead’s agnosticism seemed to foreclose several life paths. One option was to “get out and work for men’s souls,” which might be possible “even if not very confident in belief.” This path would, of course, be more difficult for a person without faith. The other option was metaphysics, but Mead worried that the essential work of bringing philosophy to the public would be impossible “for an Agnostic who did not believe in the Freedom of the Will or even in a Personal God.”29 Nevertheless, Mead was at least interested “in popularizing metaphysics among the common people,” and mentions in this context Alexander Wilford Hall’s newspaper The Microcosm.30 Mead thought Hall’s philosophy ridiculous, but this newspaper—“devoted to the discoveries, theories, and investigations of modern science, and their bearings upon the religious thought of the age”—does give a sense of what troubled Mead. Most contributors to The Microcosm, like its editor, saw a clear conflict between evolutionary ideas on the one hand and religion and morality on the other. For example, Fletcher Hamlin was worried that evolution led to skepticism: Who has not observed that multitudes of the young men of America are being unsettled in their theological views by the fact that some so-called great men are skeptics? We must all admit that “No man

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who thoroughly accepts a principle in the philosophy of Nature which he feels to be inconsistent with a doctrine of religion, can help having his belief in that doctrine shaken and undermined.” Now that the Doctrines of Development [i.e., Evolution] and spontaneous generation have this tendency is evident not only from the rejoicing of infidelity at their fi rst announcement, and the clearly logical argument of Haeckel based upon them in favor of Atheism, but also from the almost universal skepticism which immediately follows the espousal of any type of either theory.

Even those who grudgingly accepted some of the facts of evolution, such as Allan Conant Ferrin, worried about its implications for faith: “Darwin has been in natural science what Kant was in mental science. He destroyed dogmatism by introducing a critical study of Nature; but by confi ning himself too strictly to physical phenomena, and by confounding the physical with the spiritual, he ran into agnosticism.” Mead had been unsettled in just this way; he had, like Darwin, run into agnosticism.31 Around this time, Mead became very interested in the argument from design, perhaps as a possible counter to evolution. He wrote to Castle, I am going [to] thoroughly canvass the subject of the doctrine of Design and the subject of Induction in connection with it. I have glanced into the book, and though some places strike me as superficial still I think that it will be a good one upon the subject. I shall read [Darwin’s] the Descent of Man some of Haeck[el] and [John] Fisk[e] in connection, and so get both sides. 32

“The book” was Paul Janet’s Final Causes, which Mead discussed in another long letter about the design argument.33 Janet began his book by discussing what he called the principle of induction: “any constant repetition of phenomena must have a constant and determinate cause, and cannot be the effect of chance.” He then claimed that in some cases—namely, those in which the combination of phenomena is “determined relatively to a future phenomenon more or less remote”—we need to invoke a fi nal cause in addition to the efficient cause. His initial examples were those of human design—stone tools, statues—but he pointed out that exquisitely adapted organs such as eyes and wings also have this feature. We can thus draw an analogy between “the industry of man and the industry of nature,” and view both as involving a fi nal cause. He considered at length the doctrine of evolution and the work of Darwin and Spencer as possible mechanistic

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alternatives but dismissed such views as imagining “successive gropings attempted by nature, until favorable circumstances brought about such a throw of the dice as is called an organization made to live.” The design argument was completed in the second half of the book, in which Janet argued that the “fi rst cause of fi nality” in nature is God. 34 Mead announced to Castle that he was “especially disgusted” with Janet, and reiterated the weaknesses of the argument from design in a series of letters between June 1884 and April 1886. 35 Mead summed up the strategy of the design argument as follows: There is no valid argument from design which is not composed of the two element[s,] the one which removes the possibility or probability of the action of other causes and another which shows the likelihood of the action of the given cause. In the hackneyed example of the loaded dice we fi rst prove that the forces of nature did not produce the succession of falls of double sixes by an argument from difference and then we prove the likelihood of the action of human intellect in the case.

Thus, the argument has to show (1) that the result is not simply due to chance and (2) that intelligent involvement is likely. Transferring this to the case of organisms and examining the fi rst element, “the matter to be proved is that a blind force cannot produce adaptation[;]  .  .  . but this is precisely what we do not know.” We know that chance does not produce certain adaptations (e.g., “throwing up the alphabet” and having it “come down in the Iliad”), but this does not imply that it cannot produce any. Thus we are left “in perfect agnosticism upon the subject for who knows what blind force by itself can do.” The second element of the argument is just as difficult, since, apart from their adaptedness, nature’s products are actually quite different from those of our design.36 As he joked to Castle, Mead rejected “such weak simple reasonings such barefaced fallacies such trifl ing with logics such impotent graspings at truth such biased mental cross eyed ness . . . such gross idiocy.”37 Mead was aware of the conflict between evolution and design, though he did not simply endorse the former against the latter. For example, he wrote to Castle, I do not think I should agree with . . . you in your seeming admission that the verdict of modern science is in favor of a complete evolution of the highest form of animal life upon the globe from the lowest. If I am not mistaken there are great and systematic gaps which the best sci-

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entists today say we have absolutely no evidence for thinking bridged over. 38

Despite these doubts, Mead thought that evolution—if true—would destroy the doctrine of design. Returning to the question of why nature cannot produce a succession of double-sixes, he asked, but what bearing does such an example have upon what nature can accomplish under the actions of countless ages by imperceptible changes. If this analysis of the argument is correct no mere presence of adaptation indicates design. Design can only come as a [illegible] cause assigned to an effect [for] which natural forces alone have been proved insufficient. So I see no escape for the argument from design if evolution can be once established as a universal principle in nature. 39

Hence although Mead’s criticisms of the argument from design did not depend on an endorsement of evolution or natural selection, he saw quite clearly that the truth of evolution would further undermine the argument. Mead’s reading of philosophy, like his musings on design, seemed only to increase his agnostic depression. For instance, writing of Kant, he complained, “now Henry I have got to analyze a good more acutely if I am to see any escape from agnosticism in this. I must sit on the dunce’s stool with poor striped [Francis] Bowen because to me Kant’s system induces the blackest kind of skepticism.”40 Mead’s letters are indeed black in this period: “I am disgusted with life,” he wrote; “I cannot literally fi nd a motive sufficient to inspire activity.”41 In the late spring of 1887, however, he seems to have turned a corner: “I cannot extinguish the hope and expectation that under the appropriate circumstances I could blossom out.”42 As I recount in the next section, the appropriate circumstances would turn out to be a year at Harvard’s philosophy department with “poor striped Bowen” and company. As demonstrated by his conversation with Fairchild, quoted above, Mead’s agnosticism in this period stemmed in part from mechanistic or evolutionary accounts of the human mind. Modern scientific ideas seemed to threaten certain spiritual beliefs—in a personal God or in freedom of the will, to take Mead’s own examples. He was explicitly critical of the argument from design, directed against evolution by Paul Janet and others. As we will see, it would take exposure to new forms of philosophy to show Mead that evolutionary ideas need not undermine more traditional models of human life.

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EVOLUTION AND PHILOSOPHY, 1887– 91 Even before he arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1887, Mead was aware of two separate lines of recent philosophical thought—idealism and the new psychology: There is a larger outlook to healthful philosophical life now that the philosophical work is dominated by these two balancing influences[:] the idealism that has come from Kant to us and the scientific spirit of modern psychology. The one enables a man to cut loose from the world and the things of the world[;] the other [illegible] the class of philosophers as a whole necessarily including many practical matter of fact minds from wasting themselves upon to them meaningless formulae.

According to Mead, this new psychology had clearly superseded the mental philosophy derived from Scottish realism still taught in many of the nation’s colleges: “All the practical elements which this philosophy relies upon have gone now to Scientific Psychology.”43 I argue in this section that these “two balancing influences” of idealism and psychology, which formed Mead’s academic interests at Harvard and in Germany, allowed him to reconcile evolution and the human spirit. Despite Mead’s apparent excitement about psychology, Mead did not take any courses with William James—the psychology specialist in Harvard’s philosophy department.44 Listed as a Harvard senior despite his Oberlin BA, he took Philosophy 4: Ethics with George Herbert Palmer; Philosophy 13: Monism and the Theory of Evolution in their Relation to the Philosophy of Nature with Josiah Royce; Greek 8: Plato (Republic)—Aristotle (Ethics, Books I–IV and X.) with William Watson Goodwin; Greek 11: Introduction to the Critical Study of Homer, with Interpretation of a portion of the Iliad with Frederic de Forest Allen; and perhaps also Philosophy 6: Earlier French Philosophy, from Descartes to Leibnitz, and German Philosophy from Kant to Hegel with Francis Bowen.45 During his 1887–88 year at Harvard, Mead was most influenced by the teaching of Royce.46 Like Mead, Royce had been exposed to evolutionary ideas in college, having taken classes with Joseph LeConte—author of Mead’s college geology textbook—at the University of California. LeConte, according to a later essay of Royce, succeeded in showing that the doctrine of evolution “was not only reconcilable with, but an aid in, the interpretation of the world of man’s spiritual nature.”47 Likewise, Royce’s class on the philosophy of nature dealt with precisely that conflict between science

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and the human spirit that had concerned Mead over the past several years: as Royce put it, “the main problem of this course is in fact the relation between the postulates of the scientific explanation of nature, and . . . [the] ethical interpretation of the external world.”48 Students were assigned Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and Spencer’s First Principles. The reason for this strange pairing is that the class was built around a comparison of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century philosophies of nature. The seventeenth century was characterized by a commitment to “the substantial, objective, mathematically perfect unity of nature,” a view Royce attributed to both Spinoza’s philosophy and the “new mechanical science” that culminated in the deterministic “world-formula” of Pierre-Simon Laplace. The nineteenth century, in contrast, was obsessed with history and the notion of evolution, most recently represented by the work of Darwin and Spencer.49 In his lecture notes for the previous year’s version of the class, Royce argued that the “modern period” was characterized by a tension between these two philosophies of nature: on the one hand, “the clear formulation of universal mechanical postulates in the great doctrine of the Conservation of Energy”; on the other, “the accompanying growth of the historical sense & the tendency to explain by the origins,” grandly summarized in the “Doctrine of Evolution.” He described the tension between the two views as follows: Is nature a mechanical sum total of energy, whose forms vary with conditions? If so, evolution is an inessential fact, & the mechanical view returns upon our hands, apparently in 17th century form. If however, evolution is not only here & there a fact, but a deep & essential fact, we seem to have found out what saves the spiritual element in things up to a certain point, although it does not solve all our problems, and does not satisfy all our interests. Yet how reconcile the significance of evolution with the mechanical order of the world?

Discovering a deeper synthesis of the historical and mechanical, said Royce, was the problem of the course.50 Royce’s notes do not specify his solution, but in an 1889 essay on the same topic, he claimed that the belief that there is “any genuine historical element” in the universe implies the existence of spontaneity and ideals that really act in the world. Hence, those who have believed that the spirit of the doctrine of Evolution removed teleology from the world have failed to see that the presup-

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position of our historical age, ever since Rousseau and the Romantic period, has been that teleological explanations have their place, that history is worth studying for its own sake, and that the story of the significant ideals must form a part of every philosophical view of the world.

Having made this point, Royce was able to argue that modern psychology presupposed a paradoxical double self: “The psychical facts must be caused; the psychical facts must be significant. As significant, they are teleological; as caused, they have no significance.” Royce concluded by turning to Kant and Hegel’s idealism, suggesting that mechanism and teleology—real causes and ideal significance—could be reconciled if seen as existing “in and for a Universal Conscious Life, which is the world, and owns the world, and makes and solves its own infi nite paradoxes.”51 These views about the idea of evolution presumably appealed to Mead because they spoke directly to his concerns about the agnostic outlook of modern science. Mead had learned from periodicals such as The Microcosm that evolutionism was opposed to spirit and spontaneity; Royce’s argument turned the tables, claiming instead that history and evolution opened a space for teleology in an apparently mechanistic world. The argument also had the added benefit of showing that Spencer’s account of the mind, supposedly both mechanistic and evolutionary, was incoherent. Mead’s admiration of Royce is reflected in the idealist bent of his honors exam topic: his thesis asked, “How large a share has the subject in the object world?” and was based on T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics (Green was a well-known critic of Spencer’s evolutionary empiricism).52 Royce had by this time left Harvard due to a nervous breakdown in February 1888.53 After his exams, Mead was pessimistic about the future of a Harvard without Royce: “If Royce should not come back, it would be a sorry place to study Philosophy in. Then would there be absolutely nobody but James left of any consequence.”54 James, who did not have Mead in any classes but was impressed with his performance during the honors exam, asked the young scholar to teach his son Harry during the summer of 1888. Writing to his wife Alice, James declared, “have just engaged a tutor—not a naturalist, unfortunately, but a very promising young metaphysician, just the style of thing for Margaret [Alice’s sister] to fall in love with. His name is Mead.”55 James was prescient: Mead and Margaret Gibbens did become romantically involved, and things seem not to have ended well. Despite this embarrassment, James developed a respect for Mead that summer, and encouraged him to

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study abroad in Europe.56 Thus Mead went to Germany to study philosophy and psychology—fi rst to Leipzig and then to Berlin. In Germany, Mead continued to focus on the relationship between evolution and modern science on the one hand, and philosophy, religion, and ethics on the other; he also began to learn more about experimental psychology. Mead enrolled at the University of Leipzig for the 1888– 89 semester. Though he did not study psychology with Wilhelm Wundt, he did attend his Fundamentals of Metaphysics class.57 Wundt’s metaphysics, which sought to unify the results of the empirical sciences, was outlined in his System of Philosophy, published while Mead was in Leipzig. This book contained an extensive discussion of “Biological Problems,” including that of evolution, as Wundt believed that metaphysics could not ignore developments in the life sciences.58 Mead also took The Relationship of German Philosophy to Christianity since Kant with Rudolf Seydel. Like Royce, Seydel was interested in the relation between idealism and evolution. His collection Religion and Science, for example, contained essays such as “Against Materialism” and “Toward Reconciliation with Darwinism.” In the latter piece, Seydel discussed the relationship between Darwinism and “religious and spiritual beliefs of an idealistic persuasion,” arguing that theology and philosophy could work together with Darwinism and natural science.59 Thus the topics treated in Mead’s classes at Leipzig were not so different from those he encountered at Harvard. At Berlin, Mead persisted with philosophy, but he also started work in experimental psychology. According to Castle, Mead had decided to pursue physiological psychology because in America, where poor, bated, unhappy Christianity, trembling for its life, claps the gag into the mouth of Free Thought, and says “Hush, hush, not a word, or nobody will believe me any more,” he thinks it would be hard for him to get a chance to utter any ultimate philosophical opinions savoring of independence. In Physiological Psychology, on the other hand, he has a harmless territory in which he can work quietly without drawing down upon himself the anathema and excommunication of all-potent Evangelicalism.60

Berlin was a crash-course in the life sciences for Mead: anatomy with Wilhelm Waldeyer, physiology with Hermann Munk, and psychology with Hermann Ebbinghaus. Each of these scientists studied some aspect of human biology: Waldeyer specialized in the comparative anatomy of pri-

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mates; Munk focused on the physiology of the brain and nervous system; and Ebbinghaus was a psychologist, author of On Memory: Investigations in Experimental Psychology.61 Although the exact content of Mead’s science classes is unknown, he was obviously getting a thorough education in physiological psychology, possibly even supplementing his courses by reading from the Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, founded by Ebbinghaus in 1890.62 Mead’s most important philosophy teachers in Berlin were Friedrich Paulsen and Wilhelm Dilthey, both of whom discussed the relation between evolution and philosophy. Paulsen taught several classes, including History of More Recent Modern Philosophy, with Consideration of Culture in its Entirety, which probably dealt at least in part with the theory of evolution.63 In his Introduction to Philosophy, published a few years later, Paulsen devoted several sections to organic and mental evolution, following Wundt in arguing that evolution could not be completely mechanistic, as it presupposed the will to survive as well as coordinated variation in defi nite directions.64 Dilthey, under whom Mead planned to write his dissertation, gave his fi rst ever Ethics class with Mead in attendance. These lectures were built around the idea of evolution and culminated in a discussion of The Evolution of Morals and the Principles of Social Ethics. Early in the class, Dilthey sketched “the situation of the present time” as follows: The advancement of the natural-scientific mind has led to the conception of man as an animal being, who through the engines that lie in him and his environment [Milieu], has attained the highest level of adaptation by means of his intelligence and his moral habits. The evolution via natural selection, heredity, [and] adaptation of the psychophysical unity of life have become the core principles of a modern biology, to which the historical realm subordinates itself.

He even spoke of “the adaptation between the individual and his environment” as directly relevant to ethics. Thus in Dilthey’s lectures, Mead encountered the idea of organism-environment interaction—an idea he would rediscover at Michigan in Dewey’s ethical philosophy.65 But the most congenial view of the relationship between modern science and the human spirit that Mead found in Berlin was that of Hermann Lotze, who had died there in 1881 shortly after taking up a position at the university. Lotze’s book Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and his Relation to the World prompted praise from the young American: “You

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have the Microcosmus, haven’t you—It is easy reading and very attractive and uplifting.” Lotze’s book, according to Mead, was “evidently the outspeaking of a very religious nature that is yet profoundly philosophy.”66 Although Lotze had a medical degree and had written books on psychology, his philosophy also emphasized the importance of human needs and values. The introduction to the Microcosmus was thus constructed around the confl ict “between spiritual needs [Bedürfnissen des Gemüthes] and the results of human science,” or in other words between “the Philosophy of the Feelings [Weltansicht des Gemüthes]” and “the mechanical view of Nature.”67 The introduction ends with the following famous declaration, referred to by Dewey as the “oft-quoted words of Lotze”: It is in such mediation [between extreme views] alone that the true source of the life of science is to be found; not indeed in admitting now a fragment of the one view and now a fragment of the other, but in showing how absolutely universal is the extent and at the same time how completely subordinate the significance, of the mission which mechanism has to fulfi ll in the structure of the world.68

Thus Lotze, like Royce, emphasized the importance of significance and values in the world—significance that could not be brought under the rubric of mechanistic science. Mead picked up on the mediation in Lotze’s approach: “[Lotze’s] power of combining the speculative and the scientific are all qualities which make him more valuable for practical thinking along speculative lines than any other man I know of.”69 Mead’s only complaint about Lotze was that he “underestimates Evolution very decidedly—development—both in point of fact, and in point of metaphysical importance.”70 Thus, by his fi nal year in Berlin, Mead had not only moved away from his agnostic despair with the help of teachers like Royce, Dilthey, and Lotze but had also become convinced of the metaphysical importance of evolution. Modern science and the theory of evolution, rather than simply leading to skepticism and materialism, could be absorbed into a broader philosophy of the human spirit that emphasized the value and significance of our existence.

CONCLUSION Throughout the 1880s—at Oberlin, in letters to Castle, at Harvard, and in Germany—Mead was involved with debates prompted by the rise of evolutionary thinking. In Royce and Lotze, Mead found models for the recon-

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ciliation of evolutionary science and traditional notions of what it meant to be human. These models, I have suggested, helped him see evolution as important to philosophy and not just as a gateway to agnosticism. When Mead arrived at Michigan in 1891—where Dewey was the newly installed chair of Philosophy—he put his biological knowledge to good use, teaching courses not only in physiological psychology but also in the Philosophy of Evolution.71 The only lecture notes that we have from Mead’s courses at Michigan—for Philosophy 9: Special Topics in Psychology in the autumn of 1893—reveal that by that time he had already embraced, at least in psychology, what I have elsewhere called organismenvironment thinking.72 Echoing Spencer, Mead claimed that “the animal looked at from the standpoint of evolution is an increase or decrease of environment.” Mead also defi ned psychological concepts in relation to the notion of an environment: “In general as far as the environment acts on the organism directly it is attention. The reaction of the organism upon the environment is memory.” Thus in the early 1890s, as Dewey was beginning to apply the organism-environment framework in ethics, Mead was applying it in psychology.73 Mead was surely influenced by Dewey, his friend and department chair at Michigan and Chicago. But as we have seen, Mead’s biological education was independent of Dewey’s, and was much more thorough as well. Having studied anatomy, physiology, and psychology in Berlin, Mead was likely teaching biology to Dewey in the early 1890s rather than the other way around.74 Dewey and Mead continued to influence one another as their careers moved forward. Both presented naturalistic accounts of ethics in the early 1900s, emphasizing the relation between organism and environment. They adopted a functionalist perspective: moral rules and ethical systems start out as attempts to deal with concrete problems, and should continue to prove their worth in this way.75 In 1923, Mead developed an account of religion along similar naturalistic lines, which may have influenced Dewey’s better-known A Common Faith (quoted in the introduction). Mead drew a distinction between “cult values,” preserved by long tradition, and “functional values,” preserved because of their usefulness in addressing present problems: An institution should arise and be kept alive by its own function, but in so far as it does not function, the ideal of it can be kept alive only by some cult, whose aim is not the functioning of the institution, but the continued presence of the idea of it in the minds of those that cherish it. The church is the outstanding illustration of such an institution.

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Mead claimed that intelligent social policy was constantly frustrated by cult values, which were often connected to religious traditions. He gave the example of criminal justice: if we could focus on the functional value of crime prevention, social science could help; instead, we are obsessed with the cult value of “public reprobation of crime” or “public vengeance upon the criminal.” Mead’s analysis could have led him to abandon religion and tradition. But like Dewey a decade later, he insisted that the rejection of certain aspects of religion did not mean we had to give up any sense of unified purpose and value in life. Even though Mead argued that in cases where cult values related to concrete problems, they should be superseded by functional values, he still saw the former as “the most precious part of social heritage.”76 Mead’s mature view of religion was thus naturalistic but it followed Royce and Lotze in claiming that science and significance are compatible: an evolutionary worldview need not lead to despair. As described in the introduction, Philip Kitcher has recently argued that “Darwinian atheism” often neglects the more practical aspects of religion, namely, “complexes of psychological attitudes (aspirations, intentions, and emotions) among their adherents, forms of social organization, rituals, and forms of joint behavior.”77 Although Kitcher cites Dewey as offering a richer view, he could just as well have pointed to Mead’s open-ended vision of human existence: It is a great secular adventure, that has reached some measure of success, but is still far from accomplished. The important character of this adventure is that society gets ahead, not by fastening its vision upon a clearly outlined distant goal, but by bringing about the immediate adjustment of itself to its surroundings, which the immediate problem demands. It is the only way in which it can proceed, for with every adjustment the environment has changed, and the society and its individuals have changed in like degree. By its own struggles with its insistent difficulties, the human mind is constantly emerging from one chrysalis after another into constantly new worlds which it could not possibly previse.78

For Mead, the scientific attitude did not mean a life without ideals. It was a “secular adventure”—a life with purpose, even if that purpose was forever changing.

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NOTES 1. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 1, 27, 29. 2. Jerry A. Coyne, “Science and Religion Aren’t Friends,” USA Today, October 10, 2010, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010–10–11-column11_ ST_N.htm. 3. Pew Research Center, “Public’s Views on Human Evolution,” December 30, 2013, http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/30/publics-views-on-human-evolution/; Dan Kahan, “What Does ‘Disbelief’ in Evolution Mean? What Does ‘Belief’ in It Measure? Evolution & Science Literacy,” The Cultural Cognition Project, http://www.culturalcognition.net/ blog/2013/6/19/what-does-disbelief-in-evolution-mean-what-does-belief-in-it.html. 4. Philip Kitcher, “Challenges for Secularism,” in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, ed. George Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 42. 5. Dewey, A Common Faith, 31. 6. For various criticisms of the so-called “confl ict thesis,” see James R. Moore, The Post- Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 7. Philip Kitcher, “Militant Modern Atheism,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (2011): 6. 8. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College for the College Year 1869–70 (Cleveland: Fairbanks, Benedict, 1869), 4; General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1833–1908 (Cleveland: O.S. Hubbell, 1909), 656. 9. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year, 1880– 81 (Cleveland: Leader, 1880), 50. 10. Asa Gray, First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology (New York: Ivison & Phinney, 1857), 173; Asa Gray, Gray’s Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, 1875), 173; Asa Gray, Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, 1875). For Gray’s reception of Darwin’s ideas, see A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810–1888 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 11. Oberlin Alumni Magazine 1 (May): 206. 12. Wright, “Darwin,” pp. 25, 39–41, Writings (MSS), Box 10, Albert A. Wright Papers, Oberlin College Archives. 13. Oberlin Review 10 (18 November 1882): 55. Castle was editor-in-chief of the Review for 1882– 83, and was “assisted in the Editorial department by Mr. G. H. Mead.” Mead was also society editor for Phi Kappa Pi, a student literary society. See Oberlin Review 10 (23 September 1882): 6; Henry Castle to Mary Castle, 28 October 1882, in George Herbert Mead and Helen Castle Mead, eds., The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012), 203. I have compared the Collected Letters versions of all the letters I cite against the originals held with the

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Henry Northrup Castle Papers, Special Collections Research Center, the University of Chicago. 14. Castle, “Evidences of Christianity,” p. 3, Folder 8, Box 8, Castle Papers; Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1880– 81, 50. Castle and Mead attended the same classes. 15. Mead was not exactly a star pupil in the sciences, but he did place 8th out of 23 students on his Zoology exam. He placed in the middle of a pack led by Castle on his Geology exam, and received even lower grades for his zoology/geology coursework (interpreting ‘Av’ as course average). He seems to have been stronger in other subjects: Wright also graded several of Mead’s orations in Rhetoric, for which he earned perfect marks. Topics of Mead’s orations included Beauty, Sir Thomas More, and the Tia¯nwáng (heavenly kings) of Buddhism. See Teaching Material: Geology, Zoology, Box 9, Wright Papers. 16. Castle, “Notes on Zoology,” p. 2, Folder 8, Box 8, Castle Papers. See Herbert Spencer, First Principles of a New System of Philosophy, 4th ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1880), 396; Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes, trans. E. Ray Lankester, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 1:212. 17. Castle, “Notes on Zoology,” p. 45. Amphioxus is one of the primitive members of our own phylum, as noted by a song written in the early twentieth century (sung to Tipperary): “It’s a long way from Amphioxus / It’s a long way to us. / It’s a long way from Amphioxus / to the meanest human cuss. / It’s goodbye fi ns and gill slits, / Welcome skin and hair / It’s a long way from Amphioxus / But we came from there.” See Jane Maienschein, 100 Years Exploring Life, 1888–1988: The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole (Boston: Jones & Bartlett, 1989), 165. 18. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year, 1881– 82 (Chicago: Blakely, Marsh, 1881), 59; Henry Alleyne Nicholson, A Manual of Zoology, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1877), 39–40. Later British editions also included a discussion of sexual selection, but Appleton continued to reprint the second edition. I assume that Wright assigned the American edition. 19. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year, 1882– 83 (Chicago: Blakely, Marsh, 1882), 66; Joseph LeConte, Elements of Geology (New York: D. Appleton, 1878), iv, 1. 20. Nicholson, A Manual of Zoology, 39; George Campbell, Duke of Argyll, The Reign of Law (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), 230; Joseph LeConte, “Man’s Place in Nature,” Princeton Review 55 (1878): 786– 87. Wright, “Darwin,” pp. 41–42. See also Edward J. Pfeifer, “The Genesis of American Neo-Lamarckism,” Isis 56 (1965). 21. On the 1890s debates, see Trevor Pearce, “The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction,” in Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, ed. Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, and Trevor Pearce (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 18–23. 22. Castle to Caroline Castle, 15 March 1882; Castle to Family, 24 May 1882; Castle to Samuel and Mary Castle, 13 October 1882; Castle to Samuel and Mary Castle, 4 November 1882, in Mead and Mead, Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle, 158, 168, 199, 212. 23. Castle to Samuel and Mary Castle, 13 October 1882, in Mead and Mead, Col-

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lected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle, 198–200. Castle, “The Materialistic Argument,” Folder 4, Box 4, Henry Northrup Castle Papers. 24. Gary A. Cook, George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 6. 25. Mead to Castle, n.d., in Folder 16, Box 1, George Herbert Mead Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago. This letter was sent from Berlin Heights, and thus dates from between September 1883 and March 1884. See Cook, George Herbert Mead, 6– 8. 26. Mead to Castle, 23 February 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. 27. Mead to Castle, 7 March 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. 28. Mead to Castle, 16 March 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. 29. Mead to Castle, 16 March 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. 30. Mead to Castle, 16 March 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. One of Hall’s books was reviewed in the student newspaper while Castle and Mead were editors: The Problem of Human Life (New York: Schell, 1877). See Oberlin Review 10 (2 December 1882): 64– 65. 31. Fletcher Hamlin, “Science and the Clergy,” The Microcosm 3 (1883): 100–101; internal quotation from Argyll, Reign of Law, 57; Allan Conant Ferrin, “The Limits of Development—A Plea for Theistic Evolution,” The Microcosm 3 (1884): 168. ‘Development’ and ‘evolution’ were used interchangeably in the nineteenth century: see Robert J. Richards, The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 168. 32. Mead to Castle, 12 March 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. On Fiske, an American popularizer of evolutionary ideas, see Trevor Pearce, “‘Science Organized’: Positivism and the Metaphysical Club, 1865–1875,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 3 (2015): 441– 65. 33. Mead to Castle, 10 June 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. 34. Paul Janet, Final Causes, trans. William Affleck, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 25–26, 32, 115, 282, 287ff. 35. Mead to Castle, 10 June 1884; Mead to Castle, 16 August 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. Mead to Castle, 8 February 1885; Mead to Castle, 28 February 1886; Mead to Castle, 11 April 1886, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. This obsession with the design argument has not been discussed by commentators on Mead’s development: Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 16; Cook, George Herbert Mead, 8–11. 36. Mead to Castle, 16 August 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. 37. Mead to Castle, 10 June 1884, in Folder 16, Box 1, Mead Papers. For a modern treatment of the argument from design, see Elliott Sober, Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 109– 88. 38. Mead to Castle, 8 February 1885, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. 39. Mead to Castle, 11 April 1886, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. 40. Mead to Castle, 16 May 1886, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. On Bowen, see Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860– 1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 28–45.

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41. Mead to Castle, 6 June 1886; Mead to Castle, 14 April 1887, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. 42. Mead to Castle, 29 April 1887, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. 43. Mead to Castle, 6 May 1887, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. 44. In 1887– 88, James taught English Philosophy and Questions in Psychology (with laboratory work), as well as an introductory course in Logic and Psychology. See Harvard University Catalogue, 1887– 88 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1887), 106–107. 45. Castle to Helen Castle, 9 October 1887, in Mead and Mead, Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle, 496. Mead to Castle, 19 June 1888, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. Harvard University Catalogue, 1887– 88, 50, 96, 106–107. Although Henry Castle mentions that Mead is taking a course with Bowen in the letter to Helen in October, Mead does not speak of this course in the June letter to Henry. The standard senior course-load at Harvard was four elective courses, although extra courses were permitted (the latter did not count toward the degree): see Harvard University Catalogue, 1887– 88, 89– 90. 46. This is consistent with Mead’s own later recollections. See George Herbert Mead, “Josiah Royce—A Personal Impression,” International Journal of Ethics 27 (1917). 47. Josiah Royce, “Joseph Le Conte,” The International Monthly 4 (1901): 333. 48. Josiah Royce, “Courses in Ethics at Harvard College,” Ethical Record 2 (1889): 141. 49. Harvard University Catalogue, 1887– 88, 107; Josiah Royce, “Is There a Philosophy of Evolution?,” Unitarian Review 32 (1889): 3–21. Royce described this essay as containing “the substance of . . . a considerable portion” of his philosophy of nature course in Royce, “Courses in Ethics at Harvard College,” 141. 50. Royce, “Philosophy of Nature,” Lectures 4–5 (8 & 11 October 1886), Folder 4, Box 127, Papers of Josiah Royce. Original emphasis. 51. Royce, “Is There a Philosophy of Evolution?,” 21, 98, 109. 52. Mead to Castle, 19 June 1888, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers; Thomas Hill Green, “Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. G. H. Lewes: Their Application of the Doctrine of Evolution to Thought. Part I. Mr. Spencer on the Relation of Subject and Object,” Contemporary Review 31 (1877). 53. Royce’s class was apparently taken over by Francis Ellingwood Abbot, who was also interested in the question of whether the universe was fundamentally “machine or organism.” Mead, however, later tells Castle that he “was to carry on” the class himself, and does not mention Abbot. John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, 2nd ed. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), 152–154; Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Scientific Theism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1885), 157–201. Mead to Castle, 19 June 1888, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. 54. Mead to Castle, 19 June 1888, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers. 55. Mead to Castle, 19 June 1888, in Folder 17, Box 1, Mead Papers; James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 13 June 1888, and James to Royce, 24 August 1888, in Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds., The Correspondence of William James, 12 vols. (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004), 6:419, 433. 56. Cook, George Herbert Mead, 15–18. For James’s appraisal of Mead, see James to

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Royce, 24 August 1888 and James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 23 September 1888, in Skrupskelis and Berkeley, Correspondence of William James, 6:433, 443. 57. For Mead’s classes at Leipzig, see Joas, G. H. Mead, 18. 58. Wilhelm Wundt, System der Philosophie (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1889), vi, 499–550. 59. Rudolf Seydel, “Zur Aussöhnung mit dem Darwinismus,” in Religion und Wissenschaft: Gesammelte Reden und Abhandlungen (Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1887), 236. 60. Castle to Samuel and Mary Castle, 3 February 1889, in Mead and Mead, Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle, 579. In the same letter, Castle reported that Mead had recently—by coincidence—met G. Stanley Hall, who gave him advice about where to study psychology. 61. Wilhelm Waldeyer, Das Gorilla- Rückenmark (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1889); Wilhelm Waldeyer, “Das Gibbon-Hirn,” in Internationale Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Medicin (Berlin: A. Hirschwald, 1891); Hermann Munk, Ueber die Functionen der Grosshirnrinde: Gesammelte Mittheilungen aus den Jahren 1877– 80 (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1881); Hermann Ebbinghaus, Über das Gedächtnis: Untersuchungen zur experimentellen Psychologie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1885). 62. For more on Mead’s time in Berlin and on his scientific education generally, see Daniel R. Huebner, Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 63. A full list of Mead’s courses at Berlin is given in Joas, G. H. Mead, 218n15. Mead also took two courses on “Psychology and Anthropology” with Paulsen. 64. Friedrich Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1893), 186–198; Friedrich Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Frank Thilly, 3rd ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1895), 180–192. For more on evolutionary debates over variation in this period, see Pearce, “The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction,” 18–23. 65. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 26 vols. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1957–), 10:14, 50, 86ff. Volume 10 of Dilthey’s collected works, System der Ethik, corresponds to lectures given in Summer 1890 that Mead attended. See Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 10:9; Sigrid Schulenburg, ed., Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck v. Wartenburg, 1877–1897 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1923), 90; Joas, G. H. Mead, 218n15. On Dewey and organism-environment interaction, see Pearce, “The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction,” 23–27; Trevor Pearce, “The Dialectical Biologist, circa 1890: John Dewey and the Oxford Hegelians,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (2014): 747–77. 66. Mead to Castle, 29 September 1890, and Mead to Castle, 31 October 1890, in Folder 18, Box 1, Mead Papers. 67. Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and his Relation to the World, trans. Elizabeth Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1885), 1:vii, xv; Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmus: Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit, 3 vols. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1856–1864), 1:v, xiv–xv. Mead appears to have read the English translation, since he uses the title “Microcosmus” in his letters. See also Hermann Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852).

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68. Lotze, Microcosmus, 1:xvi; John Dewey, Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1888), 260. 69. Mead to Castle, n.d., 1890, in Folder 18, Box 1, Mead Papers. The day and month are not given, but this letter was likely written in autumn since there are two other similar letters about his reading of Lotze that date from this period. 70. Mead to Castle, 24 October 1890, in Folder 18, Box 1, Mead Papers. 71. The latter course used Spencer’s First Principles as a textbook, following the lead of Royce at Harvard. See Calendar of the University of Michigan for 1891– 92 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1892), 59– 61. 72. Pearce, “The Dialectical Biologist, circa 1890: John Dewey and the Oxford Hegelians.” 73. Mead, “Phil. Course 9,” pp. 42, 89, Philosophy (Mead) 1893, Box 2, Campbell Family Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Notes taken by Robert C. Campbell. I have fi lled in words for Campbell’s shorthand. See George Herbert Mead, “Herr Lasswitz on Energy and Epistemology,” Psychological Review 1 (1894): 174. For Spencer on organism-environment interaction, see Trevor Pearce, “From ‘Circumstances’ to ‘Environment’: Herbert Spencer and the Origins of the Idea of OrganismEnvironment Interaction,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010). For Dewey’s deployment of similar Spencerian ideas in his 1887 speculative philosophy course, see Pearce, “The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction,” 24–26. For Dewey’s early ethics, see John Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (Ann Arbor, MI: Inland Press, 1891). 74. Dewey studied some physiology and psychology with Henry Newell Martin and G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins, but his Psychology (published in 1887) did not use the organism-environment framework that he adopted later. 75. John Dewey, “The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality,” Philosophical Review 11 (1902); George Herbert Mead, “The Philosophical Basis of Ethics,” International Journal of Ethics 18 (1908). 76. George Herbert Mead, “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences,” International Journal of Ethics 33, no. 3 (1923): 240–243. See also George Herbert Mead, “Religion and Social Values,” in The Philosophy of the Act, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938). 77. Kitcher, “Challenges for Secularism,” 32. 78. Mead, “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences,” 246–47.

REFERENCES Calendar of the University of Michigan for 1891– 92. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1892. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College for the College Year 1869– 70. Cleveland: Fairbanks, Benedict, 1869. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year, 1880– 81. Cleveland: Leader, 1880. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year, 1881– 82. Chicago: Blakely, Marsh, 1881.

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Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Oberlin College, for the College Year, 1882– 83. Chicago: Blakely, Marsh, 1882. General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1833–1908. Cleveland: O. S. Hubbell, 1909. Harvard University Catalogue, 1887– 88. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1887. Abbot, Francis Ellingwood. Scientific Theism. Boston: Little, Brown, 1885. Argyll, George Campbell, Duke of. The Reign of Law. London: Alexander Strahan, 1867. Clendenning, John. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce. 2nd ed. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Cook, Gary A. George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Dewey, John. A Common Faith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934. ———. “The Evolutionary Method as Applied to Morality.” Philosophical Review 11 (March/July 1902): 107–24, 353–71. ———. Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning Human Understanding. Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1888. ———. Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics. Ann Arbor, MI: Inland Press, 1891. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. 26 vols. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1957–. Dupree, A. Hunter. Asa Gray, 1810–1888. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Ebbinghaus, Hermann. Über das Gedächtnis: Untersuchungen zur experimentellen Psychologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1885. Ferrin, Allan Conant. “The Limits of Development—A Plea for Theistic Evolution.” The Microcosm 3 (January 1884): 168– 69. Gray, Asa. First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology. New York: Ivison & Phinney, 1857. ———. Gray’s Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology. New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, 1875. ———. Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States. New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, 1875. Green, Thomas Hill. “Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. G. H. Lewes: Their Application of the Doctrine of Evolution to Thought. Part I. Mr. Spencer on the Relation of Subject and Object.” Contemporary Review 31 (December 1877): 25–53. Haeckel, Ernst. The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes. Translated by E. Ray Lankester. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1876. Hall, Alexander Wilford. The Problem of Human Life. New York: Schell, 1877. Hamlin, Fletcher. “Science and the Clergy.” The Microcosm 3 (November 1883): 100–101. Huebner, Daniel R. Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Janet, Paul. Final Causes. Translated by William Affleck. 2nd ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883. Joas, Hans. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Kitcher, Philip. “Challenges for Secularism.” In The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for

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How We Live Now, edited by George Levine, 24–56. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. ———. “Militant Modern Atheism.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (2011): 1–13. Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860– 1930. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. LeConte, Joseph. Elements of Geology. New York: D. Appleton, 1878. ———. “Man’s Place in Nature.” Princeton Review 55 (November 1878): 776– 803. Lindberg, David C., and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Lotze, Hermann. Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852. ———. Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and his Relation to the World. Translated by Elizabeth Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones. 2 vols. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1885. ———. Mikrokosmus: Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit. 3 vols. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1856– 64. Maienschein, Jane. 100 Years Exploring Life, 1888–1988: The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Boston: Jones & Bartlett, 1989. Mead, George Herbert. “Herr Lasswitz on Energy and Epistemology.” Psychological Review 1 (March 1894): 172–75. ———. “Josiah Royce—A Personal Impression.” International Journal of Ethics 27 (January 1917): 168–70. ———. “The Philosophical Basis of Ethics.” International Journal of Ethics 18 (April 1908): 311–23. ———. “Religion and Social Values.” In The Philosophy of the Act, edited by Charles W. Morris, 475–78. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938. ———. “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences.” International Journal of Ethics 33, no. 3 (April 1923): 229–47. Mead, George Herbert, and Helen Castle Mead, eds. The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012. Moore, James R. The Post- Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Munk, Hermann. Ueber die Functionen der Grosshirnrinde: Gesammelte Mittheilungen aus den Jahren 1877– 80. Berlin: Hirschwald, 1881. Nicholson, Henry Alleyne. A Manual of Zoology. 2nd ed. New York: D. Appleton, 1877. Paulsen, Friedrich. Einleitung in die Philosophie. 2nd ed. Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1893. ———. Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Frank Thilly. 3rd ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1895. Pearce, Trevor. “The Dialectical Biologist, circa 1890: John Dewey and the Oxford Hegelians.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (2014): 747–77. ———. “From ‘Circumstances’ to ‘Environment’: Herbert Spencer and the Origins of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010): 241–52.

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———. “The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction.” In Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, edited by Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins and Trevor Pearce, 13–32. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. ———. “‘Science Organized’: Positivism and the Metaphysical Club, 1865–1875.” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 3 (2015): 441– 65. Pfeifer, Edward J. “The Genesis of American Neo-Lamarckism.” Isis 56 (Summer 1965): 156– 67. Richards, Robert J. The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Royce, Josiah. “Courses in Ethics at Harvard College.” Ethical Record 2 (October 1889): 138–43. ———. “Is There a Philosophy of Evolution?” Unitarian Review 32 (July–August 1889): 1–29, 97–113. ———. “Joseph Le Conte.” The International Monthly 4 (1901): 324–34. Schulenburg, Sigrid, ed. Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck v. Wartenburg, 1877–1897. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1923. Seydel, Rudolf. “Zur Aussöhnung mit dem Darwinismus.” In Religion und Wissenschaft: Gesammelte Reden und Abhandlungen, 236– 64. Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1887. Skrupskelis, Ignas K., and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds. The Correspondence of William James. 12 vols. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004. Sober, Elliott. Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Spencer, Herbert. First Principles of a New System of Philosophy. 4th ed. New York: D. Appleton, 1880. Waldeyer, Wilhelm. “Das Gibbon-Hirn.” In Internationale Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Medicin. Berlin: A. Hirschwald, 1891. ———. Das Gorilla- Rückenmark. Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1889. Wundt, Wilhelm. System der Philosophie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1889.

Chapter Seven

George Herbert Mead as a Socio-Environmental Thinker Bradley H. Brewster and Antony J. Puddephatt

INTRODUCTION

E

nvironmental sociologists have traditionally implicated Mead, via symbolic interactionism, in sociology’s “tendency to ignore” the biophysical world (Dunlap and Catton 1983, 117). Admittedly, Mead was no environmental thinker, as that term is now used. While Mead was aware of the conservation movement of his day (Mead 1915, 349–50), he never seemed to identify with it. What we emphasize, however, is that Mead’s philosophy was an impressive effort to reconstruct the society-nature dualism, and such efforts are central to the mission of environmental sociological theory (Catton and Dunlap 1978). While Mead has elsewhere been described as a “socio-biological” thinker (Larrabee 1939, 435; see also Morris et al. 1938, xi), we would like to move a step further and argue that Mead can be thought of as a socio- environmental thinker as well. In this chapter, we attempt to lay the groundwork for future Mead scholarship in environmental sociology. We begin by considering how the centrality of nature has been neglected in Mead’s theories of mind, self, and society, leading to his dismissal by environmental sociologists. We aim to correct this by recapturing the vitality of the environment in Mead’s work, to set an agenda for future theory and research in this regard. We discuss Mead’s philosophy as one of mutuality, examining Mead’s notions of organism-environment co-construction; of mind, meaning, and perspectives as existing in nature; and of the concept of sociality, which is not limited to human interaction, but, as conceived by Mead (1932, 86), “is found throughout the universe” in biological and physical processes. Next, we unpack the ecological implications of Mead’s theory of self, where its development is contingent upon wider, more inclusive concep144

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tions of specific and generalized others that span both the human and nonhuman world. We turn, then, to some of Mead’s macro-level ideas for what they may hold for a more ecological view of society. These themes, taken together, not only demonstrate the ecological aspects of many of Mead’s root ideas, but also suggest creative possibilities for their use in environmental sociology.

MEAD IN THE HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY William Catton and Riley Dunlap (1978) were some of the earliest theorists to argue that mainstream sociology was inadequate to the task of dealing with the issues of our collective relation to the natural environment. As aptly put by Raymond Murphy (1995, 688), mainstream sociology was practiced “as if nature did not matter.” Further, social constructionists, if they considered nature at all, treated it as a product to be explained by the cultural resources of human groups. While constructionism has made important contributions to environmental sociology, in its “strong” form, the ontological status of nature becomes regarded as a matter of collective defi nition, even to the point where nonhuman entities are regarded as “blank paper” on which anything may be written (Tester 1991, 46, cited in Sutton 2004, 58). Critics argued this approach results in an overly anthropocentric, solipsistic analysis, viewing human communities as operating in linguistic vacuums free of the natural world, generating meanings internally to furnish images of external nature. But to argue that scientific fi ndings about climate change and energy depletion are mere social constructions means corporate interests are able to undermine science and gain political ground while committing questionable environmental practices. But environmental sociologists did not want to fall back into naïve realism either. In the new ecological paradigm, nature had to have real ontological status, while still understood as intertwined with our collective social processes and hence partially constituted by human practices. Thus, various theoretical proposals have been developed to better balance or integrate the social and natural, give nature a voice, or treat the non human as an important actor (e.g., Bell 1998; Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling 1995; Murdoch 2001; Norgaard 1995). In a similar vein, many theorists have returned to the classical sociological work of Émile Durkheim (e.g., Catton 2002; Rosa and Richter 2008), Karl Marx (e.g., Dickens 1997; Foster 1999), Max Weber (e.g., Foster and Holleman 2012; Murphy 2002),

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and Georg Simmel (e.g., Gross 2001) to reassess their socio-environmental relevance. This begs the question of how George Herbert Mead has been construed or handled in environmental sociology. Based on Mead’s sociobiological pragmatism, one would think environmental sociologists would welcome him with open arms. Yet, this has not historically been the case. In surveying articles on the history, disciplinary relations, current state, and future progress of the field, Brewster (2011) found only three mentions of Mead, all passing and none positive. In each case, Mead tended to be lumped in with the symbolic interactionist tradition and thereby dismissed as part of the “human exemptionalist” backdrop to the new ecological paradigm (Dunlap 2002, 17; Dunlap and Catton 1983, 117; Freudenburg and Gramling 1989, 441).1 Hence, one of the most thoroughgoing bio-social thinkers in the classical sociological canon was critically dismissed because of a later tradition in sociology which had largely ignored both the natural world and Mead’s attention to it. In spite of this, the 1990s saw a handful scholars taking up some of Mead’s ideas in their own thinking about the environment, most notably Andrew J. Weigert (1991a; 1991b; 1997a; 1997b) and Michael Mayerfeld Bell (1994; 1998). Extrapolating from Mead’s concepts of the generalized other and the corresponding me, Weigert (1997b) developed a generalized environmental other and environmental me, and Bell (1994) developed a natural other and natural me. Weigert’s (1997b, 27) generalized environmental other focused on the physical environment as opposed to “all living beings,” making his cut between the biotic and the abiotic (see also Owens 2007, 571). Bell (1994, 147) made his cut at a different angle, labeling his concept natural other, which reflects its focus on the nonhuman world (i.e., other species along with the physical world), the world we often think of as “natural” as opposed to “social.” Given how the concept of the generalized other was typified in symbolic interactionism as representing human social groups, what was called for must have been somewhat intuitive: an alternate conception for nonhuman units. Yet one can immediately recognize the dualism present in such a conceptual maneuver.2 Regarding Mead’s original formulation, however, it was quite otherwise: It is possible for inanimate objects, no less than for other human organisms, to form parts of the generalized and organized—the completely socialized—other for any given human individual, in so far as he responds to such objects socially or in a social fashion (by means of the mechanism of thought, the internalized conversation of ges-

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tures). Anything—any object or set of objects, whether animate or inanimate, human or animal, or merely physical—toward which he acts, or to which he responds, socially, is an element in what for him is the generalized other; by taking the attitudes of which toward himself he becomes conscious of himself as an object or individual, and thus develops a self or personality. (Mead 1934, 154n2)

Hence, Mead’s conception of the generalized other was elastic, inclusive of “any object,” whether “human or animal, or merely physical,” to “form parts” of it. Thus, the variant formations of Weigert and Bell each empty Mead’s original concept of any physical or nonhuman content. Still, it seems advisable in many cases to speak of “environmental” or “natural” others, on the one hand, and human generalized others, on the other, as such dichotomies reflect common usages on the part of everyday actors, for which we need appropriate concepts for their analysis (Bell 1994; Brewster and Bell 2010). Moreover, such dichotomous subtypes arguably introduce a more critical dimension for analysis than Mead’s more encompassing conception. Thus, we acknowledge that these dualistic conceptions have their place, but it is the original socio-environmental thrust of Mead’s thought that is our main interest here.

MEAD AS A PHILOSOPHER OF MUTUALITY Mead spent his career thinking creatively across dualisms, such as society– nature, mind–matter, self– society, and socialization–individuation. We suggest Mead was not attempting to jettison conventional dichotomies; rather, he worked with conceptual dualities, albeit re-conceiving them in their continual, interdependent relations. Thus, rather than seeing Mead as a holistic thinker, we suggest it is more apt to think of him as a philosopher of mutuality, creatively re-conceptualizing dualisms as mutualisms. This is most readily apparent in Mead’s (1925, 262) notion of the relativity of organism and environment. Rather than holding a monolithic view of the environment, Mead held that organisms seek out and select different  environmental stimuli and, thereby, create the objects that constitute their respective environments. Mead used a straightforward illustration: If an animal that can digest grass, such as an ox, comes into the world, then grass becomes food. That object did not exist before, that is, grass as food. The advent of the ox brings in a new object. In that sense, or-

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ganisms are responsible for the appearance of whole sets of objects that did not exist before. (129)

Grass is a food-object to an ox because the very structure of its organism is such that it “adds a new object” to its environment (215). 3 Take a different organism, say, a bird of prey, and grass is now a very different objectstimulus: an obstacle to overcome in hunting field mice. Thus, as Mead (1936, 140) put it, “Change the animal and you change the environment, the world in which that animal lives.” For Mead, “The causal effect of the living organisms on their environment in creating objects is as genuine as the effect of the environment upon the living organism” (1925, 158). Thus, this is neither a simple determinism of organism by environment, nor an unfettered construction of environment by organism, but a mutuality of organism and environment (Mead 1938, 200). This intimate relationship of environment and form is something that we need to impress on ourselves, for we are apt to approach the situation [only] from the standpoint of a pre-existent environment just there, into which the living form enters or within which it happens, and then to think of this environment affecting the form, setting the conditions under which the form can live. (Mead 1934, 246)

Thus, to counteract the prevailing one-sided view of a preexistent environment determining the organism, Mead stressed the organism’s role in creating its environment. The human organism additionally constitutes its environment—and very significantly so—via language (Mead 1934, 78). For Mead, this puts humans in a privileged position with regard to nonhuman animals (Mead 1934, 182–83, but also see p. 191 for a potential qualification). Nevertheless, language does not detach humankind from our biological needs, instincts, and impulses (Mead 1918, 577–79), nor our physical and biological environment. Focusing exclusively on language and cognition creates a disconnect from physical and biological entities with which humans must necessarily carry on cooperative relationships. “In balancing an ax, for instance, one is establishing a cooperative relationship with it and to this extent putting one’s self inside the object. Similarly the log which one cuts will cooperate at a certain point” (Mead 1938, 654). Language and roletaking, for Mead, do not lift human beings out of the constraints of the natural world; rather, they affirm our ongoing social relationship with it:

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An engineer who is constructing a bridge is talking to nature in the same sense that we talk to an engineer. There are stresses and strains there which he meets, and nature comes back with other responses that have to be met in another way. In his thinking he is taking the attitude of physical things. He is talking to nature and nature is replying to him. (Mead 1934, 185)

While, for Mead (1918, 579), the evolution of advanced human language and self-conscious conduct are “perhaps the most critical in the development of man,” they are after all only an elaboration of the social conduct of lower forms. Selfconscious conduct is only an exponent which raises the possible complications of group activity to a higher degree. It does not change the character of the social nature that is elaborated and complicated, nor does it change the principles of its organization. Human nature still remains an organization of instincts which have mutually affected each other.

Thus, Mead saw human social order as but an elaboration of and, hence, continuous with the more basic forms of mutuality at the physical and biological levels. While the environment is seen as relative to the perspective and activities of the organism, mind, in turn, is seen as a product of one’s interaction with the environment. Against dualistic thought, which treats mind as a special substance unlike the rest of nature and encapsulated in bodies (Baldwin 1986, 29–35), Mead’s evolutionary thinking explained mind in terms of a process continuous with the rest of nature rather than separated from it: “mind is only the culmination of that sociality which is found throughout the universe” (Mead 1932, 86). Even “consciousness as such,” according to Mead (1934, 332), “refers to both the organism and its environment and cannot be located simply in either.” Meaning, too, is taken as objectively there “in nature” (Mead 1934, 78n13). As John C. McKinney (1955, 148) noted in discussing Mead, “meaning is not a psychical addition to an act, it is a development of something objectively there as a relation between phases of the ongoing act.” As with mind, Mead approached meaning such that it is available for analysis in the act, rather than, as conventionally understood, ideas inside our heads (Mead 1934, 76). Likewise, we tend to think of perspectives as the epitome of subjectivity, but Mead (1926, 76) instead spoke of “the objective reality

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of perspectives,” seeing “the perspective of the organism” as “there in nature.” For Mead, perspectives are genuine “slabs of nature” (1926, 76; 1938, 350) which are consequential in orienting action on the part of the organism toward its environment. As Jack Martin (2005, 234) put it: According to Mead (1938, 2002) reality is perspectival in that all phenomena (objects, events, selves, others, ideas, theories) emerge in the relation of organisms to their environments. A perspective is an orientation to an environment that is associated with acting within that environment. Perspectives both emerge out of activity and enable increasingly complex forms of activity.

