This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 6 8-15,339 KEEN, Tom Clifton, 1936- GEORGE HERBERT MEAD'S SOCIAL THEORY OF MEANING AND EXPERIENCE. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1968 Philosophy University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan @ Copyright by Tom Clifton Keen GEORGE HERBERT MEAD'S SOCIAL THEORY OF MEANING AND EXPERIENCE DISSERTATION Presented In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University Tom Clifton Keen, B.A., A.M. ******** The Ohio State University 1968 Approved by f Adviser ipartment of Philosophy ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am especially indebted to Dr. Everett J. Nelson, Chairman, Department of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, and Professor Morris Weitz for coursework instruction which has been of inestimable value to me in the investigations represented by this dissertation. Also, I wish to thank my adviser, Dr. Virgil Hinshaw, Jr., and again Professor Weitz, for advice, criticism and encouragement which led me to greater thoroughness in this study. Finally, I wish to express affection and gratitude to my wife for encouragement and for long hours spent typing and retyping manuscripts. ii VITA October 19, 1936 Born - New York, N. Y. 1959 ........... B.A., Heidelberg College, Tiffin, Ohio 1959-1960 ....... Graduate Assistant, Department of Sociology, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio 1 9 6 3........... M.A., Kent State University, Kent, Ohio 1960-I963 ....... Assistant, Department of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio I963-I966 ....... Instructor, South Dakota State University, Brookings, South Dakota 1966-1968 ....... Assistant Professor, Heidelberg College, Tiffin, Ohio iii CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................ il VITA ....................................................... iii Chapter I . MEANING AND PHILOSOPHICAL PSYC H O L O G Y................ 1 II. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL FALLACY AND THE METHOD OF DOUBT . lk III. THE DE JURE THEORY OF MEANING . 39 IV. MEANING, PERSONS, AND THE SOCIAL A C T ................ 59 V. THE SOCIAL BASIS OF MEANINGFUL U T T E R A N C E ............ 80 VI. A SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE: DETERMINATION OF THE CONTENTS OF EXPERIENCE j MEANING............ 9^ VII. A SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE: PERCEPTUAL THINGS WITHIN THE ACT .... - ......... Ill VIII. A SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE: THE REALITY OF THINGS IN PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE .... 132 IX. A SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE: SUBJECTIVITY OF THINGS IN EX P E R I E N C E ............... 173 X. A SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE: RECONSTRUCTION OF EXPERIENCED REALITY............... 21? BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................... 252 IV CHAPTER I MEANING AND PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY A recently published collection of essays is described by the editor as a testimonial to . a renewed interest in the philosophy of mind, a subject which stood at the center of the philosophical stage in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Joining metaphysics, epistemology and morals, and which now bids fair to occupy the same central place again."*■ A considerable segment of contemporary writing occupied with the subject of "philosophical psychology"— as it is termed by Chappell— is marked by a repeated occurrence of one or both of two major themes. | Specifically, the literature to which I refer is that of the recent movement known as "ordinaxy-language" philosophy and the somewhat older writings of the American pragmatists Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and i George Herbert Mead. One of these themes is an attack upon a range of treatments of ! the philosophy of mind as defective in virjtufi of a common Cartesian jI character. Illustrative of such attacks is that of Gilbert Ryle who asserts that: There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even laymen that V. C. Chappell, ed., The Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1962), p. vii. It deserves to be described as the official theory. It will be argued here that the central principles of the doctrine are unsound and conflict vith the vhole body of vhat we know about minds when we are not speculating about them.2 The intention of Ryle and others who attack vhat Ryle terms "Descartes' myth" is not primarily to offer a thesis in the history of philosophy directed at revealing the pernicious nature of the peculiar views of Rene Descartes. Rather, this first theme, however phrased in particular occasions of its presentation, is primarily a claim that the principal traditional apparatus for developing a philosophy of mind must be rejected. It must be rejected because its employment has resulted in what Dewey terms a "vogue of subjectivism" that