A perspective, then, is not merely some subjective mental phenomenon, nor an arbitrary viewpoint freely held, but an ongoing product of the organism-environment transaction, no less objectively there than an environment is for its organism (Mead 1925, 256–57). While these examples illustrate Mead’s “revolt against dualism and idealism” (Miller 1973, 3), his most explicit attempt to re-imagine the social-natural dualism as a mutualism can be seen in his concept of the sociality of nature. Mead defi ned “sociality” as an object’s belonging to more than one system at the same time, such that, in the minimal case of two systems, it wouldn’t be what it is in one system if it wasn’t also simultaneously occupying the other. Consider the following ecological illustration provided by Mead (1932, 49): Sociality is the capacity of being several things at once. The animal transverses the ground in pursuit of his prey, and is at once a part of the system of distribution of energies which makes his locomotion possible and a part of the jungle system which is a part of the life system on the surface of the inanimate globe. . . . There is as genuine a sociality in his relations to his environment as in his relation to his prey.

From one frame of reference, the animal is related to its prey as predator. From another, it is an organism releasing energy in an environment. We can hardly think of the animal as a whole entity without understanding it within the different systems it occupies. Again, we see a kind of mutuality here between a given thing and its systems. Mead (1932, 63) explained that “the location of the object in one system places it in others as well” and that it is this which he called sociality. It is through the concept of sociality that we can gain a better appreciation of Mead’s notion of the

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relationship between organism and environment. Since human organisms have both a physiological structure given from the system of evolution and a consciousness that can reach into future temporal frames, the organism creatively crosscuts systems, which enables the formation of new meanings: “It is because the animal is both alive and a part of a physicalchemical world that life is an emergent and extends its influence to the environment about it. It is because the conscious individual is both an animal and is also able to look before and after that consciousness emerges with the meanings and values with which it informs the world” (Mead 1932, 67). Understanding this broader principle of sociality makes our social relationships to nonhuman objects more intelligible. Since Mead defi nes the social broadly, in terms of connectedness and mutual adjustment (not merely human interaction), then our mundane dealings with nature fall in line with his defi nition of the social, as with Mead’s example of cutting a log with an ax where “cooperative relationship[s]” with both ax and log must be brought about, a process which, Mead (1938, 654) said, “is essentially social” (see also Joas 1985, 145– 66). For, as Mead (1932, 48) elsewhere wrote, “what we are accustomed to call social is only a so-called consciousness of such a process, but the process is not identical with the consciousness of it, for that is an awareness of the situation. The social situation must be there if there is to be consciousness of it.” Thus, Mead defi ned the social as existing prior to our awareness and present in our relations with objects, organisms, and wider environments. These forms of social relation are antecedent to that which “we are accustomed to call social” (1932, 48), like the ability to take the role of others or engage in symbolically mediated social relations. With advanced language and a developed self, it is ever more possible for human beings to place themselves creatively in the position of other reference points, systems, and object-perspectives. Coming to know nature thus fi nds a parallel in coming to know other people: one must get inside the frame of reference of the other and take up the world from that perspective. For instance, Mead (1934, 183) wrote: The common attitude is that of giving them [nonhuman animals] just such personalities as our own. We talk to them and in our talking to them we act as if they had the sort of inner world that we have. A similar attribution is present in the immediate attitude which we take toward inanimate physical objects about us. We take the attitude of social beings toward them.

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The most “immediate attitude,” or our fi rst primordial response, is to relate to the world socially, to relate to the world of things and nonhuman nature as social beings. Mead (1934, 183) pointed out that the “nature poet” relates to nature in terms of “a social relation” of love and that “the man [who] kicks the chair he stumbles over” is also, in his “immediate” reaction, relating to that physical object in social terms (183), “punishing” the chair, as it were, for “infl icting” injury to his leg by “getting” in his way. Likewise, “The immediate reaction of children to things about them is social” (184), and evolution has bestowed, as it were, a human affection for babies which can spill over into our “immediate attitude” toward other small things, biological or physical (184). These examples show that it is in the immediate reaction where we fi nd our relationship to nature, inanimate objects, and nonhuman animals to be social. Only after the immediate social reaction are we then able to abstract their physical or biological being (for example, the chair as wood, or ultimately consisting of atoms). As Mead put it, “the physical object is an abstraction . . . from the social response” (184). Building from this, Gert J. J. Biesta (1998, 80) argued that for Mead, “consciousness of social objects has temporal and logical priority over consciousness of physical objects.” Going further, Alfred Stafford Clayton (1943, 103) contended that “the non-social objects of nature are dealt with in terms of the social acts which precede them.” These arguments are unnecessary and lead to a dualistic position that human social relations must be prioritized and logically precede our relationship with nature. They seem to have it that we fi rst learn to be social from our relationships with significant others, and then we apply this to our experiences with nature. Such a position appears as problematic as denying the social nature of our natural physical experiences. The following passage from Mead might clarify: “The human individual thinks fi rst of all entirely in social terms. This means . . . not that nature and natural objects are personalized, but that the child’s reactions to nature and its objects are social reactions, and that his responses imply that the actions of natural objects are social reactions” (Mead 1934, 377). Hence, Mead conceived of the social as including relations between entities in nature that are mutually interdependent. Natural objects react to other objects, organisms, or selves in patterned ways. We need not infuse the physical world with social relationships previously acquired for them to be understood as social relations, since the physical world has only ever been experienced as social, a complex interplay of gesture-response patterns (Puddephatt 2005).4 This discussion of Mead’s philosophy of mutuality shows that Mead

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was not merely interested in natural phenomena in addition to social phenomena; rather, he was keenly interested in reconstructing the traditional dualism that separates the two. His vision seemed always to see dualities—for example, organism and environment, mind and matter, sociality and nature—together in their mutuality. Sociology has largely acknowledged Mead’s genius in re-imagining the self-society and socializationindividuation dualisms, but environmental sociology, which has long been engaged in efforts at re-imagining the traditional society-nature divide, has not properly acknowledged Mead’s original contributions on this count.

AN ECOLOGICAL VIEW OF SELF For Mead (1934, 154), the generalized other “gives to the individual his unity of self.” This unity appears to be achieved in part because generalized others are larger, more encompassing, and more enduring than individual significant others. If the given human individual is to develop a self in the fullest sense . . . he must . . . take [the community’s] attitudes toward the various phases or aspects of the common social activity. . . . This getting of the broad activities of any given social whole . . . is, in other words, the essential basis and prerequisite of the fullest development of that individual’s self. (154–55)

Generalized others allow one to gain a certain objectivity toward oneself, allowing one, as if from the outside, to take oneself as an object, providing external reference points with which to view oneself. In this way, Mead claimed that the generalized other is what accounts for “the very universality and impersonality of thought and reason” (90). Yet, a vantage point that is felt to be still more objective is nature. As C. S. A. van Koppen (2000, 314) noted, “nature manifests itself as being there objectively, that is, independent of the subject’s consciousness and will.” This explains part of the need for having exclusively nonhuman generalized others, as formulated by Weigert and by Bell. If a certain unity of self is achieved through the mental consolidation of individual human attitudes in the form of a generalized other, one might ask how much more unity of self is realized in taking the still more objective reference point of nature. As Bell (1994, 6–7, 138, 146–57, 239) pointed out, a “natural other” allows for a reference point putatively free of social interests. For, as John

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Stuart Mill ([1874]1961, 370) argued, nature is often taken to mean what takes place outside of human influence. While nature is a social conception that changes with society (Williams [1980] 2005), it tends to be conceived as the external reference point, and, thus, as Bell (1994) emphasized, a basis for a greater sense of moral security, truth, and selfhood. As self is always in a developing relation with specific and generalized others, then as we enlarge our social communities, we also enlarge our sphere of caring and ethical conduct. On the fl ip side, it is potentially retrogressive if the individual retreats into smaller, narrower cliques, cults, and gangs, which may help solidify a sense of self, but only at the expense of reducing the complexity and ethical extension of the self (Mead 1934, 388–89). Thus, we tend to seek more thoroughgoing measures to unify our sense of our selves beyond merely human generalized others, as they are manifestly socially contingent and vested with interests. One of the ways we do this is to try and root our identity in nature (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 100). As previously argued, for Mead, self and moral development require larger conceptions of community, which, in principle, include the nonhuman. Considering, for example, pets as members of one’s family, landscapes and local wildlife as integral parts of one’s community, and wilderness preserves and the biosphere as parts of one’s nation, we can conceive of ourselves in a broader, more connected and far-reaching ethical context than that provided by human communities alone. It is now standard practice for ecologists to include human beings and human activity as constituting elements of the ecological units they study (e.g., landscapes, ecosystems). Sociologists working with Mead’s ideas have studied how domesticated animals are members of households (Alger and Alger 1997; Sanders 2007). But we can go further than just pets and explore how various ecological units also belong to human communities. Just as ecology has come to appropriately include humans in their analysis, sociology, in turn, ought to include ecological entities (e.g., landscapes, plant and animal communities, ecosystems, and biomes) as constituting elements of our communities, and hence our generalized others. This enlargement through greater inclusiveness is one way of broadening ourselves and our ethical conduct. However, in the process of including ever more aspects of nonhuman nature into our notions of human community, it makes sense to include ever more aspects of our human world into larger ecological wholes. For example, we have mentioned including landscape features into our conceptual scheme of local human community, but it makes sense as well

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to think of the local human community as but one constituting element of the broader landscape. Likewise, it makes sense to include the urban ecosystem as an integral part of a city, but taking a yet more generalized view, we need to also see the city as part of much larger ecosystems. This enlargement through scaling up is another way of enlarging our ethical conduct. In our reading of Mead, the self becomes more expansive both by being progressively more inclusive of diverse others into our existing groups and communities and by progressively identifying with larger groups and communities, apparently maxing out at the level of the international community (Mead 1929a). But there is no reason this self-developmental process needs to be limited to human beings or human groups since Mead (1934, 154n2) explicitly made conceptual space for the nonhuman world in his formulation of the generalized other. Further, according to Mead (1918, 580), “the size of the group to which” one “can belong is limited only by” one’s “ability to co-operate with its members.” Sociologists have been exploring various environmental notions of identity (e.g., Gottschalk 2001; Statham 1995; Stets and Biga 2003). Some of this literature draws on Mead. After reading about Joanna Macy’s (1996) eco-self concept, Stella Cˇapek (2006, 160) offered a reflection: “My thoughts turned almost immediately to George Herbert Mead’s ‘generalized other,’ that voice of society that shapes us (and that we, in turn, shape through our awareness of it). I wondered whether Mead’s concept of the generalized other could be expanded to include the natural environment and linked to an eco-self.” Cˇapek goes on to note that she fi nds Mead’s work simultaneously inviting and discouraging “a conversation about the eco-self” (161). We do not deny that there are passages in Mead’s works which can discourage such conversations. But here we have focused on the theoretical groundwork that should prove encouraging and justify moving forward with Meadian analysis into a more ecologically conceived self. Hence, so long as when speaking of an ecological self what is meant is fully inclusive of human beings and not just another dualistic alternative to some putative social self, then an ecological self is already implied in Mead’s theory of self-development.

AN ECOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIETY Having demonstrated that Mead’s theory of the development of selfhood provides a basis for thinking about a more ecological self, can we similarly fi nd warrant in Mead’s thought for taking a more ecological approach to

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conceptualizing society? Our answer is an ambivalent one. While Mead seemed oblivious to the pitfalls of unfettered control of nature, Mead’s philosophy of mutuality, combined with his belief in democratic social reform, holds some promise. For Mead, the key to differentiating human society from animal-level social organization is the modern human capacity to control and tailor its environment, initially by responding to obstacles for human survival (Mead 1909). As modern society progresses, Mead (1936, 262) believed our manipulation of the environment becomes ever greater. It is this faith in science to construct nature in line with our wishes where we begin to see Mead fall into “human exemptionalism” (Dunlap and Catton 1983). While nonhuman animals have some ability to determine their environment, Mead believed that modern human communities have a qualitative advantage in their capacity for control: The development of human society on a larger scale has led to a very complete control of its environment. The human form establishes a home where it wishes; builds cities; brings its water from great distances; establishes the vegetation which shall grow about it; determines the animals that will exist  .  .  . The whole onward struggle of mankind on the face of the earth is such a determination of the life that shall exist about it and such a control of physical objects as determine and affect its own life. . . . It is this control of its own evolution which is the goal of the development of human society. (Mead 1934, 249–51)

Nonetheless, one can fi nd indications in Mead’s work where the limits of control are acknowledged, such as geologic forces, natural disasters, and other acts of God (Mead 1934, 250). Science is another case where Mead agreed that we cannot structure the world any way we like: “we submit these hypotheses to be tested by their effectiveness in dealing with the environment, which then determines which hypotheses are supported and which are not” (Baldwin 1986, 134). Science cannot be dogmatic since it is set to flexibly and continually adapt in the face of unexpected “brute facts” emerging from the natural world (Mead 1936, 264– 91).5 Hence, society will never arrive at a perfect “end-state” but will continue to evolve through internal pressures as well as external relations with the ecological environment. Mead (1934, 251) wrote: “If humanity can control its environment, it will in a certain sense stabilize itself and reach the end of a process of development, except in so far as the society

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goes on developing in this process of controlling its own environment.” While failing to recognize those ecological threats where control of the environment through modern science itself is implicated, this passage at least admits that our relationship with the environment is one of mutual adjustment through continual emergence, a prominent concern in Mead’s work. In science, industry, politics, and everyday life, emergence guarantees a “tang of novelty” (Mead 1929b, 239; 1936, 116) and is an important source of innovation as new objects are created in unexpected ways through the overlap of systems and novel encounters. Thus, we can easily view society-environment relations under the lens of emergence to think about how Mead might conceptualize modern day ecological issues. Melting ice-caps, ozone holes, mad cows, acid rain, peak oil, extinction, pollution, and climatic changes all can be viewed as emergents from the interactions of industrial society and the natural environment. These emergents could not be predicted from prior conditions alone, but rather appear through the interaction of human society and our natural habitat as each co-evolves with the other. These represent what Mead (1938, 57, 63) would call “brute facts,” or anomalous conflicts to established modes of life, undermining the very idea of having virtually complete control over the environment. Such environmental threats point to Ulrich Beck’s (2006) notion of a world risk society, where we reflexively scrutinize our collective practices that have led to a series of incalculable risks which we now have to try our best to solve. For Beck, our position is quite different than Mead’s imaginary of virtual total control of the environment through science, as science is itself seen as part of the problem. And addressing these risks is by no means clear-cut, easy to manage, or assignable to any one group or set of experts. So where does Meadian theory fit in this world risk society? First, Mead’s belief in progressive social change through communication, democratic participation, and an enlarged worldview (Shalin 1991) means Mead would likely have embraced the cosmopolitanism envisioned by Beck (Aboula fia 2001). Second, Mead believed in the power of scientific rationality for social reconstruction, given that “what scientific method does require, if it is to be consistently used, is that all the confl icting ends, the institutions and their hitherto inviolable values, be brought together and so restated and reconstructed that intelligent conduct may be possible, with reference to all of them” (1923, 236). Mead strived to combat the problem of narrow group membership, such that only the specific values and attitudes of a given group or segment of society are realized and uncritically privileged.

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In solving collective problems, Mead knew that we are limited in what we can know, and that we can only direct the voyage of modernity as we move along. Our ends can only be determined as we encounter new obstacles and problems, and the means toward these ends must be chosen by what is available in our present set of social and material conditions: This human society . . . is a great secular adventure, that has reached some measure of success, but is still far from accomplished. The important character of this adventure is that society gets ahead, not by fastening its vision upon a clearly outlined distant goal, but by bringing about the immediate adjustment of itself to its surroundings, which the immediate problem demands. It is the only way in which it can proceed, for with every adjustment the environment has changed, and the society and its individuals have changed in like degree . . . We, none of us, know where we are going, but we do know that we are on the way. (1923, 246–47)

We see here a recognition of the mutual dependence and continual adjustment of society and environment. Following Mead, environmental activists, scientists, politicians, everyday citizens, and corporate actors could all place their confl icting interests surrounding environmental issues on the table, such that their most pressing concerns could be dealt with in a democratic fashion. Perhaps human society could fi nd ways to live sustainably while still being able to profit, enjoy comfortable living, and maintain relatively stable political arrangements. Critics might argue these compromises have already taken place in what they deem as the dubious rhetoric of “sustainable consumption” and “green capitalism” (Hinton and Goodman 2010). But what happens if nonhuman entities are included in our matrix of social and political relations? Could this change how environmental issues are debated and considered? Actor-network theory pushes in exactly that direction. In trying to figure out how to “bring the sciences into democracy,” Bruno Latour (2004) imagines scientists as spokespeople for nature, much like politicians speak for their human constituents. The idea is to enable science to have a greater role in political debates and the governance of society-nature. Similarly, Mead believed that democracy was best accomplished by widening our social connections and dialogue, taking into account as many interests as possible in forming policy. If we combine this with our capacity to “take the role” of objects and incorporate these into our concepts of the generalized other, we can better imagine the

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interests and needs of the nonhuman world. As we begin to enlarge our social and ethical consciousness in this way, our moral impetus can be expanded to include the nonhuman order that is part of our community and world. In the current global context of environmental threats, where scientific understanding is essential for shaping political will across nations, Mead’s account of widening dialogue informed by the rational method of science may have much to offer global theories of environmental reform.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS AND CONCLUSION While a handful of Mead’s most famous concepts have been brought into environmental sociology by Weigert and Bell, the larger body of Mead’s work has not been explored for its environmental implications. Throughout this chapter, we have drawn widely from Mead’s writings in an effort to more fully explore the potential of Mead’s ideas for environmental sociology. Still, we have only begun to scratch the surface. Mead’s vision was remarkably comprehensive and his writings cover a wide array of ideas pertinent to environmental sociology. For example, future work might explore Mead’s “groundbreaking” philosophy of justice (Neeley and Deegan 2005, 71) for how its restorative emphasis on bringing the offender back into the community fold might add to discussions of environmental justice. And what might Mead’s theory of social reform, related as it is with his notion of science, offer the field for thinking about environmental politics and natural resource management? Another area of environmental sociology concerns our ethical regard for nonhuman nature. Not only are many of Mead’s ideas imbued with moral dimensions and implications (Joas 1985, 121–22), but Mead also wrote articles on ethics, and their promise for environmental sociology remains unexplored. Moreover, Mead published extensively on education (Biesta 1998, 73–74), and, while recent years have seen educational scholars exploring this work, it remains untouched by environmental scholars. We imagine such work being fruitful not only for environmental education, but also for practical pedagogical considerations in how we teach environmental sociology. Hence, Mead’s work offers many creative possibilities for use within environmental sociology. We have presented a case for recognizing the socio-environmental aspects of Mead’s thought and its potential for environmental sociology. The theoretical basis for this begins with what we have called his philosophy of mutuality, which creatively re-conceives dualisms, including the social-natural dualism, in ways that accord well with the theoretical aims

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of environmental sociology. We then made the case that Mead’s theory of self-development implies the possibility for a more ecological conception of self. Finally, we explored some of Mead’s macro-scale views, envisioning how the problem-solving processes of societal change are intimately linked to social-ecological relations. Our aim was to lay the basis for future work by exploring the relevance of Mead’s ideas for contemporary environmental sociology. The pragmatic test of any such creative endeavor is that it stimulates discussion and proves fruitful for future inquiry and further development. We hope that our work here does just that, both for the community of environmental sociologists and for the community of Mead scholars—and for the greater dialogue between both.

NOTES 1. Human exemptionalism is the idea that natural factors are unimportant in accounts of human behavior due to the uniqueness of human language, rationality, and culture. 2. Such a maneuver didn’t introduce the dualism, of course. It was already there in symbolic interactionism’s one-sided typification of the concept. 3. “You may say the object is there before the animal, but it is not there as food” (Mead 1936, 140). 4. Recognizing Mead’s originally intended concept of the social makes Bruno Latour’s (2005) mission of “reconstructing the social” to include nonhuman relations far less revolutionary. 5. As nature presents problems—Mead (1936, 283– 84) used the example of a newly discovered infectious disease—we must use science to problem-solve by empirically testing possible hypotheses. The fact that science is never-ending and unfi nalizable guarantees we are never in complete control.

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Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor. Biesta, Gert J. J. 1998. “Mead, Intersubjectivity, and Education: The Early Writings.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 17, no. 2 and 3: 73– 99. Brewster, Bradley H. 2011. “Environmental Reconstruction in Microsociological Theory for Microsociological Reconstruction in Environmental Sociology.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Brewster, Bradley H., and Michael Mayerfeld Bell. 2010. “The Environmental Goffman: Toward an Environmental Sociology of Everyday Life.” Society and Natural Resources 23, no. 1: 45–57. ˇ apek, Stella M. 2006. “Surface Tension: Boundary Negotiations around Self, Society, C and Nature in a Community Debate Over Wildlife.” Symbolic Interaction 29, no. 2: 157– 81. Catton, William R., Jr. 2002. “Has the Durkheim Legacy Misled Sociology?” In Sociological Theory and the Environment, edited by R. Dunlap, F. Buttel, P. Dickens, and A. Gijswijt, 90–118. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Catton, William R., Jr., and Riley E. Dunlap. 1978. “Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm.” The American Sociologist 13: 41–49. Clayton, Alfred Stafford. 1943. Emergent Mind and Education: A Study of George H. Mead’s Bio- social Behaviorism from an Educational Point of View. New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Dickens, Peter. 1997. “Beyond Sociology: Marxism and the Environment.” In The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, edited by M. Redclift and G. Woodgate, 179– 92. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Dunlap, Riley E. 2002. “Environmental Sociology: A Personal Perspective on Its First Quarter Century.” Organization and Environment 15: 10–29. Dunlap, Riley E., and William R. Catton, Jr. 1983. “What Environmental Sociologists Have in Common (whether Concerned with ‘Built’ or ‘Natural’ Environments).” Sociological Inquiry 53, no. 2 and 3: 113–35. Foster, John Bellamy. 1999. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2: 366–405. Foster, John Bellamy, and Hannah Holleman. 2012. “Weber and the Environment: Classical Foundations for a Post-Exemptionalist Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 6: 1625–73. Freudenburg, William R., Scott Frickel, and Robert Gramling. 1995. “Beyond the Nature/Society Divide: Learning to Think about a Mountain.” Sociological Forum 10, no. 3: 361– 92. Freudenburg, William R., and Robert Gramling. 1989. “The Emergence of Environmental Sociology: Contributions of Riley E. Dunlap and William R. Catton, Jr.” Sociological Inquiry 59, no. 4: 439–52. Gottschalk, Simon. 2001. “The Greening of Identity: Three Environmental Paths.” Studies of Symbolic Interaction 24: 245–71. Gross, Matthias. 2001. “Unexpected Interactions: Georg Simmel and the Observation of Nature.” Journal of Classical Sociology 1, no 3: 395–414. Hinton, Emma D., and Michael K. Goodman. 2010. “Sustainable Consumption: Devel-

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opments, Considerations, and New Directions.” In The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, 2nd ed., edited by M. Redclift and G. Woodgate, 245– 61. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Joas, Hans. 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Larrabee, Harold A. 1939. Review of The Philosophy of the Act, by George Herbert Mead. Philosophical Review 48, no. 4: 433–36. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macy, Joanna. 1996. “The Greening of the Self.” In Engaged Buddhist Reader, edited by A. Kotler, 171– 80. Berkeley: Parallax. Martin, Jack. 2005. “Perspectival Selves in Interaction with Others: Re-Reading G. H. Mead’s Social Psychology.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35, no. 3: 231–53. McKinney, John C. 1955. “The Contribution of George H. Mead to the Sociology of Knowledge.” Social Forces 34, no. 2: 144–49. Mead, George Hebert. 1909. “On the Influence of Darwin’s Origin of the Species.” Unpublished manuscript. ———. 1915. “Madison: The Passage of the University of Wisconsin Through the State Political Agitation of 1914, the Survey of William H. Allen and his Staff and the Legislative Fight of 1915, with the Indications these Offer of the Place the State University Holds in the Community.” Survey 35: 349–51. ———. 1918. “The Psychology of Punitive Justice.” American Journal of Sociology 23: 577– 602. ———. 1923. “Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences.” International Journal of Ethics 23: 229–47. ———. 1925. “The Genesis of the Self and Social Control.” International Journal of Ethics 35, no. 3: 251–77. ———. 1926. “The Objective Reality of Perspectives.” In Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, edited by E. S. Brightman, 75– 85. New York. ———. 1929a. “National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness.” International Journal of Ethics 39:385–407. ———. 1929b. “The Nature of the Past.” In Essays in Honor of John Dewey, edited by John Coss, 235–42. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Charles W. Morris, John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunham, and David L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mill, John Stuart. (1874) 1961. “Nature.” In Essential Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by M. Lerner, 367–401. New York: Bantam.

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Miller, David L. 1973. George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, Charles W., John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunham, and David L. Miller. 1938. Introduction to The Philosophy of the Act, by George Herbert Mead, vii–lxxiii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murdoch, Jonathan. 2001. “Ecologising Sociology: Actor-Network Theory, CoConstruction, and the Problem of Human Exemptionalism.” Sociology 35, no. 1: 111–33. Murphy, Raymond. 1995. “Sociology as if Nature does not Matter: An Ecological Critique.” British Journal of Sociology 46, no. 4: 688–707. ———. 2002. “Ecological Materialism and the Sociology of Max Weber.” In Sociological Theory and the Environment, edited by R. Dunlap, F. Buttel, P. Dickens, and A. Gijswijt, 73– 89. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Neeley, Elizabeth, and Mary Jo Deegan. 2005. “George Herbert Mead on Punitive Justice: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Practices.” Humanity and Society 29, no. 1: 71– 83. Norgaard, Richard B. 1995. “Beyond Materialism: A Coevolutionary Reinterpretation of the Environmental Crisis.” Review of Social Economy 43, no. 4: 475– 92. Owens, Erica. 2007. “Nonbiologic Objects as Actors.” Symbolic Interaction 30, no. 4: 567– 84. Puddephatt, Antony. 2005. “Mead has Never Been Modern: Using Meadian Theory to Extend the Constructionist Study of Technology.” Social Epistemology 19, no. 4: 357– 80. Rosa, Eugene A., and Lauren Richter. 2008. “Durkheim on the Environment: Ex Libris or Ex Cathedra? Introduction to Inaugural Lecture to a Course in Social Science, 1887–1888.” Organization and Environment 21, no. 2: 182– 87. Sanders, Clinton R. 2007. “Mind, Self, and Human-Animal Joint Action.” Sociological Focus 40, no. 3: 320–36. Shalin, Dmitri. 1991. “G. H. Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive Agenda.” In Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead, edited by M. Aboulafia, 21–56. New York: SUNY Press. Statham, Anne. 1995. “Environmental Identity: Symbols in Cultural Change.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 17: 207–40. Stets, Jan E., and Chris F. Biga. 2003. “Bringing Identity Theory into Environmental Sociology.” Sociological Theory 21, no. 4: 398–423. Sutton, Philip W. 2004. Nature, Environment, and Society. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Tester, Keith. 1991. Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights. London: Routledge. van Koppen, C. S. A. (Kris). 2000. “Resource, Arcadia, Lifeworld: Nature Concepts in Environmental Sociology.” Sociologia Ruralis 40, no. 3: 300–318. Weigert, Andrew J. 1991a. “Imagining the Environment in Transverse Interaction: Toward an Ecological Attitude.” Journal of Mental Imagery 15, no. 1 and 2): 163– 66. ———. 1991b. “Transverse Interaction: A Pragmatic Perspective on Environment as Other.” Symbolic Interaction 14, no. 3: 353– 63.

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———. 1997a. “Defi nitional and Responsive Environmental Meanings: A Meadian Look at Landscapes and Drought.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27, no. 1: 65– 91. ———. 1997b. Self, Interaction, and Natural Environment: Refocusing Our Eyesight. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Williams, Raymond. (1980) 2005. Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. London: Verso.

Ch a pter Eigh t

Social Worlds: The Legacy of Mead’s Social Ecology in Chicago Sociology Daniel Cefaï

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his paper can be read as an essay in social theory. I will focus on the concept of social world that, in many aspects, has Meadian resonances. This concept was proposed, in the 1950s and later, by Chicago sociologists including Tamotsu Shibutani (1955, 1961, 1986), Anselm Strauss (1959, 1991, 1993) and Howard S. Becker (1982, 1986, 2006). But it has much older roots in the case studies of the 1920s Chicago sociology. Ernest Burgess (1923) uses this notion in his study of delinquents, as does Frederick Thrasher (1928) in his fieldwork on gangs. Paul Cressey (1932) dedicates a chapter of his classical book on the taxi-dance hall to “an unbiased and intimate picture of [this] social world,” he says. The taxi-dance hall has its own “ways of acting, talking, and thinking,” “its own vocabulary, its own activities and interests.” It has “its own scheme of life” (1932, 31). It is a social world in itself. And in The Gold Coast and the Slum Harvey W. Zorbaugh (1929) lists a number of social worlds his research was interested in—the rooming-house district, the “Bohemia” and the “Rialto,” the upper class neighborhood, the Gold Coast, the slum, Little Sicily, and, at another scale, the school or the gang. This concept of social world was still alive thirty years later. Shibutani and Strauss, who were two of the most active promotors of Mead in the department of sociology at the University of Chicago through their courses in the 1940s and 1950s, give a defi nition of the social world as a “universe of regularized mutual response” (Shibutani 1955, 566; Strauss 1999, 233). I will examine what this defi nition involves, try to connect it with Mead’s concepts of field of experience and universe of discourse and give a couple of examples of socialization in professional worlds. We shall see that a social world can be taken as a moving web of perspectives and perspectives on perspectives, with relative closure, a casting of roles and 165

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statuses, shared idioms of participation, a distribution of rights and duties, privileges granted to the insiders, and regulation of accessibility for the outsiders. Taking part in a social world requires a sense of membership and an awareness of living together, or at least of doing things together. I will insist on joint action and its orientation to common focuses, drawing on post-World War II doctoral dissertations at the department of sociology that referred to Mead. At the same time, the properties of unity and closure of social worlds should not be overstated. In some cases, ecological barriers or conventional boundaries prevent access to outsiders and the social world conceives of itself as a well-bounded and bonded community. But as we shall see, our authors develop in the mid-1950s a notion of reference group that takes into account the multiple personality of selves and diversity of social worlds and still resonates with the cultural pluralism born thirty years earlier. Lastly, the notion of ecology is pervasive in Mead’s works, as it was in William I. Thomas’s or Robert E. Park’s and would be in Goffman’s. But these social worlds open on ecosystems that overflow their borders. Mead’s ecology is an important counterpoint in my eyes to the human ecology practiced in Chicago in the 1920s and was, in some way, lost by many of the so-called symbolic interactionists who claim Mead’s legacy. Along with Dewey, Cooley, and Park, Mead provided a specific matrix of thought “that focused on the processual and relational character of social life” and took seriously the representation of a variety of environments of selves, professions, neighborhoods, and institutions “continuously recreated in the flow of interaction” (Abbott 2007, 7). This paper is one more argument in favor of a rereading of Chicago sociology in a pragmatist perspective (Joas 1993 and 1997).

FIELDS OF EXPERIENCE, UNIVERSES OF DISCOURSE Let us start with a short ecological story. Mead describes, in “Perception and the Spatiotemporal” (1938, 184), the “intersection between the perspectives” of the farmer, the fig-tree, and the wasp. The natural histories of these three living creatures are intertwined with one another. They hang together there, with their respective temporalities and their ways of living in the same ecological niche, tapping the resources it provides and developing in the long term a web of life with the beings and elements around them. The survival of the three species in this habitat is warranted by the sociality that binds them—a sociality, Mead says, the physical objects share with social objects. These three species maintain complex relation-

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ships of cooperation and competition, mutuality and symbiosis—which sometimes change, in other settings, into parasitism and predation. Mead adds that the farmer, the fig-tree, and the wasp, as living organisms, have perspectives. These perspectives are “in the nature.” Trees and insects have therefore an immediate experience of their environment. They are exposed to it, suffer its action, and react in their own way. What distinguishes human beings is that they are granted “reflective intelligence.” This ability is characteristic of selves able to see themselves as objects, and to have inner conversations with themselves, insofar as they can take the attitudes that the others have toward them in the social process. The farmer has a direct experience, but also, unlike the wasp and the fig-tree, a reflective experience of his environment, because the system of instincts, impulses and needs that characterizes his body is not perfectly nested in its experiential habitat. And this is possible because the self takes part in a social organization, which unfolds through processes of cooperation and communication. Only humans live in social worlds. They have experiential fields and share universes of discourse—two important Meadian concepts. So, humans cannot live without defi ning the situations they meet, and in so doing, defi ning themselves and the surrounding physical and social objects. Their ability to understand and to master social situations depends on their alignment with organized or general perspectives they take for granted. Such perspectives are organized in the fi rst place because they correlate universes of discourse—a concept borrowed from logic that Mead regularly used, as did Park and the Chicago social scientists of his time. Universes of discourse are a “medium,” “milieu” and “material” of cooperation and communication processes (Mead 1934, 259– 60). I will not go into detail concerning the use of significant symbols, embodied in sets of conduct. We adopt attitudes and acquire habits. We give meaning to institutions, to things and people, to actions and events. And it’s in these universes of discourse that we share the same sense of reality, understand each other, do things together, and act in concert and make common plans. In short, we live in the same social world. I will just point out that this statement about acts of communication was embraced by many at the University of Chicago. Charles W. Morris (1925 and 1934) draws on Mead’s assumptions to invent the pragmatics of discourse. Later, Hugh D. Duncan (1962 and 1968) tries to develop a very fi ne conception of the self socialized in a communication order and addressing his performances to different audiences. To put it briefly, he synthesizes Mead’s philosophy of signs and social psychology with the semiology of Kenneth

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Burke. He shows the importance of symbols in the institution of social hierarchy and political power, developing interesting insights on authority, sex, or art as symbolic acts. Gregory Stone (1959, ii) wrote a monumental thesis on clothing appearances in symbolic transactions following Mead’s steps on natural signs but acknowledging a debt to Goffman and Warner and invoking a challenge to overcome “the unsatisfactory character of Mead’s observations for implementation in empirical research” with the testing of his twenty-seven hypotheses. How is “the self established, maintained, and transformed in appearance with particular reference to clothing”? The universes of discourse are extended into “universes of appearance” and the acts of dressing considered as “incipient, truncated, ongoing, or completed acts” (577). Finally, Erving Goffman did not halt the dialogue with Mead. But one could pinpoint a few divergences. In his dissertation on the Shetland Islands (1953) he explicitly draws on Mead in order to build up his concept of the interaction order—but he also refers to many other authors, as he does in Behavior in Public Places, where Adam Smith, Park, and Cooley are invoked in connection with the “mutuality of immediate social interaction” (Goffman 1963, 16). If the basic question is the same (How do I react to the situation and how does the society want me to respond?), Goffman’s notion of role is slightly different. On the one hand, he moves away from functionalism or culturalism when he decomposes the “systems or roles” into strings of situational involvements in “situated activity systems” which allow a role distance (Goffman 1961, 95). On the other hand, he is much closer to a Durkheimian anthropology when he insists on the many situational arrangements, encounters and gatherings, as being understood as “social occasions” (1963, 18ff.). The way Goffman describes the interaction order as a communication order (1953) owes a lot to Mead and Chicago pragmatism but in a very different way than Ralph Turner’s (1956) role theory. He takes as much from Burke or Warner, and from the 1960s on, from socio-linguistics, ethnography of communication, or from the ecology or ethology of behavior. Goffman differentiates, for example, the body idiom from Mead’s conversation of gestures (Goffman 1963, 34), he does not quote Mead, alongside James, Schütz, or Bateson in Frame Analysis (Goffman 1974), and he fights against Denzin and Keller (Goffman 1981), who, in name of “symbolic interactionism,” “have paradigms to grind” and would never lead Mead “on to the structural analysis of strategic interaction as represented, say, by Schelling” (Goffman 1981, 61 and 68). Goffman is a good example of the way Chicago sociologists read texts and picked up ideas to test them in empirical work, with no worry about faithfulness to a systematic theory.

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SOCIAL WORLDS AND REFERENCE GROUPS AS PERSPECTIVES Thus, in connection with this notion of universes of discourse, Mead had many followers among the PhD students in the 1950s. But let us go one step further. Social worlds circumscribe common fields of experience and universes of discourse. This basic idea can be found in the attempts of Shibutani, Strauss, or Becker to defi ne what a social world is. A social world is a “universe of regularized mutual response” (Shibutani 1955). This means that the involvements of the participants in a social world have a relative typicality, regularity, and predictability. Some social worlds are ephemeral, others last. Some emerge in the confrontation with an event or in response to a problem; others are more durable, organized, formalized and institutionalized. But any individual who participates in these life-worlds has to adopt the attitude of the generalized other, Mead says. Mead develops a theory of socialization to understand the involvement and membership of the self in a social world. Through interactions with others the self adopts the reference point of a field of collective experience. One slips into a perspective and assumes a role in a set of roles. This role is one of a “socialized me,” available in the repertoire one has learnt to perform. The self thus has a “multiple personality” (Mead 1934, 142) which is unified and integrated only if one has a well-organized life in a well-organized society. And this self takes up a perspective in a network of perspectives and perspectives on perspectives that keeps on transforming. This is how a social world allocates places to its participants. It settles the marks between what is possible and impossible, allowed and forbidden, right and wrong. It selects the stimuli which have a perceptual or evaluative relevance in practice. It suppresses certain impulses and tendencies to act and supports others. It organizes the concerted behavior of its participants. Let us take a Chicago- oriented example from the worlds of gangsters, thieves, and prostitutes. One of the achievements of Mead’s generation— Thomas’s and Park’s hobbyhorses—was to demonstrate that criminal behavior is not genetically inherited but learned through contacts with situations and people. One becomes a criminal through differential association, learning the techniques of the crime as well as its impulses, attitudes, motivations, and justifications. Mead tends to have a moral view. According to him, criminals are trapped in communities of “narrow diameter” (1934, 265) out of which they would not be able to escape in order to be placed under the tutelage of mores and laws of the larger community. The social scientists draw on Mead but put value judgments in brackets.

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Thieves (Sutherland 1937) or gangsters (Whyte 1943) are well-adjusted to their social world. They know reasonably well what they do, the risks they take, the laws they violate, the penalties they incur. They master some aspects of the police, judicial, and penitentiary institutions they confront. They are involved in processes of role-taking and self-control, through a dynamic of interaction with others and participation in situations. They have acquired skills that enable them to make deals and plans, recognize opportunities, and feel the dangers around them. They socialize with other thieves and gangsters who are both colleagues and friends, while dreaming of the same goals as other members of the society. In brief, they come to terms with the different situations they meet in their environment. The same is true in the social world of prostitutes. While they assimilate the perspective attached to their work, they also learn the perspective of social workers, policemen, clients, colleagues, and procurers. They establish a modus vivendi with them, know how to co-produce and codefi ne the situations in which they are involved. They respect the limits of the areas where they can venture. They know what is tolerable or unacceptable for the police and that they must maintain arrangements with them to continue the business, escape their control, or gain their protection. Even if they do not master all of the activities of these socially significant others, they know enough in practice about where they can function and what it will cost them if they do not play the game. More specifically, they can anticipate the reactions of this client or that pimp and respond to his expected reactions. In traditional communities, according to the Chicago model in Mead’s time—Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1919) Polish village or Redfield’s (1930) Mexican city of Tepoztlán—it was easier to know where a social world began and ended. The question of membership was not a real issue. Identities were quite clearly defi ned. The things are more complicated when social worlds start to multiply and become diverse. They go through internal divisions and confl icts. They accommodate perspectives that are loosely interconnected with one another. They have fuzzy boundaries and require a great variety of commitments from their members. They no longer guarantee a unique encompassing perspective; they split and generate different ways of defi ning and valuating situations. In a city like Chicago in the early twentieth century, each self takes part in many social worlds, depending on his web of group affiliations, at the intersection of multiple social circles. Here it is interesting to note that the reading of Simmel meshes with the reading of Mead in the 1950s in order to account for this cultural pluralism in mass societies. This idea is older, of course. It goes

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back to students of James, Dewey, and Santayana such as Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallen (and, in his way, Alain Locke). And if one had to mention a founding text, it would certainly be William James’s “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” ([1899] 1983), which was such a revelation to Park that he gave to all his students to read. So, most of the time, social worlds are not totally unified. They host different reference groups—from informal social networks to complex and formalized institutions, including organizations of all kinds and imagined communities. Shibutani (1955) developed this concept of reference groups, from the perspective of Chicago sociology, although it has been previously credited to Hyman and Merton at Columbia. The coexistence of multiple social worlds goes hand in hand with the cohabitation in one self of several reference groups. This situation often leads to tensions between the different me’s in one self. The self is divided into the multiple me’s that grew up during the development of the self in response to all kinds of social situations. Troubles in interactions between social worlds are experienced through “contradictions and dilemmas of status” (as Hughes [1945] said) and “identity clashes” (as Braude [1961] wrote). Park’s and E. V. Stonequist’s (1930) marginal man or Paul Siu’s (1952) sojourner are prototypes of such go-between selves. They have a capability of mutual translation between the languages and cultures of the respective social worlds they belong to. They become experts in code switching and mixing, in impression management and double dealings. These individuals also confront ethnic tensions, generation gaps, or racial conflicts in their interactions with others. Eugene Uyeki (1953) wonders what happened to Nisei when they were evacuated to relocation camps and then when they left the West Coast to settle in Chicago. He quotes Mead to ask which processes of group identification they went through in such situations of “disrupting experience of evacuation” and of loss of their “closely-knit Japanese communities” (Uyeki 1953, 253ff.). How did new self-conceptions crystallize in the flow of interactions with other ethnic groups and new social institutions? How to describe their self in the making and the many tensions between their “I” and their “me” while exploring, assimilating, and accommodating to new environments? What looms in Mead’s writings is thus the description of the superimposition or combination of multiple processes of identification with reference groups, sometimes confl icting or antagonistic. “The socialized person is a society in miniature” (Shibutani 1955, 564) in which coexists a diversity of perspectives, irreparably mismatched in a modern society—in contrast to an image of these perspectives as reciprocal reflections

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between selves, all of them emanations of a well-integrated generalized other. The coordination between perspectives in a social world and the selves who take part into it is therefore not given at the outset. It is necessarily a collective dynamic, in the making.

BUILDING UP SOCIAL WORLDS: JOINT ATTENTION AND JOINT ACTION Mead is aware of the existence of membership groups, which are relevant in a particular social world. He speaks of these “special sets of social relations” that he calls “classes or sub-groups,” determined by the social functions they fulfi ll (Mead 1934, 157). Among them, he distinguishes two kinds. On the one hand, concrete subgroups, such as parties, clubs, corporations, and associations, are made of members who are “directly related” to one another. Mead’s preferred example of this kind of sub-group is the family whose members live together; are bound by personal habits; and play roles of husband and wife, parent and child, and so on in order to fulfi ll a number of functions such as caring, feeding, educating, or protecting. And, on the other hand, abstract subgroups are made of pairs of functional relationships, as seller– buyer, driver–passenger, teacher– student, manager– employee, connected in “systems of organized responses,” that end by shaping institutions, networks, and communities. Buying and selling activities, for example, are involved in one another. Their repetition along trading chains, interwoven with one another, give existence to this functional institution, organized for specific purposes, known as the market. In the market situation, buyers and sellers adopt complementary attitudes, differentiated but integrated roles, more or less regulated by habits, partially codified by laws and other conventions. An economic value emerges in an ongoing transaction as a common perspective from which to fi x a price and seal the deal. This double axis from the more to the less concrete and direct recalls Cooley’s (1909, 23ff. and 119) distinction between primary groups and secondary groups. A social world often mixes concrete relationships, between people who know one another as persons, and abstract, more indirect relationships. Starting with this distinction, we meet, according to Shibutani, all kinds of social worlds. 1. Some are very united, with a high degree of mutual knowledge and a strong sense of collective identity, cultural uniformity, and eco-

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logical isolation (Shibutani gives as examples the underworld, the social elites or ethnic minorities). 2. There are also “loosely connected universes of special interest” (Shibutani 1955, 566) (the worlds of stamp collectors, sports fans, or the audiences gathered daily by media programs are good examples). 3. Others consist of “networks of interrelated voluntary associations” (Shibutani 1986, 110), such as the world of unionism in steel industry (Goldstein 1957) or that of anesthesiology in the medical field (Lortie 1949). They provide an organization with powerful interests and strong loyalties, prestige scales and hierarchies of values, in order to reach their goals.

Rilma Buckman was inspired by Mead and Simmel in her dissertation on women’s clubs in Lafayette, Indiana. She treats “these free-floating, and autonomous groupings of people” as an “auxiliary system of social organization, which supplements, but does not supplant, official institutional channels and procedures” (Buckman 1952, 191). Associations are, Mead would say, “complex co-operative processes and activities,” that provide the counterpoint to the “institutional functionings of the organized society” (Mead 1934, 155). Buckman (1952, 144) interprets the confl icts between club members and leaders on the one hand, and representatives of public institutions on the other, as a situation where different groups and group segments do not share common understandings since they have “developed,” she says, “different generalized others.” “Their behavior cannot be meshed together” (14). She takes as examples of such discords situations of fundraising or power regulation. The situation is even more complex, since the clubs are composed of “semi-strangers”—that is, neither intimates such as clique members nor strangers as in formal organizations. They must learn “how to get along together” and “how to belong together as a unit” (184). They have to create the social worlds of which they are the members. Buckman is interesting from another point of view. A recurrent idea in the works of Mead and Dewey is that humans associate to handle problematic situations. The latter emerge when a cognitive or moral consensus breaks down in a social world—which means that the common solutions invented to regulate the transactions of a community with its environment are no longer taken for granted. Buckman (1952, 100) proposes to take into account two kinds of problematic situations. “An emergency will be defi ned as an external challenge (such as a war or a natural disaster) which requires the speeding up of institutional operations,” the mobilization of

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resources and hiring of personnel, beyond “routine operations.” “A crisis will be defi ned as internal confl ict over some issue of local concern.” It “involves dissension,” alters the relationship between institutions and associations and calls for “policy-making meetings” to be overcome. The idea of concerted action and public discussion around a focus of collective attention transfers the pattern of reflective intelligence (Mead 1934, 90ff. and 334–35) from the individual consciousness of a life-form to the collective mind in its environment. The members of a social world in a situation of emergency or crisis align around a new common perspective: they usually remain divided and in confl ict, but they generate goals, objectives, resources, means, and identities in order to solve the problematic situation—something close to Dewey’s defi nition of the public. Such a collective dynamic around the control of a problematic situation is at the heart of many social worlds. An example: Shibutani’s PhD dissertation—he defended it in 1948, at a time when he was Blumer’s assistant—resulted from an investigation under the supervision of Dorothy S. Thomas in a displacement camp for Japanese-Americans in California. Shibutani shows how in the absence of a reliable source of information, usually official messages transmitted by the media, people in the camps have to turn themselves into problem-solvers. They conduct inquiries, speculate, tell stories. They state hypotheses they test. Sometimes, they circulate rumors, in their attempt to understand what situation they are in. A social world in a state of emergency works at restoring a field of collective experience with shared, stable, and reliable reference points. Other situations are less problematic—for example, a conglomerate of social worlds focused around a shared interest and a common goal that Howard Becker (1982) describes in Art Worlds. Becker accounts for the many operations of coordination, the bundles of tasks, and clusters of transactions involved there. He starts with the idea that society is collective activity—an idea that Mead shared with Park (Park and Burgess 1921), and Blumer (1962 and 1966) with Hughes (1971). Often, public attention is engrossed in key performances, successful artists, momentous events, and notorious works. The networks of cooperating people remain unnoticed— in particular, in art, support activities such as “sweeping up the stage and bringing the coffee, stretching and priming canvases and framing the fi nished paintings, copy editing and proofreading” (Becker 1982, 4). Becker refers for another reason to the Meadian scheme of taking the role of the other. Artists gradually shape a line of action by taking into account not only their own impulses, but also the anticipated or imagined responses of others to what they do. They might be mistaken about the others’ re-

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sponses, expectations and valuations—and very often, they are. But in the process of creation, they have to anticipate “how people will respond, emotionally and cognitively, to what they do” (Becker 1982, 200). Acting means in this case projecting oneself into fields of actual and potential responses (and responses to responses).

ECOLOGY: COMMUNICATION NETWORKS, COLLECTIVE ACTIVITIES, AND CULTURAL ASSUMPTIONS

Ecology Social worlds can thus be seen as involving joint attention and joint action. There is an additional point of view to explore: social worlds, when examined in an ecological perspective, as Mead and Dewey did, can be treated as social life-processes. They rise up, expand, and settle through the transactions between life-forms and their environment. Social organization, language, culture, intelligence, and morality are emergents in a natural evolution. “They grow up within the ongoing effort of a group to maintain itself, to secure food, and to rear children. The human animal differs from all other animals and has a different nature, but he is nevertheless an animal. He is a very wonderful animal, one who talks, thinks, aspires, and sacrifices, but still an animal” (Faris 1937, 3). The nature of the human animal is no longer determined only by its biological instincts but by social instincts—nature is nurture—operating in social environments. This ecological dimension of social life was somewhat forgotten by the heirs of Mead, who have focused on the dynamics of self-identification and face-to-face interaction and neglected a central idea in Chicago sociology in the 1920s. Social interaction does not exclusively take place between selves but between people, objects, and situations and, beyond that, between groups, cultures, and environments. Any social world is an ecological niche. A Catholic parish in Montreal (Verdet 1959), a colony of southern hillbillies on Chicago’s West Side (Killian 1949), or a black community in Alabama who left cotton fields to breed cattle (Adams 1953) have carved their environment while adapting to the constraints and resources that were available there. Human society is not quite the same as populations of plants or animals. It transforms a natural environment into a social and cultural world. It has a significantly higher capacity, by the operation of the social mind, to generate its own web of life, with its experiencing subjects and experienced objects. Meanwhile, Mead invites us not to study the social worlds as self-

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sufficient. Social worlds are located at the intersection of several ecosystems. If we go back to Mead’s example, slightly modified, the ecosystem beekeeper-honeybee-fig-tree is itself an element of a biocenosis—that is, an ecosystem of interconnected ecosystems. The bee is attached to a swarm, itself in competition with different species of bee swarms; it is dependent on populations of pollen or nectar plants; it fights to keep predators away from its hive; it occupies some place in the food chain and pollinizes the plants it forages. The fig-tree is attached to the soil where it grows, it depends on groundwater, sun, and frost to survive; it needs a symbiosis with blastophage wasps to be fertile, and with ladybugs to get rid of fl ies, aphids, and spiders. Lastly, the beekeeper is attached to his land and those who work on it. He buys protective suits, hives, or smokers from manufacturers. He depends on the cooperatives with which he is in business to sell his honey but also on the stock exchange, agribusiness corporations, and agricultural unions. Finally, he is affected by the surrounding crops and the kind of seeds and chemicals used by his fellow farmers. We can draw several conclusions from this ecological view. The web of perspectives and perspectives on perspectives that make the social world extends well beyond the face-to-face interactions of its immediate members. It incorporates the perspectives of all the living-forms (bees and trees) which are part of it—including the arrangements of objects that order these perspectives. A social world is not a well bounded and bonded community enclosed on itself but a “blooming, buzzing, confusion,” to borrow a phrase from William James (1890, 488). At the same time, this meshing of multiple perspectives that does not stop changing shape, size, or composition has material grounds. The participants in a social world often have to build up equipment and facilities. They manufacture and maintain tools and instruments. They collect and generate resources for investments, wages, and salaries. They gather competences, recruit members, and teach and train them. They organize and monitor the division of labor, and the distribution of powers, rights, and responsibilities. If they want this organization to last, they have to stabilize joint activities through agreements and conventions that regulate the processes of coordination, cooperation, and competition (Becker 1982, 2ff.). And they incorporate forms of experience, symbolization, and communication into institutions—that turn themselves into matrices of world-making. Mead’s ecology helps us rethink the place of objects, a task that was neglected by symbolic interactionism.

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Cultural Areas Another interesting point concerns the so-called culture. The multiple fields of experience and universes of discourse that occur in a social world are constantly changing. They last thanks to sets of knowledge and bodies of habits that organize the social life-process. They can be taken, in the transactions between selves and between the selves and their environment, as the results of experience tests. Social worlds are environments of collective experience and activity in which perspectives have turned common and stable. These shared perspectives are called cultures (Redfield is constantly quoted by Shibutani, Strauss, or Becker—note that Redfield had access to Mead and Dewey in the coursework he took with Faris). Culture is this interweaving of organized, stabilized, and communalized perspectives that are embedded in the environment where human animals live, move, and orient themselves. Participants in a social world learn to master culture through its uses. They discover in practice the recurrent and common configurations of meanings and values. Culture consists in this organized body of “conventional understandings, manifest in act and artifact, that characterize societies” (Redfield 1941, 132–33). It is not a system of representations in people’s heads but a set of premises of action given in the situation out there, in signs and symbols, arrangements of objects and patterns of action, that the people have the capacity to understand spontaneously. Harry Stack Sullivan (1953, 224) used to speak of a process of “consensual validation” to describe the continuous work of formulation and confi rmation of hypotheses in the give-and-take of interpersonal transactions. But the experience testing on which this continuing process of transformation and ratification of perspectives depends bears not only upon face to face interactions but also upon technological, symbolic, institutional activities. The culture of a social world can be defi ned as a common set of assumptions or hypotheses that emerged through collective creativity (Joas 1996) and stood the test, became “common property” (Mead 1934, 41), and are taken for granted until further notice in “experiential transactions” (Mead 1934, 41) with others and with situations. In a similar way, Becker, Geer, Hughes, and Strauss (1961) defi ne the culture of medical students in Kansas City in Boys in White as a corpus of available defi nitions of situations (see also Hughes 1971, 32). These defi nitions incorporate responses to a number of problems encountered by students, partly transmitted from generation to generation, partly discovered or reinvented by each generation. The meaning ascribed to configurations

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of acts, gestures, or words can be challenged by the emergence of new practical beliefs. For example, what was treated as criminal or psychopathic becomes normal in a new repertoire of social roles. A good part of the sociology of deviance, from the 1950s on, used Mead to develop conceptions of subcultures, shared by communities of deviants, inventing their own fields of experience and universes of discourse, and living in some kinds of counter- or under-worlds. On the contrary, some premises of action can last in the social life-process, in the denial of reality tests or value tests. A good part of cultural perspectives takes place on an “imaginary scene” (Mead 1934, 375) and is not changed by this collective process of discussion, inquiry, and experiment.

Networks of Communication An idea shared by Cooley, Dewey, Mead, Sapir, and Park is that cultural perspectives are related not only to networks of activities but also to “networks of communication” (Sapir 1951). A social world, as an ecological niche, exists only in and through communication. Cultural perspectives are formed through their dissemination and maintenance through communication channels. The boundaries of a social world are those of its network of communication and the participants and audiences it reaches—an idea that Park (1922) developed early in his research on the publics of the press. I pass over here Mead’s critique of Cooley’s mistake of considering the relation between selves “in terms of mental processes”; Mead says he agrees instead with the “behavioristic” analyses of “W. I. Thomas, Park and Burgess, and Faris” (Mead 1930, 697, 705) which anchor the self and mind dynamics in “primitive forms of behavior.” A social world is the “interweaving and interworking of behavioral selves” (to paraphrase Cooley [1927, 200], who writes “mental selves” and not “behavioral selves”), through which they form networks of communication. I also pass over the discussion that was making its way in the 1920s on animal cultures and the capacity of certain species to exchange significant symbols and live in cultural environments. “Society exists not only by transmission, by communication, but in transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication” (Dewey 1916, 5). But this communication—between groups and within a group—should not be taken only in the sense of a social process of reciprocity, on an equal footing. It can cover all kinds of relationships of asymmetry and control, subordination and violence. Mead opens interesting avenues. First, the

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existence of cultural areas is often associated with parochialism—this ethnocentric attitude at the basis of religious wars (Mead 1934, 280–81) or nationalistic wars (207, 270ff.). The plurality of functional groups and thus the diversity of their interests generate “complex social antagonisms” between individuals and groups “lacking the coordinating, integrating, unifying influence of common social ends and motives” (Mead 1934, 323). Mead on the one hand was driven by ethical considerations which led him to call “social” friendly impulses, attitudes, and relations and “antisocial” the hostile ones. But besides this drawing of a picture of the “ideal society” (Mead 1934, 317ff.), Mead was on the other hand aware that some social worlds assert their superiority over other worlds (e.g., nations [Mead 1934, 207]) when they do not impose on them subjugation and administration (284– 90). Mead, while believing in an ideal of mutual intelligibility and peaceful reconciliation, also had a keen sense of opposition and confl ict between social worlds. His position is compatible with Thomas’s and Park’s, when they explored the ecology of interactions between cultural areas and discovered processes of isolation and segregation, hybridization, amalgamation or annexation, accommodation and assimilation, competition and consensus.

CONCLUSION Little room is left to account for how Mead’s working hypotheses were reelaborated by the Chicago sociology PhD students, especially in research on self-experiences and identities and professional careers in the 1950s. Anselm Strauss was instrumental, after Faris and Blumer, in carrying this legacy, while he was an Assistant Professor at the department from 1952 to 1958. He was teaching a social psychology inspired by Mead and Dewey— an influence obvious in the manual he co-edited with Alfred Lindesmith (1949) and in Mirrors and Masks (Strauss 1959). Mead was a central reference among Hughes’s students’ dissertations on the professional worlds of insurance agents, doctors and dentists, janitors, lawyers, teachers, and funeral directors. One might remember how Melville Dalton (1949) and Donald Roy (1952), famous for their ethnographic descriptions based on participant observation, drew on Mead and Dewey to explain how operators of industrial machines restrict their output, or how superintendents master their environment and build up their careers. And Leonard Cottrell and Nelson Foote (1955), borrowing from Mead as well as from Harry Stack Sullivan, attempted to imagine profi les of families and social agencies apt to develop personal and interpersonal competences.

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Of course, as Dan Huebner has shown (2014, chap. 7), much the same happened in these cases: only short parts of Mead’s work became indispensable and came to be quoted and commented on. But the metamorphosis of Mead into a classic was then completed. The reception of Mead has not weakened since. He remained a central reference in American sociology in the 1960s, even more than before with the rise of symbolic interactionism, and his fame migrated to Germany and France, at least, where pragmatism met hospitable lands. The concept of social world might sound too shallow for many researchers. But this “perspective” (Strauss 1991) was developed empirically, as we saw, by Becker (1982) who described how large chains of association and cooperation, mediated by conventions or standards of doing and thinking, converge and combine in the production of art works. And it was put to the test by Strauss and his team (Strauss et al. 1964) in their inquiry on psychiatric institutions, the fi rst fruits of what would become a sociology of negotiated orders. An idea which had a strong Meadian and Deweyan flavor but came from Hughes’s students was the scheme of new professional segments coming to light through the collective activity of people unsatisfied with the professional jurisdiction on which they depended (Bucher and Strauss 1961). This idea follows from the Chicago conception of processes of disorganization and reorganization as well as of collective behavior: it was pervaded with a pragmatist sense of emergence and creativity. One could go further and recall what Mead used to say about social reform: “In the social world we must recognize the working hypothesis as the form into which all theories must be cast as completely as in the natural sciences. The highest criterion that we can present is that the hypothesis shall work in the complex of forces into which we introduce it” (Mead 1899–1900, 369). Confronting problematic situations, here and now, the people concerned have to switch to a “reflective consciousness applied to conduct”: they build up hypotheses in order to test them according to an “experimental method”; they organize the transition to a “non-problematic future,” readjusting the world through “co-operative enterprises” that select and orient the collective attention toward the defi nition and resolution of a social problem (Mead 1934, 156–57). This process implies discussion, inquiry, and experimentation in order to determine, clarify, check, and express what the problem is (Dewey 1938). Quite often, it requires a “reconstruction of the past” (Mead 1932, 2) in order to attribute bundles of causes and to ascribe chains of responsibility to the problematic situation. And it gives rise, when it succeeds at fi nding durability over time, to a dynamic of institutionalization. The social act of dealing

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with a problematic situation, testing hypotheses, fi nding solutions, mobilizing resources, gathering actors, and valuating ends-in-view takes an “institutional form” (Mead 1934, 167): it generates “a common response on the part of all members of the community to a particular situation” (261). Usually, the public arena that mushrooms around the problematic situation has roots in different social worlds, the experiential fields of which have been troubled. It is distributed on different public stages, addressed to different audiences, anchored in different collective or institutional environments, in which different clusters of actors struggle around the issue that has come under public attention. And this public arena is not only embedded in pre-existent social worlds, it generates itself a conglomerate of new social worlds. Complemented with human ecology, this perspective on social worlds could be extended to a political analysis of publics and public problems (Dewey 1927; Cefaï 2014). This would be then a good point of departure for a sociology of democracy.

REFERENCES Abbott, Andrew. 2007. “Mechanisms and Relations.” Sociologica 2: 1–21. Adams, Samuel C. 1953. The Changing Organization of a Rural Negro Community and Its Implications for Race Accommodation. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1986. Doing Things Together. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2006. “Dialogue sur les notions de monde et de champ.” With Alain Pessin. Sociologie de l’art 8: 165–80. Becker, Howard, Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes, and Anselm Strauss. 1961. Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1962. “Society as Symbolic Interaction.” In Human Behavior and Social Processes, edited by A. Rose, 179– 92. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———.1966. “Sociological Implications of the Thought of George Herbert Mead” and “Reply.” American Journal of Sociology 71, no. 5: 535–44 and 547–48. Braude, Lee. 1961. The Rabbi: A Study of the Relation of Contingency Situations to Differential Career Structure. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Bucher, Rue and Anselm Strauss. 1961. “Professions in Process.” American Journal of Sociology 66, no. 4: 325–34. Buckman, Rilma O. 1952. Interaction between Women’s Clubs and Institutions in Greater Lafayette, Indiana. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Burgess, Ernest W. 1923. “The Study of the Delinquent as a Person.” American Journal of Sociology 28, no. 6: 657– 80.

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Cefaï, Daniel. 2014. “Public, socialisation et politisation: relire Dewey à l’épreuve de Mead.” In La théorie sociale de George Herbert Mead, edited by Alexis Cukier and Eva Debray, 342– 68. Lormont: Le Bord de l’Eau. Cooley, Charles H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1909. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1927. Life and the Student. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cottrell, Leonard S., Jr., and Nelson Foote. 1955. Identity and Interpersonal Competence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cressey, Paul. 1932. The Taxi- Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dalton, Melville. 1949. A Study of Informal Organization among the Managers of an Industrial Plant. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1927. The Public and its Problems. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1929. Experience and Nature. London: George Allen & Unwin. ———. 1931. “George Herbert Mead.” Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 12: 309–14. ———. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Dewey, John, Addison W. Moore, Harold C. Brown, George H. Mead, Boyd H. Bode, Henry W. Stuart, James H. Tufts, and Horace M. Kallen. 1917. Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. New York: Henry Holt. Duncan, Hugh D. 1962. Communication and Social Order. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1968. Symbols in Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Faris, Ellsworth. 1937. The Nature of Human Nature and Other Essays in Social Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill. Goffman, Erving. 1953. Communication Conduct in an Island Community. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. ———. 1961. “Role Distance.” In Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction, 85–152. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. ———. 1963. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press. ———. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1981. “A Reply to Denzin and Keller.” Contemporary Sociology 10, no. 1: 60– 68. Goldstein, Bernard. 1957. Unions for Technical Professionals: A Case Study. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Huebner, Daniel R. 2014. Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hughes, Everett C. 1945. “Dilemmas and Contradictions of Status.” American Journal of Sociology 50, no. 5: 353–59. ———. 1971. The Sociological Eye. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. London: Macmillan.

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———. (1899) 1983. “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” In Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joas, Hans. 1993. “Pragmatism in American Sociology.” In Pragmatism and Social Theory, 14–51. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. “George Herbert Mead and the Renaissance of American Pragmatism in Social Theory.” In Reclaiming the Sociological Classics: The State of the Scholarship, edited by C. Camic. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Lindesmith, Alfred R., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1949. Social Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Lortie, Dan C. 1949. Doctors Without Patients: The Anesthesiologist A New Medical Specialist. MA thesis. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Mead, George Herbert. 1899–1900. “The Working Hypothesis in Social Reform.” American Journal of Sociology 5: 367–71. ———. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Edited by A. E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by M. H. Moore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by C. W. Morris in collaboration with J. M. Brewster, A. M. Dunham, and D. L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1964. Selected Writings. Edited by A. J. Reck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Morris, Charles W. 1934. Preface and introduction to Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, by G. H. Mead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. Symbolism and Reality: A Study in the Nature of Mind. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamin’s. Park, Robert E. 1922. The Immigrant Press and its Control. New York: Harper and Brothers. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Redfield, Robert. 1930. Tepoztlán a Mexican Village: A Study in Folk Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1941. The Folk Culture of Yucatán. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roy, Donald. 1952. Restriction of Output by Machine Operators in a Piecework Machine Shop: A Preliminary Analysis. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Sapir, Edward. 1951. “Communication.” In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 3, edited by E. R. A. Seligman and A. Johnson, 78– 80. New York: Macmillan. Shibutani, Tamotsu. 1948. The Circulation of Rumors as a Form of Collective Behavior. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. ———. 1955. “Reference Groups as Perspectives.” American Journal of Sociology 60: 522–29.

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———. 1961. Society and Personality: An Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1986. Social Processes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Siu, Paul. 1953. The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Stone, Gregory. 1959. Clothing and Social Relations: A Study of Appearance in the Context of Community Life. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Stonequist, Everett V. 1930. The Marginal Man: A Study in the Subjective Aspects of Culture. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, the University of Chicago. Strauss, Anselm. 1959. Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. Glencoe: Free Press. ———. 1991. “A Social World Perspective.” in Creating Sociological Awareness, 233–44. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ———. 1993. Continual Permutations of Action. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Strauss, Anselm, Leonard Schatzman, Rue Bucher, Danuta Ehrlich, and Melvin Sabshin. 1964. Psychiatric Ideologies and Institutions. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Sullivan, Harry S. 1953. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W. W. Norton. Sutherland, Edwin H. 1937. The Professional Thief. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. 1918. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Boston: Richard G. Badger. Thrasher, Frederick. 1928. “How to Study the Boys’ Gang in the Open.” Journal of Educational Sociology 1, no. 5: 244–54. Turner, Ralph. 1956. “Role-Taking, Role Standpoint, and Reference- Group Behavior.” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 4: 316–28. Uyeki, Eugene S. 1953. Process and Patterns of Nisei Adjustment to Chicago. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Verdet, Paule. 1959. Interethnic Problems of a Roman Catholic Parish: A FrenchCanadian Institution and Its Bilingual Membership. PhD diss. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. Whyte, William F. 1943. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zorbaugh, Harvey W. 1929. The Gold Coast and the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter Nine

Mead, Whitehead, and the Sociality of Nature Michael L. Thomas

T

he emergence of several new philosophical movements including object-oriented ontology (Bryant et al. 2011), constructivism (Stengers 2011; Latour 2005 and 2008), and new realism (Gabriel 2013; Ferraris 2014) have renewed interest in the constructed nature of reality. Particularly in Stengers, Latour, and Gabriel, the interest is in how we might understand the construction of facts in a way that sheds light on their role in orienting human experience. In each case, we are asked to acknowledge that the objective nature of facts does not make thought sovereign over lived experience. Thought begins with experience and plays a role in directing individual and collective perspectives to experience the world in a certain way. Central to this new research is an increased interest in the work of Alfred North Whitehead, whose ideas have contributed to the fi rst two movements, and the American pragmatists. Notably absent from the discussion is George Herbert Mead, whose posthumously published essays The Philosophy of the Present develop the notion of sociality to account for objectivity of individual perspectives and the role of knowledge in the structure of social relations. In his prefatory remarks to The Philosophy of the Present, Dewey notes how these concerns became central to his work, and drew him to consider Whitehead’s philosophy: His sense of the role of subjective consciousness in the reconstruction of objects as experienced and in the production of new customs and institutions was surely the thing which lead him to his extraordinarily broad and accurate knowledge of the historical development of the sciences . . . The nature of his problem was such, as one can readily see, to make him acutely sensitive to the doctrines of Whitehead, especially the effort to include matters usually relegated to an exclusively subjec185

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tive realm within the constitution of nature itself. Since his problem was (and that long before the words “emergent evolution” were heard), essentially that of the emergence of the new and its ultimate incorporation in a recognized now old world, one can appreciate how much more fundamentally he took the doctrine of emergence than have most of those who have played with the idea. Against this background his generalization of the idea of “sociality” and his interpretation of emergence in evolution take on a meaning which they do not otherwise have. (Mead 1932, xxxviii)

Mead turns to Whitehead due to their shared aim of bridging the gap between subjective experience and objective reality which, they believe, has caused a rift between idealist and positivist theories of reality that dominate the sciences. For Whitehead and Mead, this distinction rests on a bifurcation of nature that splits reality between its subjective and objective components. The bifurcation of nature is the tendency to substitute the facts of science for the phenomena they are meant to describe. It primarily occurs in positivist methodologies (which limit knowledge to discussion of clearly defi ned empirical relations) or idealist positions (that posit the existence of non-physical mental reality) as the heart of philosophical and scientific research. Rather than yield to this bifurcation, each of these thinkers attempts to present reality as a temporal, constructive process in which the subjectivity of individuals is as objectively real as the “external world” and plays a role in its construction. In his earlier works, Mead responds to this problem by arguing that the objectivity of individual perspectives is secured by the development of mind through social processes (Mead 1927). On this account, individual human perspectives are developed in a social context through which one comes to participate in a common perspective, formed by the intersection of the perspectives of others. In a family, for example, the perspective of the child develops by mimicking the actions of their family members and taking on certain responsibilities that integrate them into the family unit. Through this process, the child learns to take the role of others—that is, to anticipate the actions of their family members and bring these considerations to bear on their own action. Through this process, the child develops her own individual perspective, which owes its objectivity to the field of accepted meanings she comes to inhabit as a member of her family. The individual self emerges in nature, as it evolves through an intersubjective engagement with others. The essays that compose The Philosophy of the Present consider the

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temporal dimension of sociality as intersubjectivity, which leads Mead to the work of Alfred North Whitehead.1 Throughout the text Mead attempts to articulate his own theory of emergence that might serve as a point of synthesis between individual human consciousness, social consciousness of the whole, and the process of nature itself. For Mead, the temporality of perspectives, and reality, links them together in a shared movement from a common past to a future shaped by their present encounters. By adding this temporal dimension, he is able to enrich his account of experience as action with an analysis of the temporal phases of the act and also to link mind and world through the multiple spatiotemporal systems in which individuals participate. By taking this approach, Mead brings sociality to bear on the social sciences as a form of investigation that seeks to explain the incorporation of individual perspectives into a larger whole and seeks to transform reality relative to shifts in these perspectives. This is an essential problem for Mead as he sees the social sciences as positioned to shape social relations through the production of knowledge based on its concern with the intersection of individuals and communities. The notion of the objective reality of perspectives is the locus of this problem, as it positions individuals in a wider social field which knowledge affects and shapes, changing the perspective of the world and the institutions that follow from it. This means that, for Mead, human society is not a given that can be reduced to a determined natural process or decided based on a particular understanding; rather, it is a constructive process that is determined by the way in which human beings individually and collectively navigate the systems of reality that compose their world. Whitehead’s oeuvre has a similar question at its core—namely, how we can use discussions of human society in the sciences, religion, philosophy, and the social sciences to understand the role played by process, or emergence, in each and to construct a perspective that takes the creative advance as a necessary element of life seen through each of these lenses. In his later work, especially Modes of Thought and Adventures of Ideas, this turns into an attempt to present a set of general notions that describe the interaction of individual perspectives and the external world through aesthetic experience. In this regard, Whitehead retains many of the metaphysical concepts he develops in Process and Reality and his other works but recasts them in terms of values that guide the construction of individual identities and investigations of the external world. This connection clarifies how individual experience is animated by its relations to other human and nonhuman entities and the way in which experience always

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seeks expression beyond the particular perspective of a given historical epoch—in other words, how the construction of the self and science are involved in the production of novel futures. In this essay, I aim to bring these concerns of the late Whitehead to bear on Mead’s function analysis in order to lay the foundation for a theory of action that takes advantage of both of their strengths. Whitehead and Mead are each concerned with the cultivation of creativity and the construction of a common world, and their different levels of intervention provide a point of synthesis between empirical analysis and speculative thought. Mead’s functionalism leads him to intervene at the level of the scientific understanding of reality and the use of the experimental method to guide responsible social research towards programs of social reform. For Whitehead, the goal is to interrogate more general presuppositions of thought to animate the value of creativity in individual perspectives and the perspectives of the whole. His focus on experience as a form of communication in Modes of Thought shifts the discussion to the aesthetics of a common world that animates a feeling of the creativity of the whole. By comparing the concepts of the present, sociality, and the common world discussed by both thinkers, we should be able to develop novel questions of the role of social sciences in creating social change and the function of the sciences in cultivating the creativity of action: a union of both projects which treats society as a creative endeavor.

MEAD, TEMPORALITY, AND SOCIALITY Mead’s notion of sociality shifts in his later works from a particular view of the intersubjectivity of human perspectives to a more general view of the relativity of perspectives found in nature.2 At this stage in his work, Mead has been able to build an account of human sociality based on its development from more general processes of animal communication and interaction. The philosophy of temporality developed in The Philosophy of the Present bolsters this account by shifting from an understanding of experience as an intersection between private entertainment of the objective world and the world itself to a process of interpretation in which the world and experience are intertwined. The notions of the past and future relative to the present provide an explanation of the givenness of the world presented to experience and the contingency of ordering present relations for the future. These notions also provide the basis for an understanding of consciousness as a form of interpretation of the external world that reacts on that world, changing our interaction with it and altering this structure.

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From this understanding of temporality, Mead can argue that new pasts and new futures are constructed in the present. This process of construction helps to explain the creativity of action and how this creativity can advance scientific knowledge. The notion of sociality, “the ability to be many things at once” (Mead 1932, 40), has two aspects that ground it in the evolution of nature. Its fi rst aspect is that individual perspectives are social to the extent that they are temporally located in an evolving present. An individual’s private perspective is not singular and tied to the present as given; rather, it involves a projection of the present into the past and future, allowing one to inhabit three systems at once. The central argument of The Philosophy of the Present is that “reality exists in a present” (Mead 1932, 1). Reality, in the sense we use the term, is always in the present tense, both in the activity of entities in the world and with respect to past and future activity. Setting the present as our temporal point of reference ensures that our view of reality maintains the temporal quality of passage that is subjectively experienced and assumed in our understanding of the external world. In addition, it shifts the emphasis of knowledge about reality away from the cognition of qualities of nature to consciousness of the activity taking place in present events. Relative to the present, the past and future are not real; they function as limits of the present that contribute to its character. They are incorporated in the present in the determinations of emergence and future ends that shape the means sought out. The settled past provides the sense of “irrevocability” which we sense in past activity understood as data (Mead 1932, 2). The future exists as what is to be determined in the present, providing a field of ends to be achieved. Through their relation to the present, the past and future provide a point of coherence between determination and emergence that links them both in the interpretive process that characterizes the present. For Mead, “we orient ourselves not with reference to the past which was a present within which the emergent appeared, but in such a restatement of the past as conditioning the future that we may control its reappearance” (15). In other words, the past does not exist relative to the present as a simple determination; it is reinterpreted in the present given the aims of the entity in question. Something similar occurs relative to the future. The orientation towards not yet achieved ends gives the present its purposiveness and alters the way in which the past and present are incorporated into a moment of experience. Taken together, this temporal account of experience bolsters Mead’s understanding of experience as a form of action, giving it a fully processual dimension that involves it in the evolution of reality. It combines the

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sense of passage in the present, the feeling of the irrevocability of the past, and the anticipation of the future, while maintaining a space for the creativity of the present. In other words, the subjective experience of time and events is reflected in the very passage of nature, and the passage of nature provides the condition for human consciousness of it. The second aspect of sociality integrates the temporal interpenetration of individual perspectives into the structure of nature itself. On a view governed by the mind-world distinction, one approaches the external world as a collection of individual entities that can be fully described in terms of the abstractions used to categorize them. By shifting to a processoriented view of reality, Mead presents reality as a negotiation between individuals and the worlds that they compose. Mead grounds this view in the relationship between organism and environment: I have indicated that we fi nd in the living form an individual thing that maintains itself through the mutual determination of the form and its environment. The surrounding world is so related to the animal or plant by their sensitivity and response that the life process continues. Over against the animal the world is one of food, shelter, protection, or their opposites. Over against the inanimate thing the surroundings do not exhibit characters that answer to the action of the thing in being what it is. A boulder is a defi nite thing with its own mass and form, but its relations to things about it do not give rise in qualities in them which through the contacts, weight, or momentum of the bolder conserve the bolder. The boulder has no environment in the sense in which the animal has an environment. (Mead 1932, 34)

The relationship between organism and environment shows that the experience of temporality by living creatures allows their action to purposively reconstruct their environments. The distinction drawn between the environments of living things and those of the nonliving emphasizes that life involves a process of aim-driven construction on the part of organisms in order to preserve themselves and flourish. This means they must be analyzed in a different way than purely physical objects. While the activity of nonliving objects can be reduced to their physical characteristics, the activity of living things changes their character relative to the environment they inhabit and changes the environment itself. While living things are also physical things, with regard to their life process, “plants and animals . . . present to science objects whose essential characters are found not in that which undergoes transformation but in the process itself and in

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the forms which the object assumes within that process” (Mead 1932, 34). If we seek to abandon either a materialist conceptual framework or a fully idealist interpretation of reality, we have to attend to the way in which living things process their environment, altering themselves and the world around them. The physical characteristics of things, the data of the past, provide the conditions to which living things are expected to conform, but there is room for individual expression in the way this conformity takes place. The problem is ensuring that emergent qualities are not ignored in the persistent attention to the regularity of details. 3 Through these two developments, the sociality of perspectives captures the way in which human beings, animals, and even objects develop through interactions with their surroundings and others. This relationality has implications both for our understanding of nature and for the objectivity of knowledge. The shift to seeing entities in terms of their temporal relations creates a space to begin to examine the emergence of novel behaviors and characteristics that alter the qualities of nature. The active nature of this process (its temporality) means that we cannot be content with descriptions of the past contained in facts but must attend to the way in which the facts also participate in this constructive process. This connection poses a new problem as the relativity of perspectives has to be located in the world in such a way that they can be said to be objectively present. The notion of the past developed in Mead’s theory of temporality accounts for the givenness of the external world, but Mead still requires a notion of objectivity that makes knowledge of the world adequate to what is perceived. The notion of sociality answers this problem by making science and other fields of knowledge a part of a larger communicative process in which we come to know the world in concert with other knowers. In other words, mind is social in a way that is consistent with the order of nature. By making objectivity a function of the passage of nature, Mead believes he has furnished a view of knowledge that secures the veracity of individual perspectives in light of a more universal perspective in which individuals participate.

SOCIALITY AND SOCIAL CHANGE The notion of sociality developed throughout The Philosophy of the Present allows Mead to present a view of the sociality of science itself. As Joas (1985) points out, this description moves beyond the idea that science is thoroughly intersubjective. The “dialectic of particularity and universality, of individuality and sociality” (206) that takes place in science, com-

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bined with the embeddedness of thought in nature, lays the foundation for a theory of science that follows from his sociology. I read this connection in Mead’s work as a pathway towards understanding how novel occurrences of thought lead to novel forms of life.4 At the heart of his analysis is the desire to generate a view of the social sciences as a tool for constructing a common world. The site of this construction is the interaction of individual perspectives with a wider field of experience produced in a universal form through social scientific research. The notion of role taking is essential at this stage as it bridges the gap between experience of the social world with the process of specialized forms of knowledge that analyze it. These two poles reflect different forms of the process of world building. The formal similarity between the two gives us a way of relating individual experience of a common world (the data of social science) with a general analysis of that world that gives us a formal (universal) description of its features. The relationship between these two forms of encountering the world provides a site of reflexive activity that links social knowledge and social life. Intersubjectivity, taking the role of the other, plays a central role in the construction of the commons. The ability to take the role of the other is not bounded by an individual cognitive understanding of the activity of other human and nonhuman entities; rather, it involves putting oneself in the positions of others relative to oneself. The sociality of individual experience involves both the ability to see things in their past and potential relations and to understand entities in terms of their ongoing activity. These features of experience extend analysis beyond a simple interpretation of the actions of others to an ideation of their activity that characterizes the present as a field for entertaining possibilities. Mead’s analysis demonstrates how human intelligence arises through the ability to see possibilities in this way and how the sociality of intelligence ties our epistemic understanding of communication and thought to an ethical context that guides the goals of the act. Thus, consciousness involves both intelligence and sensitivity to one’s surroundings. The reconstructive process of the present involves the individual (1) feeling the world through their perspective, (2) playing the roles of others in constructing that perspective, and (3) producing an action that expresses the individuality of this perspective in harmony with the social context of the act. As I will show in the next section, this reading of Mead draws his work closer to Whitehead’s and provides a point of departure to combine their respective approaches. Following the analysis of organism and environment, Mead presents the connection between individual experience and experience of the whole

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in terms of the evolution of intelligence in living forms. Again, what separates the living from the nonliving is the capacity to project oneself into the perspectives of others and adjust one’s behavior accordingly. This process of adjustment is a process of communication through which the individual is able to draw others into its own perspective and organize a response to the whole that changes its contours. The ability to halt action for the entertainment of possibilities is the primary characteristic of living consciousness, which mirrors the procedure of experimental science. Knowledge is not then to be identified with the presence of content in experience. There is no conscious attitude that is as such cognitive. Knowledge is a process in conduct that so organizes the field of action that delayed and inhibited responses may take place. The test of the success of the process of knowledge, that is, the test of truth, is found in the discovery of construction of such objects that will mediate our conflicting and checked activities and allow conduct to proceed. . . . Reflection is the operation of inference in the field of ideation, i.e., the functioning as symbols of contents and characters of things, by means of which constructions of objects sought can be carried out. (Mead 1932, 68)

This bridge between action and knowledge is reflected in the fact that meaning and ideation are not simply elements of the mind but a part of the interaction between organism and environment. Meaning reflects the activity of the environment relative to the organism, while ideation reflects the responses of the organism to its environment (1932, 4). The field of ideation and meaning creates a bridge between worldly activity and mental activity in the form of reflection, an arresting of action in which new meanings and ideations spring forth from changes in the environment itself. This connection hinges on the ability of individuals to select aspects of its environment relative to the aims of action:5 Selection undoubtedly lies in the living form, but such a form can only live in a physical environment of a defi nite sort. Living processes include active relationships with objects in an environment, and conscious living processes also include such objects. The response of the organism to its own response to food undoubtedly lies within the organism, but only as a part of a whole process of eating that includes also the food. To confi ne consciousness to the response of the organism to its food is not only to take it out of its setting but also to fail to recognize that it is only one phase of the eating. . . . Life becomes

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conscious at those points at which the organism’s own responses enter as part of the objective field to which it reacts. (Mead 1932, 73)

Through this example we see, fi rst, that taking the world into oneself is a conscious process insofar as an organism sees itself objectively (as another) in the field of ideation populated by other entities. This objectification of the self with others provides the ground for an understanding of the individual self as social (involving both its present responses and an evaluation of its responses as past data) and the importation of the self into a larger ideational field that evaluates actions in terms of its place within a common world. Thus, sociality involves the importation of the external world into the reflective consciousness of individuals involved in a social act. Second, we see that taking the role of the other relates the individual to a field of past conduct and future possibilities for action that gives reflection and action a temporal sway. Action is not simply determined by the past; the constitution of an act in the present changes the way the world is idealized and evokes novel responses in the world, which emerge in the subsequent present. From this position, Mead is able to generate a preliminary view of a common world through the contention that the world of experience is not confi ned to a single individual; rather, it extends to other selves with the same capacity of idealizing the world in their experience and activity. Therefore, the existence of a common world depends on the capacity to incorporate these other perspectives into one’s own and thus expand from an experience of the self as other to the self in reference to a generalized other in which other perspectives are actively involved. For the structure of human societies, this occurs in the form of communication. There remains the mechanism by which the individual living his own life in that of the group is placed in the attitude of taking the role of another. That mechanism is, of course, that of communication. . . . Communication as I shall use it always implies the conveyance of meaning; and this involves the arousal in one individual of the attitude of the other, and his response to these responses. The result is that the individual may be stimulated to play various parts in the common process in which all are engaged, and can therefore face various futures which these different roles carry with them, in fi nally reaching the form that his own will take. Thus the life of the community to which he belongs

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becomes a part of his experience in a higher sense than would be possible for a differentiated organ within an organic whole. (Mead 1932, 84)

The physical “arousal” of the attitudes of others in the self extends communication beyond the mere statement of propositions of one’s perspective to a felt experience of existing as one among others. This sense of the self as intermeshed with a society provides the empirical basis for a common world that is not only stated in poetry, speeches, and theories, but felt in the process of individual experience as a guiding force for activity. If we extend this analysis of individual experience to a consideration of the experience of the whole, we have a global process in which the present is understood in the context of a wider history that is reinterpreted in individuals and changes its character through their perspectives. The ability to influence others, to communicate our perspective into their perspective, generates novel understandings of reality and new forms of social togetherness. It opens a site of emergence that frees social organization from determination by past conditions and a teleology that predetermines the future, allowing the conscious production of a common world: We live always in a present whose past and whose future are the extension of the field within which its undertakings may be carried out. This present is the scene of that emergence which gives always new heavens and a new earth and its sociality is the very structure of our minds. Since society has endowed us with self-consciousness, we can enter personally into the largest undertakings which the intercourse of rational selves extends before us. And because we can live with ourselves as well as with others, we can criticize ourselves, and make our own the values in which we are involved through those undertakings in which the community of all rational beings is engaged. (Mead 1932, 90)

The notion of the community of all rational beings invoked at the end of this quotation leads us to the connection between ordinary and scientific consciousness of the world in Mead’s work. Both values and scientific understanding held in common furnish a field of collectively accepted meanings of the world that structure the present moment of experience. The capacity to navigate this field allows for collective action as well as the possibility of individual perspectives fi nding a means to alter the perspective of the whole. In his essay “Scientific Method and the Individual Thinker” (1917), Mead extends this analysis to an understanding of the

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interrelation between scientific progress and social progress. If we start with his notion of subjectivity as the peculiar response of the individual to the social whole and of objectivity as the collective perspective of that whole, we see that scientific progress is moved forward by a continued reconstruction of the whole in the individual and rearticulation of the individual perspective in terms that can be accepted by the community. The universalization of scientific discourse is our friend in this regard, as it provides a common language that, although it may require revision, sets a field of possible rearticulations of individual thought into the thought of the community. Thus, both the evolution of scientific perspectives on nature and the continued emergence of novel events in nature are mirrored in a larger process of evolution that presents a new world through processual activity.

WHITEHEAD, ACTION, AND AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE In turning to Whitehead, one is traditionally bombarded with a host of neologisms: actual occasions, ingression, eternal objects, and prehension, which confuse and befuddle as much as they communicate. This metaphysical presentation is the source of Mead’s objection that Whitehead conceptualizes events to the point that they no longer correspond to lived experience. Specifically, Mead objects to Whitehead’s position that the qualitative characteristics of objects are eternal objects that ingress into them during moments of experience, which clears them of their empirical content.6 Yet, if we focus on the view of experience and novelty developed in Whitehead’s Modes of Thought (1938), which discusses his project in terms more akin to those found in our analysis of Mead, a point of convergence emerges. Central to this point is that Whitehead shifts to discussing experience and process in communicative terms (importance, expression, and understanding) that furnish a notion of perspectives as he perceives them to be felt in human experience. At the heart of this shift is a desire to show how a change towards a process-oriented perspective transforms an individual’s feeling of the world from a collection of sense data and bare objects to an evolving process of the whole in which individual entities are involved.7 Whitehead’s notions of importance and expression, which characterize the formation and transmission of perspectives, form the primary connection between Mead and Whitehead. Whitehead agrees with Mead that reality exists in a present and that the present involves the interpretation of other entities to achieve successful action. In Modes of Thought, White-

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head discusses this process of interpretation in the individual perspective in terms of a contrast between matters of fact (the data of experience) and the importance that pervades them. The notion of importance serves as a way of bridging the gap between understanding nature as cognitively received data and the relevance of these data for lived experience in two ways. First, the notion of importance is meant to color the notion of matters of fact, characterizing them as elements of experience chosen due to their relevance to the life of the individual. By this analysis, the data of experience are not simply given in the world; they are attended to in conscious experience due to their relevance or importance to the present situation.8 Second, importance extends beyond the present moment to a general feeling of significance that accompanies all experience. Beyond the matters of fact that are incorporated into the perspective of an individual, there remains a general feeling of importance of the environment beyond its specific concerns. Thus, the specific relevance of the world for an individual is a smaller selection from a wider field of importance in its environment, to which its own perspective contributes. This presentation of perspectives serves as a more general form of Mead’s functionalism. For Whitehead, conscious experience is characterized by a general contrast between ideas of “large generality” and “insistent particularity” (Whitehead 1938, 4). The search for particular facts is animated by the “large, vague characterization indicative of some form of excitement arising from the particular fact in the world without” (Whitehead 1938, 4–5). In terms of organism and environment, this would mean that the particular elements that an organism seeks in its surroundings are organized relative to their particular need. The search for food and the desire for shelter draw attention to different elements of experience to achieve satisfaction. The same is true with regards to experiences involving knowledge. The antithesis between importance and matters of fact creates a tension between importance (what we seek to know) and matters of fact (what we take to be known) that establishes a field of potential selection among details for greater precision and a wider sense of importance. This contrast demonstrates that facts alone are not the foundation of individual perspectives. Matters of fact appeal to “mere existence,” in the sense that they capture static aspects of experience in their analytical connection to other discerned elements. The missing element in the analysis of action is the importance attached to the details we seek. Matters of fact are not created in a vacuum, they refer to a world which individuals aim to categorize and which does not lose its character by being differentiated into its elementary aspects. The many elements involved in

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our accounts are included and excluded in the process of analysis based on their relative importance. This contrast between importance and matters of fact gives perspectives an objective and subjective character that replicates itself in the production of knowledge. The goal of an act of experience (or the pursuit of knowledge) is a novel resolution, and we seek the factors in nature that would solve the problem at hand. The tension between matters of fact and their importance means that there is a certain freedom of selection through which perspectives can be organized by bringing certain elements into the foreground of experience, while features that were once important may fade into the background. Thus, lived experience is an aesthetic process that involves a particular organization of elements into an individual perspective in order to address the external world. The particular features individuals acknowledge, the matters of fact, are objective based on their capacity to coordinate features of existence into logical relations that reflect their empirical activity. This is what accounts for the givenness of facts: they capture the habit of thought to abstract from reality and organize its abstraction into a presentation of external necessity. The subjective character of facts is the sense of importance that lies immanent in them and to which they refer. Facts are selected by their importance to the situation in which they are constructed, and the unity of the universe to which they refer. Taken together, then, facts refer to the significance of particular elements of experience and the connectedness of these elements within their larger environment. There is the general sense of importance, which leads to a process of selection and allows for freedom of selection in experience. The remaining question is what accounts for the continuity between the unity of facts and the unity of wholes. The relation of individual perspectives to perspectives of the whole, which is characteristic of Mead’s notion of sociality, is found in the relationship between importance and expression. The tension between these two notions rests on the fact that while importance refers to a kind of gestalt feeling of things in a totality, expression refers to the way in which individual action is felt or perceived among other fi nite individuals. Our understanding of personal identity is an excellent example. We describe a person’s general character on the basis of their self-description (verbal expression) and on how they behave in different social situations (communication through gestures). Their actions over time give us a sense of “who they really are” through their moods, the way they carry themselves, and how we see them respond to others. We form a contrast between who peo-

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ple tell us they are and how they behave that we use to characterize them to ourselves. It is essential to the notion of expression that it is not taken in the traditional sense of a spontaneous assertion of oneself. Expression involves the whole as well as the individual. The particularity of the expression of the individual is a result of the process of selection from one’s environment. As the above analysis shows, action involves a constructive process that generates a perspective for the individual based on the aim of their action. The resulting perspective, and its interpretation of the environment, is expressed to others through individual action. This means that in “expressing oneself” one “conditions the environment” by fashioning its own perspective that structures the environment in relation to their individual desire. More importantly, this process involves the diffusion of this expression on the individual’s perspective into the environment of which it is a part. This does not mean that there is no spontaneity in expression. For Whitehead, the “impulse to diffuse” is an impulse and not necessarily a conscious activity. However, the form of expression presented by an individual is never separated from the environment in which it is conducted. It retains its reference to the whole while individualizing itself as a particular element in it. Individual expression is an element of social expression. This intersection between the individual and the whole provides a more general view of sociality. The notion of sociality, for Mead, accounts for the interpenetration of individual perspectives in a mode that mirrors the relativity of perspectives found in nature. Taking the role of the other is a matter of integrating the experience of other human beings into one’s own experience. In doing so, one takes the world into oneself and develops a sense of the world that develops the practical capacity to anticipate the action of others and the ability to see entities in the world as objects of concern. Intersubjectivity is not merely a conceptual process for Mead. Prior to symbolic (conceptual or linguistic) communication between individual entities, there is still communication through a conversation of gestures, in which one is able to anticipate the action of others through their self presentation (Mead 1927, 80). Whitehead’s contribution to this notion emerges through his desire to develop notions that facilitate our sense of belonging to and participating in the perspectives of other human and non-human entities. On Mead’s interpretation, a properly cultivated sense of sociality depends on the ability to sensually and conceptually interpret the expression of the world in

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ourselves and respond with our own expression which contributes to the whole. Whitehead’s notion of expression leads to the view that we are always already experiencing the world as it expresses itself to us through its internal activity. Individual perspectives are an abstraction from this general field of felt expression into a particular perspective that contributes to its environment. By switching to the language of “feeling” and an aesthetic presentation of perspectives, Whitehead sets the stage for considering the role played by philosophical notions in animating this sense of sociality beyond the particular elements we encounter in everyday life. This view fully emerges in his fi nal two notions of understanding and civilization.

FROM SOCIALITY TO CIVILIZATION Mead’s critique of Whitehead is that his metaphysical categories are incapable of producing a functional or behavioral explanation of sociality. His categories, however, provide the impetus for Mead’s own functional analysis. This interaction between general concepts and particular instantiations is precisely the aim of Whitehead’s speculative metaphysics. As the previous section indicates, Whitehead’s presentation of consciousness involves the use of particular facts and wider vague ideas to coordinate novel perspectives on experience. Mead’s system is proof of the efficacy of this aim. Having encountered a problem that science failed to properly understand through its lack of metaphysical insight, he reflects on metaphysical issues in order to reorient scientific notions to be more in line with the lived experience of humans as temporal, active beings. This is precisely how Whitehead characterizes the role of knowledge through the coordination of philosophy and the sciences. Both ways of knowing involve the expansion of knowledge but with different ends. The sciences function in the mode of specialization, determining the consequences of activity and systematizing them into a general perspective of the whole. Philosophy works in the opposite direction by questioning the scope of application of our specialized concepts and illustrating where the range of our observation requires more width and depth of field (Whitehead 1938, 233–38). By replicating our experiential process in this way, intellectual activity secures its relationship to the empirical world and contributes to the lived perspective of individuals. Whitehead goes further, however, and draws upon this contrast between philosophy and the special sciences in an effort to contrast their roles in the production of perspectives that facilitate the production of so-

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cieties. To this end, he uses the notion of understanding and civilization as aims that place our knowledge of the universe into concert with our activity in it. Understanding, in Whitehead’s sense of the term, is the aim at a harmony between the world understood through its actualization in the past (matters of fact) and the sense of transcendence that animates the activity of entities in the process of formation (importance). Civilization accompanies understanding as its actualized counterpart. It involves the contrast between harmony between individual actions and the situations that the social order aims to bring about. As general notions, neither are static states that can be achieved as the last stage in a process. They are aims in the sense that all epochs of history exhibit some form of understanding or civilization that guides their activity. There is always some balance struck between the matters of fact that characterize a particular era of human knowledge and the form of social organization that corresponds to them. The goal is to determine how one constructs a perspective of the world that makes this balance apparent in our search for knowledge and the modes of social organization we seek to bring about. Whitehead’s goal is to find a means of cultivating forms of understanding that result in civilized modes of living. In this regard, he acknowledges the role of gathering matters of fact into organized systems (science) as a form of advance but fi nds it inferior to the development of novel patterns in intellectual experience (philosophy). To combine these tasks, Whitehead proposes a combination of the self-evidence of logical/empirical analysis with aesthetic experience. These two modes of evidence refer to different ways of approaching the composition of reality. Composition in a logical sense refers to the distinction between entities that can be present in a given mode of experience. If an object is red, then it is not brown. This form of experience refers to the organization of abstractions in our intellectual understanding. Aesthetic experience accompanies logical selfevidence as the enjoyment of the whole which its principles compose. Logic focuses on the details of reality, symbolizing them in language and giving a sense of enjoyment of moving from the many to the one. With aesthetics, the emphasis is on the beauty of the whole, which then passes to discrimination of detail: “there is a totality disclosing its component parts” (Whitehead 1938, 62). The contrast between these two poles of experience, between parts and wholes and wholes and parts, gives thought a general movement that accompanies the process of reality.9 On the one hand, there is the discernment of detail (matters of fact) which issues into a feeling of the importance of the whole. On the other, there is the sense of a processual reality that enters into the experience of individuals, giving them a

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field of feeling in which to express themselves. Understanding is the ability to shift one’s thought between these poles of experience, moving from a sense of the whole to the discrimination of detail and using detail to gain a more nuanced sense of the whole. The failure to emphasize either aspect leads to the trivialization of experience, both logical and aesthetic. The trivialization of experience, which issues from a poorly coordinated set of abstractions, has an impact beyond our concern with understanding the world; it effects our action and the organization of our societies: There is one moral to be drawn. Apart from detail, and apart from system, a philosophic outlook is the very foundation of thought and of life. The sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behavior. As we think, we live. This is why the assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist study. It molds our type of civilization. (Whitehead 1938, 63)

Here, Whitehead emphasizes how the aesthetic aspect of experience accounts for the creative drive towards larger forms of harmony characteristic of civilization or creative modes of societies. What Whitehead wants to emphasize in this discussion is the genesis of a sense of the wider coherence in the world beyond the causal relations seen in a bifurcated nature and how this sense is animated by the contrast between the details discerned conceptually and the wider sense of importance that expresses itself for the general process of reality. An emphasis on process situates human understanding between the pure idealism of philosophical speculation and the analytical precision of the special sciences, where the two poles can interact. In reality, this contrast is represented by the differential between the world of the past, which is retained in memory and causal relations, the expression of the world in the present, and the future purposes of the entities that are developed in the present. This feeling of transition and connectedness resolves itself into a wider sense of reality that, if stimulated, draws us towards the production of creative possibilities that extend our present ideas beyond their previous bounds, enlarge our sense of the whole, and alter our understanding and the structure of social life.

CONCLUSION The difference between Mead and Whitehead lies in their point of departure, which creates a nuance between the shared end of their works.

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Whitehead, who approaches philosophy only after work in mathematics, logic, and the philosophy of science, develops his view starting with a conceptual framework that he wants to situate in the field of common sense and the variety of modes of thought that characterize our social knowledge. For Mead, who transitions from the philosophy of consciousness to behaviorist psychology, we have to begin with the fi ndings of the empirical sciences and abstract from them to see their intersection. The argument between Whitehead and Mead can be overcome if we see Whitehead’s more metaphysical concepts in their intended function. They are not meant as absolute conceptions of the structure of space-time; they serve as preliminary attempts at creating the kind of translation formulae that Mead depends on for his understanding of the relativity of perspectives. The discussion of process and communication in Modes of Thought is evidence of this fact. By seeing Whitehead’s understanding of process in the language of communication, we are able to find a point of synthesis between Mead and Whitehead’s work: the communication of perspectives and the construction of a common world. The question that remains is what sort of insights we can gain by approaching the question of the cultivation of the social sense which is not fully developed in the work of either author. Whitehead’s aesthetic ideals for epistemic and ontological relations (the values of truth and beauty in Adventures of Ideas) give a preliminary outline of the structure of social feeling, but whether or not they provide a sufficient solution is up for debate. Mead takes his own run at defi ning the social sense, particularly in his seminal work Mind, Self, and Society (1934), but his connection to the sciences leads him to defi ne ideals of organization (seen in terms of economics) and a community of human beings (displayed in religion) that leave this sense embedded in its contemporary categories. The solution to this problem lies, perhaps, in an attempt to see this argument from both sides; to ask about ideals that are contained in the social sciences as well as in the aesthetic (value laden) structure of our perspectives themselves. The foundation for this discussion lying at the intersection of these two poles, the process of individual experience and the organization of the whole, relies on our continued articulation of the notion of sociality.

NOTES 1. Gary Cook (1993, chap. 9) gives a comprehensive overview of Mead’s use of Whitehead as a “rich mine of suggestions” (160) for the development of his own view of

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relativity and the temporality of perspectives. I will not address each of the five areas of intersection outlined by Cook in this essay, but will, instead, focus on synthesizing Mead’s functional analysis with Whitehead’s metaphysical discussion in order to capture the benefits of both. 2. Hans Joas (1985, 184) traces the development of this “broad” concept of sociality as a way of further embedding his notion of intersubjectivity in the general process of natural evolution. By taking this step, Mead dabbles in metaphysics, but only insofar as it leads to greater scientific clarity. This distinction between speculative philosophy and empirical science is the ground for Mead’s critique of Whitehead’s notion of temporality as excessively metaphysical. However, as I will show later, this use of philosophical generality for scientific particularity is exactly what Whitehead has in mind for his metaphysical concepts. 3. “The distinction which I indicated above between reduction and production falls in with that between our attitudes toward past and future respectively. The past we reduce to dependable conditions, and all the rich context of the future as it takes place, if it is to be comprehensible and serviceable must be woven into the dependable web. Thus new things continually arise, the novelty of whose occurrence is worn down into the reliability of that which becomes familiar” (Mead 1932, 36–37). 4. Joas also indicates that he is skeptical that Mead fully develops this possibility. I would agree and argue that the late Whitehead provides a path towards fulfi lling this task, if his metaphysical notions are read in tandem with an empirical analysis. 5. “Primarily living forms react to external stimulation in such a fashion to preserve the living process. The peculiar method that distinguishes their reactions from the motions of inanimate objects is that of selection. This selection is due to the sensitivity of the living form. . . . The conscious animal carries selection into the field of its own response. It responds to the influence or effect the outer world has upon it” (Mead 1938, 69). 6. See Cook 1993, 125–126. 7. This distinction between nature apprehended as data and nature as experienced is the very dualism that Whitehead is accused by Mead of replicating. Thus, through this analysis I also intend to produce a way of preserving the necessity of philosophical generalizations for the animation of lived experience. As a short response to Mead’s objection, one can say that metaphysical concepts such as eternal objects are not to be treated as empirically observable entities but as a mode of thinking about the real presence of uninstantiated possibilities in nature. As I will show in the discussion of philosophy and science in the next section, philosophical categories play an alternate role in the structure of experience, as notions of wide generality, that are complementary to scientific concepts rather than alternatives. 8. “There is no escape from sheer matter- of-fact. It is the basis of importance; and importance is important because of the inescapable character of matter-of-fact. We concentrate by reason of a sense of importance. And when we concentrate, we attend to matter-of-fact. Those people who in a hard-headed way confi ne their attention to matter-of-fact do so by reason of their sense of the importance of such an attitude. The two notions are antithetical and require each other” (Whitehead 1938, 4). 9. This connection should be read in a similar way to Mead’s examination of

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temporality as giving individual perspectives a “sway” that matches the texture of experience. For Whitehead, this sway is evidence of temporal passage, but our feeling of passage is accompanied by a sense of the world in passage that involves the individuals’ perspective and the sense of the world that accompanies it.

REFERENCES Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. 2011. “Towards a Speculative Philosophy.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, 1–18. Melbourne: Re.press. Cook, Gary A. 1993. G. H. Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2014. Manifesto of New Realism. New York: SUNY Press. Gabriel, Markus. 2013. Warum es die Welt nicht gibt. Berlin: Ullstein. Joas, Hans. 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. What is the Style of Matters of Concern. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Mead, George Herbert. 1903. “The Defi nition of the Psychical.” Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, First Series, vol. 3: 77–112. ———. 1917. “Scientific Method and the Individual Thinker.” In Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Creative Attitude, by John Dewey, Addison W. Moore, Harold C. Brown, George H. Mead, Boyd H. Bode, Henry W. Stuart, James H. Tufts, and Horace M. Kallen, 176–227. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1927. “The Objective Reality of Perspectives.” In Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, edited by Edgar S. Brightman, 75– 85. New York: Longmans, Green, and Company. ———. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: The Wild and Free Creation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1938. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press. ———. 1978. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press.

Chapter Ten

Mead, the Theory of Mind, and the Problem of Others Ryan McVeigh

INTRODUCTION

T

here has never been a more fruitful time to reexamine the work of George Herbert Mead. This is somewhat ironic given the increasingly pervasive nature of Mead’s work in standard sociology. Yet it is precisely the standardized nature of Mead’s work that calls out the particular need to reexamine it—although widespread, his thought is largely presented in a fragmented manner that is unrepresentative of his full philosophical system. In fact, it is the unacknowledged and underappreciated components of Mead’s thought that make his unique brand of pragmatism particularly relevant for contemporary sociology. The reason is this: cognitive science, a field that broadly includes the related disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, is beginning to approximate an understanding of mind and self that appreciates their fundamentally social nature. They are thus starting to move away from the Robinson Crusoe-esq model of an isolated thinker toward a view of cognition that emphasizes contact with the social environment. Contemporary researchers in neuroscience, for example, have started to examine the multiple ways that the structure and function of the human brain changes relative to the stimulation received from the environment around it (see Doidge 2007; Wexler 2006). So while much research and commonsense thinking has pointed to the connection brains and bodies have with their surroundings, the formative role of the specifically social environment is something that has only recently started to garner attention in cognitive science. And although researchers there have not yet appreciated the full degree of sociality at work relative to human thought and action, they are nonetheless calling into question the previ209

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ously entrenched dichotomies of nature versus nurture, individual versus social, and inner versus outer. These questions and their combined focus on physiology and sociality are also at the heart of Mead’s corpus. Despite the subset of authors who are examining the social nature of cognition and selfhood, the prevailing theoretical paradigm in cognitive science remains in marked opposition to how Mead understood mind and self. The assumption of this more entrenched program is that human cognition is an internal, brain-based phenomenon produced by independent and isolated individuals engaging with the world around them. The self, when it is agreed that such a phenomenon exists,1 is likewise assumed to be an autonomous and automatic condition of physiology alone. So while both mind and self are acknowledged to interact with the social world at large, they are largely believed to be material instantiations of the human brain. At no time in these broader accounts is it considered that the subjectivity and cognitive functioning of one individual is intertwined with and dependent on social interaction. There are important and far-reaching implications for the discipline of sociology as a result of this trend, in part because sociality and intersubjectivity are widely accepted tenets of social theory. It would be antithetical, for instance, for sociologists to question whether or not social forces affect a given individual’s life and experience. But such lines of inquiry are starting to be asked within cognitive science. That is to say, research in that paradigm is beginning to examine topics like the affective dissonance experienced by immigrants in a new country (Wexler 2006), the biological need for ongoing contact with others (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008), and the neural mechanisms that underwrite facial expression and emotional recognition (Niendenthal 2001). Yet despite the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science, no real attention has been given to the sociological work that already attends to the experience of immigrants, interpersonal relations, or emotional display and regulation. This is perhaps not surprising since the “natural” and “social” sciences remain largely separated by disciplinary boundaries and perceived divergences relative to both theory and practice. This prevents communication, indeed contact, between the sciences regardless of those moments where areas of interest overlap; for the most part each discipline resultantly proceeds on independent and exclusive grounds. What makes matters worse is that the most visible point of contact between these fields comes through the markedly antagonistic sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Authors in the SSK tradition are often quick to pull the objective rug out from under the feet of scientists and challenge their naturalis-

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tic assumptions and supposed value neutrality. The resulting situation is one beset by both mutual disregard and even disdain, with each discipline neither looking toward nor appreciating the type of insight offered by the other. Some authors have recently attempted to fi ll this gap.2 Eviatar Zerubavel (1997), Stephen Turner (2007), and David Franks (2010) are especially significant in this regard because each has advanced key areas of contact—either existing or advised—between social theory and cognitive science. Indeed, some of the most important contributions of these works occur when the authors point out how distant the two disciplines have grown. And although clear headway has been made to showcase the relevance of sociological analysis for topics normally reserved for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, it is my contention that no author has yet given Mead the attention he deserves in this capacity. In fact, my argument is that the pragmatism of George Herbert Mead presents the ideal theoretical lens with which to examine empirical research in cognitive science and resolve long-standing debates in the philosophy of mind. This claim is made for two reasons. First, Mead’s admittedly “hypothetical conjectures” (1967a, 13) concerning the brain and central nervous system come to many of the same conclusions as contemporary neuroscience without having benefited from the use of technological advances like fMRIs and EEGs. Second, Mead’s influential analysis of mind, self, and society extends logically from his understanding of the brain and body. It thus stands to reason that the conclusions he makes regarding cognition and selfhood, which are entirely overlooked in cognitive science and largely taken for granted in standard sociology, be revisited in light of the recent turn to social models of cognition. This article will subsequently examine a prominent debate in cognitive science and place Mead’s work in critical contact with research surrounding the so-called problem of other minds. This problematic, which centers on how the self comes to recognize and understand other subjectivities, originates with the metaphysics of René Descartes. It is important to begin with Descartes because the ontological priority he gives to the individual extends unquestioned into contemporary cognitive science. The two main perspectives that make up the contemporary “theory of mind” debate exemplify this tendency and illustrate how pervasive the Cartesian notion of individuality remains. The priority Mead gives to intersubjective relations fundamentally calls this assumption into question, however, and radically undermines the possibility of a solipsistic relation between self and other. By critically examining the problem of other minds using

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Mead’s pragmatism, this article will ultimately showcase the relevance of sociological insight for research on cognition. This will help broaden the domain of standard sociology and further advance cognitive science along its path toward a social model of cognition.

THE PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS The problem of other minds in Western philosophy can be traced back to the work of René Descartes, a seventeenth-century polymath who sought to determine the methodological principles upon which all claims to truth must depend. It is important to examine this work because of the impact it had on how the self came to be conceptualized in Western thought. In fact, although Descartes’s views are largely seen as inaccurate and outdated today, his metaphysical system fi rmly entrenched the belief that the existence of other minds is doubtable and beyond absolute certainty. Of the twenty-one procedural techniques Descartes outlined in Rules for the Direction of Mind, the third is crucial because it sets the tone of his broader metaphysics and constrains how he comes to understand the world: “our inquiries should be directed, not to what others have thought nor to what we ourselves conjecture, but to what we can clearly and perspicuously behold and with certainty deduce” (1955a, 5). He thus rejects a priori any claims that involve (personal) doubt, (unfounded) opinion, or (common) conjecture and starts from a position of methodological skepticism. Descartes believes this is necessary in order to avoid the possibility of error because only then can the “fi rst principles” of a grounding philosophy be themselves grounded on absolute truth. He even rejects knowledge gained through sensory perception because it can sometimes be deceptive, as when one thinks a distant star is actually as small as it appears (1955b, 101). Given his subsequent resolution to “seek no other science than that which could be found in myself, or at least in the great book of the world” (86), 3 then, Descartes identifies only two avenues for knowledge that avoid the threat of illusion: intuition, which reveals innate truths through introspection, and deduction, the logical consequences that follow therein (1955a, 7). This single precept sets the stage for Descartes’s system of thought. Since personal intuition and logical deduction are the sole avenues through which certain knowledge can be obtained, the introspective mental life of an individual is granted ontological privilege and epistemological superiority over the perceived material world outside it. In fact, this is the true force behind the infamous cogito ergo sum—my thoughts guarantee

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knowledge of my existence alone; all else can and should be doubted. And while Descartes actually says quite little about other people in his writings, it should be clear what status they maintain in his metaphysics: since an individual can only know with absolute certainty that they personally exist, other people remain a doubtable and inferred conjecture. Insofar as Descartes perceives other people in daily life, then, it is only through an explicit act of rational deduction that he is able to identify them as people. He expresses the situation thus: “And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I judge them to be men” (1955c, 155, emphasis added). For if Descartes were to believe his fallible perception alone, other people could quite simply be machines dressed as humans. This moment of doubt subsequently requires that an additional cognitive step occur so a given person can deduce that a perceived body is also a sentient subject.4 Broadly construed and without calling it as such, this is a position of methodological solipsism because Descartes cannot know with absolute certainty that the human forms he encounters are actually subjects of consciousness. A person has unmediated or direct knowledge only of their own mental life, so one’s certainty begins and ends with their own selfhood. And since other people are ontologically separate from and superfluous to the subjectivity of a given individual, their existence becomes a logical problem to be solved. John Stuart Mill (2005, 202–3) was one of the fi rst authors to expand Descartes’s analysis and explicitly relate the problem of other minds that follows from it: By what evidence do I know, or by what considerations am I led to believe, that there exist other sentient creatures; that the walking and speaking figures which I see and hear, have sensations and thoughts, or in other words, possess Minds?

Mill’s solution to the problem of other minds is known as the argument from analogy.5 It runs as follows: in my own privileged case, I know that I have experiences when my body is causally influenced and that these experiences frequently bring about certain forms of conduct. When I perceive other bodies like my own and observe that they act in similar ways when affected in some manner, I infer by analogy that the outward show of their bodily conduct is associated with an inner experience similar to one that I have experienced. For example, being scalded by hot water is associated with a feeling of intense pain; this experience further gives rise to

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the distinct behavior of screaming. When I observe other bodies screaming after touching hot water, I infer that it is quite likely that they are also feeling pain. And while I can never fully be sure that my analogy is correct, the inference at least gives me reason to believe in the existence of other like-minded individuals. Despite the attractive simplicity of this argument, a number of issues arise through the supposition that analogical reasoning is the primary method people use to recognize and understand others. The phenomenologist Max Scheler (1954) has identified four such concerns. First, the argument from analogy, which entails that we infer the minds of others through an explicit process, is too complex. After all, Scheler notes that both animals and infants seem to recognize and understand the behavioral intentions of others with relative ease. Second, the argument necessitates that a similarity exists between my bodily experience and my perception of another body. This subsequently reduces one’s subjective experience to the visual representation of a generalized biological form. In addition, the argument from analogy does not adequately explain how we are able to empathize with creatures whose bodies do not resemble our own (i.e., non-human empathy). Finally, by fi nding my own subjective experience as analogous with the perceived body of another, all that I am logically entitled to infer is that the foreign body is probably also linked with my own mind. By virtue of these oversights, Scheler believes the argument from analogy both underestimates the difficulties involved in self-experience and overestimates the difficulties involved in the experience of others. It further assumes that the key connection between self and others is one’s mental life and, as a result, that we are only able to indirectly experience an other’s subjectivity; we never have unmediated access to someone else and can only assume they exist via an inference to their bodily appearance.

THEORIES OF MIND Research in cognitive science has moved away from the argument from analogy presented by Mill and others. For while the existence of another subjectivity is clearly something that can be inferred using analogy, advances in brain imaging technology have shown that such practices are rarely if ever needed. Instead, the focus has turned to the neurological mechanisms that drive our ability to automatically recognize other selves, understand their behavior, and predict their likely future conduct.6 Research on the self’s relationship with others has thus turned inward to ex-

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amine the structure and function of the human mind. Since the self-other relationship hinges in cognitive science on how we come to believe that other entities possess thoughts, beliefs, and values (or “interiority”), the central question advanced there is how people come to possess a “theory of mind.”7 There is heated debate about how the theory of mind is actually realized, however, and two main camps offer somewhat polarized models for resolving the problem of others: theory-theory and simulation theory.8 The theory-theory of mind is the dominant explanatory paradigm for understanding how we grasp other minds in contemporary cognitive science (Stueber 2006, 106). It maintains that our everyday comprehension of others stems from an implicit knowledge of psychological laws and theories that we apply to the entities we perceive. This is a detached strategy insofar as folk psychology is based on “knowledge-rich” and “data-driven” processes rather than some sense of emotive or affective affinity. The theory-theory model of mind thus conceptualizes our folk psychology as analogous to the hypothesis-laden perception of theoretical entities in science (Carruthers 1996, 26), where the driving force behind theory change is a general testing-learning process. The amount of cognitive labor involved in this process is not viewed as an inherent problem, however, because normal human beings are all believed to be “good psychologists” (Segal 1996, 141) who can easily develop and deploy psychological generalizations. An analogy can be made here with our spatial interaction with the world: just as our ability to negotiate the physical world depends upon a body of knowledge about the ways in which physical objects tend to behave, so also our ability to negotiate the social world depends upon our possessing a body of knowledge about the way that people tend to behave. (Stone and Davies 1996, 126)

This form of “folk physics,” with its body of theoretical generalizations and hypotheses about how the observable material world functions, is seen as mirroring the folk psychology we use to identify and engage with other minds. For at base the same scientific theorizing applies and we attend to the world of observable phenomenon through a base understanding of natural laws (122). There are three main varieties of theory-theory. Differentiations stem primarily from the position authors take relative to the developmental origins of the cognitive structures involved in “reading” other minds. The fi rst formulation sees our folk theory of mind as innate and maturing over

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time. Authors such as Fodor (1991), Leslie (1987), and Segal (1996) point to the fact that the development of a concept cannot be explained by any deductive or inductive process and thus must be present ab initio. In fact, as Baron-Cohen and Swettenham (1996, 158) point out, reading minds comes far more naturally than reading words, and people interpret the behavior of others automatically in terms of what they may be thinking, planning, or wanting. They thus come to the conclusion that only genetic and therefore universal structures—such as the theory of mind module or shared attention module they postulate—can adequately account for our natural mind-reading abilities. While worldly experience is still obviously important, it only acts as a catalyst for realizing the underlying physiological potential that exists innately within each person. The fact that children only pass false-belief tests around age four is often given as support for this view.9 A second variety of theory-theory sees our folk psychological abilities not as innately predetermined and removed from the effects of worldly experience but as inherently predisposed and developed through processes of individual learning. This is not to say that physiological mechanisms do not exist and structure our understanding of other minds, just that these structures require development, growth, and reformation through personal experience. Children are seen here as proto-scientists who individually revise and expand their knowledge of other minds in response to evidence received from the outside world. Gopnik (1996, 171) refers to this model as “theory-formation-theory” because innate conceptions of persons act as the foundation upon which more advanced theories of mind are later constituted. A third formulation of theory-theory is in close alignment with the previous model because it denies that innate structures of the brain can account for the full depth of knowledge we can have of others. Rather than envision the process of learning as best characterized by a solitary scientist, researchers such as Botterill (1996) and Harris (1996) propose instead that children acquire a theory of mind through participation in cultural activities. For them, it is through enculturation and interaction with the social world that the full potential of understanding others is developed. So if the proto-scientist view of folk psychology aligns itself more with Piaget’s (1963) understanding of cognitive development, this perspective stresses an approach in closer proximity to the work of Lev Vygotsky (1978). Astington (1996), for instance, adopts Vygotsky’s distinction between inter- and intra-psychological processes to think through how the external world of social meaning gets “into” the mental world of

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the individual. This creates a perspective on the self-other problem that distinguishes between the mental functions occurring between individuals prior to their internalization within children as psychological categories. The application of Vygotsky’s so-called zone of proximal development (1978, 86) is further evident here. Most importantly, however, this fi nal variety of theory-theory challenges the possibility that there exists one universal theory of mind in place for all cultures and across all times. For while it may remain true to say that all people have some way of interpreting social interaction through knowledge-rich theories of mind, it may not be true that the Western form of this theory is the one adopted universally. Botterill (1996) for example conceives of the theory-theory of mind as entailing only a core set of psychological generalizations that are always augmented by subsequent theories that one learns directly through cultural experience. If this version of theory-theory is correct, then the relevance of the false-belief test is also seriously called into question (Wexler 2006). Simulation theory, in stark contrast, begins from the belief that our relation to other people is radically different from our cognitive understanding of other entities. Since all (normal) human beings are equipped with a similarly functioning brain and mind, the need to develop or deploy psychological theories ex nihilo does not actually arise; we need only use our own cognitive processes in an imitative fashion to gain information about other minds (Strueber 2006, 111). I simply “put myself in the other’s shoes” and imagine the situation from their perspective. This is in part why an emotional response (sympathy) often accompanies seeing things from another person’s perspective (empathy). So despite the sense of epistemic privilege that still exists when accessing one’s own mind, this theory assumes a degree of overlap between the cognitive abilities of self and other: “We not only recognize the other person as a minded creature, but we recognize each other as same-minded and as persons who have access to their minds from a fi rst-person perspective” (13). To be sure, simulation theorists are not arguing for full cognitive identification between self and other because they recognize that a person always retains the ability to reflect on simulated beliefs in respect to their own. This is simply to say that we do not stop being ourselves while we imaginatively assume the perspective of another. For Gordon (1996), this notion of simulation is best explained by seeing a shift in reference for the fi rst-person pronoun, I, as in the sentence “I wouldn’t have done that.” But since the fundamental assumption being made here is that the other possesses the same cognitive capacities and tendencies as the simulating self does, Scheler’s third critique of the argu-

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ment from analogy—that a person would only be able to relate to physically similar others through it—arises once again. Theorists like Heal (1996) and Harris (1996) sidestep this problem though by pointing to the fluidity of role-playing in perspective simulation. It would be cognitively uneconomical to duplicate the situated knowledge of each being we encounter, they argue, so cognitive development must proceed through increases in “imaginative sophistication” (Strueber 2006, 115) rather than through the continuous accumulation of theoretical knowledge. The point here is that understanding others consists not in bringing their behavior under law-like generalizations but simply in rendering their conduct intelligible. This means that the question of how we come to relate to dissimilar physical forms loses its sting because mind-reading comes simply when we imaginatively shift our perspective to the position of another— any other—and try to see the world from their vantage point; the “I” could subsequently then apply both to humans, non-humans, or fictitious creatures alike. As a result, simulation theory is best understood as denying the supposed centrality of theoretical knowledge in our folk psychological abilities. It asserts both that there are ‘knowledge-poor’ strategies deployed when recognizing other minds and that these strategies can better account for the emotive and affective sensations that often go along with empathetic understanding. From the simulationist’s perspective, then, the self’s understanding of others cannot be equated with implicit psychological theory because theory does not account for the depth of ways we relate to others beyond knowledge. It also does not account for the intense cognitive load associated with having to possess theoretical knowledge for every unique person, entity, role, or situational combination therein—for an additional difficulty inherent in theory-theory is the fact that our knowledge of a person would have to be reformulated to account for every scenario the individual is in.10 There are a number of cognitive mechanisms that simulation theorists point to as support for their position but one in particular has garnered a great deal of attention: mirror neurons. These cells represent what some believe to be the brain-based processes that make language acquisition, role taking, and empathy possible (Iacoboni 2008). Essentially, mirror neurons activate (or “fi re”) in the brain of one person when they perceive someone else engaged in behavior they are capable of reproducing.11 The same motor processes are therefore activated in the brain of the witness as if they were the one accomplishing the perceived activity. These neurons

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were fi rst discovered in macaque monkeys but they have since been found also in humans and other primates (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). In addition, while human mirror neuron systems have been shown to exist at birth, they are also acquired throughout life and are subsequently believed to aid in the acquisition of new skills (Iacoboni 2008, 42). Several characteristics of mirror neurons are important for our purposes: fi rst, they are goal-directed. Iacoboni (2005) demonstrates this feature nicely through an experiment involving teacups. Subjects were shown video of a hand grasping for a teacup in three completely different situations —one without a background, emphasizing simply that the cup is being held; one at a messy table, indicating the act of cleaning up; and one with liquid in it, indicating the act of drinking. Since the intention behind the grasping action in each scenario was different, the intensity of mirror neuron activation changed as well. This implies that the cognitive activity “mirrored” in one’s own mind arises through recognition of the intentional and practical purpose intended by a particular behavior. Mirror neurons do not then activate relative to the objects themselves—the same teacup was being held by the same hand in all videos—but to the specific goal of the activity itself. The stronger the association between a person and a perceived activity, the stronger the connection effaced through mirror neurons (i.e., a tennis player would have much stronger mirror neuron response when they watch someone swing a racket). In addition, since the level of activity exists within the brain and outside conscious awareness, the type of connection represented by mirror neurons is biological and prereflective. According to Iacoboni, the type of simulation initiated “is not an effortful, deliberate pretense of being in somebody else’s shoes. It is an effortless, automatic, and unconscious inner mirroring” (2005, 120). It is for these reasons that some authors (i.e., Gallese 2001) refer to mirror neurons as a form of physiological “resonance” between self and other. In fact, Gallese goes so far as to say that mirror neurons transform the other we observe into “another self” (cited in Iacoboni 2008, 147). This statement in particular illustrates why these cells have become such a rallying point for simulation theorists: a biological mechanism has been found that reaches out automatically from a given person and connects to others without relying on theory or conceptual knowledge. This is an important point to note because it stresses again the egocentric nature of simulation—rather than either actualize, develop, or learn generalized theories of folk psychology, the individual self uses their own mind as the cognitive foundation through which they recognize and understand other beings.

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MEAD: RESOLVING THE “PROBLEM” OF OTHERS There can be little doubt that pronounced developments have been made in cognitive science concerning the multiplicity of ways that humans recognize and understand one another. Advances in neuroimaging technology and a renewed interest in research on cognition are certainly at the heart of these achievements. That said, Mead’s pragmatism distances itself sharply from the argument from analogy and both theory of mind perspectives. His view of the self as a distinctly social emergent radically undermines the individualistic assumptions at play within cognitive science and challenges the view that other minds are an existential problem to be solved. The following statement is emblematic of Mead’s position: Selves can only exist in defi nite relationships to other selves. No hardand-fast line can be drawn between our own selves and the selves of others, since our own selves exist and enter as such into our experience only in so far as the selves of others exist and enter as such into our experience also. (1967a, 138)

In this light, a number of points can be raised against the theory of mind perspectives. For instance, the theory-theory of mind overlooks the active and behavioral component to engaging others. In its emphasis on theory and knowledge, it comes across as a far too conceptual, abstract, and detached strategy of experience. For while we certainly do at times assess the conceptual contents of others’ minds, normally we do not need to. This fact points less to all humans being “good psychologists” (Segal 1996) though and more to the fact that they rarely need to be psychologists at all. For Mead, instead, the focus moves from rationally thinking about the world to pragmatically acting within it. This is why he continually stressed that meaning is derived from conduct; for him, meaning is not abstract and conceptual but active and embodied (see Mead 1967a, 75– 82). In regards to the three specific varieties of theory-theory outlined previously, then, Mead would certainly support the existence of innate cognitive abilities, accept the need for personal learning and hypothesis-testing, and stress that situated theories of mind emerge in culturally specific ways. His analysis of instinct and impulse in the “biologic individual” (1967b), the interplay between the “I” and “me” phases of selfhood (1967a), and the difficulties inherent in developing a universal system of ethics (1929) attest to this. But he would nevertheless deny that these methods provide either the complete picture or individually act as its most important as-

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pects. In comparison with Mead’s system, the fact remains that theorytheory is a conceptually dense way to understand a phenomenon that is primarily neither conceptual nor dense. Given the similarities between simulation theory and the emphasis on role taking in Mead, it may subsequently appear that this perspective more fully embraces the social nature of self-development. In a number of ways this assessment is correct because simulationists rightly show, from a cognitive standpoint at least, the central role that gestures, perspectives, and imitation play in interpersonal relations. Research on mirror neuron systems undoubtedly adds to this alignment. And while there is some disagreement on the importance of these brain cells (see Hickok 2009), the importance of mirror neurons for the work of George Herbert Mead is unquestionable. For instance, the goal-directed nature of mirror neurons emphasizes the fact that human cognition is structurally and functionally tied to embodied action. This rightly underscores Mead’s label as a pragmatist and grants empirical support to many of the presumptions he made concerning the central nervous system. Second, mirror neurons seem to explain how an organism is able to develop mind and self pre-reflectively through a conversation of gestures, something that Mead’s system assumes but cannot account for. That said, the full breadth and depth of intersubjective relations cannot possibly be reduced to a neurological process alone. So while mirror neurons certainly represent an important discovery for both cognitive science and sociology, their existence says little about the social situations in which intersubjective relations are always embedded, structured, and constrained. Still, the physiological connection they entail substantiates Mead’s claim that role taking and perspective adoption are the primary means through which social minds and selves emerge. Despite these parallels, Mead’s assessment of the social nature of selves is fundamentally at odds with both theories of mind. The reason, which ultimately does less to resolve the problem of others than negate it entirely, is this: the self only emerges after an individual has successfully internalized the meaning and significance of other selves: For he enters his own experience as a self or individual, not directly or immediately, not by becoming a subject to himself, but only in so far as he fi rst becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he and they are involved. (1967a,138)

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The self is, therefore, derived from the others it interacts with. It is dependent on significant communication and cannot exist in either conceptual or actual isolation. The importance of this statement for both cognitive science and sociology cannot be overstated. Since the nascent human self develops out of interaction with others—others that are already apprehended as selves—the existence of other minds cannot be a problem to be solved. That is to say, the self in Mead is a product of our interaction with others and not, as the vast majority of research in cognitive science assumes, the precondition for it. In that sense, the appropriate question to ask is not how we are logically sure others exist but how we personally come to exist as a self amongst others: “what is there in human social conduct that gives rise to a ‘me,’ a self which is an object” (Mead 1925, 405)? This inverts the problem of other minds and rightly focuses on the developmental issues faced by an individual self. In both theory of mind perspectives, then, the existence of other minds only becomes a problem to be solved because the self is assumed to be an autonomous and automatic entity that preexists contact with social others. It is always taken for granted as the starting point of analysis. Take for example this statement concerning mirror neurons: “these cells originate early in life when other people’s behavior is the reflection of our own behavior. In other people, we see ourselves with mirror neurons” (Iacoboni 2008, 134). Instead, Mead has shown that the social individual needs to assume the roles of pre-formed others toward itself in a constitutive and developmental fashion before a self as such can emerge. It thus makes better sense to see mirror neurons as the physiological mechanism through which we connect with others and develop ourselves. Or, while mirror neurons provide defi nitive evidence for a physiological connection between self and other, they remain simply the invitation, not the conversation. Theory-theory assumes something similar, of course, because it presumes that an autonomous self applies its conceptual powers to theorize about the world at large. As a result, both theory of mind perspectives begin from the assumption, wrongly held in light of Mead’s pragmatism, that the self exists prior to an organism’s contact with others. The privilege granted to the self in the theory of mind debates entails a logical if not ontological primacy of the self over others. As shown, this assumption originated with the Cartesian position of self-certainty, where the status of other subjects can always be doubted, and through the argument from analogy that followed as a result. This greatly devalued the constitutive role others play for self-development. Since cognitive science has not challenged this assumption, an implicit asymmetry remains in

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its research between one’s status as a self and the others that we then perceive, understand, and relate to using our cognitive abilities. To see just how pervasive this individualism is in contemporary research on cognition, consider the work of Michael Tomasello (2009 and 1999). As a developmental psychologist who examines the cultural origins of human cognition, Tomasello’s work is well-received by those emphasizing the social nature of mind and self. For instance, he points to the crucial nature of imitation, gestural communication, and symbolic language for human and primate cognition. In addition, Tomasello points to how so-called joint attention schemes, which act as a triadic system of relations between self, other, and environment, emerge for children around nine months of age. This illustrates by yet another method that human cognition is critically dependent on interaction with the social world of others. Yet beyond these connections, Tomasello’s writings remain entrenched in language that privileges the individual self directing its autonomous energies toward the world of others: Since other persons are “like me,” any new understanding of my own functioning leads immediately to a new understanding of their own functioning; I more or less simulate other persons’ psychological functioning by analogy to my own, which is most directly and intimately known to me. Consequently, the specific hypothesis is that when infants come to a new understanding of their own intentional actions, they use their “like me” stance to understand the behavior of other persons in the same way. (Tomasello 1999, 70)

Like the theory of mind debates as a whole, Tomasello’s efforts at delineating the cultural origins of human cognition overlook the fundamentally derivative nature of the self. The problem centers on his recourse to the “like me” stance. For if Mead is correct and the self only emerges when it sees itself as an object by adopting the perspectives of pre-existing others, then the developmental path described by Tomasello needs to be inverted: “since I seem to be like them, any new understanding of their functioning leads immediately to a new understanding of my own. I subsequently simulate other people’s psychological functioning to constitute my own.” Although the difference is slight, the effect is dramatic. Mead’s pragmatism directly challenges the assumption that individual selves exist innately and in ontological parity with others. We see instead that the self needs others to develop, that it does not come into existence until the role-specific behavior and attitudes of others are internalized and

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taken up as one’s own. To be sure, this does not deny the existence of specifically biological or ontological modes of relation. Take for instance the wealth of empirical research around the importance of the face for cognition and development (Wexler 2006; Tomasello 1999; Brothers 1997). This research all points to the ways the human face—with its specific configuration, with its range of expressive capacities, and as a focal point of orientation in communication—acts as the primary anchor for relations between people.12 There is, in addition, a wealth of philosophical analysis surrounding the ontological significance of the face as such (Butler 2004; Levinas 1998). Mead is denying neither of these claims. What he is saying instead is that the cognitive and existential predisposition toward faces does little to address how the self develops socially; it merely can act as a focal point of the symbolic communication that still must come after it. This entails that strictly ontological and biological modes of existence require full selfdevelopment before they can enter into an organism’s own field of awareness. This is specifically why they are pre-reflective; until the self develops fully, it will be unaware that it has been developing for some time: The self and self-consciousness have fi rst to arise, and then these experiences can be identified peculiarly with the self, or appropriated by the self; to enter, so to speak, into this heritage of experience, the self has fi rst to develop within the social process in which this heritage is involved. (1967a, 172)

This is an important and easily overlooked point. Since the mind, which developmentally precedes the self, takes the attitude of others toward itself, it is only when the self has fully formed that it can become an object of its own awareness; only then does it become an object for itself. The fundamental difference between Mead’s notion of selfhood and accounts in cognitive science is subsequently the fundamental imbalance in selfother relations: in Mead, alterity is given developmental priority over the self that can potentially emerge through interaction with it. As such, the privilege conveyed to the individual self in research on cognition is logically misplaced because it fails to recognize the developmental and ontological priority of social others.

CONCLUSION From this brief overview of the problem of other minds, it should be clear that the work of George Herbert Mead is relevant for discussions concern-

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ing the mind, self, and cognition. Moreover, his pragmatism sidesteps many of the philosophical difficulties that arise when investigating the self’s relation to others. The key point of difference between his perspective and the authors examined here is the developmental priority he gives to others. Although more can be written on the importance of Mead’s thought for resolving additional debates in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science—notably the problem of how the mind is related to the body—focusing on the self was important because the discipline of sociology has tended to concentrate on Mead’s writing in this capacity. It has thus ignored the larger body of work on the mind and brain that makes his pragmatism of increased importance today. Regardless of the attention given to it, Mead’s underlying assumptions about the structure and function of the human brain—upon which the more established portion of his canon depends—has been given empirical support and validation by recent work in neuroscience. As mentioned, the view of the brain coming out of this research is beginning to reveal the developmental importance of social environment for human cognition. The science at the heart of Mead’s writings in the early twentieth century is thus in marked alignment with the science emerging from brain research today. So while standard sociology has undoubtedly made a “larger retreat from the cognitive” (Turner 2007) and turned its attention away from why Mead is important today, it has done so at a time when research on cognition is increasingly turning to face issues that are sociological in nature. That is to say, while cognitive science is beginning to make claims about distinctly social phenomena, sociology has made little attempt to weigh in on these debates. Many have argued that this places the discipline of sociology at a clear disadvantage in light of the institutional funding and public reverence given to cognitive science (see Turner 2007; Strydom 2007; Pharo 2007). The analysis here has shown that this need not be the case, however, as clear thematic overlaps exist between Mead’s pragmatism and the theory of mind debates. And since the underlying assumptions in cognitive science disregard the constitutive role others play for cognition, the increasing body of research on social cognition in that discipline would be greatly furthered by contact with Mead’s writings. Such contact would showcase the relevance of sociological insight for research on cognition and expand both the sociology and cognitive science that emerged as a result. The underlying goal at the heart of this paper has been to disrupt the prevailing view of Mead in sociology and call out his relevance for contemporary cognitive science. That is to say, while this analysis is on one hand

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concerned with demonstrating Mead’s relevance for research in cognitive science, it is equally aimed at reminding sociology that the widespread assessment of Mead—as sociologist, social psychologist, or as the supposed originator of symbolic interactionism—is increasingly fragmented, narrow, and misplaced. For what a reexamination of Mead’s work in light of research in cognitive science demonstrates, more than anything else, is how any understanding of mind and self must begin from a standpoint that appreciates the fundamentally social nature of cognition. Although research in cognitive science is beginning to appreciate this fact, Mead has argued from this standpoint all along: Emphasis should be laid on the central position of thinking when considering the nature of the self. Self-consciousness, rather than an affective experience with its motor accompaniments, provides the core structure of the self, which is thus essentially a cognitive rather than an emotional phenomenon. . . . The essence of the self, as we have said, is cognitive: it lies in the internalized conversation of gestures which constitutes thinking, or in terms of which thought or reflection proceeds. And hence, the origin and foundation of the self, like those of thinking, are social. (1967a, 173)

NOTES 1. See work by the aptly named “neuroskeptics” (Hofstadter 2007; Nørretranders 1991) and “epiphenomenalists” (Jackson 2006; Kim 1991) for positions that deny the material relevance of the self. 2. In fact, it should be noted that the discipline of sociology originated with authors—such as Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim—for whom the now distinct natural and social sciences were fundamentally intertwined. 3. These are the very same principles that Rousseau (1974) would later use to educate his pupil Émile and illustrate a substantial area where Descartes’s influence would prove lasting. 4. Descartes actually prefigures much research on artificial intelligence when he identifies two tests through which machines could be distinguished from humans (1955b, 116). Both essentially come down to the inability of machines to fully capture the nuances of language and the fact that humans act on the basis of more than instinct alone. 5. Other notable writers who support the argument from analogy are Adam Smith (2009) and Bertrand Russell (1991). 6. These “mind-reading” abilities are broadly referred to as “folk psychology” in cognitive science literature, a term that somewhat pedantically brands the everyday and commonsense mode of apprehending the world of others.

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7. This term seems to have originated with Premack and Woodruff’s (1978) article “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” The question of other minds is, therefore, a direct indication of the parallels being drawn between human and animal cognition. Despite Premack and Woodruff answering their question hesitatingly in the affirmative, at least relative to the ability of chimpanzees to detect intention, there exists no clear consensus whether animals are believed to possess theory of mind abilities. See Smuts (2001) for a position that argues in the affirmative and Penn and Povinelli (2007) for one that argues in the negative. 8. Some authors have begun to abandon the polarity between these camps and advocate instead for hybrid positions that incorporate some aspects of both (see Heal 1996; Carruthers 1996). 9. The false belief test is an experiment designed to see if children can differentiate between their own and another’s beliefs about a given situation. It is a necessarily a test about false beliefs because a child is given preferential knowledge about a situation (that a box labeled “crayons” is shown to actually contain raisins, for instance) and then asked what another person will expect to fi nd inside the box. If the child is able to set aside their knowledge of the situation and adopt the standpoint of the uninformed person, they demonstrate that they have passed the false belief test. Interestingly, research has shown that children are only able to pass the test at around age four. 10. See Heal (1996, 81–85) concerning the “frame problem” of artificial intelligence for an in-depth examination of this issue. 11. Most research on mirror neurons focuses on the connection made through visual perception. Additional experiments have found, however, that certain cells fi re through audible sensations as well. Iacoboni, for instance, noted mirror neuron responses in areas that code for hand movements when subjects heard the sound of paper ripping. Similar activity occurred in areas of the brain that control jaw movement when subjects heard the words “bite the apple” (Iacoboni 2008, 102). 12. Mead himself notes the importance of the face in intersubjective relations (see, e.g., 1967c, 368).

REFERENCES Astington, J. 1996. “What is Theoretical about the Child’s Theory of Mind? A Vygotskian View of its Development.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 184– 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baron- Cohen, S., and J. Swettenham.1996. “The Relationship between SAM and ToMM: Two Hypotheses. In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 158– 68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Botterill, G. 1996. “Folk Psychology and Theoretical Status.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 105–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brothers, L. 1997. Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

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Cacioppo, J. T., and W. Patrick. 2008. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York: W. W. Norton. Carruthers, P. 1996. “Simulation and Self-Knowledge: A Defense of Theory-Theory.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 22–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. 1955a. Rules for the Direction of Mind. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Edited and translated by E. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1955b. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Edited and translated by E. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1955c. Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Edited and translated by E. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doidge, N. 2007. The Brain That Changes Itself. New York: Penguin. Fodor, J. A. 1991. “Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology.” In The Nature of Mind, edited by D. M. Rosenthal, 485– 98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franks, D. 2010. Neurosociology. New York: Springer Link. Gallese, V. 2001. “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy.” In Between Ourselves: Second- Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness, edited by E. Thompson, 33–50. Charlottesville: Imprint Academic. Gopnik, A. 1996. “Theories and Modules: Creation Myths, Developmental Realities, and Neurath’s Boat.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 169– 83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, R. 1996. “‘Radical’ Simulation.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 11–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, P. 1996. “Desires, Beliefs, and Language.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 200–222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heal, J. 1996. “Simulation, Theory, and Content.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 75–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hickok, G. 2009. “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21: 1229–43. Hofstadter, D. 2007. I am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books. Iacoboni, M. 2005. “Neural Mechanisms of Imitation.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 15: 632–37. ———. 2008. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Picador. Jackson, F. 2006. “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” In The Philosophy of Mind: Classic Problems/Contemporary Issues, edited by B. Beakley and P. Ludlow, 311–20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kim, J. 1991. “Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation.” In The Nature of Mind, edited by D. M. Rosenthal, 257– 65. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Leslie, A. M. 1987. “Pretense and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind.’” Psychological Review 4: 412–26. Levinas, E. 1998. Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking- of-The- Other. Translated by M. B. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. Mead, G. H. 1925. “The Genesis of Self and Social Control.” International Journal of Ethics 35: 251–77. ———. 1929. “National-Mindedness and International-Mindedness.” International Journal of Ethics 39: 385–407. ———. 1967a. Mind, Self, and Society. In Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, edited by C. W. Morris, 1–336. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1967b. “The Function of Imagery in Conduct.” In Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, edited by C. W. Morris, 337–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1967c.” Fragments on Ethics.” In Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, edited by C. W. Morris, 379– 89. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mill, J. S. 2005. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy: And of the Principle Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings. New York: Adamant Media Corporation. Niendenthal, P. 2001. “When Did Her Smile Drop? Facial Mimicry and the Influences of Emotional State on the Detection of Change in Emotional Expression.” Cognition and Emotion 15: 853– 64. Nørretranders, T. 1991. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. New York: Penguin Books. Penn, D. C., and D. J. Povinelli. 2007. “On the Lack of Evidence that Non-Human Animals Possess Anything Remotely Resembling a ‘Theory of Mind.’” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B 362: 731–44. Pharo, P. 2007. “How is Sociological Realism Possible? Sociology after Cognitive Science.” European Journal of Social Theory 10: 481– 96. Piaget, J. 1963. The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: Norton Library. Premack, D., and G. Woodruff. 1978. “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” The Behavioral and Brain Science 4: 515–26. Rizzolatti, G., and L. Craighero. 2004. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27: 169– 92. Rousseau, J.-J. 1974. Émile. Translated by B. Foxley. London: Everyman Classics. Russell, B. 1991. “Analogy.” In The Nature of Mind, edited by D. M. Rosenthal, 89– 91. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheler, M. 1954. The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by P. Heath. London: Routledge. Segal, G. 1996. “The Modularity Theory of Mind.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 141–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. 2009. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by R. P. Hanley. New York: Penguin Classics. Smuts, B. 2001. “Encounters with Animal Minds.” In Between Ourselves: Second-

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Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness, edited by E. Thompson, 293–309. Charlottesville: Imprint Academic. Stone, T., and M. Davies. 1996. “The Mental Simulation Debate: A Progress Report.” In Theories of Theories of Mind, edited by P. Carruthers and P. K. Smith, 119–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strueber, K. 2006. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Strydom, P. 2007. “Introduction: A Cartography of Contemporary Cognitive Social Theory.” European Journal of Social Theory 10: 339–56. Tomasello, M. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Turner, S. 2007. “Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience.” European Journal of Social Theory 10: 357–74. Vygotsky, L. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Translated by M. Cole. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wexler, B. 2006. Brain and Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zerubavel, E. 1997. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter Eleven

Imitation and Taking the Attitude of the Other Kelvin Jay Booth

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esearch over the past few decades has challenged a number of Mead’s central claims. Some researchers in animal cognition have contended that great apes are able to understand the intentions or experiences of others, which is sometimes called “mind reading” or having a “theory of mind.” This would contradict Mead’s claim that this ability is restricted to humans. It would also call into question his theory that taking the role or attitude of the other, which he sees as a distinctively human ability, is the basis for human self-consciousness and symbolic communication. Second, there is good evidence that imitation appears very early in human development. This could contradict Mead’s claim that there is no imitation instinct and that imitation is the result of taking the role of the other, not its basis. The evidence seems to support a contrary position that imitation is the basis of taking the role of the other and thus of language and self-consciousness. A further potential weakness of Mead’s theory, especially in light of this research with apes and infants, is that he offers no explanation for why humans have the ability to take the role of the other while other animals do not. This chapter fi rst examines some of the more well-known claims of imitation and so-called mind reading in apes and then concludes that, despite claims to the contrary, there is no clear evidence for either. Thus Mead is likely correct on these points. Mead’s theory of gestural communication is then offered as a much more plausible and fruitful interpretation of apparent mind reading. His gestural theory also anticipates recent work on embodied mind. Next I will consider claims for imitation in very young children. The evidence is strong, but we need to be clear what is meant by imitation, both in humans and in other animals. Building on Marcel Kinsbourne’s idea of synchrony I use the term “mimesis” to cover 231

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a wide range of flexible imitative behaviors, including mimicry in newborns and young infants, and argue that mimetic abilities precede and are responsible for the ability to take the attitude of the other. Nevertheless, we will see that what Michael Tomasello and Josep Call name true imitation does result from, rather than precede, taking the attitude of the other. I offer a possible explanation for why humans are the only mimetic animals, and thus the only animals that can take the attitude of the other. If it is true that mimetic abilities are the basis for taking the role of the other, and if it is true that only humans have these abilities, then we have an explanation for why humans can take the role of the other while other animals cannot. This lends support for Mead’s overall theory of mind, self, and language.

RESEARCH IN ANIMAL IMITATION Before we look at claims of imitation in animals, we need to be clear about what Mead means by imitation. In a conversation of gestures, the gesture of one individual calls out a different adjustive response in another. A dog fight is one of Mead’s favorite examples. In imitation, however, a gesture of one animal calls out the same gesture in the other. In symbolic communication also, a symbol calls out the same response in both individuals, thus it looks like imitation might be responsible for symbolic communication, including language. Wundt, among others at the time, posited an imitation instinct, but Mead thinks that there cannot possibly be such a thing. He realizes that there does seem to be a tendency to imitate, especially among children (Mead 1934, 52). However, he concludes that there is no evidence that in a conversation of gestures the gesture of one animal becomes a stimulus for the other to do the same thing. Imitation as the mere tendency of the part of an organism to reproduce what it sees or hears other organisms doing is mechanically impossible; one cannot conceive an organism as so constructed that all the sights and sounds which reach it would arouse in the organism tendencies to reproduce what it sees and hears in those fields of experience. (Mead 1934, 60)

By imitation Mead seems to have in mind an almost mechanical notion of an instinct that just automatically reproduces any or all behavior of others. This would clearly be maladaptive. It would not even result in cooperative behavior.

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In the most basic sense of the word, imitation is simply doing what another individual does. Thorndike’s (1898) original defi nition is learning an act by seeing it done. Most researchers now acknowledge that imitation is not simply that one individual does what another does; rather, it is a matter of how an individual learns to behave as another does. There are many ways this can happen, and some of these ways obviously have nothing to do with imitation. Others are similar enough to cause confusion and misunderstanding. Imitation can be distinguished from at least three other ways that animals adopt the behavior of conspecifics. One is stimulus enhancement. Animals sharing the same environmental conditions will have their behavior shaped in similar ways. They depend on the same kind of foods, must avoid the same predators, or live in the same kind of nest or burrow. In some cases this may be aided by observation learning. For example, if one chimpanzee sees another open a simple box to get a food item, that observer will also open the same box to see if it contains food. Another kind of observational learning is emulation. One individual watching another use a tool to gain a desirable result can see there is some relationship between the tool and the result but uses trial and error to learn the necessary skill rather than directly copying the method of the demonstrator (see, e.g., Tomasello, Davis-Desilva, and Bard 1987). In the end, the behaviors of the two individuals will look very much the same, but imitation is not how the observer learns. Some of the most well-known laboratory studies supporting claims of primate imitation have been done by Andrew Whiten (1998 and 2002) and his associates (Horner and Whiten 2004). Whiten used an apparatus that can be opened two different ways, each way involving two actions (a twoaction experiment). The subject witnesses a demonstrator open the apparatus. When the opening mechanism is hidden from view, the subject will tend to follow the demonstrated method. But when the mechanism is obvious (such as when the apparatus is transparent and simple), the subject tends to use the most direct method of getting it open. The researchers call the fi rst scenario imitation and the second emulation. But consider the previous example of a chimpanzee watching another chimp open a simple box to access food. We are not surprised if the observing chimp opens the lid when presented with a similar box, and it would be unwarranted to call it imitation. It is simply an example of observation learning. Many animals learn something about their environment by watching others. This is essentially what is happening with the opaque apparatus in the Whiten experiments, only with more complicated boxes. Because the

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method of getting inside the box is not obvious, the subject must rely on others to model how to do it. In the transparent situation, the subject simply goes directly to the food. Interestingly, children presented with a very similar problem copied the adult demonstrator whether or not the box was transparent and the method demonstrated was the easiest way to get into it. This is behavior we can rightly call imitation. The child wants to do what the adult does, regardless of whether it is the most efficient means. The behavior of the adult directly elicits the same behavior in the child. Richard Byrne introduced the idea of program level imitation. Exact actions are not imitated, but imitation occurs on the organizational level of a series of actions (Byrne 1993; Byrne and Russon 1998; Byrne 2002). He examined young gorillas learning to handle and eat thistles by watching their mothers. Thistle processing is complicated if the gorilla is to avoid getting stung. The gorilla carefully rolls the leaves so that the stingers are inside the rolled up leaf, then eats the exposed side. Byrne thinks that these actions are too complicated to be ascribed to emulation. He proposes behavioral parsing, a concept derived from linguistics, and he does what amounts to a quasi-linguistic analysis on non-linguistic behavior. Gorillas apparently can break down the analog flow of behavior into relatively discrete units and rearrange them to suit the circumstances, much as humans can re-arrange words into larger linguistic structures. There are a number of problems here. First, it is not clear that gorillas actually engage in behavioral parsing. Second, it is not clear that the learned sequences can be separated from trial-and-error learning or from learning object affordances through observing the behavior of others. Finally, given that the beginning and end stages remain constant (picking leaves and eating them) and that the affordance of the thistles demands that certain actions must come before others, it should not be surprising that the structure of the sequence is replicated, especially when observational learning facilitates developing the skill. Michael Tomasello has a more nuanced idea of imitation and, with his associates, has developed a number of landmark experiments to sort out various kinds of observation learning. When learning to complete a task, some animals will learn the sequence of actions of the model, and others may learn the goal of the model and develop their own ways of achieving that goal. What Tomasello calls “true imitation” is replicating both the means and the ends of actions (Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993). The subject understands and replicates the intentions of the demonstrator and uses the same means to act on those intentions. This is only clearly found in human subjects, starting in their second year of life (though possibly

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also in a few human-raised chimpanzees). This is the kind of imitation the children were doing in Whiten’s two-action experiment. It depends on taking the attitude of the other, and it develops after children become aware of the intentions of others and that these intentions may be different from their own. If we consider the results of these and other research programs, a few things become clear. Even if imitation is defi ned broadly, non-human animals are not very good at it—if they can do it at all.1 It is rarely if ever observed in either natural or non-laboratory captive settings. Moreover, in experimental situations it is almost always motivated by some extrinsic reward. Animals have to be trained or rewarded to imitate. In contrast, humans imitate early, often, and spontaneously. We will imitate someone in order to accomplish a task, or we will imitate simply for the enjoyment of imitating. Imitation seems to be its own reward in many cases. Susan Jones (2005) points out that in experiments that compare the imitative abilities of apes and children, children and chimpanzees are not really doing the same task, even though it may look as if they are. The task will have a different meaning to a child than it does to a chimpanzee. Children may be trying to establish an affiliative relationship with the adult demonstrators or trying to grasp the meaning of the situation, while the chimps just want to get at a tasty bit of food. In short, there is nothing in research on animal imitation that shows that Mead is wrong when he claims that non-human animals do not imitate in the sense that a gesture itself calls out the same gesture in another individual. I think we can assume he is correct until we are presented with clear contrary evidence.

MIND READING AND HAVING A SELF- CONCEPT It was David Premack and George Woodruff (1978) who fi rst asked “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” In other words, do apes understand others as having mental states? They tested the chimpanzee Sarah to see if she understood the intentions and predicaments of human demonstrators. They concluded that she did. However, other leading primate researchers questioned the methodology of the experiments—especially the possibility of unconscious cues—and there has been controversy ever since.2 In later work Premack has been more conservative in his claims (Premack 1986; Premack and Premack 2003). Daniel Povinelli and Timothy Eddy (1996) found that chimpanzees responded to another’s bodily orientation more than to the other’s gaze, but also found that chimpanzees would turn around to follow a human gaze to a spot behind the sub-

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ject. When there was nothing there, they appeared to check to see if that was indeed where the human was staring. On the other hand, they were not able to understand that when an experimenter was looking at a place where food was hidden, this was a sign that they should look there. Povinelli, Nelson, and Boysen (1990) trained chimps for a false belief test, which required understanding the perspective of others. They passed the test only after 100 to 150 trials, and even then their training did not transfer to different testing situations. Some researchers base their claims for an ape theory of mind on observations in the field or in captive but non-laboratory situations. Solicitation of allies in coalitions and alliances is one line of evidence. Sometimes individuals will recruit allies ahead of time, or even seem to cultivate alliances through grooming and other mutualistic behavior. 3 But these behaviors show that chimpanzees are able to understand the bodily social relationships that other individuals have to each other and that they are able to use foresight to put this understanding to use. They do not demonstrate that chimpanzees understand others as having mental states. The animals only need to understand the social relationships between bodies, not intentions. A second indicator for understanding the mental states of others would be intentional deception. Most reports come from anecdotes collected by Byrne and Whiten (1988). Besides having the methodological problems of anecdotes, many were recounted from memory without having been recorded at the time that they happened. Since the researchers were not looking for deception at the time, these events are open to misinterpretation. Other apparently convincing stories, including reports by Frans de Waal (1982) and Tanner and Byrne (1993), show only that apes are conscious of certain parts of their bodies as objects and the effects these body parts have on other individuals. Again, this does not require an understanding of other individuals’ mental states. Third, declarative pointing (where one individual points to something at a distance to draw the attention of another) would be very good evidence that apes understand that others have mental states. Some apes who live in close contact with humans have been reported to point, but this is usually an open-hand “begging” gesture similar to gestures used in the wild. It is like a grasping toward something rather than showing something to another individual, and so does not require understanding the mental states of others. The most recent and significant experiments investigating whether chimpanzees understand the mental states of others, or at least what others see, have been carried out by Hare et al. (2000 and 2001). In the basic setup there was a subdominant chimpanzee subject behind a gate on one side of

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a small room and a dominant chimp behind a gate on the other side. In the center, just off to one side there was a food item in view of both animals, and just off to the other side there was a food item behind a barrier that hid it from the view of the dominant chimp but not the subdominant subject. The subject reliably—and safely—went to the food that was hidden from the dominant’s view. This strongly suggests that the subdominant understands in some way that the dominant can “see” the food out in the open but not behind the barrier. The experimental conditions were varied in a number of ways, such as the timing of opening the gates, using a transparent barrier, enabling the subject to see the placement of the food, and so on. Each time, the subject acted in accordance with what the dominant chimp could see. This appears to be evidence for some degree of a chimpanzee theory of mind. However, considering the failure of chimpanzees in other research to understand the relationship between what an individual sees and their communicative intentions, Tomasello et al. (2003, 156) concludes that chimpanzees can understand what others see and that they “know something about intention in action,” but they do not have a “full-blown theory of mind.” Taking a more skeptical position, Daniel Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk (2003) maintain that nothing in these and other experiments separate the subjects’ ability to understand mental states, such as seeing, from being very good at reading behavior, since the former depends on the latter. To infer mental states requires a highly developed sensitivity to the behavior of other individuals, but this sensitivity on its own is enough to explain the observed behavior without supposing that the subjects have an additional understanding of what others see or know. According to Mead, understanding that others have mental states arises simultaneously with self-consciousness. Both depend on being able to take the position of the other. Self-consciousness involves taking the position of others toward oneself, so it depends on understanding others as having a position of awareness. Similarly, understanding others as having a position of awareness depends on understanding oneself as having a position of awareness. This requires that a self can become an object to itself. In other words, an ape must have a self-concept in order to have an understanding that others have a position of awareness. Thus if apes do not have a selfconcept, then they would likely be unable to understand others as being selves or having mental states. Mirror recognition tests are thought to be a way to test for a self-concept. Mirror recognition techniques were pioneered by Gordon Gallup (1968 and 1970) with four chimpanzees. At fi rst the chimps responded to mirrors as if their reflections were other chimps. After a few days they showed

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evidence that they recognized the reflections to be of their own bodies. They performed various self-directed grooming activities on parts of their bodies that they could not otherwise see. After several days of this, the subjects were given the mark test. They were anesthetized and their faces were marked with colored ink that left no tactile or olfactory clues. The next time they were in front of a mirror, the chimpanzees explored these marks with their fi ngers, sometimes inspecting and smelling their fi ngers after touching the marks. Chimps who were marked but had no previous experience with mirrors showed no interest in the marks. Despite early successes, others were not able to reliably replicate the results (Povinelli et al. 1993). Karyl Swartz and Sian Evans (1997) have been critical of Gallup’s methodology and insist from their own and others’ research—and even on the basis of Gallup’s own results—that passing the mark test is not universal for chimpanzees or for other apes. They maintain that not all chimps show self-directed behaviors when exposed to mirrors, and that not all chimps that do show self-directed behaviors pass the mark test. Even if some subjects pass the mark test, this does not mean that they have a self-concept. First, as Mead points out, visible parts of the animal’s own body can appear as things in the world that can be touched and handled like other things. Through using their hands, chimps may understand quite a bit about their own bodies, including parts of their bodies that they can touch but not see. These parts are often groomed by others, and groomed on others. Chimps will investigate marks on their wrists, yet this does not suggest a self-concept. It merely means that they are investigating something unfamiliar. We also know that chimpanzees and some monkeys can learn to use mirrors and video displays to access food objects that cannot be directly seen (Menzel et al. 1985; Anderson 1986). What mirror research shows is that some chimps will use mirrors to access parts of their own bodies that they cannot normally see, just as they can use mirrors to locate food in hidden areas. After prolonged exposure to mirrors, a new mark on their face would be treated the same as a mark on their wrist—something to be investigated. This does not indicate a sense of self. Tomasello and Call (1997, 337) conclude that mirror self-recognition “is thus about the perception of parts of the body, at which all primates are likely to be skillful with no special training or experiences,” and that researchers should ask why “vision and the recognition of the face have been privileged over other senses and other parts of the body.” They point out a difference in the behavior of apes and children in front of mirrors that may be telling. In human children, mirror recognition is often accompanied by signs of embarrassment and linguistic self-reference. Embarrassment

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indicates that they understand themselves as objects of others’ gaze just as they are now objects of their own gaze. They take the position of others toward themselves.

GESTURE AND MEANING Mead’s concepts of the gesture and gestural communication provide a fruitful way of interpreting the behaviors in apes that some researchers believe show evidence of mind reading. Mind has its genesis in gestural communication as a bodily activity. Communication is not mind to mind but body to body. Mead’s philosophy of mind is a philosophy of embodied mind. At its most basic, a gesture in Mead’s view is a movement of one animal that is responded to by another animal. If that same movement does not generate a response, then it is not a gesture (Mead 1934, 75–78, 145). Thus, a gesture is inherently social, and all social behavior is carried out through gestures. A gesture may be the movement of a limb, a subtle shift in facial muscles, or the movement of the whole body. Additionally, it is not a completed movement that serves as a gesture but the beginning of a movement. Mead describes how we approach a tool, say a hammer, with an organized set of largely unconscious expectations and are bodily prepared to use the tool before we reach it. Likewise when a chimpanzee approaches food or a social situation, it is bodily prepared to respond to probable conditions and outcomes. These subtle beginnings of movements, or what Mead sometimes calls attitudes, are what serve as gestures to another individual. Because a gesture is the beginning of an action, a conversation of gestures is not a matter of taking turns as in a verbal conversation. As one animal responds to a gesture of another animal, that other animal is already adjusting its behavior to that response. The movement of the two animals is a single dynamic system of mutual adjustment and attunement. It is a social dance where each individual is astutely attuned to subtle movements of others (King 2005). As in a human dance, this mutual attunement does not require the individuals to understand the “minds” of the others. In Mead’s theory, gestures have meaning. The gesture of one animal “means” the outcome of the social act to the other. However, the gesturing animal “is not at the same time indicating or bringing out the same thing or meaning to or for himself” (Mead 1934, 75–78, 81, 145; 1964, 110–11). The individual does not respond to its own gestures from the standpoint of the other animal. It is completely involved in responding to the movements of the other animal, not to its own movements. In Mead’s terms, there

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is meaning but no consciousness of meaning. This we can call gestural meaning to distinguish it from symbolic meaning. If an animal cannot indicate to itself the meaning that its gestures have for others, then the animal cannot self-consciously communicate meaning to others. However, though gestural meaning is not conscious, gestures can still be intentionally directed toward another individual with an expectation of the other’s response. For instance, just as a chimpanzee will manipulate a physical object with the expectation of certain results, they will gesture toward another chimp to initiate grooming or playing and then monitor the other to see if it behaves in the expected way. We should not fi nd this behavior surprising in a species with a high level of social awareness. But unless an animal can respond to its own gestures as the other responds to them, which requires taking a standpoint toward itself from a position outside itself, the gesturing animal cannot have the meaning of its gestures “in mind” as something that can then be directed to others through the gesture. Gestures are directed, but not their meaning. Apes are attentive to the outcomes of the actions of others, and they seem to have some understanding that the actions of others are directed toward an outcome. Apes are also attentive to ongoing interactions that other individuals have to each other and to the outcomes of those interactions. These form a background field of gestural meaning within which any particular conversation of gestures takes place, and they are important when it comes to forming coalitions and alliances. The individual forms a dynamic cognitive map of the gestural landscape within which it acts and learns to anticipate the outcome of the combined behavior of other individuals toward objects, toward one another, and toward itself. Tomasello and Call (1997, 371) think that the understanding of third-party relationships, combined with understanding the directedness of others’ actions, accounts for most or all of the complex social cognition found in monkeys and apes. Taking the role of the other is not necessary to explain the complexity of ape social behavior and cognition.

IMITATION IN CHILDREN Though there are some dissenters, most researchers agree that some form of imitation starts either at birth or just a few months afterwards. If this is the case, then imitation cannot be the result of taking the attitude of the other as Mead thought. Infant imitation has been extensively studied by Andrew Meltzoff and his associates. They discovered that infants as young as twelve days after birth are able to imitate tongue protrusions

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and an open mouth gesture following an adult demonstrator (Meltzoff and Moore 1977). Their later studies found the same phenomenon just hours after birth.4 After a few months infants are able to imitate actions such as tongue rolling, tongue protrusions to the side of the mouth, and simple hand movements, and in one series of experiments they imitated an action up to twenty-four hours after they had seen it (Meltzoff and Moore 1989; 1994; 1977). Meltzoff (2005) has three criteria for imitation: First, the observer produces behavior similar to the model. Second, seeing the adult’s action causes the imitative response by the child. And third, there is an equivalence between the observer and the model that is in some way perceived by the child. The fi rst two criteria together come close to Mead’s idea of the gesture of one individual stimulating the same gesture in the other, which is what Mead would call imitation. The third criterion specifies that this relationship is one between conspecifics—that is, two human beings. The child, in Meltzoff’s words, perceives the adult to be “like me.” Meltzoff (2005, 56) is very clear that he thinks that imitation leads to an understanding of other minds, “not the other way around.” So he disagrees with Mead. Offering an explanation for infant imitation he says, “When infants see others acting similarly to how they have acted in the past they project onto others the mental state that regularly goes with that behavior” (Meltzoff 2005, 57). In short, they use themselves as models for understanding others. Even at a very early age, according to Meltzoff (2005, 74), an adult “looks like the infant feels himself to be.” This, he says, is an innate capacity, not learned, though it is developed through learning. The trouble with this explanation from Mead’s perspective is that the “like me” hypothesis already requires the ability to take the attitude of the other; it does not explain it. Meltzoff claims that imitation is the basis for understanding other minds, yet “like me” appears to be based on the very ability Meltzoff wishes to explain. According to Mead, a sense of “like me” would require some sense of “me” as an object of awareness. It also involves a comparison—that two distinct things are in some sense “like” each other. It’s not clear that a newborn has these abilities. Second, Meltzoff claims that the infant has direct and immediate apprehension of its own mental states. This not only runs counter to Mead’s rejection of immediate knowledge, but as Alvin Goldman (2005) points out it runs counter to the “theory theory” view of understanding other minds held by Meltzoff. In this view, as in Mead, understanding first-person mental states develops at the same time as understanding third-person mental states. One learns to objectify or “theorize” oneself as one objectifies or theorizes others.

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A much better interpretation of imitation in children is offered by Marcel Kinsbourne (2005), who talks about interactional synchrony, a term coined by William Condon and Louis Sander (1974). Infants take on the rhythms of movement and speech of surrounding adults well before they begin to understand speech. He proposes that “humans are innately predisposed to adopt rhythms that accord with those of others” and believes that “there is a core predisposition of the human brain to entrain with conspecifics” (Kinsbourne 2005, 167, 168). Infants tend to synchronize their movements with a source of arousal. Babies naturally fi nd the faces and voices of caregivers arousing. Thus they are more likely to “entrain” with facial expressions rather than, say, inanimate objects (see Meltzoff 1995). Kinsbourne provides a story of him interacting with his 20-month-old niece, a story recognizable to all parents. He sneezes and she is startled. She keeps asking him to sneeze again, and then she imitates the sneeze. What is going on here according to Kinsbourne (2005, 168) is that his niece is “affiliating,” a form of synchrony that is stimulated by the interaction. In early infancy, such synchrony is restricted to very simple mouth and tongue movements because these are the only behaviors over which a newborn has some control. As the child matures, synchrony grows more complex. It is not just specific actions but overall patterns of behavior that are synchronized. If we see synchrony as a general openness that is shaped and conditioned by the child’s surroundings and that is directed toward certain sources of arousal, we avoid the idea of a fi xed imitation instinct that concerned Mead. What is the basis of this synchrony in humans? A clue can be found in our enjoyment of repetition. We like our routines, we like to practice skills, we like rhythms and rituals. Of course any animal repeats what it enjoys; some dogs will play fetch endlessly. But human repetition is often just for the sake of repetition itself. This is particularly evident in rhythmic music and in the effectiveness of chants and rituals. Repetition brings structure to activity. Humans come into the world with a nervous system and behavioral repertoire that is unstructured compared with other species, and when an unstructured situation gains structure this is itself rewarding. Repetition just for its own sake may be similar to infants imitating just for the sake of imitation and not necessarily to achieve a particular outcome. Kinsbourne (2005) calls this kind of repetition for repetition’s sake “self-imitation.” On the other hand, we could call imitation the repetition of others. In short, repetition “imitates” one’s own behavior, while imitation is a repetition of the behavior of others. Imitation, then, fulfi lls

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the same role as repetition—the structuring of behavior and experience. Related to imitation is declarative pointing, which is essentially a request for another individual to “imitate” or get in synch with one’s own perspective. All activity involves doing an action and simultaneously undergoing an experience. Imitation is a mutual doing, and pointing is a request for a mutual undergoing. I propose that repetition, imitation, and declarative pointing are manifestations of a generalized human ability and desire for what I am calling mimesis or getting in synch with others.5 We can make some guesses as to the underlying neurological basis for our mimetic abilities. We know that the enlarged human cerebral cortex results in great plasticity and unstructured possibilities for human behavior and cognition. And we know that this same part of the brain produces extensive overlaps of sensory and motor modalities through its highly complex interconnections with other areas of the brain. This kind of overlap can be seen in Butterworth’s (1993) research where infants presented with both a bumpy and a smooth pacifier were more visually interested in the one they previously had in their mouths but had not previously seen. With such overlapping modalities of sense, repeating the behavior of others becomes almost as easy as repeating one’s own behavior. The enlarged cerebral cortex, then, both requires imitation to provide structure to behavior, and makes imitation possible by having overlapping neural pathways. What about mirror neurons? Mirror neurons likely have been overused as an explanation of many human and primate cognitive abilities (see Hickok 2009; Heyes 2010; and Churchland 2011). Nevertheless, they may have a role to play in what I am calling mimesis. Mirror neurons were fi rst discovered in monkeys, who are not imitators. So even if mirror neurons have something to do with imitation, they cannot be the whole story. Roman Madzia (2013) emphasizes that mirror neurons enable an organism to simulate but not imitate the actions of others. When mirror neurons are activated in the observing monkey, the actions of the other individual are neurologically embodied in that observer. The brain simulates the action of the other. Since the other is directed toward an outcome such as grasping and eating a bit of food, this may give the observer an ability to bodily anticipate the other individual’s movements as being directed toward that outcome. This does not mean that the observing animal understands the other as having a point of view or as wanting or intending something. There is no theory of mind here. Rather, because neurons in its own brain are fi ring in a way similar to how they would fi re if the observer were doing that action itself, it has in its own body the attitude of carrying

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out that action, and that attitude would be integrated into its own behavior. The observing organism would anticipate the outcome of the other’s action as it would anticipate the same outcome of its own actions. This is not taking the attitude of the other, but it is having a similar attitude that the other has. Tomasello and Call (1997) suggest that the ability to understand the behavior of others as directed toward an outcome distinguishes the behavior of primates from most other mammals and may be an evolutionary mid-point prior to having a theory of mind. It is possible that this may have something to do with mirror neurons. Simulation may also help explain some primates’ ability to understand the social relations that other individuals have to each other, enabling complex relationships such as recruitment of allies into a situation of social confl ict. My proposal is that if mirror neurons have a function in taking the role of the other, it is because the openness of the human brain allows them to have a greater role than they do in other primates. In humans, simulation can be expressed as imitation.

THE ONTOGENY OF JOINT ATTENTION AND THE SELF The human tendency for behavioral synchrony leads to joint attention activities, and these activities lead to taking the role of the other. Prior to the age of nine months, the child’s social relationships are dyadic. The child pays attention either to a feature in the environment or to another human but not to both simultaneously (Tomasello 1995). In dyadic relationships with humans, the child gets in synch with its caregivers in increasingly complex ways but does not need to understand the adult as a person with mental states. There is no joint attention; even if child and adult may be attending the same object, they are doing it independently. Sharing and checking adults’ attention to proximal objects emerges between nine and twelve months (Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello 1998). The child is aware that the adult is attending to the same thing that the child is attending in matters close at hand. Just as the child synchronizes its behavior with adults, she gets in synch with the attention of the adult. Also at this stage, the child starts showing objects to adults, usually by holding them up to the adult’s gaze. She wants the adult to get in synch with her attention-paying toward objects. The child is interested in both the object and the adult’s relationship to the object and in subtle changes in the adult’s attention to things. This requires some understanding of the

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other as an experiencing being. It is here that we begin to see Mead’s taking the role of the other beginning to develop. Reliably following an adult’s gaze to objects at a distance emerges between eleven and fourteen months. The child understands that the adult is paying attention to a particular object out of a variety of possibilities. Tomasello (1995) suggests that the prior stage of sharing attention to a proximal object requires the infant to understand that the adult is paying attention to something, while following an adult’s gaze to a distal object requires the child to understand what the adult is attending within a range of possibilities. Understanding that another’s attention is directed toward a distal object requires understanding what the adult is intending, not just attending. The child learns this through participation in social activity directed toward shared outcomes. In Mead’s terms, the child and adult are engaged in a cooperative social act and the development of shared meanings. The direction of the adult’s attention means a certain outcome, which involves certain objects that stand at a distance within a background. Next, between twelve and fi fteen months, the child directs adult attention through declarative pointing at a distal object (Tomasello 1995). Declarative pointing requires the child to understand that the adult’s attention and intentions can be directed to the same thing that the child is already attending. It is a request or demand for shared intention, not just attention. This requires understanding intention as something that can be shared and directed. Joint attention becomes joint intention; it is “what we are doing together.” This understanding is still inchoate because it is not yet linguistically symbolized. Nevertheless, the basis for symbolization has been established. There are shared attitudes, expectations, and meanings around the same gesture. Declarative pointing to something at a distance is a basic symbolic act, perhaps the original symbolic act. In Mead’s terms, both the pointer and the other person respond to the point in the same way. The gesture of one individual stimulates the same attitude in the other. The point “means” the same to both. Pointing refers—that is, directs—the attention of the other to an object. The reference of the pointing is not just to the object, it is to the object as it functions in a later stage of the cooperative joint intentional act. The meaning of a pointing gesture as a symbol is not “reference” or “representation” in the sense of a correspondence between the symbol and an “external” object. It is the relationship of the present phase of the social act to an anticipated future outcome. This forms the basis of

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human thinking. For Mead, to think of something is to point it out before acting. Thinking is pointing out—to think about a thing is to point it out before acting . . . Whether one points with his fi nger, or points with the glance of the eye, or motion of the head, or the attitude of the body, or by means of a vocal gesture in one language or another, is indifferent to that thing which is indicated. That is the essential part of language. (Mead 1934, 93n22)

A symbol indicates not just an object but a perspective that can be taken toward that object. A word picks out some salient feature of the situation from a point of view. Taking the attitude of the other is taking the perspective of the other. Tomasello correctly maintains that cognitive categories can be understood in terms of perspectives, with each category representing a different perspective that can be taken through linguistic symbols. “We may then say that linguistic symbols are social conventions for inducing others to construe, or take a perspective on, some experiential situation” (Tomasello 1999, 118). They enable us to take the perspective of the other. As the child learns a language, she comes to see that there are many different ways of looking at a situation and at objects within a situation and that different words express different perspectives or attitudes toward the same event. This understanding of perspectives is fundamental to symbolic communication. Like Mead, Tomasello emphasizes that symbolic communication requires mimetic role reversal, which in Mead’s terms is taking the role of the other. “The child must learn to use a symbol toward the adult in the same way that the adult used it toward her” (Tomasello 1999, 105). The child must be able to direct the adult’s attention with symbols just as the adult used the same symbols to direct the child’s attention. She must be able to substitute herself for the adult, and substitute the adult for herself as the target of her communication. This is taking the role of the other. Children also learn role reversal from watching communication between adults. The child is able to put herself in either role in the conversation. This role reversal is what makes a gesture, vocal or otherwise, fully symbolic. The child “can assume in most circumstances that the listener both comprehends and can produce that same symbol—and the listener also knows that they can both comprehend and produce the symbol” (Tomasello 1999, 106). Tomasello maintains that “only now can a child monitor the intentional states of others toward herself—indeed toward her

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own intentional state—and can understand a communicative intention.” This is a complex development of the basic human ability and desire for synchrony. One of the things adults attend to in joint attentional activities is the child. The child develops a growing awareness that she herself is the object of attention. But it is not just her physical body that is the object of attention, parts of which she can perceive as objects in the world. The adult is interested in the child’s attention and intentions. The child follows the adult’s attention back toward herself and her own intentions and attitudes. The child has a growing sense of herself as an intending being. Perceiving her nascent self as an object, the child also begins mimetically to perceive others in a similar way. They, too, have intentions like her own. She can direct her attention toward their intentions. Understanding that the adult is “like me” emerges at the same time as the “me” that the adult is like. The child is now taking the position of the other, and she can take the position of the other toward herself and in the process become a self. “That the person should be responding to himself is necessary to the self . . . the individual is not a self in the reflective sense unless he is an object to himself” (Mead 1934, 143). We might ask, what is carrying out the reflexive act? It is not an original self, for the self is entirely social in Mead’s view. It is the primal animation of the child, the felt capacity for directed movement. The animate body’s mimetic abilities and desires are reflected back upon itself through the attention of others. The dawning of self-awareness in the child is the awareness of the unity of its own felt capacities for movement, its intentions and attitudes, as they are reflected back to itself in its social relationships. To sum up, solid evidence for imitation or for a theory of mind in nonhuman primates is lacking, so Mead appears to be right that these abilities are distinctively human. The evidence adduced for an ape theory of mind is better explained by developing Mead’s ideas of the gesture and the conversation of gestures. Contrary to Mead, however, there is strong evidence for imitation in young children that becomes the basis for taking the attitude of role of the other. But Mead is right that this is not an imitation instinct. Rather, it is a tendency for children to synchronize their movements with adults. We are born with these abilities only in the sense that we are born with a lack of structure and an openness to being structured by repeating one’s own actions and repeating the actions of others. Rather than an instinct, it is more like a lack of instincts. Synchrony is first exhibited in neonatal imitation and later develops into joint attentional activities that give rise to our ability to take the role of the other. This in

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turn gives rise to what Tomasello calls true imitation, which is imitating both the intentions and the means of achieving those intentions. Imitation in this sense does follow from taking the role of other just as Mead thought. At this time there is no other explanation for why humans can take the attitude of the other and other animals cannot. If synchrony is a precondition for taking the role of the other, and if (as appears likely) humans are the only creatures that get mimetically in synch with others, then we have a possible explanation for how humans have this attitudetaking ability. This would lend support for Mead’s entire social psychology. The process is no doubt complex, but once we admit a basic tendency for mimetic synchrony, we can build up a developmental picture of Mead’s entire theory of mind, self, language, and culture that is consistent with research in primate cognition and human cognitive development.

NOTES 1. See the two volumes edited by Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (2005a and 2005b). 2. For examples, see the critical comments following Premack and Woodruff’s target paper “Do Chimpanzees Have a Theory of Mind?” 3. For examples, see the work of Robin Dunbar and Frans de Waal. 4. This imitation in infants has also been confi rmed in some other primates (see Ferrarri et al. 2006; and Myowa 1996). However, it disappears quickly as the infant develops and does not seem to play a role in further social learning. 5. My use of the terms “mimesis” and “mimetic” is similar to Merlin Donald’s use of the term “mimetic culture” in his discussion of the transition from the “episodic culture” of apes to the “mythic” or symbolic culture of homo sapiens (see Donald 1991).

REFERENCES Anderson, James R. 1986. “Mirror-mediated Finding of Hidden Food by Monkeys (Macaca tonkiana and M.facicularis).” Journal of Comparative Psychology 100: 237–42. Butterworth, George. 1993. “Dynamic Approaches to Infant Perception and Action: Old and New Theories About the Origins of Knowledge.” In A Dynamic Systems Approach to Development: Applications, edited by Linda B. Smith and E. Thelen, 171– 87. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Byrne, Richard W. 1993. “Hierarchical Levels of Imitation.” Commentary on “Cultural Learning,” by M. Tomasello, A. Kruger, and H. Ratner. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 516–17. ———. 2002. “Imitation of Novel Complex Actions: What Does the Evidence from Animals Mean?” Advances in the Study of Behavior 31: 77–105. Byrne, Richard W., and Anne Russon. 1998. “Learning by Imitation: A Hierarchical Approach.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21: 667–721.

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Byrne, Richard, and Andrew Whiten, eds. 1988. Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carpenter, M., K. Nagell, and M. Tomasello. 1998. “Social Cognition, Joint Attention, and Communicative Competence from 9 to 15 Months of Age.”Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 63. Churchland, Patricia. 2011. Braintrust. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Condon, W., and L. Sander. 1973. “Neonate Movement Is Synchronized With Adult Speech: Interactional Participation and Language Acquisition.” Science 183: 99–101. de Waal, Frans B. M. 1982. Chimpanzee Politics. London: Jonathan Cape. Donald, Merlin. 1991. The Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ferrari, Pier F., Elisabetta Visalberghi, Annika Paukner, Leonardo Fogassi, Angela Ruggiero, and Stephen J. Suomi. 2006. “Neonatal Imitation in Rhesus Macaques.” Public Library of Science: Biology 4, no. 9: 1501–8. Gallup, Gordon., Jr. 1968. “Mirror Image Stimulation.” Psychological Bulletin 70: 782–93. ———. 1970. “Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition.” Science 167: 86-87. Goldman, Alvin I. 2005. “Imitation, Mind Reading, and Simulation.” In Perspectives on Imitation Vol. 2: From Neuroscience to Social Science, edited by Susan Hurley and Nick Chater, 79– 93. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hare, Brian, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello. 2001. “Do Chimpanzees Know What Conspecifics Know and Do Not Know?” Animal Behavior 61: 139–51. Hare, Brian, Josep Call, Bryan Agnetta, and Michael Tomasello. 2000. “Chimpanzees Know What Conspecifics Do and Do Not See.” Animal Behavior 59: 771– 85. Heyes, Cecilia. 2010. “Where Do Mirror Neurons Come From?” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 34: 575–83. Hickok, Gregory. 2009. “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21: 1229–43. Horner, V., and A. Whiten. 2005. “Causal Knowledge and Imitation/Emulation Simulation in Chimpanzees (Pantroglodytes) and Children (Homo sapiens).” Animal Cognition 8: 164– 81. Hurley, Susan, and Nick Chater, eds. 2005a. Perspectives on Imitation Vol. 1: Mechanisms of Imitation and Imitation in Animals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———., eds. 2005b. Perspectives on Imitation Vol. 2: Imitation, Human Development, and Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jones, Susan. 2005. “Why Don’t Apes Ape More?” In Perspectives on Imitation Vol. 1: Mechanisms of Imitation and Imitation in Animals, edited by Susan Hurley and Nick Chater, 297–301. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. King, Barbara. 2005. The Dynamic Dance: Non-Verbal Communication in African Great Apes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kinsbourne, Marcel. 2005. “Imitation as Entrainment: Brain Mechanisms and Social Consequences.” In Perspectives on Imitation Vol. 2: Imitation, Human Development, and Culture, edited by Susan Hurley and Nick Chater, 163–72. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Madzia, Roman. 2013. “Mead and Self-Embodiment: Imitation, Simulation and the Problem of Taking the Attitude of the Other.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 38: 195–213. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited with an introduction by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 1964. Selected Writings. Edited by Andrew J. Reck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meltzoff, Andrew, and M. Keith Moore. 1977. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures in Human Neonates.” Science 198: 75–78. ———. 1989. “Imitation of Newborn Infants: Exploring the Range of Gestures Imitated and the Underlying Mechanisms.” Developmental Psychology 25, no. 6: 954– 62. ———. 1994. “Imitation, Memory, the Representation of Persons.” Infant Behavior and Development 17: 83– 89. Meltzoff, Andrew. 1995. “Understanding the Intentions of Others: Re-enactment of Intended Acts by 18-month old Children.” Developmental Psychology 31: 838–50. ———. 2005. “Imitation and Other Minds: The ‘Like Me’ Hypothesis.” In Perspectives on Imitation Vol. 1: Mechanisms of Imitation and Imitation in Animals, edited by Susan Hurley and Nick Chater, 55–78. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Menzel, E. W., Jr., E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, and J. Lawson. 1985. “Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) Spatial Problem Solving with the Use of Mirrors and Televised Equivalents of Mirrors.” Journal of Comparative Psychology 99: 211–17. Myowa, Masako. 1996. “Imitation of Facial Gestures by an Infant Chimpanzee.” Primates 37: 207–13. Povinelli, Daniel, and T. J. Eddy. 1996. “Factors Influencing Young Chimpanzees Recognition of Attention.” Journal of Comparative Psychology 110: 336–45. Povinelli, Daniel, K. E. Nelson, and S. T. Boysen. 1990. “Inferences about Guessing and Knowing by Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).” Journal of Comparative Psychology 104: 203–10. Povinelli, Daniel, A. B. Ruff, K. R. Landau, and D. T. Bierschwale 1993. “SelfRecognition in Chimpanzees: Distribution, Ontogeny and Patterns of Emergence.” Journal of Comparative Psychology 107: 347–72. Povinelli, Daniel, and Jennifer Vonk. 2003. “Chimpanzee Minds: Suspiciously Human?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 157– 60. ———. 2004. “We Don’t Need a Microscope to Explore the Chimpanzee’s Mind.” Mind and Language 19: 1–28. Premack, David. 1986. Gavagai: Or The Future History of the Animal Language Controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Premack, David, and Anne Premack. 2003. Original Intelligence: Unlocking the Mystery of Who We Are. New York: McGraw-Hill. Premack, David, and George Woodruff. 1978 “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1, no. 4: 515–26. Swartz, Karyl B., and Sian Evans. 1997. “Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Mirrors.” In Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, edited by Robert M. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson, and H. Lyn Miles, 296–310. Albany: SUNY Press.

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Tanner, J. E., and R. W. Byrne. 1993. “Concealing Facial Evidence of Mood: PerspectiveTaking in a Captive Gorilla.” Primates 34: 451–57. Thorndike, Edward. 1898. “Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Process in Animals.” Psychological Review and Monograph 2: 551–53. Tomasello, Michael. 1995. “Joint Attention as Social Cognition.” In Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, edited by Chris Moore and Philip J. Dunham, 103–30. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. ———. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, Michael, and Josep Call. 1997. Primate Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press. Tomasello, Michael, Josep Call, and Brian Hare. 2003. “Chimpanzees Understand Psychological States—The Question is Which Ones and to What Extent.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 153–56. Tomasello, M., M. Davis-Dasilva, L. Camak, and K. Bard. 1987. “Observational Learning of Tool-use by Young Chimpanzees.” Human Evolution 2: 175–83. Tomasello, M. A. Kruger, and H. Ratner. 1993. “Cultural Learning.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 495–511. Whiten, Andrew. 1998. “Imitation of the Sequential Structure of Actions by Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).” Journal of Comparative Psychology 112: 270– 81. ———. 2002. “Imitation of Sequential and Hierarchical Structure in Actions: Experimental Studies with Children and Chimpanzees.” In Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, edited by K. Dautenhahn and C. Hehaniv, 191–209. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

C h a p t e r T w e lv e

Mead Meets Tomasello: Pragmatism, the Cognitive Sciences, and the Origins of Human Communication and Sociality Frithjof Nungesser

INTRODUCTION

I

n the work of George Herbert Mead we fi nd a radical, innovative, and transdisciplinary account of the intrinsic sociality of human action. Mead’s theory synthesizes the two major breakthroughs in pragmatist social theory: fi rst, a naturalistic and non-reductionist account of human action as described in great detail in the work of John Dewey and, second, a theory of the constitutively social character of the self as presented, for example, in the work of Charles Horton Cooley.1 By explaining the unique characteristics of both human behavior and human sociality within one complex argument, Mead avoids the complementary gaps that can be identified in both Dewey’s and Cooley’s accounts of human conduct.2 To speak of the intrinsic sociality of action does not only mean that human agency can only emerge through intensive social interaction early in life. Rather, it refers to the stronger claim that human agency is in itself an intersubjective process, which must be explained on the basis of the individual’s constitutive embeddedness in human sociality. The task of social theory, then, is to explain human agency by referring to the increasing internalization or “importation of the social process” (Mead [1934] 1967, 186) that leads to a comprehensive reorganization of the experiential, cognitive, and motivational structures of the individual. Consequently, the concept of the intrinsic sociality of action refers not only to a genetic but also, and more importantly, to a systematic claim about human agency and action. One of the key strengths of Mead’s work is its deeply transdisciplinary character. Because he largely abstained from boundary-work, Mead was able to integrate arguments from diverse fields such as philosophy; social, 252

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developmental, and animal psychology; physiology; evolutionary theory; and physics. Today, unfortunately, large parts of the literature on Mead sever these connections to the natural sciences. 3 In opposition to this tendency, I claim that we must adhere to the transdisciplinary perspective of pragmatism in order to deepen our understanding of the anthropological foundations of human sociality, communication, and action. More specifically, I argue that certain developments in the cognitive sciences can be beneficially integrated within a Meadian framework. This claim may seem surprising, given the fact that the cognitive sciences often tend to model human thought in terms of computational concepts that imply a rather cerebral, dualist, and mechanical picture of human cognition. From the 1980s onward, however, approaches such as enactivism, embodied  cognition, extended mind, and distributed cognition developed that can partly be understood as a critical reaction to the computational paradigm, especially in the form of evolutionary psychology.4 Although these approaches do not constitute a homogeneous group, they share some characteristics that are of interest from a pragmatist point of view. These similarities have been noted in an increasing number of publications from the 1990s on. This development even led to the coinage of the term “neuropragmatism.”5 The tenor of this important group of publications is that recent developments in the cognitive and neurosciences confi rm and refi ne a pragmatist model of human action that conceptualizes mental faculties such as reflexivity, consciousness, perception, imagination, and knowledge as processes that are constitutively embedded in the organism’s bodily interactions with its environment and that, consequently, have to be understood as functional phases of human conduct. Mark Johnson, for example, claims that “Dewey’s non-dualist functional approach is quite compatible with mainstream views in cognitive neuroscience today, according to which organism and environment are correlative terms, defi nable only in relation to their continuous interaction. There is no mind without a functioning body and brain, nor a functioning brain without cognitive activity engaging the world” (Johnson 2010, 127). What is interesting with regard to the problem at hand is that the majority of authors participating in the dialogue between pragmatism and the cognitive and neurosciences almost exclusively draw on Dewey (and sometimes James). This holds true even when they discuss problems that lie at the core of Mead’s (in contrast to Dewey’s) work—for example, problems regarding the phylogenetic and ontogenetic preconditions of human communication and sociality, the differences between the interaction with animate and inanimate objects, or the cognitive reorganization that

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follows from the social embeddedness of the child (see, e.g., Johnson 2010, 128; Schulkin 2009, 6ff., 23ff.; Solymosi 2011, 361, 363; Solymosi and Shook 2013, 218f., 222f.). If we keep in mind that Dewey explicitly stated that he took over his most important concepts in social theory from Mead (see Jane Dewey 1931, 313; Dewey 1939, 26), I think we have to consider Mead’s absence from large parts of the literature on pragmatism and the cognitive sciences a major shortcoming.6 There is, however, one major exception to this marginalization of Mead within the current discussion. Several publications engage in an interesting discussion on the potential relevance of mirror neuron research for pragmatist social theory.7 I cannot go into detail here. Yet, I think caution is in order for two reasons. First, the very fact that mirror neurons have been found not only in humans but also in monkeys and in some birds, suggests that this mechanism “of course may not be the only relevant one” (Turner 2007, 366) if we want to understand human-specific intersubjectivity, and it suggests “that there are good reasons to believe that mirror neurons do not represent a sufficient condition for imitation” (Madzia 2013a, 195).8 Second, research on mirror neurons focuses on the neurophysiological basis of social interaction, communication, and empathy. It does not, however, look into the importance of sociocultural processes for the development of human cognition. In what follows, I strive to alleviate this shortcoming by providing a comparative analysis of Mead and the work of Michael Tomasello, which not only comprises experimental studies in primatology, linguistics, and comparative and developmental psychology, but also broader theoretical studies on the origins of human communication and language, cultural cognition, and cooperation. Tomasello’s studies, I claim, can contribute to an empirically saturated and refi ned account of both the evolutionary and ontogenetic logic of cognitive development described by Mead. In contrast to the approaches discussed above, Tomasello does not deal with a pragmatist account of human action, nor does he focus on neuronal and cognitive processes that can be found in both human and nonhuman primates—as does research on mirror neurons. Rather, he strives for the identification of human-specific sociocognitive faculties. Thereby, he opens up another promising path for the dialogue between pragmatism and the cognitive sciences. In the following section, I will summarize the major similarities between Mead and Tomasello, before details of Tomasello’s studies are presented that may help to reformulate Mead’s argument regarding the transi-

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tion from animal to human-specific communication in a more convincing way in the third section. Finally, I will discuss very briefly a conceptual problem in Tomasello that might be instructive with regard to the relationship of pragmatist social theory and the cognitive sciences in general in the fourth section.9

GESTURAL COMMUNICATION, ROLE-TAKING, AND SOCIOCULTURAL COGNITION: MAJOR SIMILARITIES BETWEEN MEAD AND TOMASELLO Both Mead and Tomasello make use of results from animal and human developmental psychology in order to gain a comparative view of the behavioral and cognitive capabilities of humans and other animals. Although they emphasize evolutionary continuity, they do not search for Our Inner Ape (as Frans de Waal does [2006]). Instead, they search for the humanspecific faculties that have made possible the emergence of human communication, society, and culture. Implicitly or explicitly, both Mead and Tomasello take into account the evolutionary “time problem” of hominization (see Tomasello 1999, 2f.). This is why they search for a very small set of differences that not only emerged within a relatively short evolutionary period, but also initiated a qualitatively new dynamic of behavioral and cognitive change which operates on a different time scale—that is, cultural history. This new mode of cultural transmission and innovation is, of course, closely intertwined with the development of language. Yet, for Mead as well as for Tomasello, language is not the starting point of this process. Rather, language itself has to be understood as the product of a complex historical and cultural development that is based on a small biologically evolved faculty, which is not language-specific (see, e.g., Mead [1934] 1967, 17; Tomasello 2014, 127). After its emergence, however, language became an active and crucial factor in the development of human behavior, thought, and culture. Tomasello captures this insight by quoting Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society: “There is nothing odd about the product of a given process contributing to, or even becoming an essential factor in, the further development of that process” (Mead [1934] 1967, 226; cited in Tomasello 1999, 13). In order to arrive at a better understanding of the conditions of possibility of this cultural process both authors search for a transitional concept that helps to understand the evolutionary shift from animal to hu-

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man communication. Tomasello and Mead agree that this transitional phenomenon has to be identified on the level of gestural interaction (see, e.g., Mead [1934] 1967, 17; Tomasello 2008, 172). Moreover, the two authors concur in their understanding of gestures; Mead identifies “the term ‘gesture’ . . . with the beginnings of social acts” (Mead [1934] 1967, 43), as “a syncopated act, one that has been cut short, a torso” (Mead 1909, 406). Similarly, Tomasello argues that gestures are “basically abbreviations of full-fledged social actions” (Tomasello 2008, 23).10 Given this argumentation, the two authors have to explain which social psychological concepts may account for the understanding of the new kind of gestural interaction. Most importantly, both Mead and Tomasello agree that the difference in role-taking abilities can be identified as the crucial factor that explains the gulf between human and animal sociality. In both accounts, this implies a criticism of theories that regard imitation as constitutive for human intersubjectivity and communication. For Mead, as well as for Tomasello, imitation does not explain human-specific forms of social cognition but rests on these skills.11 As is well known, the human-specific ability to take the role or attitude of the other is for Mead the conditio sine qua non for the emergence of symbolic communication, the understanding of others, self-reflexivity, and the understanding of group activities and norms. Yet, the development of the mature form of role-taking needs time and takes place in several steps (see esp. 1922, 161f.; 1925, 268ff.; [1934] 1967, 138, 154ff.). Mead famously distinguishes two major stages within this process, which correspond to two steps of children’s play behavior (play and game). However, because Mead provides a “developmental logic, in contrast to a developmental psychology,” he “is very vague when answering the question, at which age of the child do these developmental steps occur?” (Joas [1980] 1997, 120). If we compare Mead’s account with Tomasello’s empirical work in developmental psychology, it becomes clear that Tomasello provides a much more detailed chronology of the emergence and further development of role-taking abilities (see esp. Tomasello 1999, chaps. 3– 6; 2008, chap. 4). Nonetheless, as Tomasello himself notes, his results show marked similarities to Mead’s description. 2-year-olds participate in shared intentionality with specific other persons, whereas 5-year-olds participate in collective intentionality with individuals representing a broader set of cultural perspectives and norms. In the terms of Mead (1934), the child is going from guiding its

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actions via an internalized ‘significant other’ to guiding its actions via an internalized ‘generalized other.’ Importantly, this difference enables a new understanding of human mental activity in terms of not only individual beliefs but also of collectively intentional beliefs—which have the world-making power to create cultural-institutional realities. Thus, 2-year-olds’ understanding of intentions simply does not enable them to grasp the workings of cultural institutions such as money, marriage, and government—whose reality derives from collective practices and beliefs in their existence—whereas 4- and 5-year-olds, with their newly acquired concepts of belief and reality, are in a position to begin learning about these collective entities. Indeed in virtually all cultures in which there is formal education, where children learn about such things as cultural institutions and their workings, 5 to 6 years of age is the canonical starting point. (Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003, 139)12

Thus, according to Tomasello, the results of his experiments confi rm Mead’s claim of an increasing generalization of role-taking in the course of ontogeny (see also Tomasello 2009, 41f.; 2014, 1, 116). In the beginning, it is this role-taking process that makes symbolic communication possible. In the further course of ontogeny, however, it is through language that the role-taking process is generalized and becomes more and more complex. At the same time—and again Tomasello and Mead agree—the internalization of this process transforms thought into an inner dialogue (see Mead 1925, 272; [1934] 1967, 47ff., 141f.; Tomasello 1999, 10, 201ff.). In both Mead and Tomasello, we can clearly recognize a three level theory. On the phylogenetic level, we have to account for basic humanspecific abilities of role-taking (see, e.g., Mead [1934] 1967, 234; Tomasello 1999, 189, 202f.). On the ontogenetic level, we have to describe and explain how these abilities develop in childhood through constant interaction with others and through constant internalization of language, norms, institutions, etc. On the historical level, we have to explicate how these ontogenetically developed abilities facilitate the cumulative cultural development of human-specific phenomena, not just of language, but also of complex tools and technologies, mathematical symbols, or institutions. Crucially, however, we have to explain not only how basic cognitive skills make cultural history possible, but also how these cultural products become themselves crucial driving forces within the development of human cognition.

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OF DOGS, APES, AND MEN: TOMASELLO AND MEAD ON THE TRANSITION FROM ANIMAL TO HUMAN-SPECIFIC COMMUNICATION AND SOCIALITY If we look into the details of Mead’s and Tomasello’s accounts of the evolutionary transition to human-specific sociality and communication, we can identify some instructive differences that may be used to reformulate Mead’s transitional scenario in a more satisfying manner. Four aspects seem to be of special importance.

Reference Species Mead and Tomasello make frequent use of comparative arguments. They do so, however, with respect to different species. While Tomasello refers mainly to studies on great apes, especially chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), conducted by his own research group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Mead refers to a variety of animal species as comparative examples. Most prominently, he uses the imaginary example of two fighting dogs as a foil.13 From an evolutionary perspective, it may appear odd that there are hardly any primates in Mead’s argument. After all, already Darwin emphasized the extraordinary similarities between human and nonhuman primates (see, e.g., Darwin [1871] 1981, 48f.). Yet, one has to keep in mind that the fi rst pertinent psychological studies of monkeys and apes were published in 1916 and 1917, respectively;14 that is, they appeared after the formative period of Mead’s anthropological theory of communication (lasting until 1913).15 Nonetheless, it is striking that no systematic distinctions are drawn between different groups of species regarding their behavioral patterns, cognitive skills, or social relations, apart from the distinction between “social insects” and “vertebrates” (see [1934] 1967, 227ff.; 1925, 262ff.). Hence, despite Mead’s intention to give an account of the evolution of human communication and interaction that satisfies the principle of evolutionary continuity, in the end he arrives at a rather contrastive and ideal-typical opposition of man and animal, which is characteristic of social theory and sociology as a whole.

Vocal vs. Manual Communication If we consider not only Mead’s choice of reference species but also the importance of Wilhelm Wundt’s work for the formation of Mead’s thought,

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it hardly comes as a surprise that he focuses on the vocal channel in his search for a transitional concept. In his anthropological theory of communication, Mead draws critically on Darwin’s and Wundt’s model of emotional expression. He criticizes Darwin and Wundt because they focus too much on individual expression and ignore the communicative value of gestures (see Mead 1910b, 177). Despite his criticism, their arguments are of great interest for Mead because they open up the possibility for an evolutionary account of the transition from animal to human-specific communication. Of special importance in Mead’s theory is Wundt’s concept of the vocal gesture (Lautgebärde). According to Mead, the vocal gesture differs from other kinds of gestures, such as facial and bodily expressions, because it can not only be perceived by other individuals, but also by the individual who performs the gesture. Since the sender is affected by his own vocal expression, he can associate this self-affection with the attitude of the other that has been observed before: “In so far then as the individual takes the attitude of another toward himself, and in some sense arouses in himself the tendency to the action, which his conduct calls out in the other individual, he will have indicated to himself the meaning of the gesture” (Mead 1922, 161). This is why the vocal gesture, for Mead, is a decisive step towards the emergence of symbolic communication and self-reflexivity. But is it really true that “one shakes his fist primarily only at another, while he talks to himself as really as he talks to his vis-à-vis” (Mead 1912, 403)? Are there good reasons for this primacy of the vocal channel? In his 1907 paper “Concerning Animal Perception,” Mead suggests that—compared to the manual skills of humans—“the function of locomotion is so dominant in use of the [monkey’s] so-called hands” that, in contrast to humans, it is not able to perceive things as isolated entities (1907, 389). Later, in The Philosophy of the Act, Mead claims that apes do not experience physical objects as distinct objects because they do not engage in inhibited object manipulation (Mead [1938] 1964, 24, 136). Although it is true that “nonhuman primates do not engage in the kinds of disinterested object manipulations, involving the complex relating of objects to one another, that human infants and children do with regularity from early in development,” it is important to know that “in comparison to mammals in general, but also to prosimians and many monkeys, apes are much more interested in and more skillful with respect to manipulating objects” (Tomasello and Call 1997, 70). Moreover, another very important non-locomotive manual activity, which is not mentioned by Mead, is tool use. In the wild, primates  use

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tools in three main contexts: “threatening or attacking intruders,” “bodily care,” and “acquisition and preparation of food” (Cheney and Seyfarth 1992, 296f.). As with object manipulation in general, there are again substantial differences among primates: apes “use tools more often and in more different ways than monkeys” (Cheney and Seyfarth 1992, 297; see also Tomasello 2014, 16). From a certain perspective, tool use may be even more instructive than mere object manipulation: “Since tool use is at least potentially linked to social learning and imitation, it is tempting to speculate that it represents a breakdown in the barriers between social and nonsocial domains.” (Cheney and Seyfarth 1992, 295)16 Given the lack of systematic primatological research at the time, it is not surprising that Mead was unaware not only of the sophisticated manual skills of apes with regard to object manipulation and tool use, but also of their intensive manual communication. Far more surprising, in contrast, is the fact that until recently the overwhelming majority of studies on primate communication focused on the vocal channel. Of course, monkeys and apes often communicate vocally (see Cheney and Seyfarth 1992, chap. 4; Tomasello 2008, 15ff.). Even in great apes, however, these vocal signals seem to be genetically fi xed (see Tomasello and Call 1997, 243). In contrast, “great apes use their gestural signals with conspecifics in flexible and strategic ways that are in some ways sensitive to the audience. The same signal may be used for different ends, different signals may be used toward the same end, and many signals are given in ways that are appropriate to the observational situation of the recipient” (Tomasello and Call 1997, 249). Note that Tomasello writes “gestural signals,” instead of “gestures.” This is because Tomasello, in contrast to Mead, distinguishes two main types of animal communication. On the one hand, there are “communicative displays” which comprise typical physical characteristics (such as horns, teeth, or coloration) as well as “reflexive behaviors that are invariably evoked by particular stimuli or emotional states over which the individual has no voluntary control” (Tomasello 2008, 14). On the other hand, there are “communicative signals,” which are “chosen and produced by individual organisms flexibly and strategically for particular social goals, adjusted in various ways for particular circumstances” (14). These signals “are individually learned, intentionally and flexibly produced” (20). Because parts of the gestures of great apes are reflexive in character (e.g., facial expression), we need to distinguish between gestural displays and gestural signals in great ape communication—only the latter can be classified as “intentional communication.”17

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If we take into account the apes’ use of “communicative signals,” we understand why Tomasello (2008, 33) claims that, from “a functional, communicative point of view . . . , on practically every dimension imaginable, great apes display more sophisticated communicative skills in the gestural rather than in the vocal modality.” On the whole, then, compared to Mead’s account of the “vocal gesture,” Tomasello’s focus on the manual gestures of great apes—which actually possess hands and which use them not only for locomotion or tool use, but also for communicative ends— seems to constitute a much more promising perspective regarding the transition from animal to human specific communication.18 Given the importance the pragmatists ascribe to the process of eye-hand-coordination within their general account of human activity, it seems as if this result would fit in quite well with a pragmatist approach to the evolution of human communication.19

The Social Skills of Reference Species If we compare Tomasello’s analysis of the gestural communication of great apes with Mead’s description of the canine “conversation of gestures” (Mead 1910a, 398), we see that Tomasello’s apes are equipped with far more elaborate social skills than Mead’s dogs. According to Mead, the dogs’ fight consists of “instinctive reactions” (1912, 402) and “does not call for more than inherited physiological adjustment” (1925, 263). Consequently, in Tomasello’s terminology, the interaction of dogs during a fight, as described by Mead, would be an example for communication by displays. Each of the dogs adjusts its behavior instinctively to the genetically fi xed and inflexible displays of the other dog. In contrast, especially in competitive experimental designs, chimpanzee, are able to adjust and inhibit their behavior—including their communicative signals—flexibly and strategically with respect to the behavior of other individuals. This, in turn, presupposes that “apes understand others in terms of their goals and perceptions and how these work to determine behavioral decisions, that is, they understand others as intentional, perhaps even rational, agents” (Tomasello 2008, 49; see also 2014, 20ff.). Here are some of the results from different experimental settings Tomasello refers to in order to substantiate his claim: When a human passes food to a chimpanzee and then fails to do so, the ape reacts in a frustrated manner if the human is doing this for no good reason (i.e., is unwilling) whereas she waits patiently if the human is

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making good-faith attempts to give the object but failing or having accidents (i.e., is unable). (Tomasello 2008, 45) When a human or conspecific needs help reaching an out-of-reach object or location, chimpanzees help them in a way similar to human infants—which requires an understanding of the other’s goal. (Tomasello 2008, 45) When apes beg a human for food, they take into account whether the human can see their gesture. (Tomasello 2008, 47) When chimpanzees compete with one another for food they take into account whether their competitor can see the contested food, and even on occasion attempt to conceal their approach from a competitor. (Tomasello 2008, 47f.)

Against the background of these fi ndings, the claim that all animal interaction resembles a continuous instinctive exchange of communicative displays seems to be too strong, at least with respect to apes.20 To oppose the uninhibited and instinctive conduct of “animals” to “human” action, which can be inhibited and often presupposes reflection and perspectivetaking, does not do justice to the evolutionary continuum between animal and human behavior (see Tomasello 2014, 26).21 Rather, in order to conceptualize the behavior of great apes, it seems to be more appropriate to distinguish between different dimensions of perspective-taking. Chimpanzees, it seems, are not only able to take the role of others with respect to their perceptions and intentions, but also to adapt their own behavior accordingly. Crucially, however, there are other aspects of perspective-taking that chimpanzees are not capable of. Most importantly, they do not understand communicative intentions as can be demonstrated in pointing experiments. The reason for the chimpanzees’ failure to understand the pointing of others is not that they are unable to follow the direction of the deictic gesture (see, e.g., Tomasello 2014, 52). This can be seen in the so-called object choice task. In this experiment, the tested primates are confronted with different opaque boxes. An experimenter then points to one of the boxes, which is the only one containing food. Although the apes know from prior experience that the experimenter is kind to them, this does not influence their choice. After following the pointing fi nger to the box fi lled with food, they nonetheless choose at random. In contrast, in a similar, yet competitive design, the apes demonstrate their ability to understand

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the intentions of others. In order to get the food stored in a bucket, a human competitor reaches through a hole in a Plexiglas wall. Because the bucket is out of reach, however, the human is unable to obtain the food. Although reaching appears quite similar to pointing, in this situation the chimpanzees in most cases choose the right bucket and get the food (see Tomasello 2006, 508). From this Tomasello concludes “that understanding goals or intentions is not the same thing as understanding communicative intentions” (508).

The Evolution of Human- Specific Communication How did human-specific communication evolve? This is one of the crucial questions Mead and Tomasello want to answer. We can only hope for an answer if we take the principle of evolutionary continuity seriously. Against this background, the results from primatology are of fundamental importance because they give us an idea of what the behavior, cognitive skills, and communication of our primate ancestors may have looked like (see Tomasello 2014, 15, 30). Most probably, they did not behave like Mead’s dogs but acted more flexibly and demonstrated more sophisticated manual, gestural, and sociocognitive skills. This, in turn, significantly alleviates the evolutionary time problem: it was not perspective-taking and reflexive gestural communication per se that emerged with Homo sapiens but smaller—albeit crucial—refi nements and extensions of these faculties. Yet, what did the situation in which the emergence of these new abilities was evolutionarily advantageous look like? Tomasello and Mead agree that human specific communication evolved in the context of practical, object oriented cooperation in small groups (Mead [1934] 1967, 240; Tomasello 2008, 7f., 169ff.; 2014, 34ff., 51ff.). Mead, however, does not describe the evolutionary relationship between cooperation and human communication in a consistent way.22 Moreover, even if we ignore these inconsistencies, we can assert—following Joas—that Mead “completely neglects the ecological conditions of this process” (Joas [1980] 1997, 114). In contrast, Tomasello tries to reconstruct at least some of the evolutionary conditions in which the flexible use of manual signals by our primate ancestors may have led to the emergence of both symbolic reference and human-specific cooperation. Of course, Tomasello also cannot give a complete account of anthropogenesis and he is well aware of the methodological problems of all evolutionary hypotheses (see, e.g., Tomasello 2008, 171, 191). Considering the results of primatology, the basic evolutionary question is how the human ancestors started not only to gesture to others but

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also  for others. As has been described, chimpanzees use bodily gestures regularly and flexibly. According to Tomasello, these gestural signals can be differentiated into two groups: “attention getters” and “intention movements” (Tomasello 2008, 22ff.). Importantly, however, all these gestures are imperative in character. Chimpanzees use them in order to manipulate the attention of others, request food, or to initiate play or grooming. In contrast, human children begin to point not only imperatively but also declaratively (i.e., in order to inform others) and expressively (i.e., in order to share experiences with others) at around one year of age (see Tomasello 2008, 135ff.). From the perspective of evolutionary theory, Tomasello claims, the only possible explanation for the emergence of human-specific cooperative gestural behavior is that it “was adaptive initially because it arose in the context of mutualistic collaborative activities in which individuals helping others were simultaneously helping themselves” (Tomasello 2008, 170). Consequently, the fi rst crucial evolutionary step would consist in a motivational change towards cooperativeness and sharedness after the human lineage diverged from that of its primate relatives—especially with respect to food. As can be seen in human-raised chimpanzees, a change in the motivational make-up of the group is enough to significantly alter the apes’ social and cognitive skills.23 They start to point and learn through imitation. In a situation like this, our ancestors could have used the pointing gesture in order to request help in mutualistic activities. Then, the second step could occur. Those “individuals, who are coordinating actions with one another more regularly and tolerantly, would then be in a position for natural selection—given the appropriate ecological conditions—to specifically favor cognitive and motivational machinery supporting more complex collaborative interactions” (Tomasello 2008, 194). These more complex interactions could then result in an increasing generalization of cooperative and communicative processes—indirect reciprocity, cooperation with individuals that are neither kin nor members of the group, generalization of norms, institutionalized norm-enforcement, etc. (see Tomasello 2008, 199ff.). According to this evolutionary narrative, the change of communicative behavior in the course of anthropogenesis co-evolved with a more cooperative pattern of social interaction. This change led to the transformation of the gestural communication of apes (and our last common ancestors) into genuine significant symbols. Intention movements turned into iconic gestures (pantomime), whereas “attention getters” were transformed into deictic gestures (pointing). Later, with the shift from the manual to the vo-

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cal channel, iconic gestures became content words, like nouns and verbs, while deictic gestures turned into demonstratives such as “this” and “that” (see Tomasello 2008, 324). In Tomasello’s account, then, manual gestures and language are interlocked both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. Humans pantomimed and pointed before they spoke; children pantomime and point before they speak (see Tomasello 2008, chaps. 4 and 5). Moreover, Tomasello also presents an elaborate theory of the grammaticalization of human language in the course of both cultural evolution and ontogeny (see Tomasello 1999; 2008, chaps. 4, 6). Thus, he addresses a shortcoming that has been identified as one of the crucial problems in Mead’s account of language (see, e.g., Puddephatt 2011, 82f.). Tomasello’s research demonstrates that “human collaborative activities differ from great apes’ group activities in precisely the same way that human cooperative communication differs from great ape intentional communication” (2008, 172f.). In addition, his account of the evolution of human-specific communication is already quite detailed and backed up with substantial empirical research. His “quasi-evolutionary tale” (2008, 198), while still quite “speculative” (2008, 238), nonetheless gives us an instructive insight into the co-evolution of human cooperation and communication that is, although much more detailed, compatible with Mead.

A PRAGMATIST ACID TEST: CONCLUDING REMARKS In a recent paper Loren Goldman (2012, 20) warns that “the growing interest in neuropragmatism threatens to hypostatize the fi ndings of natural science.” Of course, many studies in the cognitive and neurosciences give good reasons “to pause and step back from the hype” (Noë 2009, 20). But this should not induce us to abandon the interdisciplinary dialogue. Instead, we should follow the pragmatists’ lead and take up a critical, yet positive position towards the natural sciences. In fact, what makes positions such as Tomasello’s attractive to pragmatist social theory is the fact that they try not to “divorce the fi ndings of medical science from the meaningful social environment” (Goldman 2012, 20). Also, they do not conceptualize social and cultural phenomena as dependent variables that are to be explained within an exclusively psychological or biological framework. Rather, sociocultural processes serve as crucial explanatory factors in their argumentation. Therefore, Tomasello would completely agree with Goldman that “we cannot stop at the cranium or the skin” (Goldman 2012, 20).24 Pragmatism, however, not only welcomes the fi ndings of the natural

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sciences and reflects them critically but also strives to integrate them into a non-reductionist understanding of human activity and experience. It acknowledges the enormous biological similarities between humans and their nonhuman relatives. At the same time, it stresses the qualitatively new form of life that results from the biologically evolved human-specific faculties. In other words, from a pragmatist perspective, human specific faculties impregnate our existence as a whole, even those aspects we share with other species. Hence, pragmatism recognizes what Matthias Jung calls the anthropological double-structure of “evolutionary continuity” and “the holism of difference” (Jung 2009, 6ff., 54ff., 197ff., 370). This double-structure, I claim, can serve as an instructive pragmatist acid test for an anthropological account of sociality and action. Because many theories in the social sciences ignore or reject arguments from evolutionary anthropology or the cognitive sciences, they end up using “the hazy cognitive theories of folk wisdom, their own and those of the people they study” (Bloch 2012, 8). While this often leads to a one-sided and distorted overemphasis on the “holism of difference,” many approaches in the biological or cognitive sciences such as evolutionary psychology want to get rid of this holism altogether. If we now compare Tomasello’s perspective with these theories, it seems that he fails much better (to adapt a phrase of Beckett’s). Although Tomasello seems to be quite determined to pass the acid test, it can be shown that his “holism of difference” omits important parts of human behavior. Especially when it comes to reckless, cruel, or violent behavior, he falls back on an apish logic of action. For example, take the following quotes: All viable organisms must have a selfish streak; they must be concerned about their own survival and well-being or they will not be leaving many offspring. Human cooperativeness and helpfulness are, as it were, laid on top of this self-interested foundation. (Tomasello 2009, 5, emphasis added) Our proposal is that human cooperative communication was adaptive initially because it arose in the context of mutualistic collaborative activities in which individuals helping others were simultaneously helping themselves. This is not quite as obvious as it fi rst sounds, as cooperative communication today may be used for all kinds of selfi sh, deceptive, competitive, and otherwise individualistic ends. (Tomasello 2008, 170, emphasis added)

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If we look at the quotes, we have to ask: what lies ‘under’ the layer of “human cooperativeness and helpfulness”? And why are “deceptive” or “competitive” ends necessarily “individualistic ends”? It seems as if Tomasello resorts to a kind of “multi-story anthropology” (Jung 2009, 198), which distinguishes between an “apish ground-floor” (characterized by egoistic motives) and a “human upper floor” (characterized by cooperative motives). All “anti-social” behavior is conceptualized as selfish, instrumental, and individualistic—features that Tomasello declares to be characteristic of great ape cognition (see, e.g., Tomasello 2014, 30f.). Thus, it appears as if the anti-social acts of humans constitute a behavioral aberration that does not correspond to the cooperative nature of human action in general. It is of utmost importance, however, to see that all human action, not only cooperative action in the narrower sense, takes place in a qualitatively new social medium, in an intersubjective space opened up by intricate sociocognitive and motivational skills. One example Tomasello himself refers to is lying. Lying becomes possible only on the basis of cooperative communication—“you only lie because you know that I will trust your information as truthful and act accordingly” (Tomasello 2014, 51; see also 2008, 8, 170, 190, 216f.; 2014, 156). Yet, while the liar has to maintain the pretense of cooperation, there is an impressive spectrum of openly uncooperative behavior that is also based on human-specific skills. Torture, to take an extreme example, is based on complex forms of roletaking. Often, the torturer not only knows how to infl ict bodily harm upon his victim in efficient, culturally transmitted ways but also attacks the symbolic or social identity of his target (by desecrating religious symbols or by threatening to harm the victim’s loved ones). On the other side, the vulnerability of the victim also rests on human-specific intersubjectivity. Regardless of how much she detests the torturer, she cannot escape the shared cognitive space between them. She will recognize the situation and she will understand the aims of the torturer. All this would be impossible for nonhuman primates. So, we can agree with Terrence Deacon (1997, 430) who notes that torture constitutes “a uniquely human collision of the most base with the most noble powers of symbolic consciousness.” Because he does not take into account the whole spectrum of humanspecific action, Tomasello runs the risk of sketching a cleft anthropology that conceptualizes cooperative behavior as intrinsically social and specifically human, “anti-social” behavior, however, as egocentric and brutish.25 The reason for this shortcoming seems to be that he does not decouple the phylogenetic explanation of the emergence of human specific social cognition and motivation in situations of cooperation from a systematic

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account of the intrinsic sociality of all human action. Yet, we need to acknowledge that also the most egoistic, cruel, and heinous human acts become possible only on the basis of human specific social skills. In most cases these practices are performed collectively in accordance to culturally shaped motivations that are appropriated in the course of socialization and that build upon cumulative cultural histories of deception, violence, and cruelty. In conclusion, we may state that Tomasello’s work might help to update Mead’s evolutionary account against the background of recent fi ndings in the cognitive and biological sciences. Nevertheless his conceptualization of human action must be revised in the light of pragmatist objections.26 More generally, this exemplary discussion demonstrates the need for an intense dialogue and mutual criticism between sociology and the natural sciences and highlights the continued importance of Mead’s pragmatist social theory.

NOTES 1. This claim of a twofold paradigm shift in the work of Mead has already been advanced by Hans Joas. See, for example, his criticism of Habermas (Joas 1993, 130). 2. Thereby, I do not intend to suggest a simple “narrative of progress.” Rather, in order to appreciate the value of each of these œuvres, one has to keep in mind the specific character and the aims of each of these three thinkers (the same applies, of course, to James and Peirce). For example, compared to “the extensive reach of Dewey’s philosophy” (Cochran 2010, 7), which continually opens up new fields for pragmatist reconstruction, Mead’s studies resemble a “deep drilling” carried out on a rather limited area. In the case of Mead and Dewey, the differing approaches can, in part, even be understood as a kind of “division of labor” (Morris [1934] 1967, xi; see also Westbrook 1991, 72; and Cook 1993, 166). Dewey, for instance, repeatedly stresses the crucial importance of sociality for human action and emphasizes “The Need for Social Psychology” ([1917] 1980). In the end, however, he “really did not have a whole lot to say that could in any strict sense be termed social theory” (Westbrook 2005, 185). Cooley, in turn, writes much on the intersubjective nature of the self, but fails to interlock these arguments with a substantial account of human action (see Nungesser and Wöhrle 2013). Hence, if one wants to look into the intrinsic sociality of action, Mead is certainly the most important author within the pragmatist movement. It does not come as a surprise, then, that Mead not only wrote a critical appraisal of “Cooley’s Contribution to American Social Thought” ([1930] 2009) but also a skeptical review of Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct, which—according to its subtitle—was intended to be an Introduction to Social Psychology (the review was only published posthumously; see Cook 1994). 3. Even the mainstream of symbolic interactionism, which presented itself as the heir of Mead’s social theory, largely neglected the anthropological dimensions of his work (see, e.g., Joas 1993, 17f.; Franks 2010, 1f.; and Franks and Turner 2013, 139ff.).

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4. See Jung (2011, 30) and Schüler (2012, 86ff.). For important general criticisms of the tenets of evolutionary psychology see Dupré (2003) and Buller (2006). 5. Recent publications are Rockwell (2005), Schulkin (2009), Johnson (2010), Jung (2009 and 2011), Franks (2010 and 2013), and Madzia (2013b). The term “neuropragmatism” was coined by Tibor Solymosi (2011, 2013a, 2013b, and Solymosi and Shook 2013). 6. There are few exceptions to this. In the work of Matthias Jung (2009 and 2010, 157, 159f.), Mead plays a significant role. Also, David Franks, in his publications on “neurosociology” (2010, 2013), and Jay Schulkin, in his book on social sensibility (2000), touch on some of the important similarities between Mead’s pragmatism and certain strands in cognitive neuroscience. 7. See Turner (2007), Franks (2010, chap. 5 and 9), Franks (2013, 145f.), Madzia (2013a), and Solymosi (2013c, 93ff.). 8. Interestingly, Turner and Madzia agree in this respect despite the fact that they formulate diametrically opposed positions as to whether the fi ndings in mirror neuron research refute or confi rm Mead’s theory (see Turner 2007 and Madzia 2013a). Rizzolatti and other neuroscientists also claim that the mirror neuron system alone is a necessary but not sufficient condition for human-specific forms of intersubjective understanding, imitation, and communication (see, e.g., Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008, 150ff.). 9. I give a more general comparison of Tomasello’s work and the sociological pragmatism of Mead and Cooley in Nungesser (2012). Parts II and III of this paper provide an introductory presentation of Tomasello’s seminal contributions to cultural and social theory, Part IV develops some comparative arguments. The present paper could be seen as a sequel to this paper since it focuses on more restricted problems that are only discussed very briefly in the 2012 article (in section IVc and IVd). Arguments regarding the relation of Tomasello and Mead can also be found in Jung (2011, 40ff.), Puddephatt (2011, 93ff.), and Ofner (2013, 166ff.). 10. At the same time, there is an important difference. For Mead, the term “gesture” applies to vocal, manual, and bodily signs. For Tomasello (2008, 20), in contrast, gestures are defi ned as “a communicative behavior . . . in the visual channel: mostly bodily postures, facial expressions, and manual gestures.” Hence, in Tomasello, gestures, by defi nition, cannot be vocal in character. 11. See Mead (1909, 404ff.), Mead (1922, 160ff.), and Tomasello (1999, 26ff.). Of course, this does not imply that imitation is unimportant—far from it. In Tomasello’s account, for instance, imitation is of crucial importance for cultural transmission (see Tomasello 1999, 26ff.). 12. As this quote—and other references to Mead—suggests, Tomasello does not draw on a detailed interpretation of Mead. For example, Mead never used the concept of the significant other. The term was coined by Harry Stack Sullivan in 1940 and then became part of the vocabulary of symbolic interactionism (see Burke 2011, 548). In most cases, Tomasello refers quite generally to Mead’s work (e.g., Tomasello 1999, 70, 89; 2014, 2, 5). In no case does Tomasello cite any work other than Mind, Self, and Society, which was published posthumously and remains an editorially problematic volume (see Huebner 2012). 13. For Mead’s example of the dog fight, see Mead (1910b, 177f.; 1912, 402; 1925, 263; [1934] 1967, 14f., 42–45, 48f., 63, 68, 162, 181, 234). Apart from dogs, Mead repeatedly

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refers to different kinds of birds (see especially 1907, 383ff.; 1910a, 405; 1912, 405; 1922, 160; [1934] 1967, 61ff., 359ff.), cats (1907, 383, 389), and some species of (mostly social) insects (1907, 384ff.; for social insects, see 1925, 262ff.; [1934] 1967, 55f., 227ff.). Quite often, however, he refers simply to “animals,” “animals below man,” or “lower animals” (e.g., 1907, 383ff.; 1908, 386, 390; 1910a, 398; 1912, 405; 1925, 521, 528; [1934] 1967, 2, 13). 14. Robert Yerkes published The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes in 1916. One year later, Wolfgang Köhler published his Intelligenzprüfung an Anthropoiden (which was translated into English in 1925 as The Mentality of Apes). 15. In his earlier published writings, Mead looks at primates only once—in his 1907 paper “Concerning Animal Perception” (1907, 383, 389). He refers to monkeys, however, and not to apes. Mead seems to have had direct contact with the psychological study of monkeys in the years before 1908. This can be inferred from an episode by John B. Watson (who left Chicago in 1908): “I took courses and seminars with Mead [at the University of Chicago]. I didn’t understand him in classroom, but for years Mead took a great interest in my animal experimentation, and many a Sunday he and I spent in the laboratory watching my rats and monkeys” (cited in Cook 1993, 43). Also, in Mead’s later work we fi nd few references to primates. In Mind, Self, and Society, Mead argues (and Tomasello would agree) that the “monkey has been traditionally the most imitative animal, but under scientific study this was found to be a myth. The monkey learns very quickly but he does not imitate” ([1934] 1967, 51). Moreover, in two of the essays included in The Philosophy of the Act he touches on the manual skills of apes. This seems to be due to the reading of Köhler (see Mead [1938] 1964, 24, 136). He also refers to Köhler in Mind, Self, and Society ([1934] 1967, 37). Yet, this passage refers to Köhler’s work in Gestalt psychology not in primatology. 16. For more information on object manipulation, see Tomasello and Call (1997, chap. 3.1). For tool use, see Cheney and Seyfarth (1992, 227ff., 295ff.) and Tomasello and Call (1997, chap. 3.2). 17. For details regarding the “intentional communication” of great apes, see Tomasello and Call (1997, chap. 8.2) and Tomasello (2008, 43ff.). 18. There also are important neurophysiological reasons for arguing for this primacy of gestural communication (see Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008, 157ff.). 19. The “vast importance of the human hand” (Mead 1907, 388) can be illustrated, for instance, by James’s famous example of the child with the candle, which was taken up by Dewey as well as by Mead (see, e.g., James [1890] 1950, 24ff.; Dewey 1896, 358f., 367ff.; Mead 1903, 100; 1910a, 400f.). James adopted this example from the Austrian anatomist Theodor Meynert. The interaction of hands and eyes also plays a crucial role in Mead’s explanation of the constitution and perception of physical objects (see, e.g., 1907, 388ff.; 1912, 401f.). In Mind, Self, and Society Mead even argues that “speech and the hand go along together in the development of the social human being” ([1934] 1967, 237). Yet, he does not really interlock these two aspects of anthropogenesis, although the relation of the constitution of social and physical objects is of crucial importance for his thought (see, e.g., 1909, 404f.; 1910a, 402ff.; 1912, 401ff.; [1938] 1964, 24f., 103ff., and 174ff.). 20. It should be noted, however, that Mead’s description of dog behavior also does not do justice to the cognitive skills of dogs. For example, it seems as if dogs—at least

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in certain contexts—understand the perception of others and can inhibit their behavior accordingly (see, e.g., Kaminski, Pitsch, and Tomasello 2013). 21. Tomasello himself changed his position concerning the sociocognitive abilities of chimpanzees significantly around the year 2003. In his writings before 2003 he argued that “the overwhelming weight of empirical evidence suggests that only human beings understand conspecifics as intentional agents like the self” (Tomasello 1999, 6). Hence, Tomasello’s former position was more similar to Mead’s. For more on this shift in Tomasello’s theory see Nungesser (2012, 184f.). 22. In some cases, this is due to changing defi nitions of “cooperation”: “Thus, we get the beginnings of the process of communication in the co-operative process, whether of reproduction, caring for the young, or fi ghting” (Mead [1934] 1967, 234; see also 139). In sentences like this, “cooperation” seems to refer to all interaction, not just—as in the passage quoted above—to “organisms working together.” Moreover, in other texts, Mead even seems to claim the opposite of the above-mentioned argument: “It has been recognized for some time that speech belongs in its beginnings, at least, to this same field of gesture, so-called vocal gesture. Originally indicating the preparation for violent action, which arises from a sudden change of breathing and circulation rhythms, the articulate sounds have come to elaborate and immensely complicate this conversation of attitudes by which social forms so adjust themselves to each other’s anticipated action that they may act appropriately with reference to each other” (Mead 1912, 402f., emphasis added). 23. Quite generally, human-raised chimpanzees differ significantly from their mother-reared conspecifics with respect to their cognitive and motivational make-up. According to Tomasello, these differences demonstrate the huge impact of socialization (see Tomasello, Savage-Rumbaugh, and Kruger 1993; Tomasello 1999, 20ff.; 2008, 246–56). 24. Accordingly, Tomasello repeatedly criticizes reductionist developments within the cognitive sciences (see, e.g., Tomasello 1999, 2ff., 67, 203ff.). 25. Interestingly, in his few and short remarks on phenomena such as lying or violence, Tomasello repeatedly uses “of course”-phrases—as if all this goes without saying (see Tomasello 2008, 190; 2014, 51, 156). 26. Tomasello’s work could (and should) be compared with pragmatism in many more respects than discussed in this paper. Important questions concern (a) the similarities and differences of Tomasello’s use of the concept of shared intentionality and Mead’s concepts of role-taking and the generalized other; (b) the possible incompatibilities between a pragmatist perspective and the use of a rather cognitivist language that is characteristic of parts of Tomasello’s studies; (c) the more detailed comparison of the two theories with regard to the ontogenetic development of social cognition—for example, with respect to the understanding of plays and games (see, e.g., Rakoczy 2007).

REFERENCES Bloch, Maurice. 2012. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buller, David J. 2006. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Burke, Joseph. 2011. “Significant Others.” In The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer and J. Michael Ryan, 548. Oxford: Blackwell. Cheney, Dorothy L., and Robert M. Seyfarth. 1992. How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cochran, Molly. 2010. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, edited by Molly Cochran, 1–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Gary A. 1993. George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1994. “George Herbert Mead: An unpublished review of John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 30: 374–79. Darwin, Charles. (1871) 1981. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deacon, Terrence William. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co- evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W. W. Norton. de Waal, Frans B. M. 2006. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead. Dewey, Jane M. 1939. “Biography of John Dewey. Edited by Jane M. Dewey.” In The Philosophy of John Dewey, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, 3–45. New York: Tudor Publishing. Dewey, John. 1896. “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology.” The Psychological Review 3, no. 4: 357–70. ———. 1931. “George Herbert Mead as I Knew Him.” Journal of Philosophy 28: 309–14. ———. (1917) 1980. “The Need for Social Psychology.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 10, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 53– 63. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dupré, John. 2003. Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means Today. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franks, David D. 2010. Neurosociology: The Nexus Between Neuroscience and Social Psychology. New York: Springer. ———. 2013. “Relationships Between Neurosociology, Foundational Social Behaviorism, and Currents in Symbolic Interaction.” In Franks and Turner 2013: 139–48. Franks, David D., and Jonathan Turner, eds. 2013. Handbook of Neurosociology. Dordrecht: Springer. Goldman, Loren. 2012. “Dewey’s Pragmatism from an Anthropological Point of View.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48, no. 1: 1–30. Huebner, Daniel R. 2012. “The Construction of Mind, Self, and Society: The Social Process behind G. H. Mead’s Social Psychology.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 48, no. 2: 134–53. James, William. (1890) 1950. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Dover. Joas, Hans. 1993. Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1980) 1997. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, Mark. 2010. “Cognitive Science and Dewey’s Theory of Mind, Thought, and Language.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, edited by Molly Cochran, 123–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Jung, Matthias. 2009. Der bewusste Ausdruck: Anthropologie der Artikulation. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 2011. “Verkörperte Intentionalität—Zur Anthropologie des Handelns.” In Handlung und Erfahrung. Das Erbe von Historismus und Pragmatismus und die Zukunft der Sozialtheorie, edited by Bettina Hollstein, Matthias Jung, and Wolfgang Knöbl, 25–50. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Kaminski, Juliane, Andrea Pitsch, and Michael Tomasello. 2013. “Dogs Steal in the Dark.” Animal Cognition 16, no. 3: 385– 94. Madzia, Roman. 2013a. “Mead and Self-Embodiment: Imitation, Simulation, and the Problem of Taking the Attitude of the Other.” In Nungesser and Ofner 2013: 195–213. ———. 2013b. “Chicago Pragmatism and the Extended Mind Theory: Mead and Dewey on the Nature of Cognition.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 5, no. 1: 193–211. Mead, George Herbert. 1903. “The Definition of the Psychical.” Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago. First Series, Vol. 3, 77–112. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1907. “Concerning Animal Perception.” Psychological Review 14: 383– 90. ———. 1908. “McDougall’s Social Psychology.” Psychological Bulletin 5: 385– 91. ———. 1909. “Social Psychology as Counterpart to Physiological Psychology.” Psychological Bulletin 6: 401–8. ———. 1910a. “Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning.” Psychological Bulletin 7: 397–405. ———. 1910b. “What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose?” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 7: 174– 80. ———. 1912. “The Mechanism of Social Consciousness.” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9: 401– 6. ———. 1922. “A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol.” Journal of Philosophy 19: 157– 63. ———. 1925. “The Genesis of the Self and Social Control.” International Journal of Ethics 35: 251–77. ———. (1930) 2009. “Cooley’s Contribution to American Social Thought.” In Human Nature and the Social Order, edited by Charles Horton Cooley, xxi–xxxviii. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ———. (1934) 1967. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1938) 1964. The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Charles W. Morris, John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunham, and David L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, Charles W. (1934) 1967. “Introduction: George H. Mead as Social Psychologist and Social Philosopher.” In Mead (1934) 1967: ix–xxxv. Noë, Alva. 2009. Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Nungesser, Frithjof. 2012. “Three Dimensions of the Sociality of Action: Some Reflections Based on the Cultural Psychology of Michael Tomasello and Sociological

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Pragmatism.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4, no. 1: 178–207. Nungesser, Frithjof, and Franz Ofner, eds. 2013. Potentiale einer pragmatistischen Sozialtheorie: Beiträge anlässlich des 150. Geburtstags von George Herbert Mead. Vol. 12 of Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie. Sonderhefte. Wiesbaden: Springer. Nungesser, Frithjof, and Patrick Wöhrle. 2013. “Die sozialtheoretische Relevanz des Pragmatismus—Dewey, Cooley, Mead.” In Nungesser and Ofner 2013: 43–71. Ofner, Franz. 2013. “‘Bewusstseinslücken’—Probleme in Meads Konzeption der Genese des Selbst-Bewusstseins und Lösungsvorschläge.” In Nungesser and Ofner 2013: 155– 80. Puddephatt, Antony. 2011. “Language and Mind in the Thought of G. H. Mead: Challenges from Chomsky’s Linguistics.” In Blue Ribbon Papers: Interactionism; The Emerging Landscape, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Lonnie H. Athens, and Ted Faust, 75–106. Bingley: Emerald. Rakoczy, Hannes. 2007. “Play, Games, and the Development of Collective Intentionality.” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 115: 53– 67. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. 2008. Mirrors in the Brain. How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rockwell, W. Teed. 2005. Neither Brain nor Ghost. A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind- Brain Identity Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schüler, Sebastian. 2012. Religion, Kognition, Evolution: Eine religionswissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit der Cognitive Science of Religion. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schulkin, Jay. 2000. Roots of Social Sensibility and Neural Function. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2009. Cognitive Adaptation: A Pragmatist Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solymosi, Tibor. 2011. “Neuropragmatism, Old and New.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 3: 347– 68. ———. 2013a. “Cooking Up Consciousness.” Contemporary Pragmatism 10, no. 2: 173– 91. ———. 2013b. “Neuropragmatism on the Origins of Conscious Minding.” In Origins of Mind, edited by Liz Swan, 273– 87. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2013c. “Can the Two Cultures Reconcile? Reconstruction and Neuropragmatism.” In Franks and Turner 2013: 139–48. Solymosi, Tibor, and John R. Shook. 2013. “Neuropragmatism: A Neurophilosophical Manifesto.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 5, no. 1: 212–34. Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2006. “Why Don’t Apes Point?” In Roots of Human Sociality. Culture, Cognition and Interaction, edited by Nicholas J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson, 506–24. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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———. 2009. Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, Michael, and Josep Call. 1997. Primate Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press. Tomasello, Michael, and Hannes Rakoczy. 2003. “What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality.” Mind & Language 18, no. 2: 121–47. Tomasello, Michael, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and Ann Cale Kruger. 1993. “Imitative Learning of Actions on Objects by Children, Chimpanzees, and Enculturated Chimpanzees.” Child Development 64: 1688–1705. Turner, Stephen. 2007. “Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience.” European Journal of Social Theory 10, no. 3: 357–74. Westbrook, Robert B. 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2005. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Chapter Thirteen

Conscience as Ecological Participation and the Maintenance of Moral Perplexity Joshua Daniel

I

n this essay I propose a conception of conscience indebted to Mead’s anthropology, in particular his I/me distinction, whereby conscience is understood as a phenomenon that is fundamentally ecological rather than merely dialogical or discursive. That is, the experience of conscience concerns the self’s holistic interactions with its various social environments, not simply its conversations with imagined or actual social interlocutors. I intend to show that Mead can aid in relieving the tension between individual and society that seems to lie at the very core of the concept of conscience. Meanwhile, I intend to show that Mead’s contribution to an understanding of conscience, particularly as it relates to situations of moral perplexity, extends beyond the account of moral inquiry that he articulates. Rather than resolving the moral perplexity that results from plural, competing interests by articulating principles and procedures for adjudicating such competition, the work of conscience consists in rationally maintaining such moral perplexity by constantly negotiating between the various ecologies of social roles and their norms that pull us in various directions. My essay proceeds in three sections. In the fi rst I map the individualsocial tension as it appears in historically significant accounts of conscience in order to set up the contribution that Mead makes to understanding conscience. In the second section I utilize Mead’s I/me distinction to articulate an ecological account of conscience that operates along both social and individual dimensions, in and through our performances of various social roles and in and through our novel responses to the demands of such performances. Finally, in the third section, I trace the ramifications of this ecological account for understanding the social character of moral

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perplexity and argue for conscience’s role in maintaining such perplexity in a rational manner.

CONSCIENCE AND THE CONCEPTUAL TENSION BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SOCIAL The conceptual tension within conscience that Mead helps relieve is that between inviolable, personal moral discernment and socially provisioned moral conventions. Each pole of the tension contains a family of accounts of conscience united by an emphasis on either the individual or the social; but within each of these families, the accounts do not neatly cohere with one another. The etymology of the original Latin—con/scientia—refers to knowledge (scientia) held in common (con). Conscience concerns knowledge shared with others and paradigmatically knowledge shared because provided by one’s moral community. Conscience, while a reality of the individual self, mediates social knowledge and expectations. Adam Smith, whose relation to Mead has been discussed (Aboulafia 2001, 109–10), describes conscience as “the great inmate of the breast,” the “impartial spectator” within the self that properly judges its own stature and interests vis-à-vis those of others. Importantly, the impartiality of this internal spectator is keyed not to an abstract universalism but to social standards of propriety and praiseworthiness. For Smith, conscience opposes our self-love not by some universal benevolence but rather by social canons of honor and nobility (Smith 2002, 156–81). Theological accounts of conscience also depend on concretely social perspectives. John Paul II in his influential encyclical Veritatis Splendor (1993, 76, 81–2) calls conscience “the witness of God himself ” within the self, a personal reality that nevertheless must be formed by the Catholic Church and Magisterium. It is telling that John Paul II (1993, 73–4) positions his account against a competing one that he calls a “‘creative’ understand ing of moral conscience,” which seeks to protect some personal moral discernment even from the Church’s Magisterium. It reflects how his account dovetails with less sanguine accounts of conscience that are structurally similar. Sigmund Freud (1961, 84– 94), for instance, understands conscience as the internalization and self-propagation of social prohibitions, which often operates counter to individual well-being. For both John Paul II and Freud, conscience concerns the social disciplining of the individual, though they differ on the value of that discipline. Meanwhile, Smith characterizes conscience less

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as a disciplinary force than as a sentimental-pedagogical one, but for him conscience still disciplines our self-interested tendencies. In contrast to such social accounts are those regarding conscience as that reality of the individual self responsible for moral discernment that ought to be protected against social coercion. The paradigmatic instance of this is the notion of religious liberty, and connected to this, the right to conscientious objection against demands of the state. One critic has referred to this as the “individual-versus-state” paradigm (Vischer 2009), and it is still a live option. Martha Nussbaum (2008), drawing on the Stoics and Roger Williams, has recently articulated conscience as the human faculty of searching for life’s ultimate meaning, a faculty which is vulnerable to harm through the imposition of orthodoxy and so requires institutionally protected space in order to be properly respected. Ingredient to this account is an understanding of self-development or self-realization as an individual good that the social order ought to respect. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, particularly in his Émile, represents another instance of this family that focuses on self-development. While he understands conscience to work as the disciplining of passions and temptations, he argues that conscience develops from a benign form of self-love that can be extended to just otherregard through pity and that the passions that conscience overrides are the result of insidious social influences that warp our self-love so that it takes an exclusive, competitive form. Thus, the triumph of conscience over passions is the triumph of the individual over destructive socialization. This resembles Smith’s account in terms of conscience’s work, but for Rousseau (1979) conscience’s source is ineradicably individual. Similarly for Martin Heidegger (1996), conscience is tied to authenticity: conscience concerns the call of Da-sein to itself to be resolute in the fact of death. At their best, conceptions of conscience bear the tension between the individual and the social, articulating how conscience works both to judge us according to prevailing norms and to guide us beyond them. Kenneth Kirk (1952, 14–16), one of the twentieth century’s most prominent theorists of conscience, asserts that conscience provides two sorts of moral judgments, distinguishable but inseparable: those that simply endorse social standards and those that critically vary or add to those standards. All too often, as the above paragraphs suggest, accounts of conscience reduce it to one of these aspects. Either conscience is merely the voice of society within us, demanding our conformity if not instigating self-destructive psychic processes; or, conscience is our own-most authentic self, calling us out of the rigid orthodoxy of vacuous gossip that is the atmosphere of much social life. Mead’s anthropology enables us to conceptualize con-

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science in a way that, like Kirk’s account, avoids both of these reductions, comprehending the moral values both of our social constitution and of our individual, free creativity. Besides relieving the tension between the individual and the social within conscience, Mead helps us conceptualize it beyond dialogue and discourse. Predominant conceptions of conscience—whether reductive or more complex—depict it as speaking to us: persuading, cajoling, wheedling, accusing us, and sometimes even excusing us. Whether calling us toward or away from social life or more complexly mediating our social interactions, the experience of conscience is often understood to be dialogical and discursive. One commentator argues that speech is conscience’s natural medium: both speech and conscience connect the individual person to broader normative structures that simultaneously enable and constrain (Strohm 2011, 101–2). This idea is abetted by historical understandings of conscience as a participating function in procedures of moral judgment that bring universal principles to bear on particular situations, or as a discrete faculty within the self responsible for judging the moral standing of other faculties. While I affirm conceptualizing conscience as mediating the individual and the social, there are other models for this than language and concept use; namely, an ecological model that views individual-social relations along the lines of organism-environment relations—mutually transformative, in an embodied, participatory manner. John Dewey (1960 and 1948) articulates this ecological model most explicitly, but I intend to show below how Mead implies such a model as well, thus pushing beyond a moral psychology dependent on faculties and centered on articulated judgments. The experience of conscience is a moral experience of the entire self interacting with various social environments, not only the experience of reason making judgments and decisions. This is not to deny that one function of conscience is to make judgments and decisions but rather to insist that this function is one aspect of a broader phenomenon, which orients this function in particular ways.

MAINTAINING THE TENSION: CONSCIENCE AS ECOLOGICAL Most basically, my argument is that Mead’s I/me distinction enables us to conceptualize conscience as an ecological phenomenon mediating the individual and the social along two dimensions. Mead articulates the self as a process of two alternating phases, social constitution and individual reconstruction, which articulation I utilize to describe conscience as the

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moral process of negotiating our socially provisioned attitudes and dispositions with our novel, critical responses to these attitudes and dispositions. In short, the conscience refers to the self as moral in the sense that it integrates what I refer to as our social consciences and individual conscience. After articulating this conception in this section, I will trace its ramifications for understanding moral perplexity in the fi nal section. The key to Mead’s advance over prior conceptions of the social conscience lies in his understanding of self-development as the development of role-taking capacities. For Adam Smith, as I noted, conscience refers to the self taking on the role of the impartial spectator over its own conduct and passions. Mead’s account of the generalized other, despite the singularity of its phrasing, is more complex because more ecological and so harder to imagine simply as “the man within” calling us out of ourselves. According to Mead, the social development of the self occurs in two stages, playing and participating in a game. Children play by taking on the roles of particular others whom they pretend to be: “A child plays at being a mother, at being a teacher, at being a policeman; that is, it is taking different roles . . . he addresses himself as a parent, as a teacher; he arrests himself as a policeman” (Mead 1934, 150–1). At this stage, children are able to organize particular social stimuli and responses into a coherent whole and so play out routine social situations; so, my daughter cleans her room and then says “Good job!” and demands a hug as a reward. Developmentally speaking, children here are beginning to acquire selves because they are beginning to imagine themselves from the perspective of others. This stage is limited because the others whose roles the child is playing at are isolated from each other in the child’s organization of stimuli and response. First they play at being a parent, next they play at being a teacher, and so on; these roles are not interrelated with each other yet; they are rather taken on in a serial fashion. At the second stage of social development, the self learns the complex task of organizing in an integrated fashion the roles it takes on. Mead refers to this stage as participating in a game because the self can only take on a role within a game by imaginatively taking on the roles of everyone else participating in the game; that is, the self plays in a particular role insofar as it is interrelated with all of the other roles. Mead’s baseball example illustrates this. To play any particular position well requires imaginatively taking on the roles of the other positions. The person playing shortstop can only execute his role in particular situations insofar as he is able to take on the roles of all of the other positions so as to anticipate and respond to the actions of the other players appropriately. Thus, to par-

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ticipate in a game is to take on an organized set of roles, interconnected by patterns of responsive relations. The self that is acquired at this stage is more developed because more defi nite and unified: children are learning to imagine themselves not simply from the multiple perspectives of isolated particular others but from the integrated perspective of interrelated others. Mead (1934, 154–8) calls this latter perspective the “generalized other,” and the capacity to take on such a perspective enables us to participate in social life. In this way, we can say that a crucial aspect of the difference between playing at being a parent and socially-materially acting as parent turns on whether or not the self has taken on the parental role as integrated and organized with the other social roles that concern the child: teachers, policemen, neighbors, doctors, etc. In other words, to play at being a parent is to respond only to one’s child; to occupy the social role of parent is to respond to one’s child while being responsive to surrounding and mediating social roles that concern one’s child. Hence, the baseball example can be taken seriously as a model for social life without being taken literally. Just as participating in a game requires taking on an organized set of roles while performing a particular role (shortstop) in order to maintain and promote the team in its collective endeavor, so participating in social life requires taking on an organized set of social roles while performing particular roles (parent, teacher, etc.) in order to maintain and promote that life together through particular tasks. Stated along the lines of an ecological model of human life, the baseball example suggests that social life regards an ecology of social roles that constitutes us as selves by drawing us into patterns of responsive relations. Coming to participate in these patterns inculcates in us attitudes and dispositions that accord with expectations to act fittingly, to take on particular socially available roles in a way fitting to others’ roles so as to maintain and promote the ecology of social roles that composes our shared social life. This is one way to conceptualize social conscience: the self judges its own attitudes, dispositions, and conduct from the perspective of its social environment in the sense that it governs itself according to norms of social fittingness. If we take the baseball example concretely as contributing to an ecological account of conscience, we can understand social constitution working especially through bodily expectations of social participation, and not merely through responses to utterances such as “Do this” or “Thou shalt not.”1 More subtly stated, such explicit utterances, the function of which I do not intend to deny, gain their force and perceived legitimacy in the context of patterns of bodily comportments and choreographies. Accordingly, the experience of social conscience regards the push

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and pull of our bodies in social, institutional, and demographic dynamics, as much as, if not more fundamentally than, the call of representative social voices that provide social judgments. When my daughter is taking on my role as parent by telling herself “Good job!” when she cleans her room, she seems much more attuned to how that utterance attends our bodily relations to each other than to the utterance’s content. My claim “Good job!” attends a certain physical intimacy between us in the form of hugs. Meanwhile, she seems to realize that utterances like “I told you to clean your room!” or “Why isn’t this room clean?” attend a denial of hugs, if not the forced removal of her body from where she wants to be back to her room. When such utterances are not, or are perceived not to be, attended by such bodily comportments, they carry little force. Social constitution, or the provision of social conscience, outside of the domestic sphere cannot depend on the same bodily threats and enticements that parents provide, but such constitution still depends on patterns of embodied responsive relations (see Turner 2008). Teachers administer a choreography of student bodies through the placement of desks and chairs within the setting of collective tasks, and social service institutions like DMVs and hospitals do something similar by placing bodies in a succession of lines, windows, waiting rooms, exam rooms, and so on. Even cities and larger political entities can be understood to contribute to this dynamic to the extent that their neighborhoods and territories are populated and distinguished from one another in particular ways. If we no longer require parental bodily threats and enticements to “behave ourselves” in civil social venues, it is not because we have become fully rational agents that critically recognize and validate the justice of such venues and so are able to check the impulses of our body that threaten injustice; rather, it is because we have bought into the collective endeavors these venues promote, often through the routinization of our bodily motions. Thus, public schools provide a manifest curriculum of specific content knowledge, but they also deliver a hidden curriculum of bodily comportments and movements that reinforces conformity and cooperation, which is extended into other public institutions (Apple 2004, chap. 5). Of course, the term “hidden curriculum” is often deployed to describe bodily routinizations that reinforce social inequalities, and so are intrinsically nefarious—hence, such curricula are termed hidden rather than tacit. My claim is that Mead’s account of the generalized other suggests that, because we are embodied creatures, social constitution necessarily involves such hidden/tacit curricula, for better or worse depending on their purpose and methods. If we appreciate these as functions of the provision of social conscience, then

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the scope of moral judgment becomes broader than that of articulated utterances of judgments and reasons. Crucially, taking on the perspective of the generalized other, that integrated ecology of roles in which we participate by performing particular roles, is not sufficient for full selfhood in Mead’s anthropology. That is, developing social conscience is not sufficient for developing full conscience. This is where the I/me distinction becomes significant. According to Mead, the very structure of the self is that of a social process between two alternating phases. The me concerns that phase of the self that takes on the perspective of the generalized other; in the terms of my argument, the me is the phase of the self that follows social conscience, not necessarily in a blinded or passive manner, but still in an endorsing manner. The me is the self insofar as it accepts its place in a social ecology of roles, performing its own role according to the expectations of others’ roles: “The ‘me’ is a conventional, habitual individual” (Mead 1934, 196–7). On the other hand, the I regards the phase of the self that actively responds to the me, and so to the prevailing social ecology of roles, in novel ways. The precise character of the I in Mead’s thought is controversial,2 but the experience is plausible: we do respond to the prevailing social situation in unpredictable ways that often only make sense in retrospect. The I acts in “freedom from conventions, from given laws,” appealing “from a narrow and restricted community to a larger one,” paradigmatically, to a future community that can metabolize such free acts (Mead 1934, 199). Mead insists that the results of the self’s novel responses are only discernible once they have become a part of the social situation. That is, the actions of the I are successful to the extent that they become part of the social ecology of roles, settling into a new me that will evoke further novel responses from further I’s (Mead 1934, 174). Hence, the I is the phase of the self that is responsible for reconstructing the social, which is to say, responsible for unsettling social conscience, whether contesting particular norms of social fittingness or expanding their range to include those persons historically or presently excluded from them. In the terms of my argument, the I is the self enacting individual conscience in response to social conscience: the I regards the individual moment of conscience that transforms the social conscience provided by the prevailing ecology of social roles. Just as full selfhood requires the work of the I, so the work of fully developed conscience requires moments of individuality. Mead’s anthropology as developed through the I/me distinction depicts the self as a process with two alternating but responsive phases. The point of the self’s individual novelty is not to contest or reject its social constitu-

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tion outright but rather to reconstruct it, offering a free, creative act, the social acceptance of which would transform the norms of fittingness that compose the prevailing ecology of social roles. Such transformations inevitably calcify and evoke their own novel responses. The self moves back and forth between conventional predictability and responsive surprise, but the rhythm is meant to drive forward: convention is the sediment of past novelty, nourishing further novelty. I have taken this anthropology on to conceptualize conscience as a moral process alternating between social and individual moments, between maintaining and promoting an ecology of social roles through fitting conduct, on one hand, and on the other, transforming that ecology by altering or expanding norms of social fittingness. What I want to emphasize is that, just as the I and me do not fundamentally confl ict, even as local and discrete confl icts drive their responsive alternation, so social and individual conscience do not fundamentally confl ict, even as their mutual development is driven by particular disagreements. The disciplining of the individual self by norms of social fittingness is essential to moral development, but what completes this development is the self’s capacity to respond creatively to those norms. Hence, in Mead’s articulation, a genius is not a figure uniquely unconditioned by norms of social fittingness, but rather one who carries “to the nth power” the uniqueness of their individual response to those conditioning norms. Moreover, the genius responds “with reference to a form of society or social order which is implied but not adequately expressed” by the prevailing ecology of social roles; the genius “expresses the principles of the community more completely than any other” social participant (Mead 1934, 216–7). We could even say that the genius is more conditioned by norms of social fittingness but in a much subtler fashion than most, releasing the norms’ potential by responding to them in a novel manner. This is the ideal of individual conscience: not mere resistance to social conscience but the release of its expansive, enriching potential. Again, it is essential for my account of conscience to appreciate that the novel response of the I cannot only take the form of articulated judgments on the prevailing performances of social norms of fittingness. While it is essential to social transformation to be making public critical utterances, it is also important to comport our bodies in surprising, unpredictable ways, for instance, sitting in a “socially invalid” bus or restaurant seat. Such gestures may not only lend credence to articulated demands for new forms of social respect but may also and more significantly enact these new forms, demonstrating in the present an imagined future choreography of bodies. To fully exercise this capacity for novel bodily com-

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portments requires some rational, critical distance from the patterns of embodied responsive relations we participate in, but our critical view on those patterns is not detached from our bodies. That is, it is not our disembodied minds that tell us that our bodies are being routinized in destructive ways; rather, it is our bodies that tell us, though we often need to cultivate forms of “body consciousness” that make this discernible (see Shusterman 2008; 2012). The I/me distinction is not a mind/body split whereby the I refers to the self as unencumbered by its body, critically judging the me understood as that body and its participation in embodied relations. This interpretation would fund an understanding of conscience that I am attempting to overcome—namely, that conscience refers to reason judging those inclinations and interests rooted in our bodies. Instead, the I/me distinction refers to an individual/social tension in the self, where both poles are understood holistically: the me refers to the entire self following social norms of fittingness as it participates in prevailing patterns of responsive relations; the I refers to the entire self attempting to transform norms of fittingness as it participates in those patterns creatively, often disruptively. Social conscience and individual conscience are not parts of the self but moral modes of the whole self, both relative to social environments, but in differing manners. I will illustrate how the I works bodily by briefly discussing the work of the theater director and theorist (and politician) Augusto Boal. Boal created a form of theater called theater of the oppressed, the purpose of which is to make us aware of how our bodies are routinized according to oppressive social rituals and to train us through games and exercises how to use our bodies to intervene in (dramatized and then actual) scenes of oppression in order to begin liberating ourselves and others. 3 Boal relates one example involving the dramatization of a scene in which a young woman is called by her industrialist father to his place of work: he intends to send her away to travel for a year or two because she has fallen in love with someone he disapproves of. Those who intervened in the woman’s role were unable to convince the person in the father’s role to change his mind, until one participant refused to sit in the chair designated for her, the chair where the father received visitors. Instead, she sat on her father’s desk, forcing him to look up at her; eventually, he changed his mind (Boal 2002, 200). Here we can see how social norms of fittingness play out in patterns of embodied responsive relations: the father expects the daughter to listen and obey, and he promotes this expectation by situating her in a chair intended for those who come to his office to be told by him what to do. The daughter overturns this expectation by disrupting the chore-

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ography of bodies that sustains it. Boal’s hope is that she continues such disruptions until her relation with her father is transformed, becoming less paternalistic. My point in discussing Boal is to suggest how social reconstruction can take place materially, through the novel response of our bodily comportments to prevailing patterns of embodied relations. Such work is the work of individual conscience upon social conscience, connected to but distinct from the articulation of critical judgments; hence, the necessity to articulate an ecological, and not just dialogical, model of conscience. I have used Mead’s account of social constitution and his anthropology, particularly his I/me distinction, to begin articulating an ecological model of conscience. According to this model, conscience refers to the self’s moral mode of participating in an ecology of social roles, which participation is rooted in bodily comportments and expectations within patterns of responsive relations. This model integrates the social and individual dimensions of conscience by viewing the self as a process alternating between phases of social fittingness and individual novelty; social conscience refers to the self acting fittingly so as to uphold the prevailing ecology of social roles and patterns of relations, while individual conscience refers to the self acting so as to transform the prevailing ecological patterns. These dimensions of conscience are phases of the moral self, suggesting a rhythm that moves forward, steadily improving society via individual members’ local variations to problematic norms of social fittingness. The fi nal section of this essay complicates this picture, filling out the proposed ecological model of conscience and tracing its ramifications for understanding conscience’s role in the atmosphere of moral perplexity.

THE ECOLOGICAL CONSCIENCE AND THE RATIONAL MAINTENANCE OF MORAL PERPLEXITY On a common understanding, the function of conscience is to resolve situations of moral perplexity by deciding for one normative claim over others. Conscience clears the moral ground of conflicting claims so that when we choose one claim by acting on it we do so with a “clear conscience”—that is, with justification. To take a typical example: my nation has drafted me for a particular war, but my religious commitments do not allow me to participate in warfare. It is possible to construe this as a conflict between the individual and social conscience. Either the individual’s personal piety confl icts with the social demands of her nation; or, conversely, the individual’s endorsement of the nation’s moral right to wage war conflicts

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with the social norms of her religious community. Consider a more microsocial example: my job requires routinely deceiving others (e.g., business deals and salesmanship that involve bluffing, interrogations that involve misleading suspects, etc.), while I am devoted to teaching my children virtues of truthfulness such as honesty, sincerity, and so on. Again, we can imagine this as a confl ict between the individual’s personal morality and the social demands of her career, or between the individual’s personal judgment that the morally questionable tactics of her career are permissible and what she perceives as the overly moralistic worldview she received from her parents. The problem with such a construal of these examples is that it fails to see that, in each instance, the individual viewpoint is socially funded: personal piety by religious communities, personal morality by family upbringing, personal politics by civil social relations, and so on. In other words, the moral perplexity that bedevils conscience regards confl icts between the many communities and their norms of social fittingness in which any given individual participates, not simply between individuals and social demands, as Vischer (2009) rightly argues. In the terms of my essay, moral perplexity is not paradigmatically a matter of the tension between individual and social conscience but rather of the tension between multiple social consciences. To appreciate this difference, we need to reconstruct Mead’s I/me distinction. In the prior section, I depicted Mead’s account of the self as a process or rhythm alternating between social constitution and individual reconstruction. However, the social lives of selves are thicker than this depiction suggests. Insofar as the individual self participates in multiple communities with their own ecologies of roles and norms of fittingness, it takes on multiple generalized others (Silva 2007, 50). Recall that the difference between playing at being a parent and socially-materially acting as parents turns on whether or not the self in the parental role has taken it on as integrated and organized with other social roles. Now it is important to recognize that the self in the parental role likely acts in other roles, both in the family (e.g., as spouse, as child) and in other communities (e.g., as colleague and subordinate or supervisor at work, as co-member of a religious community, as fellow citizen in varying scopes of political community, and so on). Hence, there is a multiplicity inherent to the me: what it presents to the I for response is not a singular ecology of social roles with its constitutive set of norms of fittingness but rather many ecologies and sets of norms. In turn, the response of the I must be more complex: rather than transform one social ecology through its individually reconstructive performance of its role within it, the I must negotiate with several ecolo-

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gies, struggling to integrate them into some sort of coherent unity as it participates in multiple communities that involve the self in multiple expectations, underwritten by multiple sets of norms. In this way, the self can be understood as having as many social consciences as communities it participates in, such that the socially conscientious life simply is the life of moral perplexity. According to Kenneth Kirk (1999, 321, 388– 92), who I mentioned above, what distinguishes moral perplexity from moral doubt is that perplexity involves too much rather than too little moral “data.” The work of individual conscience is to negotiate this data, to maintain an internal, imaginative meta-ecology inclusive of the various social ecologies in which the self participates, a meta-ecology that, if instituted, would enable the self to live an integrated life. That is, the work of individual conscience is to maintain an ecology of social consciences. Sometimes our social consciences overtly compete, and the role of individual conscience is to choose between them—but not always, and not paradigmatically. It is true, for instance, that many religious adherents feel caught between the character of their religious communities and the form of an ever-increasingly secularized society, and individual conscience sometimes demands a choice between the social conscience promoted by the self’s patriotism and the social conscience promoted by the self’s piety. However, if we make this the standard depiction of moral perplexity that conscience faces, then we miss a broader view of such perplexity and the work of conscience, and this is the case in two senses. First, if the experience of conscience is that of living in multiple ecologies of social roles while seeking some integrity between them, then individual conscience is already negotiating between the social fittingness norms of nation and church, and likely managing some friction between them, before confronting a more zero-sum dilemma such as whether or not to support or join a particular war. In other words, behind this dilemma lies a history of the individual conscience engaging in a form of social-ecological management so that the self may live in two different moral communities with some measure of integrity. Such dilemmas and the exclusive decisions they demand are punctuated episodes in a broader dynamic in which the paradigmatic work of individual conscience is negotiation rather than judgment. The decision to support or contest warfare is not made in a vacuum but rather emerges as a coagulation, at a particular moment, of the historical trajectory of the self’s ongoing negotiation between social consciences. Religionists from a pacifist tradition who support or contest war have likely been conceding the lion’s share of their normative allegiance to either civil society or their religious communities

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respectively over a period of time. In this sense, individual conscience’s exclusive judgment in favor of one social conscience over another is best understood as an expression of its past long-term work of negotiating between them. Second, individual conscience’s work of negotiating between the social consciences, which often pull the self in different directions, also concerns those aspects of human life that are often not understood to be morally salient. Moral thinking that focuses on quandaries and dilemmas—like what pacifists should do when their nations go to war—may fail to see the moral significance in on-going felt tensions between family life and work life. Above I used the example of the confl ict between holding jobs that involve deception and aspiring to raise truthful children, but this is too dramatic for my point here: the norms of social fittingness in the workplace do not need to be morally questionable to have moral ramifications for more domestic norms of fittingness. For instance, Richard Sennett (1998) has argued that the temporal structures of experience promoted by an economy that relies on worker flexibility literally corrode our ability to form our own characters; and Arlie Hochschild (2012) has argued that the “emotional labor” required by many service-sector jobs results in a form of self-loss. What Sennett and Hochschild articulate is the terrain of individual conscience’s work, the felt tensions between social consciences that threaten to tear us apart. Such terrain and work is moral because what is at stake is not simply the quality but more significantly the character and orientation of our shared life, in both its individual and social dimensions. Recall the scene from Boal, where what is at stake is not simply the autonomy of the daughter over against paternal expectations; this construal smacks of an individual-versus-society model of conscience that I am attempting to overcome. Rather, what are at stake are the form, character, and future of their daughter-father relationship, and the individual performances of their roles fitting to that relationship. Note that the ethical problem I am describing as the negotiation of tense social consciences is slightly different than the ethical problem that Mead discusses himself. For Mead, ethics regard the resolution of competing interests, values, and ends through the articulation of principles and procedures of moral reasoning to address public problems. The ideal is that of the research scientist: just as she must take all of the relevant facts into consideration when conducting an experiment, and then communicate her fi ndings in a way that is rationally accessible and responsive to her colleagues’ understanding of the facts; so the ethicist must take account of all of the relevant interests, values, and ends when proposing a

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solution to a publicly-shared moral problem, if his solution is to be persuasive to all who are affected by the problem and effective (Mead 1964, chaps. 17 and 25).4 This account of ethics remains dialogical, turning on the adjudication of judgments that articulate confl icting interests, values, and ends. On my account, built from the ecological model of conscience I have been pursuing, conflicts between social ecologies are experienced within individual selves. This is not to deny that conflicts between social ecologies are experienced between individual selves in shared public places, but rather to acknowledge the complexity of individual selves’ social lives. Moreover, this experience of confl ict is not only that of being pulled between various discursively articulated claims on our behavior, but also that of being pulled between the various bodily comportments our ecologies demand of us—comportments that, as I suggested above, require forms of body consciousness to discern. Doubtless, the daughter in the Boal example had heard judgments like “Daughters should listen to their fathers,” throughout her upbringing, and was beginning to articulate her own judgments in response, like “Fathers should support their daughters’ life decisions.” However, Boal’s work, and Mead’s too as I have been arguing throughout, suggest that such articulated judgments require the enactment of bodily comportments to sustain and promote them—the work of individual conscience negotiating between social consciences involves both. The daughter expressed her judgment about what the form, character, and orientation of her relationship with her father ought to be by putting her body in a novel position vis-à-vis his body. This Boal example is also suggestive regarding another central theme of my argument, that of maintaining rather than dissolving the tension between the individual and social dimensions of conscience. Individual conscience’s work of negotiation between social consciences often involves creatively responding to the claims of a particular social conscience. In Mead’s account of the genius, the I is able to reconstruct the me by more completely or more expansively performing the norms constitutive of that me; the I often resists certain tendencies of the me, but such resistance is for the sake of a deeper, more expansive me. Once we acknowledge a multiplicity inherent to the me, we can more easily discern that the reconstructive capacities of the I may be drawn not only from the implicit resources of the social ecology that is being reconstructed but also from the other social ecologies that the I must negotiate. That is, individual conscience’s negotiation between the self’s various social consciences may involve using the resources of one social conscience to help reconstruct another. This dynamic provides one way to construe the Boal example.

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The daughter’s sitting on her father’s desk rather than in the seat where he receives visitors could be understood as an instance of her following a norm of fittingness from an ecology whose roles are more equally related—say, an ecology constituted by social peers—but now within an ecology whose roles are more hierarchical. Her intention is not necessarily to reconstruct her relationship with her father such that it becomes identical to a relationship with a social peer, but rather to utilize the norms of a peer-relationship in order to relax or render more mutual the roles of her family-relationship. Meanwhile, considered from the other direction, the father’s insistence that her daughter meet him at his workplace could be understood as an attempt to utilize the norms of his relationship to his subordinates in order to tighten his grasp over this family relationship, perhaps in response to its perceived relaxing.5 Appreciating this dynamic means reconstructing Mead’s account of the genius. Rather than discerning the potential implicit in the norms of only one particular social conscience and reconstructing accordingly, the individual conscience of the genius discerns the potential in the norms of multiple social consciences and then weaves them together in novel ways in order to make specific interventions in particular social ecologies. Such work requires the maintenance of an ecology of social consciences that keeps them relatively mutually vulnerable. If constant negotiation between multiple ecologies of social roles and their norms of fittingness, rather than punctuated judgment, is the paradigmatic work of individual conscience, then the resolution of moral perplexity cannot be conscience’s primary function. Rather, moral perplexity is something to be endured, borne, lived with but neither cured nor dissolved. Hence, moral perplexity should not be understood as a dilemma between opposing claims or judgments on our past behavior or future options but more significantly as the felt tension of participating in multiple social ecologies whose norms of fittingness often pull us in different directions. In this sense, moral perplexity is the very atmosphere of any complex social life composed of numerous, differentiated ecologies of social roles. Of course, it is possible to refuse this atmosphere—for instance, by collapsing our individual conscience into one of our social consciences. Mead anticipates this by discussing the possibility of the I and me fusing, such that the individual self becomes absorbed into its social group, which most often occurs in situations of intense religiosity or patriotism. Mead argues that, just as individual selves depend on others to exist, so individual nations depend on other nations for their national identity (Mead 1915). Extending this, I would argue, fi rst, that the numerous social ecologies

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that populate a shared social space (whether that be a nation or not) are also dependent on each other; and second, that our individual conscience relies on the multiplicity of social consciences to be truly individual. In this respect, acknowledging the multiplicity inherent in the me, the problem is not simply an I/me fusion that results in the loss of individuality but rather a reduction of conscience whereby the individual self orients its entire social life—that is, its life insofar as it is lived in and through a variety of social ecologies—according to the fittingness norms of one social conscience. This is Boal’s implicit construal of what the father is doing: trying to conduct his family life according to the norms of his workplace, since these norms secure his own role as superior to other roles. This is what the daughter’s novel bodily response is attempting to disrupt and reorient.6 The work of individual conscience, which I have articulated as the maintenance of an ecology of social consciences that remain vulnerable to each other such that their norms can be utilized across various social ecologies, is nothing less than the rational maintenance of moral perplexity. Moral perplexity itself, that voluminous and often confl icting moral data that emerges from our embodied participation in multiple ecologies of social roles, can be understood as rational to the extent that it expresses the necessary complexity and thickness of our social life. The fittingness norms of domestic life and work life should not be identical: children who routinely disappoint their parents should not be disowned, exempted from the role of child; but doctors who routinely fail to heal or ameliorate the suffering of their patients probably ought to be exempted from their medical roles. At the same time, such fittingness norms should not be overbearing, claiming the lives of their performers outside of the ecologies that they constitute, as Sennett and Hochschild worry certain jobs and economic trends do to the personal lives of workers. The work of individual conscience to resist the reduction of conscience involves resisting the collapse of social ecologies and their fittingness norms into each other, so that social life becomes flattened—whether the proximate motivation for such a collapse is experienced as a personal desire for simplifying social life or as an institutional demand arising from a particular social ecology. This work, understood as the maintenance of moral perplexity, is rational to the extent that it recognizes that contemporary social life cannot be sustained according to the norms of only one of the social ecologies that compose that life. The reduction of conscience is tempting because it relieves the pressure of the felt tension that is constitutive of social partici-

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pation in a complex social order. The work of individual conscience is to maintain the felt tension between multiple social consciences by resisting reduction within and between social ecologies. Such work involves both internal maintenance (some form of conscientious self-discipline that enables one to endure moral perplexity) and external maintenance (the conscientious performance of our various social roles such that they remain vulnerable to reconstruction but structured enough to prevent a complete takeover). Ultimately, I am less confident than Mead is regarding the possibility of the rational resolution of moral problems and dilemmas. I prefer the term maintenance because it suggests the possibility of social life breaking apart at any moment and so the need for conscience to exercise constant vigilance. Perhaps this is a testament to our different historical moments, to the fact that my intellectual atmosphere is suffused with a sense of risk and the increasing acceleration of contingency, more than an ambience of progress and hope (Beck 1992; Rosa 2013). In any event, I have endeavored to demonstrate how Mead’s anthropology funds a moral vision that acknowledges and addresses the ecological character and complexity of our social life.

NOTES 1. In this way, I am troubling Mead’s “defi nite distinction” between self and body (see Mead 1934, 136). 2. J. David Lewis (1991) maintains that Mead equivocates between a functional and ontological account of the I: sometimes it is characterized as the self’s response, and other times as that reality in the self that makes a response. Mead’s total position obligates him to a functional account. Meanwhile, there’s a question regarding whether the I is the source of potential social transformations or an actual response to social situations. For the former position, see Honneth (1995, 166–7). For the latter position, see Markell (2007, 122). I believe that Mead’s account of the genius obligates him to the latter position. 3. For his most programmatic account, see Boal (1985). 4. For a rich discussion of Mead’s articulated ethical method, see Joas (1997, chap. 6). According to Filipe Carreira da Silva (2008), the cornerstone of Mead’s thought is science as a problem-solving activity. 5. In this respect, it is important to remember that, for Mead, the response of the I to the me is the locus of or avenue for social reconstruction, not its necessary achievement. 6. Of course, we must recognize the possibility that the daughter is also trying to effect a reduction of conscience.

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REFERENCES Aboulafia, Mitchell. 2001. The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Apple, Michael W. 2004. “The Hidden Curriculum and the Nature of Confl ict.” In Ideology and Curriculum. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge Falmer. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage. Boal, Augusto. 1985. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and MariaOdilia Leal McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group. ———. 2002. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. 2nd ed. Translated by Adrian Jackson. London: Routledge. Dewey, John. 1948. Reconstruction in Philosophy, enlarged edition. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1960. “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy.” In On Experience, Nature, and Freedom: Representative Selections, edited by Richard J. Bernstein. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Translated by Jon Stambaugh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, updated edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy. Edited by Charles W. Wright. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Joas, Hans. 1997. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. rev. ed. Translated by Raymond Meyer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. John Paul II. 1993. The Splendor of Truth: Veritatis Splendor. Boston: Pauline Books & Media. Kirk, Kenneth E. 1952. The Threshold of Ethics. London: Skeffington & Son. ———. 1999. Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Lewis, J. David. 1991. “A Social Behaviorist Interpretation of the Meadian ‘I.’” In Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead, edited by Mitchell Aboulafia. Albany: SUNY Press. Markell, Patchen. 2007. “The Potential and the Actual: Mead, Honneth, and the ‘I.’” In Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, edited by Bert Van Den Brink and David Owen. New York: Columbia University Press. Mead, George Herbert. 1915. “The Psychological Bases of Internationalism.” Survey 33: 604–7. ———. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1964. Selected Writings. Edited by Andrew J. Reck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Nussbaum, Martha. 2008. Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality. New York: Basic Books. Rosa, Hartmut. 2013. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Translated by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys. New York: Columbia University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1979. Emile, or On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton. Shusterman, Richard. 2008. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Silva, Filipe Carreira da. 2007. G. H. Mead: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA: Polity. ———. 2008. Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Smith, Adam. 2002. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strohm, Paul. 2011. Conscience: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, Bryan S. 2008. The Body and Society. 3rd ed. London: Sage. Vischer, Robert K. 2009. Conscience and the Common Good: Reclaiming the Space Between Person and State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ch apter Fourteen

Presentation and Re-Presentation: Language, Content, and the Reconstruction of Experience Roman Madzia

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he relation between experience and language has been a central issue in contemporary philosophy. Starting with positivism and neopositivism, philosophers of the twentieth century have increasingly paid attention to the way in which the bits of our language are supposed to represent the corresponding bits of the world. The very idea of correspondence between linguistic assertions and the world “out there” has been problematized by thinkers of the second wave of the linguistic turn such as Willard Van Orman Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Rorty—thinkers who have been called pragmatists on so many occasions that it seems superfluous to back up this particular label with a single reference. Although the ideas of the above-mentioned thinkers radically differ in many respects, they all seem to share the fundamental conviction that our relation to the world is never direct but at every instant mediated by language, albeit in a non-corresponding (and non-representational) fashion. For pragmatistically inclined thinkers such as John McDowell (2007, 349), “conceptual rationality is everywhere in our lives.” Although McDowell himself has strong reservations to being called a pragmatist or neo-pragmatist,1 his words nicely represent the general Kantian stance of the neo-pragmatists, according to which the conceptual (linguisticallybased) spontaneity of the self-reflective “mind” is a necessary condition for a subject to enter into cognitive relations with the world. This chapter aims to problematize such a picture of knowledge, and it does so from the intersecting perspective of the philosophy of George H. Mead and the currently flourishing area of cognitive science called situated cognition. In the history of the pragmatist philosophical movement, Mead was the fi rst thinker to present a relatively complete and systematic treatment of the origins of language and communication and their 296

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role in human conduct. Since Mead’s theory of symbolic communication is organically bound with his theory of the self, this article demonstrates how his philosophy represents a balanced view of the relation of the symbolically constituted self and the world, without falling prey to linguistic intellectualism, as is the case with many contemporary neo-pragmatists. More than presenting and then criticizing the position of the singular neopragmatists, this chapter concentrates on analyzing and developing those of Mead’s ideas that are most conducive to its primary goal. That is, this chapter attempts to show how Mead’s philosophy presents an interesting and empirically responsible alternative to the increasingly untenable contemporary positions of various forms of neo-pragmatism, which seem to hold that our primary relation to the world is the relation of a disembodied mind to an omnipresent linguistically structured content.2 The paper proceeds as follows. First, it presents and analyzes the position of the contemporary (neo-)pragmatists who claim that our knowledge of the world is necessarily mediated by language and linguistic structures that we carry around in our minds. Second, it contests, from the perspective of Mead’s philosophy of the act, the contention that in order to attain knowledge of the world we must necessarily employ some pre-existing explicit conceptual framework. In this respect, particular attention is paid to the problem of direct perception as well as possible connections of Mead’s theory of the act to William James’s radical empiricism and certain contemporary theories of embodied cognition. By means of this synthesis, it is shown that, according to Mead, our primary relation to the world is that of absorbed skillful coping which is not mediated by propositional content. Third, after a brief introduction of Mead’s theory of the emergence of symbolic communication, it is demonstrated how, in Mead’s view, the use of symbolic thinking enables human beings to systematically reconstruct their habits in response to practical problems that emerge in their otherwise contentless, practical activities in the world. Finally, it is shown to what extent Mead’s perspective on the role of symbolic thinking in experience presents a much more balanced outlook on the issue than the overly intellectualist accounts of contemporary neo-pragmatist thinkers.

CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND THE REMNANTS OF CARTESIANISM: MIND AS A MEDIATOR AND INTERIORITY In his recent essay titled “Retrieving Realism,” Charles Taylor (2013) criticizes a certain picture of knowledge, which, to paraphrase Wittgenstein,

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has held us captive since the time of Descartes. As it often happens with metaphorical figures absorbed long ago by our culture and social practices, this largely unreflected-upon picture frames our ways of thinking about our knowledge of the world to such an extent that it makes us virtually unable to even imagine how things could be otherwise. As Taylor contends, the picture in question is a picture of knowledge as mediational— that is, as an activity of mediating the external states of affairs to our inner mind’s eye. According to the mediational epistemology of the Western philosophical canon (Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc.3), our knowledge of the world comes about only through some features of the mind; in other words—to attain knowledge of the world we always necessarily employ some pre-existing propositionally articulable structure: “I want to call this picture ‘mediational,’ because of the force of the claim which emerges out of the crucial phase ‘only through’” (Taylor 2013, 62). Although, in the course of the history of modern philosophy, the particular form of this structure has been thought of in many different ways, the game of epistemology has been usually played on the conceptual playground conceiving of knowledge as a self-contained inner activity of the human mind, grasping external reality by means of internal cognitive items (ideas, mental representations, conceptual frameworks, etc.). Taylor holds that mediational epistemology consists in four interwoven claims which are (depending on the particular philosophical position) to a greater or lesser degree advocated by most of the Western philosophical tradition: 1. Mediation: The form of the phenomenal world as perceived by humans is an outcome of the categorizing activity of the mind. The world, as perceived and/or represented is never accessible directly but only through and thanks to the classifying activity of the intellect. Our attitude toward the world is that of a disengaged observer. 2. Explicitness: Since our knowledge is a product of such a rational activity, its content can be analyzed into clearly defi ned, explicit elements (ideas, beliefs, sentences held true). The cognitive content of our minds takes a form of atomic bits of information, which gain their semantic content either by means of their referring to objects in the real world or by means of their internal relations. 3. Insurpassibility : We can never go beyond/below these explicit, formulated elements. The only reality there is, is the one given through the theoretical frame of our mind. Humans basically thought of as minds which never have a direct access to the world—as minds, we are always distanced.

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4. Dualism: Although the majority of contemporary thinkers are materialists, they still work with the conceptual opposition of mind and body in that they conceive of mind as a distinct, however dubious, entity which needs to be either eliminated by means of natural science or at least reduced using its conceptual apparatus.4

Especially the last, dualistic, point has much broader ramifications than presented by Taylor. For one, as Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 338–81) indicate, the modern dualism to a significant degree consists in understanding the mind on the background of the metaphor of a container—that is, in conceiving of the mind as a specific sort of localizable entity which contains thoughts and performs mental operations. The problematic element in this kind of thinking lies in a dualism of inner and outer, which is, in fact, even more conceptually necessary to mediational epistemology than dualism of substance, criticized primarily by Taylor. Cartesianism, as Taylor neglected to explicitly state, is not exclusively a dualism of substances but, perhaps even more importantly, an internalism. Internalism, as a dualism of inner and outer, understands mind as interiority—that is, as a spatially localizable self-contained domain performing mental operations. It is only on the background of internalism, which holds that the world shows up “in our minds,” that mediational epistemology makes sense. In this respect, a major portion of contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and language, despite being programmatically materialist, remains captured in the Cartesian intellectual paradigm as, for instance, Daniel Dennett has repeatedly observed.5 Charles S. Peirce (1931–35, 5:128) once wrote: modern philosophy has never been able quite to shake off the Cartesian idea of the mind, as something that “resides”—such is the term —in the pineal gland. Everybody laughs at this nowadays, and yet everybody continues to think of mind in this same general way, as something within this person or that, belonging to him and correlative to the real world. A whole course of lectures would be required to expose this error.

Nowadays, after more than a century, we can be sure that Peirce was too optimistic about the question of how long it would take to debunk the Cartesian intellectual paradigm that has held us captive since the onset of modernity. As opposed to various versions of Cartesian materialism, then and now, Mead’s (social) behaviorism was, and is, a real alternative to all

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views of the mind which are built on the metaphor of interiority. Mead held that mind, as well as conscious phenomena in general, are not the kind of thing that could be spatially localizable anywhere, much less exclusively in the brain, because “consciousness is functional, not substantive” and therefore “cannot . . . be located in the brain” ([1934] 1967, 112). According to Mead, the mind is a skill, or achievement, of the active human body capable of entering into increasingly complex interactions with its social and physical environment. In his view, the states of the brain are physiological events that give our bodies access to the world of physical and social interactions and in this sense they are necessary for consciousness to take place. However, if consciousness is a function of the body to skillfully cope with its social and physical Umwelt, then its structural characteristics, and indeed its very existence, depend precisely on its interaction with the environment. For Mead, therefore, the description of brain states alone is not a sufficient condition for the explanation of mental phenomena, for they come into existence as a relation and as a relation they need to be explained. As noted above, internalism is conceptually deeply bound with mediational epistemology. In the mediational model of knowledge, the mediational structure (beliefs, conceptual schemes, etc.) plays the role of an interface that imposes a structure on the perceptual material and presents the world to the mental interiority as content. In this sense, even the selfproclaimed anti-Cartesian schools of twentieth century thought such as post-structuralism (Barthes, Derrida), neo-pragmatism (Rorty, Brandom, McDowell), and analytic philosophy (Quine, Goodman, Sellars) have not liberated themselves from Cartesianism, for—being mere versions of neoKantian idealism—they still preserve the conceptual opposition of mind and world. At this point, the following question poses itself: What is the role that, in Mead’s view, language plays in the conceptualization of experience? In the second half of the twentieth century there certainly have been interpreters of Mead, such as Herbert Blumer or Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who seem to have been inclined, to say the least, to reading Mead through the lens of what may be called mediational epistemology. In what is to follow, an interpretation of Mead will be proposed which denies that, according to Mead, our primary relation to the world is mediated by any sort of explicit theoretical structure—that is, that the world is present to us as a linguistically organized content of our minds. By contrast, the linguistic or contentful relation to the world will be presented as a second-order, derivative attitude, situated in the mediatory phase of the act and will be called re-presentation.

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PRESENTATION: BODY AND THE WORLD AS A SPACE OF ENGAGED PRACTICE It is one of the quite interesting, and yet not commonly known, facts about Mead’s philosophy that a certain concept of a life-world appeared in his writings even before Mead introduced key social-psychological ideas such as significant symbol, taking the attitude of the other, generalized other.6 Mead’s notion of the life-world, to which he usually laconically referred as the “world that is there” or the “world of unquestioned validity,” and which he first introduced in his 1900 paper “Suggestions Toward a Theory of the Philosophical Disciplines,” remained, in its decisive conceptual features, unchanged till his late writings, included by the editors of his work in the Philosophy of the Act. The concept of the world that is there played a crucial role in Mead’s theory of inquiry, embodied especially in the Philosophy of the Act, which is one of the reasons why Hans Joas (1985, 203) wrote that this notion of Mead’s “is the central concept of the theory of science developed by Mead in the final phase of his work.” However, we should not forget that the importance and scope of this term, in fact, reaches way beyond his theory of inquiry, for it is an irreplaceable element of Mead’s reflections on the nature of human experience. In Mead’s understanding, the world that is there is an ultimate, intersubjective horizon of objects, values, and events in which our everyday comportment unfolds. It is an unproblematic realm of perceptual objects (physical as well as social) shared with others and with others taken for granted. The world that is there is an all-encompassing, and yet dynamic field of intelligibility on the background of which all meaningful structures of our experience show up. As Harold N. Lee (1963, 53, emphasis original) points out, the world that is there may not be identified either with consciousness in general, nor with any of its particular contents: To Mead, experience is wider than consciousness, for consciousness emerges upon the fi rst occasion of the reflective act. The non-reflective act comes fi rst, and the world in which it takes place is the world that is there  .  .  . The world that is there does not arise in consciousness; instead, consciousness is a response to it. The world that is there does not arise within experience; experience takes place within it. The world that is there does not arise at all, it is simply there.

A world that is there is a “world of objects of which we are not reflectively aware” (Mead 1938, 220) in the sense that they remain withdrawn from our deliberate attention even in the course of our goal-directed

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conduct. In the “attitude of immediate experience,” which, according to Mead, is our primary mode of experience, the world does not show up as a content of our minds.7 By contrast, it presents itself as a field of practical behavioral solicitations into which we are unreflectively absorbed. In this sense, Mead’s position regarding the primary relation of a human actor and her world is similar to that of the phenomenologists such as Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty: “Existential phenomenologists contend . . . that the world we are drawn into when we are absorbed in coping does not stand over against us as a set of facts that can be captured in propositions but rather is directly lived by the absorbed coper as a shifting field of attractions and repulsions” (Dreyfus 2013, 17–18). From Mead’s perspective, the world that is there is a field of pervading and irreducible aesthetic value: “Man lives in a world of Meaning. What he sees and hears means what he will or might handle” (Mead [1925] 1964, 294). From the perspective of an individual organism, the world that is there receives its structure due to the form of embodiment of that organism: “Our world  .  .  . is built up of contact experience through the hand. The dog’s world is built up of odors” (Mead 1982, 119). Physical objects, in that sense, are always perceived as means, or instruments, to a particular end, depending on the actual homeostatic state of the organism. For Mead, human action is teleological, not necessarily in the sense of pure instrumentality but, fi rst and foremost, in the sense of being value-laden and goal-oriented: “The world that is there, this slab of nature, is there because of the teleological determination of the individual” (Mead 1938, 348). The world that is there, as a space of significance and value, exists only in relation to the organism (individual and social), and, hence, neither the organism nor the world is primary to one another—they both come into being simultaneously within the adjustive process of the “act,” which, in turn, is the defi ning feature of life. Wherever there is life, there is also value, as Evan Thompson (2004, 386) once put it: “Living isn’t simply a cognitive process, it’s also an emotive process of sense-making, of bringing signification and value into existence.” To Mead, as well as to contemporary philosophers of cognitive science like Thompson, teleology is an inherent feature of life. The basic teleology of the life-process manifests itself also in human conduct. In opposition to all theories that are based on what might be called “perceptual atomism,” Mead held that perceptual objects do not show up as context-independent items in our perceptual field but as directly accessible “chunks of meaning”: “Our world is defi nitely mapped out for us by the responses which are going to take place” (Mead [1934] 1967, 129). In the attitude of immediate experience, the world, then, shows

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up not simply as a centrally stored symbolic world-model of any kind but as a sphere of engaged and absorbed practice in which things and events are perceived in terms of possible actions that a physically embodied and socially embedded agent is able to carry out toward its structures on the basis of its sensorimotor make-up. Now, if the life-process itself is a process in which value and significance come into existence, then it would not pose a problem for Mead to maintain that the world necessarily comes to us as always already conceptualized or stratified. This conceptualization, however, is not, at the most fundamental level, theoretical (explicit, linguistically mediated) but practical in nature. The conceptualization Mead has in mind is not one in which the cognizing organism knows that the world is so and so; rather, in contrast, it is one in which it knows how to negotiate certain environmental structures in order to satisfy its needs. With Dewey (1925, 172–80), we could say that it knows the “world by its habits,” and not by any symbolic processes (or representations contained in the central processing unit) in the consciousness. In this regard, in the aforementioned article “Suggestions Toward a Theory of the Philosophical Disciplines,” Mead (1900, 3) talks about the teleological nature of the concept which holds that “the meaning of the object is derived entirely from our reaction upon it, or . . . our use of it.” In the most basic sense, concepts are not symbolic, private mental items but rather recurring sensorimotor patterns that enable an organism to effectively act on the structures of its world. This particular way of understanding concepts enables Mead to avoid the intellectualistic flavor this term usually invokes and makes it possible for us to think about concepts in such a way that knowledge does not need to possess an explicit symbolic structure—in this sense, even animals can be said to possess concepts and genuinely “conceptually” organize their world: “Every perceived thing is insofar as perceived a recognized means to possible ends, and there can be no hard and fast line drawn between such perceptual consciousness and the more abstracted processes of so called reasoning” (Mead [1907] 1964, 80–81). In this regard, Alva Noë, a philosopher of cognitive science, holds that what we call concept is simply “a technique or tool or skill of access. As the etymology of the word concept would suggest—as well as that of its German cognate Begriff—a concept is a technique for grasping something. To say that perceptual experience is conceptual, from this standpoint, is to say that perceptual experience is a skillful grappling with what there is” (Noë 2012, 35). Although Mead would see eye to eye with the proponents of mediational epistemology who claim that our perceptual experience is permeated by conceptuality, he would strongly disagree with them

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as far as the nature of this conceptuality is concerned; more specifically, he would disagree that this conceptuality is linguistically founded. The goal-directed behavioral items, due to which the world is present to us as a virtual space of action, are attitudes. In several places in his writings, Mead defi nes attitudes as “beginnings of acts” or neurologically realized bodily dispositions encoding perceptual stimuli in terms of possible reactions toward them.8 By means of attitudes, we conceptualize the world even before we develop skills to share those conceptualizations with others. In a sense, attitudes are proto-intentional, because they enable the living body to reveal the world as a sphere of praxis.9 For Mead, attitudes constitute what might be called “bodily (or motor) intentionality” in the sense described by Merleau-Ponty (2002, 162): “Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia,’ which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, without having to make use of ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function.’” Mead’s concept of attitudes as neurophysiological items encoding perceptual objects as “invitations to action” (see 1938, 12) can also be understood in terms of James J. Gibson’s term “affordances” or opportunities of behavior: “affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill . . . I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment” (Gibson 1979, 127). Affordances are neither features of the environment nor exclusively of the perceiving animal. As Anthony Chemero, a philosopher of cognitive science and an advocate of ecological psychology, argues, they come into being as a relation between what Chemero calls the animal’s “body scale” and physical properties of its environment. Referring to William James’s radical empiricism (according to which objects and their relations have an equal ontological status), Chemero claims that affordances, as relations between things in experience, are given directly in perception. The world as a space of affordances, then, shows up without the need of being mediated by any sort of representation or mental content. According to theories of direct perception (such as that of James, Gibson, or Chemero): “meaning is in the environment, and perception does not depend on meaning-conferring inferences.10 Instead the animal simply gathers information from a meaning-laden environment. The environment is meaning laden in that it contains affordances, and affordances are meaningful to animals” (Chemero 2009, 135). In Meadian terms, affordances come into existence in a perspective, which is a func-

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tional, objective relation between an organism and the environment. A perspective is not a subjective relation between a mind and the world but rather a structural coupling between the sensorimotor profi le of the body and the environment, giving rise to a meaningful and directly accessible world that is there. To Mead, the world that is there is not a mental construct situated in our heads; it is an ultimate intersubjective horizon of meaning which originates from objective relations between bodies, their continuously developing skills, and the environment. As indicated above, the mode of experience in which the world appears as an undisturbed space of practical activity and undoubted meanings and values, Mead called the attitude of immediate experience. For the purposes of this paper, let us name this mode of experience presentation. As opposed to immediate experience, where the emphasis is put on the individual experiential dimension of the embodied agent, the term “presentation” points more in the direction of pure there-ness of a meaningful world. In the most important sense, presentation is an activity. More precisely, it is an activity of bringing the world and its structures into being via our bodily skills and continuously verifying the validity of these structures in contact experience. The world is made present, or it is made the relatively stable totality that it is, due to the stable relations we build with it through our bodies and symbolically shared skills. In the experiential mode of presentation the body and world are experienced as unity. Since presentation is the most fundamental mode of consciousness, all experience naturally tends in the direction of re-establishing this unity when it breaks down. In other words, all experience tends to make the world present-again in case it loses the quality of being a unified field of action. In the remainder of this paper it will be argued that in the case of socialized human beings, the process of making the world present-again is directed by means of significant symbols, thanks to which certain parts of the world are mediated by language and eventually show up as contents of mind. This process will be called re-presentation. Since the process of re-storing presentation by means of linguistic mediation is situated in the mediatory phases of the act, re-presentation will be subsequently proven to be a borderline, derivative case of presentation.

RE-PRESENTATION: LANGUAGE AND APPEARANCE OF MENTAL CONTENT In Mead’s understanding, the fundamental non-intentional (and therefore also contentless) items which organize the social act are gestures. Ges-

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tures are attitudes, or goal-directed bodily movements, which are being responded to by others. Mead sometimes referred to gestures as truncated acts which inform other participants of the social act about the result of a certain action of which a gesture is an initial phase. In the case of significant gestures (that is, gestures made and perceived by actors who are capable of taking the attitude or the role of the other), gestures encode what might be called social affordances—socially shared responses toward certain parts of a common practical world. If, in the individual mind, an object is coded in terms of possible responses toward it, then—in the mind of a social individual—this set of possible responses is coded by a gesture, by means of which this social individual is able to turn attention of others toward that object. If the responses of others turn out to be functionally identical with those of the initiator of the social act, then the gesture is significant. Significant gestures (symbols), or social affordances, are concepts (responses) which became an object of reflective awareness. Therefore, concepts, in the sense of basic responses toward a common practical world, do not come into being by means of language; with language they become articulable to others and shareable with others. Following the logic of Mead’s reasoning, what comes into being with language is, however, intentionality. From the point of view of Mead’s philosophy of language and mind (and pace Brentano) intentionality is not an inherent, or inborn, capacity of the mind. By contrast, since intentionality implies self-reference (see above) and conditions of satisfaction, it only comes into being after an individual mind: (1) has learned to indicate meanings to herself and others and (2) has learned to reflectively recognize when the act has reached the phase of consummation. In Mead’s rendition, then, language and symbolic thinking turn the mere initial teleology of attitudes into a self-referential and articulable form of intentional (reflective) thought, since attitudes can be about something only when the actor, at the same time, takes the role of the object toward which her attitudes are directed. Mead identified the human capacities for symbolic thinking with the response of the human body to a growing need of organizing its social relations with others: “The mechanism of human society is that of bodily selves who assist or hinder each other in their cooperative acts by the manipulation of physical things” (Mead 1932, 169). That is why Mead situated the origins of language in the manipulatory phase of the act where the acting body, confronted with a problem, inhibits its conduct, suspends the consummation, takes a step back, and reflects. For Mead, conceptually speaking, the initial phases of symbolic interaction can be identified

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with problematic situations where the gesturing organism is forced to reflect on the sort of action which is going to bring about a desired response (in other words calls out in herself the same response she is going to call out in the other). In Mead’s view, language is not only closely connected but, in fact, originates in the need to solve problems. As David L. Miller puts it: “Mead makes it abundantly clear that if men could live by habit alone there would be no occasion for thinking” (Miller 1973, 148). There are two elements which are necessary for the emergence of reflective (contentful) thought: (1) significant gestures (symbols) and (2) the physiological construction of the human hand. On the most fundamental level, both these elements derive from human embodiment. In the case of (1), significant gestures are inhibited bodily movements connected to mental images of the bodily response of the other; and (2), owing to the hand, human bodies are naturally apt to delay the consummatory phase of the act in favor of manipulation, disassembling and/or creative rearranging of physical things. Together with the capabilities of the human hand, significant symbols serve as an important part of the process of inhibition, since they enable the human body to analyze the problematic object in terms of possible responses toward them. Mead held that significant symbols refer to objects in two complementary ways—that is, denotation and connotation, intension and extension.11 On the one hand, significant symbols always denote (or name) objects or things in the world. On the other, significant symbols as names always also connote sets of possible responses toward those objects. Mead held (pace most of the analytic philosophers of language) that extension and intension are not mutually exclusive—that is, if a significant symbol is to mean anything, it has to be composed of both these elements. With Andy Clark (2003, 70), we might call significant symbols “cognitive shortcuts” because being intersubjectively shareable items (denotation), they subsume sets of possible reactions toward objects of the common practical world (connotation). In the problematic situation, it is usually the internal, or individual, element of connotation that becomes an object of reflection.12 Now, if an object is a set of possible responses which we can carry out toward a particular stimulus and this object becomes problematic, then in the reflective mind, an object becomes a linguistically mediated content of the mind because it is language which enables the reflective mind to single out, decontextualize, and analyze particular problematic properties of the object in question. Precisely this manipulatory stage of the act might be called re-presentation. The notion of re-presentation, as it is used here, also implies an important as-

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pect of temporality. If the mode of immediate experience, or presentation, is a mode of conduct in which the world is present as an unproblematic field of action, then reconstruction of experience by means of significant symbols (or re-presentation) introduces an element of temporality: “Intelligence is essentially the ability to solve the problems of present behavior in terms of its possible future consequences as implicated on the basis of past experience” (Mead [1934] 1967, 100). Problematic situations suspend consummation of an act and introduce temporality to experience. In other words, problems put off consummation to the future (while we try to solve them on the basis of our past experience). In this sense, re-presentation taking place in the process of the symbolic reconstruction of experience, is an attempt to eliminate this suspension, or render consummation present-again. Since significant symbols enable us to refer to objects and their mutual relations, Mead held that in the case of socialized, reflective beings which operate with these symbols the action-problems, which normally take place in the world and are dealt with by means of the organism’s bodily skills, become internalized and scrutinized not necessarily by means of operations of the human hand but often exclusively on the basis of an internal dialogue of the social mind with itself: “When you are reasoning you are indicating to yourself the characters that call out certain responses—and that is all you are doing” (Mead [1934] 1967, 93). To paraphrase another of Clark’s terms, significant symbols are means of offloading the energetically demanding process of trial-and-error to the “inner” process of internal conversation: Public speech, inner rehearsal . . . are all potent tools that reconfigure the shape of computational space. Again and again we trade culturally achieved representation against individual computation. Again and again we use words to focus, clarify, transform, offload, and control our own thinkings. Thus understood, language is not the mere imperfect mirror of our intuitive knowledge. Rather, it is part and parcel of the mechanism of reason itself. (Clark 1997, 207)

We should nonetheless keep in mind that, in Mead’s case, the process of reflective deliberation and reconstruction of the act by means of significant symbols is derivative of the human bodily capability of transforming, manipulating, and exploiting the environmental structures by means of the human hand. Mead was, therefore, one of the fi rst philosophers to have taken embodiment really seriously: “Language, Mead holds, would

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not have emerged had not the hands been freed from supporting the body and capable, through the juxtaposition of the thumb and the fi ngers, of dissecting and reassembling objects. Without the hand, language would have no function, and by language the increase in the ways of manipulating the physical object is unlimited” (Miller 1973, 62). Linguistically mediated thought, like other bodily skills, comes into being and fulfi lls its role as a tool of making the world present-again when its parts cease to respond to our habitual actions. Re-presentation, or appearance of mental content, thus—in the new and revised sense—neither means mirroring the outer world to the “internal spectator,” nor is it a conceptual framework through which we necessarily perceive the otherwise inaccessible world “out there.” Re-presentation is an action of the human body in which it, by means of significant symbols, attempts to restore the unity of experience which has been disrupted by the emergence of a problematic situation. In other words, it is an activity of the body in which it tries to make the world present-again as a unified field of action. Mead, obviously, never used that word in this particular sense, but, with respect to the current discussion in the philosophy of mind and language, it seems to be necessary to suggest an alternative view of this troubled philosophical term. When we linguistically re-present the world, we experience it as (1) mediated, (2) explicit, (3) unsurpassable (when making the problematic situation explicit by means of significant symbols, we can never go beyond this explicitness of what we can indicate to others), (4) dualistic (the lack of attunement causes the problematic part of the world to become an object and our attitudes toward it become subjective). At this point, it should be stated unequivocally that the relation between presentational and representational aspects of human experience is not that of mutual exclusivity or even dualism. Re-presentation, being a transitory phase of the act, is an integral and organic part of ordinary experience, which enriches it by new possibilities for adjustment (i.e., symbolism). The transitory moment of linguistic mediation of the world belongs to the manipulatory phase of the act and is, therefore, derivative of presentation—the fundamental experiential mode of the act. Mead was convinced that although the world appears in a subject-object manner in the manipulatory phase of the act, even this transitory division is not absolute because reconstruction of the act causally depends on the worldly affairs and returns to it in order to be checked for validity: “Mind involves . . . a relationship to the characters of things. Those characters are in the things, and while the stimuli call out the response which is in one sense present in the organism, the responses are to things out there. The whole process

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is not a mental product and you cannot put it inside of the brain. Mentality is that relationship of the organism to the situation which is mediated by sets of symbols” (Mead [1934] 1967, 124–25). Since action-problems appear in real-time, intensely felt and pressing difficulties, the task of contentful thinking is not to come up with the best possible solution. From the point of view of Mead’s pragmatic naturalism, embodied cognitive agents tend to act in accordance with what Clark has called the “principle of ecological assembly” which holds that “the canny cognizer tends to recruit, on the spot, whatever mix of problem-solving resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of effort” (Clark 2008, 13). The task of symbolic, or contentful, thinking is not to create an ideal copy of reality but to enable the act to continue in an efficient, acceptable manner. Hence according to Mead, there is no need to unite the self and world because they were never separated in the fi rst place. Although there is a logical priority of embodiment over the use of significant thought (had there been no bodily tools like the human hand, reflective thought of the human sort would not have emerged); once significant thought is in place, it reinforces in a top-down manner our ability of inhibition of action toward even better manipulation and more creative reflection on action-problems. Moreover, Mead was convinced that since significant thought encodes socially shareable and historically inherited ways of conduct, the relation of human agents toward their environment is deeply pre-structured by the use of language: Symbolization constitutes objects not constituted before, objects which would not exist except for the context of social relationships wherein symbolization occurs. Language does not simply symbolize a situation or object which is already there in advance; it makes possible the existence or the appearance of that situation or object, for it is a part of the mechanism whereby that situation or object is created. (Mead [1934] 1967, 78)

What does Mead, however, mean by “creation” of perceptual objects? As this paper is at pains to argue, we should avoid reading Mead as an advocate of any sort of mediational epistemology, not to say linguistic idealism. For Mead, perceptual (physical as well as social) objects are not created out of thin air, just by the sheer use of language. In order for significant symbols to mean anything, the world’s affordances always have to respond to our significant actions in an intersubjectively verifiable manner. If an object is anything toward which we are able to act and

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a language (significant symbols) encode socially shareable ways of such conduct, then a language “creates” its objects in the sense that it encodes historically contingent (and often unique) ways in which different communities organize and interact with physical and social affordances in their world. Language creates new objects in the sense of enabling new socially shareable ways of interaction with the environment to originate. Some languages encode concrete practices in such a way that it may be impossible to translate some parts of its discourse without loss of meaning to other languages. This is, however, no drama. As Alva Noë (2009, 103) argues, in some cases, to demand full translatability between very divergent forms of discourse is about as intelligible as trying to translate baseball into football. The impossibility of full translation does not mean that either form of discourse is less real than any other; it only means that one discourse encodes certain practices that have little or no counterpart in other forms of discourse. From the pragmatist perspective, the idea of full-blown translatability across languages stems from the erroneous idea that languages are sets of names for the elements of the world which are independent of our historically contingent and socially inherited ways of conduct. From the perspective of Mead’s philosophy of communication, it is, however, not so important that languages be translatable; by contrast, what is absolutely necessary is that they be learnable (significant)—that is, that it is possible for one actor to systematically call out in herself responses that are functionally identical to the acts she calls out in others. Mead’s conception of language opposes the neo-Kantian, internalist idea (shared by the advocates of mediational epistemology) that language plays the role of conceptual scheme through which we, at all times and necessarily, perceive and understand the world. In his rendition, we understand the world not through conceptual schemes but by means of sharing standard ways of conduct with others. Since these normal ways of behavior come into existence in a universe of discourse, all intelligent social conduct is explicable by means of significant symbols. Even though all intelligent behavior takes place in the universe pre-structured by significant symbols, it by no means follows that intelligent behavior is, in all instances, caused by significant symbols. As demonstrated above, for Mead, the need for linguistic mediation and reflective thinking originate in problematic situations and cease with their disappearance. The reflective, selfaware, and linguistically mediated deliberation which the advocates of mediational epistemology take to be the basic mode of human experience is, in Mead’s understanding, a transient mode of the act aimed at restoring the state of presentation wherein we skillfully cope with everyday situ-

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ations to which we are non-reflectively absorbed. The representatives of mediational epistemology tend to understand human cognition as receptivity. For them, we are minds whose understanding of the world is conditioned by a theoretical frame of linguistic, explicit propositions. Mead, by contrast, tried to think of cognition not primarily as a mental but bodily activity. In other words, we are bodies whose ways of conduct are, among other things, pre-structured by shareable significant practices (propositional language being just one of them). Of course, it would be completely misguided to ascribe to Mead the idea that language only influences human conduct when it is disrupted by problematic situations. It would, however, be equally misguided to contend that our primary relation to the world is that of a reflective, linguistically structured interiority. Certainly, Mead was convinced that language and symbolic thinking steadily affect human conduct in a top-down manner by enabling us to cooperate with others and engage in significant practices with them in qualitatively new ways. This sort of human-specific practices, however, primarily take place in the mode of presentation, in which we are skillfully absorbed in significant, socially shared embodied activities.

NOTES 1. In this article, the term “neo-pragmatists” refers to pragmatically inclined thinkers after the linguistic turn such as Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom. 2. I borrow the concept of empirical responsibility from Lakoff and Johnson (1999, xi, 551–52). In connection with Mead’s philosophy it is also used earlier by Kilpinen (2013). 3. Nietzsche would, however, argue that the tendency of the Western philosophical tradition toward idealism (in general—a view that reality is to a greater or lesser degree mental and therefore accessible only to an educated theoretical reason) was present as early as Plato (see Nietzsche 1990, 50–52). 4. Mead called this sort of attitude “parallelism” (see Mead [1934] 1967, 38). 5. According to Dennett, many contemporary theories of psychophysical identity merely replace the older concept of the soul with the concept of mind, and on top of that still preserve the implicit dualism of brain and body (center and periphery). Dennett has called this error “Cartesian materialism” (1991, 107). 6. For the fi rst time in Mead (1900). 7. See Mead (1938, 14). 8. See Mead ([1934] 1967, 8–12; 1938, 130, etc.). 9. Attitudes ought not be thought of as being intentional in the classical understanding since intentionality is usually characterized by two basic properties: (1) directedness (aboutness) and (2) conditions of satisfaction. Condition 1 presupposes dualism of subject and object (conscious mind is aware of something which is not itself). Condi-

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tion 2, in turn, holds that a certain mental state is intentional if specific conditions under which the mental state in question is true can be indicated. In case of attitudes, neither of these takes place because by means of attitudes pace (1) the lived body experiences itself as being “absorbed” in the world without setting itself over against it in a dualistic manner. And pace (2) since the situation of absorption is pre-linguistic, it is non-veridical and no explicit and complete description can be formulated as to what attitudes are about. 10. The development of Gibson’s ecological psychology was to a crucial extent influenced by William James’s psychology. On the history of this relation, see Heft (2001). 11. See Mead ([1922] 1964, 246). 12. This is also why Mead maintained that problematic situations appear in the individual mind of the inquirer but must necessarily be dealt with in terms of universals, intelligible to the entire scientific community.

REFERENCES Chemero, Anthony. 2009. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2003. Natural- Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, Daniel D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little & Brown. Dewey, John. 1925. Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: Modern Library. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2013. “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental.” In Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-world: The McDowell– Dreyfus Debate, edited by Joseph K. Schear. London: Routledge. Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Heft, Henry. 2001. Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James. East Sussex: Psychology Press. Joas, Hans. 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re- examination of His Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, Mark. 2007. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kilpinen, Erkki. 2013. “George Herbert Mead as an Empirically Responsible Philosopher: The Philosophy of the Act Reconsidered.” In George Herbert Mead in the Twenty- First Century, edited by Krzysztof Skowronski ´ and Thomas Burke, 3–20. Lanham: Lexington Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

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Lee, Harold N. 1963. “Mead’s Doctrine of the Past.” Tulane Studies in Philosophy 12: 52–75. Mead, George H. 1900. “Suggestions Towards a Theory of Philosophical Disciplines.” Philosophical Review 9: 1–17. ———. (1907) 1964. “Concerning Animal Perception.” In Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead, edited by Andrew J. Reck, 73– 81. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1922) 1964. “A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol.” In Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead, edited by Andrew J. Reck, 240–47. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1925) 1964. “The Nature of Aesthetic Experience.” In Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead, edited by Andrew J. Reck, 294–305. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court. ———. (1934) 1967. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Charles W. Morris, John M. Brewster, Albert M. Dunham, and David L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1982. “1927 Lectures in Social Psychology.” In The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Work of George Herbert Mead, edited by David L. Miller, 106–75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McDowell, John. 2007. “What Myth?” Inquiry 50: 338–51. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Miller, David L. 1973. George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990. The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti- Christ; or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. London: Penguin Books. Noë, Alva. 2009. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 2012. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1931–35. Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Reproducing Vols. I– VI, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2013. “Retrieving Realism.” In Mind, Reason, and Being-in-theworld. The McDowell– Dreyfus Debate, edited by Joseph K. Schear, 61– 90. London: Routledge. Thompson, Evan. 2004. “Life and Mind: From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology; A Tribute to Francisco Varela.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 381– 98.

Chapter Fifteen

G. H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research Timothy Gallagher

G

eorge Herbert Mead thought broadly about the question of speech and was mostly correct in his observations when judged in the light of contemporary research. Philosophy, Darwinian evolutionary theory, human physiology, comparative animal behavior, and experimental psychology all influenced how Mead approached questions concerning human speech, and more broadly the nature of consciousness (see Baldwin 1986; Cook 1993; Mead 2001; Gallagher 2014; Joas 1985; Miller 1973). Following a review of the interdisciplinary field on the nature of speech, the author began to recognize in Mead’s work a fit with a conceptual framework known as “Tinbergen’s Four Questions” (Tinbergen 1963). The framework is named after the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen for his contributions in developing this approach to the study of animal behavior. The questions are: (1) How does the behavior work? (Mechanics); (2) How does the behavior develop in the individual? (Ontogeny); (3) How did the behavior emerge in history? (Phylogeny); (4) How is the behavior adaptive for survival? (Function). This framework has been adopted by leading speech scholars (e.g., Hauser 1996; MacNeilage 2008), thus demonstrating its interdisciplinary reach. The discovery of this unifying thread in Mead with a framework not wholly articulated until Tinbergen’s 1963 paper adds to the case confi rming John Dewey’s prediction of Mead’s legacy: “I believe that a widening public will increasingly fi nd in his writings what personal students have found for many, many years: a seminal mind of the very first order” (Mead 1932, xl). The present paper fits with a tradition of scholarship on Mead expressed by Cook (1993, xiii–xiv, emphasis added): “Anyone who wishes to do justice to the full scope and coherence of Mead’s intellect must there315

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fore struggle to discern unifying threads running through numerous short essays and reviews he published during his lifetime; he or she must further attempt to identify and fi nd linkages between the central themes in a small mountain of additional materials consisting mainly of unfi nished manuscripts, correspondence, and student notes from Mead’s most important courses at the University of Chicago.”

THE VOCAL GESTURE IN MEAD’S THEORY “The nature of consciousness as personal and private” was Mead’s primary intellectual problem according to Dewey (Mead 1932, xxxvi). Mead’s initial inquiry into the nature of consciousness gradually became an investigation into subjectivity, the self, and ultimately intersubjectivity, mind, and society. The chief significance of the vocal gesture for Mead is the role it plays in his functional model of consciousness: “Functional psychology has set itself the program of assimilating the purposive character of conscious processes . . . to the evolutionary conception of adaptation” in contrast to parallelist conceptions of consciousness where mind and body are separate entities with separate functions, and consciousness “is a something into which the object of knowledge in some sense enters from without” (Mead 1910a, 174). Mead begins the development of his functional model of consciousness in the context of critiques of the subject matters of philosophy (Mead 1900) and psychology (Mead 1903). His account of consciousness served as an alternative to those in philosophy based in metaphysics (i.e., theology), deductive logic (i.e., Cartesian rationalization and Plato’s ideals), and inductive logic (i.e., empiricism). In these two papers Mead presents a functional model of consciousness where consciousness manifests in thought terms and has purpose. In 1904 Mead advocated for Wilhelm Wundt’s treatment of language as a psychological phenomenon in contrast to the historical and, what Mead perceived as flawed, psychological treatments by philologists. Wundt conceived of language as beginning in “the primitive impulse to expression,” which in its beginning stages is markedly emotional and motor in nature with “the intellectual content recognized as a development” (Mead 1904, 380). This “primitive impulse to expression” manifests itself in gesture language, which “passes over easily to that of the beginning of spoken language” (Mead 1904, 382). While the concept of gesture remained central to Mead, he later rejected the dualism in Wundt’s specification that selves, as intentionally expressive, are antecedent to the social process. Such a

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conceptualization “entirely fails to illuminate” the bearing of social experience on the development of mind and self (Mead 1934, 50–51). In 1909 Mead sums up his model of the nature of consciousness. In it the vocal gesture (i.e., social intercommunication) plays a critical role: “The positions I have in mind are the following: that human nature is endowed with and organized by social instincts and impulses; that the consciousness of meaning has arisen through social intercommunication; and fi nally that the ego, the self, that is implied in every act, in every volition, with reference to which our primary judgments of valuation are made, must exist in a social consciousness within which the socii, the other selves, are as immediately given as is the subject self” (Mead 1909, 403). In five subsequent papers (Mead 1910a, 1910b, 1912, 1913, 1922) Mead refi nes and elaborates this basic model of consciousness and the role of the vocal gesture. He uses the term “consciousness of meaning” to represent a subjective phase of consciousness wherein there exists both an awareness of one’s attitude and of those of the other in the social act. Awareness of one’s attitude occurs because one’s attitudes “are responsible for the changes in the conduct of other individuals” (Mead 1910b, 403). Given that gestures are the behavioral means by which emotions and attitudes are conveyed, “consciousness of meaning at least at this stage is a consciousness of one’s own attitudes of response as they answer to, control, and interpret the gestures of others” (Mead 1910b, 405). The vocal gesture is especially valuable here: “gestures, especially vocal gestures, which man makes in addressing others, call out or tend to call out responses from himself. He cannot hear himself speak without assuming in a measure the attitude which he would have assumed if he had been addressed in the same words by others” (Mead 1913, 376–77). Consequently, the vocal gesture “provides an ideal mechanism through which the individual can become conscious of his own tendencies to respond” (Cook 1972, 180). The vocal gesture for Mead represents a solution to the nature of human consciousness, within which the self and intersubjectivity are major conceptual components.

SPEECH AS BEHAVIOR Mead understood language as “ultimately a form of behavior . . .” (Mead 1938, 518). This is also the understanding of today’s interdisciplinary field on the nature of speech (Christiansen and Kirby 2003). A focus on behavior provided solutions to theoretical problems for Tinbergen and Mead. For Tinbergen it removed two obstacles in the analysis of animal behavior:

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subjectivism and teleological reasoning (Tinbergen 1963, 413). For Mead, a focus on behavior served as an escape from the “epistemological serpent,” as Mead called it, of pre-behavioristic psychology.1 This epistemological serpent represents the incompatibility of defi ning objects of awareness as existing independently both in consciousness (the legacy of Cartesian rationalism) and in the world of physiology and physics. With a shift of focus to behavior came a shift away from states of consciousness as generators of the objects of awareness to stating consciousness in terms of conduct (Mead 1925, 251–52). The literature review below draws on that field of speech research that models human speech as a natural behavior with an evolutionary history. The field spans some dozen disciplines and the work occupies thousands of articles, chapters, and books. The review is meant to serve as a representative sample of work that is relevant to assessing Mead’s speech model in the context of Tinbergen’s four questions framework.

MECHANICS (HOW DOES SPEECH WORK?) The behavioral characteristics of human speech are impressive (Levelt 1989; MacNeilage 2008). Its complexity is due to the fact that speech producing structures were originally adapted for, and continue to serve, vegetative functions necessary for survival such as breathing, swallowing, sucking, and chewing (Kohler 1998), what MacNeilage refers to as “ingestion-related cyclicities of mandibular oscillation” (MacNeilage 1998b, 499). Mead correctly identified the cyclical nature of this process, though he was wrong on the connection between mastication and speech: “mastication  .  .  . is a purely mechanical circle, similar to that which is responsible for the rhythmical processes of walking, but which has no important likeness to such processes as that of learning to talk” (Mead 1909, 405). It turns out that “mastication” (i.e., articulation) is but one of three subsystems which operate as modulated cyclicities in speech production (MacNeilage 2008). The subsystems are the respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory. Exhalation (one of the two phases of respiration) is modulated as a power source for phonation. Phonation results from the modulation of vocal fold oscillation (located in the larynx), which produces pitch variation. Articulation is accomplished by varying the open-close positions of the mouth via modulations of the positioning of the lips, tongue, and soft palate. While Mead failed to connect the “mechanical circle” of mastication with speech, he did make the other two connections: “the vocal

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mechanism is part of the mechanism of respiration, and the early stages of the act are usually accompanied by changes in circulation and respiration and these may readily involve the larynx” (Mead 1982, 216). The open position of the articulatory cycle is associated with vowels and the closed position with consonants, which together are the foundation of syllables—the fundamental unit of a speech utterance (MacNeilage 1998a, 223–24). Vowels and consonants, the smallest components of speech, are classified as phonemes. Phoneme production into a seemingly infinite number of semantically meaningful utterances is made possible by the combination of articulation with a combinatorial semantics based on the particulate principle of self-diversifying systems (Abler 1989; StuddertKennedy 1998). For language systems, the finite media or “particles” are phonemes. Language is self-diversifying in that it makes infinite use of this finite media of phonemes “in the creation of something not present per se in the original media” (Abler 1989, 7), sometimes referred to as discrete infi nity. With only forty phonemes, estimates of the number of words known by the average native English speaker are between 20,000 and 60,000 (Miller 2000; Nation and Waring 1997). This is possible because the forty phonemes are repeatedly permuted and combined into larger units (e.g., words and sentences) which yield more diversity in structure and function than the constituent forty phonemes. Mead appears to have been generally aware of this unique feature of human language: “If we recognize language as a differentiation of gesture, the conduct of no other form can compare with that of man in the abundance of gesture” (Mead 1910a, 178). Human speech systems also appear to be based on self-organization, which refers to “the emergence of order on a larger scale in a system through interactions that are only on a local scale” (de Boer 2001, 24). Computer modeling of vowels and consonants using simulated agents has shown that self-organization of vowel configurations and syllable systems emerge on a larger scale, with properties similar to living human languages (de Boer 2000, 2001; Oudeyer 2006; Worgan and Damper 2007). That self-organization can explain the emergence of coherent syllable systems suggests that self-organization may also explain the emergence of higher level systems of meaning (i.e., consciousness and the emergence of self and other), as these are functionally dependent on syllable and, thus, phoneme combinations. In the three excerpts below, Mead connects the local scale of the vocal gesture to systems of meaning on larger scales through self talk and taking the attitude of the other through both the vocal gesture and auditory and motor imagery:

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That a consciousness of a self as an object would ever have arisen in man if he had not had the mechanism of talking to himself, I think there is every reason to doubt. (Mead 1912, 405) The fi nal outcome in human conduct is that the individual, in exciting through the vocal gesture the response of another, initiates the same response in himself and, in that attitude of the other, comes to address himself, that is, he appears as an object to himself in his own conduct. (Mead 1938, 189– 90) When an individual puts himself in the place of another he is speaking as the other has spoken and is not simply hearing him. He has the kinesthetic idea. He is aware of the motor imagery, the process of speaking in addition to auditory imagery. Kinesthetic imagery and auditory imagery of how it will sound always appear when one takes the place of another in inner conversation and imaginative reconstruction. (Mead 1982, 69)

Mead had little to say about the role of the brain in language, which is not surprising given the state of neuroscience in Mead’s time. The best Mead could do was to recognize the purported role of the central nervous system in consciousness and language. As Mead writes (quoted in Baldwin [1986, 62]): “We can fi nd part of the necessary mechanism of such conduct in the central nervous system. The question now is whether the mere excitement of the set of these groups of responses is what we mean by an idea.” Mead (1925, 267) recognized the difficulties in tracing out the responsible neural pathways, describing them as “too minute” and concluding that: “It is only in the behavior of the human animal that we can trace this evolution.” With dramatic advances in the brain sciences during the past three decades, neuroscientists have been tracing out those neural pathways. For example, in a recent twenty-year review of PET and fMRI studies of speech, research “has clearly established that spoken and written language relies on concurrent activation in multiple brain areas” (Price 2012, 817). A distinction can now “be made between processes that are localized to specific structures (e.g., sensory and motor processing) and processes where specialization arises in the distributed pattern of activation over many different areas that each participate in multiple functions” (Price 2012, 816). And it appears that the same anatomical area can be involved in motor, auditory, and memory processes associated with language (Price

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2012, 822). This has led some to develop an integrated theory of language processing where production and comprehension are tightly interwoven, in contrast to the Lichtheim-Broca-Wernicke model that asserts production and comprehension rely on distinctly different anatomical pathways (Pickering and Garrod 2013, 329). In summary, Mead was essentially correct about the mechanics of speech. He implicated the brain and central nervous system in consciousness, language, and the self. He appears to have had a general awareness of the discrete infi nity properties of language. And he described the emergence of the self and other as self-organized, with the vocal gesture providing the medium for this emergence.

ONTOGENY (HOW DOES SPEECH DEVELOP IN THE INDIVIDUAL?) Mead’s understanding of the relationship between innate and learned behavior is remarkably consistent with Tinbergen’s and, thus, the contemporary view: “The quarrel over instincts is unnecessary . . . The distinction between instinct and habit comes down to degrees of modification” (Mead 1982, 113); “A central issue in behaviour development studies seems to me the question raised by the fact that so many behaviour patterns can be said to be at the same time innate and learned, or partly innate and partly learned” (Tinbergen 1963, 425). This is as true of human speech as it is of any behavior. The new view of language acquisition supports neither the external determinism represented by Skinner’s reinforcement theory (i.e., acquisition by habit or learning) nor the internal determinism represented by Chomsky’s language module theory (i.e., acquisition by instinct or innate processes): “The emerging view suggests that infants engage in a new kind of learning in which language input is mapped in detail by the infant brain” (Kuhl 2000, 11850). This mapping is initially open-ended to all possible speech phonemes, but within the fi rst twelve months of life demonstrates a neurological commitment to native language phonemes (Kuhl et al. 2006, 2008). According to Kuhl’s native language magnet theory (NLM) (Kuhl et al. 2008), the infant’s perception is “warped” to highlight and discriminate the basic phonetic units of his or her native language. The term “warped” refers to a perceptual process of pulling non-native phonetic units toward native phonetic units, thereby eliminating perceptually their natural physical boundaries. This process “alters the dimensions of speech we attend to, stretching and shrinking acoustic space to highlight the differences

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between language categories” (Kuhl 2000, 11854). As categorical distinctions between native and non-native phonetic sound units are eliminated, distinctions between native phonetic units are magnified. The result is categorical perception, where a sound is treated as one phoneme or another, showing little or no sensitivity to intermediate sounds (Kuhl 2004). For example, by the time a Japanese infant is twelve months old, sensitivity to the r-1 contrast (a nonnative contrast in Japanese) is substantially dulled, where at six months it was equal to that of an American infant (Kuhl et al. 2006). In the last phase of the process between six and twelve months, “The mapping of incoming speech has altered which stimulus differences infants respond to, producing a language-specific listener for the fi rst time” (Kuhl 1999, 431). Mead understood the general nature of this process: “An instinct implies fi rst of all a certain type of stimulus to which the organism is attuned. This sensuous content will attract the attention of the individual to the exclusion of other stimuli” (Mead 1909, 404); “All human individuals have the same phonetic elements. What does happen to the child is a selection of its phonetic elements in accordance with those which constitute the stimulus” (Mead 1982, 59). Infants also possess innate statistical processors for distinguishing between speech and non-speech sounds and how those sounds are put together (Saffran, Aslin, and Newport 1996) and for learning the distributional patterns of speech sounds (Maye, Werker, and Gerken 2002). In young children it was recently shown for the fi rst time that they use implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax (Kidd 2012). But these perceptual mechanisms are only “half the story.” It’s clear that the infant’s vocal production itself plays a fundamental role in acquiring his or her perceptual organization of speech. In attending to and discovering its own babbling, the infant makes the link between production (articulatory motor action) and perception (the acoustic patterns that accompany them). In summarizing this process, Vihman (1993, 74) proposes the notion of an “articulatory fi lter”: “a phonetic template (unique to each child) which renders similar patterns in adult speech unusually salient or memorable; in particular, the fi lter picks out patterns for which the child has already established a ‘motor plan’ . . . specifying the articulatory implementation which will result in the particular sound pattern.” Accordingly, the motor activity that makes canonical syllable formation (recognizable syllables) possible at about six months acts, in effect, as an articulatory fi lter by which the infant is able to adjust its own syllable sound production to that of caretakers. The proprioceptive and auditory experience of this process “facilitates the infant’s initial breakthrough

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into awareness of and eventual familiarity with particular segmental patterns in adult speech” (Vihman and DePaolis 2000, 136). The above suggests that perceptuo-motor learning is the core process of language acquisition. Perception and production are two facets of this self-organized process: “once motor production begins to highlight words in the input  .  .  . the input to the child’s distributional learning mechanism will necessarily begin to include the child’s own word forms.  .  .  . The whole process is data-driven from the bottom up and self-organized.” (Vihman, DePaolis, and Keren-Portnoy 2009, 180). In the excerpts below Mead’s understanding of early language development fits these contemporary models and shows that Mead recognized the central role that language acquisition plays in self formation: The child repeats continually a sound which he has mastered . . . the da-da-da, the ma-ma-ma, of the earliest articulation. . . . The child is making the fi rst uncertain efforts to speak—in this case to himself; that is, in response to an articulate sound which operates as a stimulus upon his auditory apparatus as inevitably as if the sound were made by another. (Mead 1909, 405) The child  .  .  . stimulates himself; he talks to himself, on the whole, more than to others. This is important in his learning to speak. This provides a mechanism which can lead to the formation of a self over against other selves. (Mead 1982, 54)

Mead also understood what Vihman (1993) points out—that is, that the infant’s production does not copy the adult speaker. Rather, it seeks to match an established pattern that is both intrinsic to itself and unique: A form in responding to other forms stimulates itself . . . It is not that you have a picture defi nitely before you and proceed consciously to copy it; but rather there is a direct response on our part to stimulations which other persons have called out in us. Stimulation selects a natural response, not necessarily identical. (Mead 1982, 58–59)

In summary, Mead understood that behavior is contingent on a combination of biology and learning. He also understood speech development in the child as a process of selection of native phonemes. These insights and his understanding of the self-organizing dynamics of language acquisition make Mead compatible with the contemporary view.

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PHYLOGENY (HOW DID SPEECH EMERGE IN HISTORY?) A phylogenetic analysis seeks to identify the extent of continuity of a behavior across species and to examine how a behavior developed within a species over time. Mead’s analysis of the vocal gesture demonstrates both. Mead’s understanding of human speech as unique in the animal kingdom and as having evolved from pre-existing structures and processes is consistent with contemporary views. Compare Mead to the psychologist and human speech expert Peter F. MacNeilage: Articulation, as a muscular process, is explained in the same way movements of the face, of the hands, of the whole body are accounted for under the influence of emotional tension. Instead, therefore, of having to assume unknown or exceptional conditions as the antecedents of the origin of speech, we can fi nd the conditions present in our own movement. (Mead 1904, 380) Speech didn’t just “happen” by means of a secular miracle but, instead, evolved by descent with modification in accordance with the principle of natural selection. . . . If descent with modification is a basic tenet, novel evolutionary outcomes can’t come from nowhere. (MacNeilage 2008, 17)

Comparative Phylogeny The extent of continuity of human speech with non-human communication systems varies for the three component systems of language (i.e., audition, cognition, and vocalization). The evidence shows that human audition has the greatest continuity with non-human animal audition, followed by cognition, with human vocalization showing the least continuity with non-human animal vocalization (Aitchison 1998). Comparative behavioral data indicate the same: “Compared with call production, call perception in nonhuman primates exhibits many more parallels with human speech” (Cheney and Seyfarth 2005, 145). Thus, the most unique component system of human language is vocalization. As it turns out, song birds (i.e., the oscines), and not other primates, provide the best animal models of human speech learning: “The many thousands of songbird species, as well as the parrots and hummingbirds, stand in striking contrast to the paucity of mammalian vocal learners” (Doupe and Kuhl 1999, 573). But although there are strong parallels

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between birdsong and speech learning (e.g., innate predispositions, avid learning, and complex neural substrates), significant differences exist (e.g., grammar and other aspects of meaning): “These differences suggest that although human speech is undoubtedly built on pre-existing brain structures in other primates, there must have been an enormous evolutionary step, with convergence of cognitive capacities as well as auditory and motor skills, in order to create the flexible tool that is language. In contrast, it seems a smaller jump from suboscine birds that produce structured song but do not learn it, to songbirds” (Doupe and Kuhl 1999, 620). Mead’s frequent observation of the parallels between the child learning to talk and the song bird learning to sing are consistent with this contemporary picture: “the child repeats continually a sound which he has mastered . . . the da-da-da, the ma-ma-ma, of the earliest articulation. . . . We see the same thing probably in a bird’s insistent repetition of its own notes” (Mead 1909, 405). Another parallel Mead makes between human vocal learning and bird song learning is the importance of imitative vocal behavior. The parallel is strongly supported in the literature (Doupe and Kuhl 1999; MacNeilage 2008): “There is a very marked difference between vocal gestures and other types of conduct in this respect. It is only in vocal gestures that we have anything which can be called imitation; e.g., in monkeys it has been eliminated under careful analysis. But the bird learning and child learning are of the same sort” (Mead 1982, 59). Mead observed the same in the adult speaker. Again, contemporary research is supportive. A vocal imitative capacity exists in a number of species with the strongest observed in birds and humans (Fitch 2007). A neurological basis for a general imitative capacity called “mirror neurons” has been suggested for primates, including humans. Monkeys are the exception (Arbib 2005; Keysers and Gazzola 2010). And imitative behavior has been observed at many levels of verbal and nonverbal exchanges among human interlocutors (Garrod and Pickering 2007): “There does . . . seem to be a tendency to imitate among men, and in particular to reproduce vocal gestures. We fi nd the latter tendency among birds as well as among men” (Mead 1934, 59).

Evolutionary Phylogeny In a short manuscript titled “On Perception and Imitation” not published until 2001, Mead (2001) makes the distinction between automatic (i.e., nonconscious) imitation and imitation that follows from a conscious per-

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ceptual process. Imitation of an action based on a conscious perceptual process requires imagery of the manipulation necessary for replicating the action, suggesting that “a rich kinesthetic experience in manipulation may be almost a pre-condition of perception” which serves “the sort of mediate experience in which stimulus and response would mutually control each other in the adaptation of one act to another” (Mead 2001, 71). Mead’s description is strikingly close to Merlin Donald’s mimetic theory of speech origins (Donald 1991 and 1999). Donald describes the evolution of self-programmed motor action as the precondition of a protolanguage—the earliest approximation of what would be refined and ultimately contain the essential elements of modern language. This ability requires: (1) an implementable representation of action in the brain; and (2) that imagery generated in kinematic imagination may be edited before being implemented in action: “without this capacity, there could be no refi nement of human movement, no increase in its variation within the species” (Donald 1999, 143). Mead concludes his analysis by stating that such an imitative process could hardly have arisen before the evolution of the “highly sensitive flexible hand” in primates (Mead 2001, 71). Donald expresses the same type of understanding some eighty years later: “All gestures and intentional vocalizations are ultimately actions of the musculature, and to generate greater varieties of gestures and sounds, primate motor behaviour must somehow have become much more plastic, less stereotyped, and subject to deliberate rehearsal. In other words, a breakthrough in hominid motor evolution must have preceded language evolution” (Donald 1999, 141). In the excerpts below Mead appears to specify the evolutionary sequence of language to be gesture, followed by vocal gesture, and then speech, where speech represents the fully developed vocal gesture. A review of the work by MacNeilage that follows supports Mead’s specified sequence: Such a conception of the beginning of gesture language passes over easily to that of the beginning of spoken language, through the recognition that articulate sounds are in their beginning but sound-gestures and take the same place in the act of emotional expression that is taken by the gesture. (Mead 1904, 382) The field of the operation of gestures is the field within which the rise and development of human intelligence has taken place through the

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process of the symbolization of experience which gestures—especially vocal gestures—have made possible. (Mead 1934, 14)

Mead understood human speech as evolving from bodily actions that were not originally developed for speech. This is the guiding assumption of MacNeilage’s frame/content (F/C) theory of speech origins (MacNeilage 1998b, 2008; MacNeilage and Davis 1990). F/C theory specifies that syllable structures provide frames for semantic meaning-content. MacNeilage theorizes that the frame stage arose fi rst in evolution from gesture, followed by an F/C stage (MacNeilage 2008). An evolutionary sequence from gesture to frame is supported by comparative primate studies suggesting that precursors to the frame in primate vocalization may be the extremely common mandibular cyclicities involved in visuofacial communicative gestures (MacNeilage 2008, 93). These include lipsmacks, tongue-smacks, and teeth chatter. A neuroanatomical comparative study of the orofacial motor system in primates supports MacNeilage’s hypothesis “that the motor patterns of human speech are similar in form to oscillating visuofacial signals of nonhuman primates” (Sherwood et al. 2005, 77). The detail now provided by MacNeilage and others confi rms Mead’s understanding that speech emerged from gesture. In “Imitation and the Origin of Language” in Mind, Self, and Society (1934), that Mead reasoned phylogenetically about the origins of speech is clear. In Mead’s eyes a conversation of gestures makes possible complex cooperative action without the presence of significant symbols. That nonsymbolic gestures of the musculature can serve communicative functions is a fundamental premise of Donald’s theory: “mimetic communication can become highly intricate and complex, as they are in modern human society, without ever invoking a linguistic mode of representation” (Donald 1999, 143). Mead’s understanding of the vocal gesture as unique and as having humble origins is a thoroughly contemporary perspective.

FUNCTIONALITY (HOW IS SPEECH ADAPTIVE FOR SURVIVAL?) Tinbergen’s fourth question addresses a behavior’s adaptive value. Mead expressed it well: “In nature there are always more forms born into the world, more plants and animals, than can possibly survive. There is a constant pressure which would lead to the selection of those variants which are better adapted to the conditions under which they must live” (Mead

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1936, 161). The adaptive value of sound-producing apparatuses in the animal kingdom tends to be for intraspecific communication purposes, regardless of whether they evolved initially for other purposes (e.g., defense against predators) (Bradbury and Vehrencamp 1998, 522). A behavioral trait such as vocalized communication exists in a species because its earliest forms garnered greater reproductive success for those individuals who possessed it. For Mead, the adaptive value of the vocal gesture is its purpose in providing superior coordination of social activity. Non-vocal gesture also serves the purpose of coordination and historically precedes the vocal gesture. In the fi rst excerpt below “gestures in their original forms” refers to non-vocal gesture: gestures in their original forms are the fi rst overt phases in social acts, a social act being one in which one individual serves in his action as a stimulus to a response from another individual. The adaptation of these individuals to each other implies that their conduct calls out appropriate and valuable responses from each other. (Mead 1910b, 397) The value of this importation of the conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual lies in the superior co-ordination gained for society as a whole, and in the increased efficiency of the individual as a member of the group. (Mead 1934, 179)

Mead’s view is consistent with contemporary scholars. Tomasello (2008) proposes that humans evolved cooperative communication, which requires joint goals and attention before developing speech. Cooperative communication “arose in the context of mutualistic collaborative activities in which individuals helping others were simultaneously helping themselves . . . human infants develop cooperative forms of both collaboration and communication underlain by skills and motivations for shared intentionality (and before language)” (Tomasello 2008, 170–71). His basic argument is “that arbitrary communicative conventions—first gestural and then vocal, with a period of overlap—could only have arisen by building on action-based gestures (i.e., pointing and pantomiming) which were already meaningful ‘naturally’” (Tomasello 2008, 172). Gardenfors (2004) proposes that language’s adaptive significance in its latter stages of evolution is the enhancement of cooperation by enabling the sharing of future goals and the means to realizing those goals. Whereas animals exhibit planning based on immediate environmental cues, plan-

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ning based on future goals requires a cognitive detachment from that environment and “gives humans an enormous advantage in cooperation in comparison to other species” (Gardenfors 2004, 243). For Mead, the vocal gesture brings the self and the other into stark symbolic relief as a unit in conscious awareness. This is accomplished by reference to a shared set of attitudes (the generalized other) expressed symbolically: “the self as an object becomes a part of the individual through his having assumed the generalized attitude of a member of the group to which that self belongs, a group that widens until it takes in all rational individuals, that is, all individuals who could indicate to one another universal characters and objects in co-operative activity” (Mead 1938, 375). Mead’s specification of the functional value of the vocal gesture in bringing the self and other into conscious awareness is consistent with Dunbar’s gossip hypothesis for the evolution of speech (Dunbar 1996). Dunbar argues that speech emerged in the hominid line as a more efficient way of “grooming” than tactile means of grooming. This greater efficiency became adaptive as human ancestor reproductive success pushed group size beyond the maximum possible for primate groups (about fi fty). His gossip hypothesis specifies that talking to each other about each other and others serves the purpose of maintaining social ties (which is the social function of grooming) more efficiently because it allows for an approximately three times larger social network (about 150) than can be maintained without speech. The only way the vocal gesture could displace the tactile gesture is by recasting self and other into a symbolic—in contrast to a tactile—emotional framework. In summary, the primary value of human speech is for intraspecific communication. Preceding human speech was likely some form of protolanguage (Bickerton 1990), which itself was likely preceded by nonlinguistic mimetic gestural communication (Donald 1999). Mead specified such a sequence: “Language, then, has to be studied from the point of view of the gestural type of conduct within which it existed without being as such a definite language. And we have to see how the communicative function could have arisen out of that prior sort of conduct” (Mead 1934, 17). The evidence on the nature of speech across all four of Tinbergen’s questions suggests that the primary survival value at each stage in the evolution of speech was for a greater, more dynamic form of interpersonal communication. More specifically, the environmental causes selecting on speech were selecting on increased complexity in message content and message distinctness (MacNeilage and Davis 2000, 149). Mead understood that human speech was singular in this regard: “If we recognize language

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as a differentiation of gesture, the conduct of no other form can compare with that of man in the abundance of gesture” (Mead 1910a, 178).

BEYOND THE FOUR QUESTIONS The four questions framework informs research today on the nature of human speech. Yet, the strength of its reductionist logic in revealing the mechanics of a spoken word, the brain processes for learning a native tongue, the convergent evolution of human speech and bird song, and the likely evolution of modern speech from a protolanguage has limitations on the question of the nature of consciousness—Mead’s primary intellectual problem. Even neuroscientists recognize the limitations of reductionist logic in explaining such conscious phenomena as the meaning of a word or the essence of an idea (Damasio 1994; Edelman 1992). In a sense, Mead was “beyond” the four questions from the start. He recognized the limitations of reductionist logic in studying elements of consciousness, such as images and ideas, and in the tradition of James viewed consciousness as a process and not a substance. Following Dewey’s argument, he rejected the model of behavior that separates stimulus and response for one where each is a component of self-organized action. These were aspects of Mead’s non-dualist conception of body and mind. Consequently, Mead successfully eliminated the mind-body dualism in his model of consciousness, replacing it with a context of social interaction, based in the vocal gesture, where meaning is emergent, functionally relevant to the well-being of actors, and fundamentally creative and openended. Yet, did he overstate the role of the vocal gesture in the nature of self? “That a consciousness of a self as an object would ever have arisen in man if he had not had the mechanism of talking to himself, I think there is every reason to doubt” (Mead 1912, 405). Three contemporary areas of research suggest he may have. Research on mirror neurons, embodied cognition, and animal cognition demonstrate that a sense of self or consciousness in humans and animals almost certainly have non-verbal/ non-symbolic elements and processes. The discovery of mirror neurons, fi rst in macaque monkeys (Gallese et al. 1996) and then in humans (Keysers and Gazzola 2010), may have significant implications for understanding the basis of the self and social consciousness. The basic mechanism of a mirror neuron is that it “fires” both when the individual is doing an action and when the individual merely observes another person doing the same type of action (e.g., grasping for an object). It appears that mirror neurons may play a significant, if not essen-

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tial, role in empathy (Corradini and Antonietti 2013). Thus, social learning may be based in part in an automatic, nonconscious understanding of another person’s experience. As stated by Gallese (2009, 519): “The shared intersubjective space in which we live since birth enables and bootstraps the constitution of the sense of identity we normally entertain with others. Social identification incorporates the domains of action, sensations, affect, and emotions and is underpinned by the activation of shared neural circuits.” The fundamental observation in the work on embodied cognition is “that the body is closely tied to the processing of social and emotional information” (Niedenthal et al. 2005, 184). This work shows that “embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver interacts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition)” (Niedenthal et al. 2005, 184). But “body variables” don’t just underlie social information processing; they can cause changes in social cognition: “manipulating bodily states for the face, head, arms, and torso causally affects higher cognitive processes, such as evaluation, decision making, and attribution” (Barsalou 2010, 718). Finally, since the 1970s the field of cognitive ethology has been investigating the nature of animal minds. This field studies “the mental experiences of animals as they behave in their natural environment in the course of their normal lives” (Ristau 2013, 493). The cumulative evidence from cognitive ethology and the neurosciences on the question of animal minds has established that conscious awareness is broadly distributed in the animal kingdom, and that self-awareness is evident among some mammals and even in magpies (Bekoff 2002; Griffin 1992; Low et al. 2012; Ristau 2013; Young and Thompson 2013). While Mead captured major facts and theoretical insights on the nature of speech more than half a century before the interdisciplinary field of speech research came into its own, and had access to rigorous experimental, measurement, and historical methods, he may have overstated the role of the vocal gesture in the nature of the self and social consciousness. Non-conscious and nonverbal elements appear to be intrinsic aspects of self-awareness. Yet, this should not diminish his contributions. Joas (1985, 4) is instructive on this point: “theories are to be understood as attempts to solve the particular problems arising in a particular period; they can only be properly judged when they are treated as historical phenomena and brought into contact as such with the present-day, historically changed situation in science and society.”

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Mead’s observations and ideas on the nature of language and consciousness continue to inform scholarship today, from the neurosciences to philosophy. Dewey’s appraisal of Mead’s intellectual significance as seminal was correct.

NOTE 1. The behavioristic psychology that Mead advocated differed fundamentally from strict behaviorism, which in Mead’s time was represented by J. B. Watson. The hallmark of strict behaviorism is the rejection of an inner experience independent of observable behavior. For Mead this was “misguided and unsuccessful, for the existence as such of mind or consciousness, in some sense or other, must be admitted—the denials of it leads inevitably to obvious absurdities” (Mead 1934, 10).

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Mead, George H. 1900. “Suggestions Toward a Theory of the Philosophical Disciplines.” The Philosophical Review 9, no. 1: 1–17. ———. 1903. “The Defi nition of the Psychical.” Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, First Series, vol. 3: 77–112. ———. 1904. “The Relations of Psychology and Philology.” The Psychological Bulletin 1, no. 2: 375– 91. ———. 1909. “Social Psychology as Counterpart to Physiological Psychology.” Psychological Bulletin 6: 401–8. ———. 1910a. “What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose?” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 7: 174– 80. ———. 1910b. “Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning.” Psychological Bulletin 7: 397–405. ———. 1912. “The Mechanism of Social Consciousness.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 9: 401– 6. ———. 1913. “The Social Self.” The Journal of Philosophy 10: 374– 80. ———. 1922. “A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol.” The Journal of Philosophy 19: 157– 63. ———. 1925. “The Genesis of the Self and Social Control.” International Journal of Ethics 35, no. 3: 251–77. ———. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. ———. 1934. Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1982. The Individual and the Social Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. Essays on Social Psychology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Miller, David L. 1973. George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World. Austin: University of Texas Press. Miller, Geoffrey F. 2000. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Doubleday. Nation, Paul, and Rob Waring. 1997. “Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage and Word Lists.” In Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy, edited by Norbert Schmitt and Michael McCarthy, 6–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niedenthal, Paula M., Lawrence W. Barsalou, Piotr Winkielman, Silvia Krauth- Gruber, FranÇois Ric. 2005. “Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, no. 3: 184–211. Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves. 2006. Self- Organization in the Evolution of Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pickering, Martin J., and Simon Garrod. 2013. “An Integrated Theory of Language Production and Comprehension.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36: 329– 92. Price, Cathy J. 2012. “A Review and Synthesis of the First 20 Years of PET and fMRI Studies of Heard Speech, Spoken Language and Reading.” NeuroImage 62: 816–47. Ristau, Carolyn A. 2013. “Cognitive Ethology.” WIREs Cognitive Science 4: 493–509.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Hans Joas is Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Among his recent publications are The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Georgetown University Press, 2013) and Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (Stanford University Press, 2014). Daniel R. Huebner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he is also the 2016–17 Chancellor’s Resident Fellow in the Lloyd International Honors College. He is author of Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and co-editor with Hans Joas of Mind, Self, and Society: The Defi nitive Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Kelvin Booth received his PhD in philosophy at Southern Illinois University and is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops BC, Canada. His primary research areas are American pragmatism, environmental ethics, and the philosophy of animal mind. Bradley H. Brewster is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa. He graduated in 2011 with his PhD in Environment and Resources with minors in sociology and philosophy from University of Wisconsin– Madison. His dissertation aimed to bring classical microsociological thought into a number of domains in or pertinent to environmental studies, particularly environmental sociology. He has also published on Erving Goffman and environmental sociology for an environmental sociology of everyday life. Charles Camic is John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. His specialty areas are sociological theory, science and technology studies, and the history of the social sciences. He is completing a book on the development of Thorstein Veblen’s economic ideas. Recent publications include Social Knowledge in the Making (co-edited with Neil Gross and Michele Lamont, University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Essential Writings of Thorstein Veblen (co-edited with Geoffrey Hodgson, Routledge, 2011). Daniel Cefaï is Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, EHESS–Paris and Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2015–16. He is

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Contributors

currently researching with Howard Becker the transformations of post-World War II sociology at the University of Chicago. He also studies the notion of the “public” in pragmatist philosophy and explores forms of public inquiry, experiment, and discussion in the United States in the 1920s. He translated into French and edited with Louis Quéré the 1934 edition of Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society. His most recent book, L’Urgence sociale en action (Paris, La Découverte, 2011), was an ethnography of outreach work with homeless people on the street in Paris. Joshua Daniel has been teaching philosophy and religious studies in the Chicago area—most recently at North Central College, but also Saint Xavier University and Elmhurst College—since graduating from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His fi rst book, Transforming Faith: Individual and Community in H. Richard Niebuhr (Pickwick Publications, 2015), examines the influence of George Herbert Mead on one of America’s most important twentieth-century theologians. Timothy J. Gallagher (deceased in 2015) was an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Kent State University. He received his PhD from Western Michigan University in 1992 and completed postdoctoral research fellowships in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Michigan in 1994 and Washington University in St. Louis in 1996. His recent publications on Mead include: “A Mead-Chomsky Comparison Reveals a Set of Key Questions on the Nature of Language and Mind.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 44, no. 2 (2014): 148–67; and “Human-Animal Studies, G. H. Mead, and the Question of Animal Minds.” Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies 24, no. 2 (2016): 53–71. Roman Madzia is Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, having received his PhD in 2013 from Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He was previously a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Toledo and Visiting Researcher at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. His research examines the systematic conceptual and methodological relationships between pragmatist philosophy and contemporary cognitive science. Ryan McVeigh is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Interdisciplinary Studies and Sociology at Lakehead University in Orillia, Ontario, Canada. Frithjof Nungesser is Assistant Professor (Universitätsassistent) of Sociology at the University of Graz, Austria. Together with Franz Ofner, he is co-editor of Potentiale einer pragmatistischen Sozialtheorie: Beiträge anlässlich des 150. Geburtstags von George Herbert Mead, a special edition of the Austrian Journal of Sociology (ÖZS) published in 2013 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of George Herbert Mead’s birth. Trevor Pearce is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is author of “The Dialectical Biologist, circa 1890: John Dewey and the Oxford Hegelians,” published in 2014 in the Journal of the History of Philosophy (52: 747–77), and he is currently writing a book on pragmatism and biology. Antony Puddephatt is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lakehead University, Canada. He is interested in the social philosophy of George Herbert Mead, sociological theory, qualitative research, and sociology in Canada. Recently, he has been studying the open-access movement in scholarly publishing. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg is Senior Professor of Sociology at the Dresden University of Technology and was 2003– 07 president of the German Sociological Association. He

Contributors

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is editor of the Arnold Gehlen Gesamtausgabe. His most recent book is Symbolische Ordnungen: Beiträge zu einer soziologischen Theorie der Institutionen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014). Michael L. Thomas received his PhD from the University of Chicago’s John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and has been a Fellow at the Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover. He is currently completing a manuscript that traces the implications of Whitehead’s philosophy for social theory. Robert Westbrook is Joseph F. Cunningham Professor of History at the University of Rochester. He is the author of John Dewey and American Democracy and Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth.

Na me Index

Abbot, Francis Ellingwood, 138n53 Abbott, Andrew, 77, 166 Abler, William L., 319 Allen, Frederic de Forest, 127 Ames, Van Meter, 57n7, 58n8 Argyll, George Campbell, Duke of, 121 Aristotle, 42–43, 83– 84 Astington, Janet, 216–17 Aulard, François Victor Alphonse, 48 Austin, Mary Hunter, 51 Bain, Alexander, 121 Bakewell, Charles M., 57n3 Baldwin, James Mark, 97 Baldwin, John D., 55, 156 Barnes, Charles Reid, 58n9 Barnes, Harry Elmer, 83 Baron- Cohen, Simon, 216 Barsalou, Lawrence W., 331 Barthes, Roland, 300 Bateson, Gregory, 168 Baumgarten, Eduard, 54, 93 Beard, Charles, 62, 64 Beck, Ulrich, 157 Becker, Howard S., 7, 165, 169, 174–75, 177, 180 Beckett, Samuel, 266 Bell, Michael Mayerfeld, 146–47, 153–54, 159 Bentham, Jeremy, 20, 25 Berger, Peter L., 300 Bergson, Henri, 16, 95, 98– 99, 102 Bernstein, Richard, 63 Biesta, Gert J. J., 152 Bloch, Maurice, 266

Blumer, Herbert, 49, 56, 174, 179, 300 Boal, Augusto, 285– 86, 289– 92 Booth, Kelvin J., 8– 9 Botterill, George, 216–17 Bourne, Randolph, 171 Bousset, Wilhelm, 69 Bowen, Francis, 126–27, 138n45 Boysen, Sarah T., 236 Brandom, Robert, 300, 312n1 Brasch, Frederick E., 46–47 Brentano, Franz, 306 Brewster, Bradley H., 6–7 Buckman, Rilma O., 173–74 Burgess, Ernest W., 33–34, 165, 178 Burke, Kenneth, 167– 68 Burnet, John, 57n3 Butterworth, George, 243 Byrne, Richard, 234, 236 Call, Josep, 232, 238, 240, 244, 259– 60 Camic, Charles, 3–4 Cˇapek, Stella M., 155 Carlyle, Thomas, 25 Carnot, Nicolas Léonard Sadi, 27 Carpenter, William B., 121 Castell, Alburey, 53–54 Castle, Henry Northrup, 57n2, 120–22, 124– 26, 130, 132, 135n13, 136nn14–15, 137n30, 138n45, 138n53, 139n60 Catton, William R., 144–45, 156 Cefaï, Daniel, 7 Chamberlin, Thomas, 33 Chemero, Anthony, 304 Cheney, Dorothy L., 260, 324

341

342

name index

Chomsky, Noam, 321 Clark, Andy, 307– 8, 310 Clayton, Alfred Stafford, 152 Clifford, William Kingdon, 49 Closson, Carlos, 33 Cochran, Molly, 268n2 Colapietro, Vincent, 78n4 Comte, Auguste, 20, 29, 34, 226n2 Condon, William, 242 Cook, Gary A., 7, 16, 18, 35, 90n4, 122, 203n1, 315–17 Cooley, Charles H., 166, 168, 172, 178, 252, 268n2, 269n9 Côté, Jean-François, 57n2 Cottrell, Leonard S., 179 Coulter, John, 33 Coyne, Jerry A., 117 Cressey, Paul, 165 Dalton, Melville, 179 Daniel, Joshua, 9–10 Darwin, Charles, 1, 6, 27–28, 30, 32–33, 45, 50, 57n1, 58n13, 70, 93, 118–21, 124, 128, 130, 134, 258–59, 315 Davies, Martin, 215 Deacon, Terrence William, 267 de Boer, Bart, 319 Dennett, Daniel D., 299, 312n5 Denzin, Norman K., 168 DePaolis, Rory A., 322–23 Derrida, Jacques, 300 Descartes, René, 8, 59n17, 65, 94, 127, 211– 13, 222, 226nn3–4, 298–300, 312n5, 316, 318 de Waal, Frans B. M., 236, 255 Dewey, John, 4–5, 7, 16, 18–35, 37n5, 44–45, 49–52, 54, 57nn1–2, 58nn11–13, 59n14, 59n17, 63– 65, 70, 72–73, 78n6, 78n10, 83– 88, 93, 100, 102, 110n4, 111n8, 117–18, 131–34, 140n74, 166, 171, 173–75, 177– 80, 185, 252–54, 268n2, 270n19, 279, 303, 315–16, 330, 332 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 5– 6, 65, 73, 92, 95, 109, 131–32, 139n65 Donald, Merlin, 248n5, 326–27 Doupe, Allison J., 324–25 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 302 Driesch, Hans, 93, 98, 109 Du Bois, W. E. B., 64 Dunbar, Robin I. M., 329 Duncan, Hugh D., 167

Dunlap, Riley E., 144–45, 156 Durkheim, Émile, 106– 8, 145, 168, 226n2 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 130–31 Eddy, Timothy J., 235–36 Einstein, Albert, 1, 46, 58n8, 70–71 Elias, Norbert, 106 Ellis, John Millot, 121 Evans, Sian, 238 Fairchild, James Harris, 123, 126 Faris, Ellsworth, 175, 177–79 Feffer, Andrew, 89n2, 90n3 Ferrin, Allan Conant, 124 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 16, 94 Fiske, John, 124 Fodor, Jerry A., 216 Foote, Nelson, 179 Franks, David D., 211, 269n6 Freud, Sigmund, 83, 102, 106, 277 Friauf, Heike, 110n5 Gabriel, Markus, 185 Galileo Galilei, 46, 50, 55 Gallagher, Timothy J., 10–11 Gallese, Vittorio, 219, 331 Gallup, Gordon, 237–38 Gardenfors, Peter, 328–29 Geer, Blanche, 177 Gehlen, Arnold, 5, 92, 94, 96– 97, 100–108, 110n4, 111n6, 111nn8– 9 Geiger, Roger L., 32–33 Gibbens, Margaret, 129 Gibson, James J., 304, 313n10 Goffman, Erving, 166, 168 Goldman, Alvin I., 241 Goldman, Loren, 265 Gomperz, Theodor, 57n3 Goodman, Nelson, 296, 300 Goodwin, William Watson, 127 Gopnik, Alison, 216 Gordon, Robert M., 217 Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm, 78n10 Gray, Asa, 119 Green, Thomas Hill, 129 Guyau, Jean-Marie, 98 Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 66, 100, 105–7, 268n1 Haeckel, Ernst, 120–21, 124 Hall, Alexander Wilford, 123, 137n30 Hall, Everett W., 53

name index Hall, G. Stanley, 139n60, 140n74 Hamlin, Fletcher, 123–24 Hampe, Michael, 77 Hare, Brian, 236–37 Harper, William Rainey, 32 Harris, Paul, 216, 218 Hartmann, Eduard von, 98 Heal, Jane, 218 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25–28, 35–36, 64, 66, 94, 129 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 76, 278, 302 Henderson, Lawrence J., 51 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 20 Hobbes, Thomas, 44–45, 55, 102 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 289, 292 Honneth, Axel, 100 Horkheimer, Max, 64 Huebner, Daniel R., 2, 4, 180 Hughes, Everett C., 171, 174, 177, 179– 80 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 110 Hume, David, 102 Husserl, Edmund, 64– 66, 76, 93 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 119, 121–22 Hyman, Herbert H., 171 Iacoboni, Marco, 219, 222, 227n11 James, Alice Howe Gibbens, 129 James, William, 54, 58n11, 63– 64, 67– 69, 78n10, 90n3, 97, 100–102, 110n4, 127, 129–30, 138n44, 168, 171, 176, 253, 268n2, 270n19, 297, 304, 313n10, 330 Janet, Paul, 124–26 Jaurès, Jean, 48 Joas, Hans, 4, 16, 55, 89n2, 93, 95, 100, 103, 191– 92, 204n2, 204n4, 256, 263, 268n1, 301, 331 John Paul II (pope), 277 Johnson, Mark, 253, 299, 312n2 Jones, Susan, 235 Jowett, Benjamin, 15 Judson, Harry Pratt, 33 Jung, Matthias, 266– 67, 269n6 Kallen, Horace M., 49, 58n11, 171 Kant, Immanuel, 19–20, 25, 29, 66, 68, 94, 124, 126–27, 129, 296, 298, 300 Keller, Charles M., 168 Keren-Portnoy, Tamar, 323 Kilpinen, Erkki, 312n2 Kinsbourne, Marcel, 231, 242

343

Kirk, Kenneth E., 278–79, 288 Kitcher, Philip, 117–18, 134 Kloppenberg, James, 62 Köhler, Wolfgang, 94, 109, 270nn14–15 Kuhl, Patricia K., 321–22, 324–25 Kuhn, Thomas S., 55 Lakoff, George, 299, 312n2 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 121 Lange, Friedrich Albert, 121 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 27, 128 Latour, Bruno, 158, 160n4, 185 LeConte, Joseph, 121, 127 Lee, Harold N., 301 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 76 Leslie, Alan M., 216 Lewes, George Henry, 121 Lewis, J. David, 293n2 Liatsi, Maria, 78n4 Lindesmith, Alfred R., 179 Lippmann, Walter, 83, 90n6 Livingston, James, 89n3 Lloyd, Alfred H., 57n2 Locke, Alain, 171 Locke, John, 298 Loeb, Jacques, 33 Lotze, Hermann, 118, 131–32, 134, 140n69 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 52–53, 59n17 Luckmann, Thomas, 300 MacDougal, Daniel T., 51 Mach, Ernst, 49 MacNeilage, Peter F., 318, 324, 326–27 Macy, Joanna, 155 Madzia, Roman, 10, 243, 254, 269n8 Malebranche, Nicolas, 76 Mann, Michael, 77 Mannheim, Karl, 78n10 Martin, Henry Newell, 140n74 Martin, Jack, 150 Marx, Karl, 16, 29, 64, 95, 145 Mathews, Shailer, 33 McDougall, William, 95– 97, 103 McDowell, John, 296, 300 McKinney, John C., 149 McVeigh, Ryan, 8 Mead, Hiram, 118 Meltzoff, Andrew, 240–41 Menand, Louis, 89n2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 302, 304 Merton, Robert K., 171

344

name index

Meyer, Eduard, 57n3 Meynert, Theodor, 270n19 Mill, John Stuart, 19–20, 153–54, 213–14 Miller, David L., 6, 53, 150, 307– 9 Millikan, Robert A., 58n9 Misak, Cheryl, 87– 88 Moore, Addison W., 49, 58n11 Moore, Eliakim H., 32 Moore, Merritt H., 17–18, 24–25 Morris, Charles W., 18, 53, 56, 58n8, 100, 108, 167, 268n2 Morris, George S., 18–19, 29 Moulton, Forest Ray, 58n9 Munk, Hermann, 130–31 Münsterberg, Hugo, 98 Murphy, Arthur E., 1, 53–54 Murphy, Raymond, 145 Nef, Elinor Castle, 52, 56 Nef, John U., 52 Nelson, Kurt E., 236 Newton, Isaac, 46, 70 Nicholson, Henry Alleyne, 121 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 78n10 Niedenthal, Paula M., 331 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 68, 94, 100, 102, 312n3 Noë, Alva, 265, 303, 311 Novick, Peter, 62– 65 Nungesser, Frithjof, 9 Nussbaum, Martha, 278 Palmer, George Herbert, 127 Park, Robert E. 33–34, 166– 69, 171, 174, 178–79 Parsons, Talcott, 3 Pasteur, Louis, 50, 58n13 Paulsen, Friedrich, 131, 139n63 Pearce, Trevor, 6 Peirce, Charles S., 58n11, 63– 65, 67– 68, 70, 75–76, 78n4, 87, 110n3, 268n2, 299 Penfield, Harriet E., 44–45, 57n4 Piaget, Jean, 216 Plato, 15, 42, 102, 312n3, 316 Plessner, Helmuth, 65, 92, 94– 95, 98, 100– 101, 110n4 Poincaré, Henri, 49 Popper, Karl Raimund, 64 Portmann, Adolf, 109 Povinelli, Daniel J., 235–37 Premack, David, 215, 227n7, 235 Price, Cathy J., 320–21

Price, Maurice T., 43, 57n3 Puddephatt, Antony J., 6–7, 55 Pugh, Willard J., 32 Putnam, Hilary, 85, 312n1 Pythagoras, 57n2 Quéré, Louis, 7 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 296, 300 Redfield, Robert, 170, 177 Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert, 5, 11 Rickert, Heinrich, 78n6 Ristau, Carolyn A., 331 Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 269n8 Robinson, James Harvey, 47–49, 51, 64 Rorty, Richard, 78n6, 89n2, 296, 300, 312n1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 20, 25, 129, 226n3, 278 Roy, Donald, 179 Royce, Josiah, 4, 6, 63, 67–70, 78n9, 110n1, 118, 127–30, 132, 134, 138n49, 138n53, 140n71 Russell, Bertrand, 226n5 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 20, 29 Sander, Louis, 242 Santayana, George, 58n11, 171 Sapir, Edward, 178 Sarton, George, 51, 59n14 Scheler, Max, 65, 92, 94–102, 110n3, 214, 217–18 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 16, 168 Schiller, F. C. S., 110n1 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 65 Schmitt, Carl, 5 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 68, 94, 98, 102 Schulkin, Jay, 269n6 Schütz, Alfred, 93, 168 Scott, Fred Newton, 57n2 Segal, Gabriel, 215–16, 220 Sellars, Wilfrid, 296, 300 Sennett, Richard, 289, 292 Sewell, William H., 77 Seydel, Rudolf, 130 Seyfarth, Robert M., 260, 324 Shalin, Dmitri N., 16, 18 Shepherd, Walter, 84 Shibutani, Tamotsu, 7, 165, 169, 171–74, 177 Silva, Filipe Carreira da, 16, 37n2, 55, 57n2, 293n4 Simmel, Georg, 146, 170, 173

name index Siu, Paul, 171 Skinner, B. F., 321 Sklansky, Jeffrey, 90n3 Small, Albion, 33 Smith, Adam, 106, 168, 226n5, 277–78, 280 Smith, T. V., 49 Socrates, 102 Solymosi, Tibor, 253, 269n5 Spencer, Herbert, 19, 29, 34, 45, 118–24, 128– 29, 133, 140n71, 140n73, 226n2 Spinoza, Baruch de, 128 Stengers, Isabelle, 185 Stone, Gregory, 168 Stone, Tony, 215 Stonequist, Everett V., 171 Stout, Jeffrey, 78n6 Strauss, Anselm, 7, 165, 169, 177, 179– 80 Strueber, Karsten R., 217–18 Sullivan, Harry S., 177, 179, 269n12 Sunderland, Eliza Jane, 37n5 Swartz, Karyl B., 238 Swettenham, John, 216 Taft, Jessie, 90n3 Taine, Hippolyte, 48 Tanner, Joanne E., 236 Taylor, Charles, 79n11, 297– 99 Tenbruck, Friedrich H., 92– 93 Thales, 41, 55 Thomas, Dorothy S., 174 Thomas, Michael L., 7– 8 Thomas, William I., 33, 166, 169–70, 178–79 Thompson, Evan, 302 Thompson, James Westfall, 57n1 Thorndike, Edward, 233 Thorndike, Lynn, 51 Thrasher, Frederick, 165 Tillich, Paul, 78n10 Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 10–11, 315, 317–18, 321, 327, 329 Tomasello, Michael, 3, 8– 9, 109–10, 223, 232, 234, 237–38, 240, 244–48, 252, 254– 68, 269nn9–12, 270n15, 271n21, 271nn23–26, 328 Tonness, Alfred, 53 Troeltsch, Ernst, 4–5, 69, 75–76, 78nn9–10

345

Tufts, James, 21, 37n7 Tufts Mead, Irene, 37n7 Turner, Ralph, 168 Turner, Stephen, 211, 225, 254, 269n8 Ueberweg, Friedrich, 19 Uexküll, Jakob von, 109 Uyeki, Eugene S., 171 van Koppen, C. S. A., 153 Veblen, Thorstein, 3, 33 Vihman, Marilyn M., 322–23 Vincent, George E., 33 Vischer, Robert K., 278, 287 Volkelt, Johannes, 98 Vonk, Jennifer, 237 Vygotsky, Lev, 216–17 Waldeyer, Wilhelm, 130–31 Warner, W. Lloyd, 168 Watson, John B., 270n15, 332n1 Weber, Max, 2, 54, 67, 85, 91n15, 93, 145 Weigert, Andrew J., 146–47, 153, 159 Westbrook, Robert B., 5, 73, 268n2 Whitehead, Alfred North, 7– 8, 71, 185– 88, 192, 196– 97, 199–203, 204nn1–2, 204n4, 204nn7– 8, 205n9 Whiten, Andrew, 233–36 Whitman, Charles, 33 Williams, Donald C., 53 Williams, Roger, 278 Windelband, Wilhelm, 57n3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 297– 98 Wooddy, Carroll D., 84 Woodruff, George, 215, 227n7, 235 Wright, Albert Allen, 119–22, 136n15, 136n18 Wundt, Wilhelm, 5, 95– 96, 98, 108– 9, 110n2, 130–31, 232, 258–59, 316 Yerkes, Robert, 270n14 Zeller, Eduard, 15, 57n3 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 211 Znaniecki, Florian, 170 Zorbaugh, Harvey W., 165

Subject Index

action theory, 10, 297, 300–312 anthropology, 9, 65, 75–76, 92–103, 105– 9, 168, 253, 258–59, 266– 67, 276, 278–79, 283– 84, 286, 293 Chicago School of Sociology, 7, 33–34, 93, 165– 81 cognition, 8– 9, 68, 71, 73–74, 76, 88, 94, 110, 148, 189, 192– 93, 197, 209–13, 215–21, 223–26, 231, 240, 243, 246, 248, 252–58, 263– 64, 266– 67, 296– 98, 302, 310, 312, 324–25, 329–31 cognitive science, 3, 8– 9, 11, 108, 209–12, 214–22, 224–26, 253–55, 265– 66, 268, 296, 302–4, 320, 330–32 communication, 2, 9–10, 44, 68, 96, 103– 6, 110, 157, 167– 68, 175–76, 178, 188, 191– 96, 198– 99, 203, 222–24, 231–32, 237, 239–40, 246–47, 253– 67, 296– 97, 311, 317, 324, 327–29; symbolic communication, 224, 231–32, 246, 256–57, 259, 297 conscience, 9–10, 276– 93 consciousness, 11, 41–42, 44, 48, 73, 94, 96, 101–2, 104, 129, 147, 149, 151–53, 159, 174, 180, 185, 187– 90, 192– 95, 197, 199–200, 203, 213, 219, 224, 226, 231, 236–37, 239–40, 253, 267, 285, 290, 300–301, 303, 305, 315–21, 323, 325–26, 329–32 democracy / democratic participation, 5, 11, 54, 82– 89, 93, 106–7, 156–58, 181 discourse, universe of, 7, 31–32, 34–35, 165– 69, 177–78, 311

ecology, (social), 6–7, 9–10, 144–46, 150, 153– 57, 160, 165– 66, 168, 175–76, 178–79, 181, 263– 64, 276, 279– 81, 283– 84, 286– 88, 290– 93, 304, 310 environment (social), 3, 6–7, 9–10, 35–36, 65, 76, 94, 98, 109, 131, 133–34, 144–51, 153, 155– 60, 166– 67, 170–71, 173–75, 177–79, 181, 190– 93, 197–200, 209, 221, 223, 225, 233, 244, 253, 265, 276, 279, 281, 285, 300, 303–5, 308, 310–11, 328–29, 331; environmental studies / environmental sociology, 6, 11, 144–47, 153, 155, 157, 159, 160 epistemology, 1, 11, 22, 46, 50, 62, 66, 85– 88, 97– 98, 192, 203, 212–13, 296–300, 303–4, 309–12, 318. See also science (scientific method, knowledge, thought) ethics, 11, 84– 87, 128–34, 154–55, 159. See also conscience; morality—moral confl ict evolution, 4–5, 9–11, 27, 36, 48, 76, 94, 98, 117, 120–21, 123, 125–26, 128–29, 131–33, 149, 151–52, 156, 175, 186, 189, 193, 196, 244, 254–55, 258–59, 261– 66, 268, 316, 318, 320, 324–30; theory of evolution, 6, 27–30, 32–33, 36, 45, 51, 54, 70, 75–76, 109, 117–34, 253–54, 263– 64, 315 experience, 4, 7– 8, 10, 31, 42, 44–46, 50, 55, 67– 69, 71–72, 77, 94– 96, 99, 103–5, 107, 110, 117, 152, 165– 67, 169, 171, 174–79, 181, 185– 90, 192–203, 210, 213–14, 216– 17, 220–21, 224, 226, 231–32, 238, 243, 245–46, 252, 264, 266, 276, 279, 281, 283,

347

348

subject index

experience (continued) 288– 90, 292, 296– 97, 300–305, 308– 9, 311, 317, 322, 326–27, 331 gesture, 9, 11, 96, 104–5, 108, 152, 168, 178, 198– 99, 221, 223, 226, 231–32, 235–36, 239–41, 243, 245–47, 255–56, 259– 65, 284, 305–7, 315–17, 319–21, 324–31 historicism, 4–5, 62– 67, 73–77 historiography, 3–4, 11, 62– 65, 67, 71–73, 77, 95 history: historical reconstruction, 1–2, 4, 15, 26, 30–31, 34–37, 45–46, 52–56, 68, 71–73; history of philosophy, 4, 6, 15–17, 19–26, 30, 41–43, 45, 50, 53; history of science, 4, 6, 11, 26–30, 40–47, 49–53, 56, 74, 92; history of sociology / social science / social thought, 11, 28–31, 33–34, 53, 56, 92, 145–46; intellectual history / history of (modern) thought, 15, 26–27, 29–31, 34–37, 42–46, 49, 52, 55–56, 82 imitation, 8– 9, 96, 98, 104, 217, 221, 223, 231–35, 240–44, 246–48, 254, 256, 260, 264, 325–27 intention / intentionality, 8– 9, 107, 109, 134, 214, 219, 223, 231, 234–37, 240, 245–48, 256–57, 260– 65, 304– 6, 316, 326, 328 interaction, 9–10, 17, 67, 94, 96, 99–101, 105– 9, 131, 144, 149, 151, 157, 166, 168–71, 175–77, 179, 187– 88, 191– 93, 200, 210, 215–17, 222–24, 240, 242, 252–54, 256–58, 261– 62, 264, 276, 279, 300, 306–7, 311, 319, 330; interactionism, (symbolic), 93, 96– 97, 108, 144, 146, 166, 168, 176, 180, 226. See also sociology— symbolic interactionism (sociological school) intersubjectivity, 4, 9, 67, 75–76, 92, 95, 97– 98, 100, 103, 106– 9, 186– 88, 191– 92, 199, 210–11, 221, 252, 254, 256, 267, 301, 305, 307, 310, 316–17, 331 language, 10–11, 17, 96, 99–100, 103, 105, 109–10, 148–49, 151, 171, 175, 195– 96, 201, 218, 223, 231–32, 242, 246, 248, 254–55, 257, 265, 279, 296– 97, 299–300, 304–12, 315–32 Mind, Self, and Society, 7, 17–18, 31, 45, 53, 105– 6, 108, 144, 146–49, 151–57, 167, 169,

172–74, 177– 81, 203, 211, 232, 239, 246– 47, 252, 255–58, 263, 280– 81, 283– 84, 300, 302, 308–10, 317, 325–29 morality: moral confl ict, 276– 80, 283– 93 Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 4, 15–31, 34–37, 40, 53–54, 148, 156–57, 327–28 other, 8– 9, 68, 75, 88, 97–100, 103–5, 109, 146–47, 150–55, 157, 167, 169–71, 174, 177, 186– 87, 191– 95, 198– 99, 209–25, 231–48, 256–57, 259, 261– 64, 266, 277, 280– 83, 285, 291– 92, 301, 304, 306–7, 309–12, 317, 319–21, 323, 328–31; generalized other, 145–47, 153–55, 158, 169, 172–73, 194, 257, 280– 83, 287, 301, 329; problem of other minds, 8, 211–20, 222, 224. See also role taking / taking the attitude of the other perspective, 6–7, 70–71, 88, 94– 95, 99, 104, 106, 110, 144, 149–51, 165– 67, 169–72, 174–78, 180– 81, 185–201, 203, 217–18, 221, 223, 236, 243, 246, 280– 81, 283, 304–5 philosophy: anthropology (see anthropology); epistemology (see epistemology); philosophy of mind, 211, 225, 232, 239, 299, 306, 309 (see also problem of other minds; theory about theory of mind); philosophy of science, 26–30, 36, 49–50, 55–56. See also history— history of philosophy Philosophy of the Act, The, 53, 65, 148, 150–51, 157, 166, 259, 301–2, 304, 317, 320, 329 Philosophy of the Present, The, 1–2, 7, 52–53, 63, 70–72, 144, 149–51, 180, 185– 91, 193– 95, 306, 315–16 pragmatism, 2– 6, 9–10, 25–27, 34–35, 40–41, 45, 49, 54, 62– 67, 70, 72–77, 82, 85– 88, 92– 99, 101–3, 108, 146, 166, 168, 180, 185, 209, 211–12, 220–23, 225, 252–55, 261, 265– 66, 268, 296– 97, 300, 311 psychology: comparative psychology, 9, 55, 109, 231–40, 242–44, 247–48, 254–56, 258– 64, 315, 324–25, 327; developmental psychology, 2, 9, 215–17, 223–25, 231–32, 234–35, 238, 240–48, 253–57, 259, 264, 280– 81, 322–23; social psychology, 2, 4, 16, 21–22, 30, 45, 49, 96– 97, 101–3, 167, 179, 226, 248, 252–53, 256, 301

subject index realism, political, 5, 82– 87 research, scientific / research science, 2, 4, 17–18, 23, 26–34, 36 role taking / taking the attitude of the other, 9, 74, 97, 101–3, 105, 147–49, 151, 153, 158, 167, 169–70, 186, 192– 95, 218, 221–24, 231–32, 235–38, 240–41, 244–48, 255–57, 259, 262– 63, 267, 280– 83, 287, 301, 306, 319–20 science (scientific method, knowledge, thought), 2, 4, 7, 18, 20–22, 26–30, 33–34, 36, 45–46, 49–51, 55–56, 70–71, 85– 88, 93, 117–19, 122–23, 125–26, 128–32, 134, 156–59, 186, 188– 89, 191– 93, 195– 96, 200, 203, 210, 215; cognitive science (see cognitive science); natural science, 1, 4, 11, 26, 29–30, 32–33, 48, 63– 66, 70, 73, 88, 93, 98, 108– 9, 117–18, 124, 130–31, 180, 203, 210, 253, 265– 66, 268, 299; social science, 4, 6, 11, 29–30, 32–34, 36, 48–49, 55, 66, 77, 82– 84, 92– 93, 95, 109, 134, 167, 169, 180, 187– 88, 192, 203, 210, 266, 277. See also history— history of science; philosophy— philosophy of science; research, scientific self, 2, 8– 9, 17, 44, 48, 67– 69, 73, 82, 88, 94– 95, 97, 99–100, 103–4, 107, 109, 129, 144, 147–49, 151, 153–55, 160, 166–72, 175, 177–79, 186, 188, 192– 95, 199, 209–15, 217–26, 231–32, 235, 237–38, 240–42, 244, 246–48, 252, 256, 259, 276– 81, 283– 92, 296– 97, 306, 310, 316–17, 319–21, 323, 329–31 sociality, 5– 6, 8– 9, 15, 44, 48, 54–55, 94, 100, 144, 148–53, 166, 185– 92, 194– 95,

349

198–200, 203, 209–10, 223–24, 226, 247, 252–53, 256, 258, 266– 68, 276–77, 287 social theory, 7, 165– 81, 209–12, 252, 254, 255, 258, 265, 268; theory of action (see action theory) sociology: Chicago School of Sociology (see Chicago School of Sociology); symbolic interactionism (sociological school), 144, 146, 166, 168, 176, 180, 226. See also history— history of sociology subjectivity, 7, 50, 53, 67, 70–71, 100–101, 149–50, 185– 86, 189, 196, 198, 210, 213– 14, 305, 309, 316–17 symbol / symbolicity, 2, 10–11, 41, 68, 75–76, 96, 99, 103, 109, 151, 167– 68, 176–78, 193, 199, 201, 223–24, 231– 32, 240, 245–46, 256–57, 259, 263– 64, 267, 297, 301, 303–12, 327, 329–30. See also communication— symbolic communication symbolic interactionism (sociological school). See sociology— symbolic interactionism temporality, 1, 3–5, 7, 62, 66, 69–72, 76–77, 94, 151–52, 166, 186– 92, 194, 200, 289, 308 theory of mind / theories about theory of mind, 8– 9, 211, 215–23, 225, 231, 235–45, 247 University of Chicago, 1–2, 4, 7, 16, 21, 32–34, 36–37, 41–42, 46, 49, 52–53, 56, 62, 93, 100, 133, 165– 68, 171, 175, 179, 316. See also Chicago School of Sociology