pervades modern philosophy and is by no means absent from contemporary efforts .3 Continued use of these conceptual tools, it is argued, will but per­ petuate one or another of the subjectivisms that largely comprise the history of modern philosophy of mind. As used here, the term "subjectivism" may be taken loosely as pointing to a set of typical problems and proposed solutions to these problems which occupy the attention of those who theorize in the Cartesian manner. An archetype, so to speak, among such problems is the supposed philosophical need to establish a line of argument which will yield a probability to the assertion "that there exist other minds." Similarly paradigmatic is the attempt to infer the existence 20ilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Hew York: Barnes and Hbble, Inc., 19^9)> P« H * 3 J o h n Dewey, Experience and Mature. 2nd ed., 1929 (Hew York: Dover Publications, 195&)> PP* 222-231. of the external world. Aa for typical solutions, the argument from analogy for the existence of other minds Is a case In point. Especially Interesting in regard to this particular example of an attempted solution of vhat I have termed a "Cartesian subjectivism," is Borman Malcolm's recent article denying the probative force of this argument. Malcolm asserts that the "fundamental error" of the argument from analogy is ". the mistaken assumption that one learns from nit one's own case what thinking, feeling, sensation are. He further claims that this mistaken assumption leads, "... first to solipsism and then to nonsense."5 What Malcolm is attacking is the assumption that it is a viable procedure In philosophical psychology to suppose one might have adequate evidence of his own existence and immediate experience, while yet the existence of similar experience in other minds remained philosophically problematic in some important way; and that, therefore, there is a theoretic need for some line of reasoning such as the analogical argument to provide an evidential basis for claims to know that other minds exist. Proceeding in terms of this assumption of the "priority of one's own case," Malcolm takes to be the "fundamental error" of a Cartesian approach. 2he solipsism to which he claims this vrror will lead is but the reappearance of subjectivism i)-.-, an extreme and obviously unaccept­ able form. If Malcolm is correct, then the egocentric predicament is a ^Horman Malcolm, "Knowledge of Other Minds," in Chappell, The Philosophy of Mind, p. 1 5 6. 5Ibid. problem to which Cartesian philosophy must continually address Itself, but vithout hope of success In Its resolution. For probably no one Is willing to regard solipsism as a satisfactory end point of philosophic inquiry into the nature of mind. In this regard, it is instructive to note that Chappell constructs his introduction to The Philosophy of Mind as an argument the conclusion of which is the doctrine of solipsism. For Chappell, this conclusion renders the argument a type of reductio ad absurdum. The several essays comprising the texts are accordingly treated as variant ways in which contemporary philosophical psychology is dissenting from the "Cartesian" premises of the arguaent. ? Malcolm's further assertion— that the fundamental error leads ultimately to nonsense— intimates the second of the two themes that recur in the literature under discussion. On the Cartesian assumption, one supposes he may simply come to notice a recurrent content of his own conscious experience, give the same name to each instance of the content, and only then concern oneself with the possibility of the existence of a further case of this content in a supposed experience other than one's own. Following Wittgenstein, Malcolm finds nonsensical the very notion that one could in this manner attain the specification of an initial identical content in experience. Does one make correct identifications. Feeling sure is no guarantee of being right. Indeed he has no idea of what being right could mean. We do not know what a mistake would be. We have no standard, no examples, no customary practice, with which to compare our inner recognitions A As Malcolm makes clear, such criticism of a Cartesian approach to philosophical psychology has occasioned a significant change in vhat is taken to be philosophically problematic, and thus in need of exam­ ination and explanation. Zt is no longer the case that the capacity of an individual to make first person descriptions of his own experience constitutes an irrefragable "given" in the philosophy of mind. Not that obvious fact is to be denied, but rather this capacity, too, is in need of examination. There obtains for it no peculiar exemption from criticism, nor any special evidential status. To state the point more generally, Malcolm is here representative of a point of view for which there is no sanction for a philosophical hiatus to gape between a set of utterances (expressions, thoughts, etc.) that are initial and indubi­ table and therefore an absolute starting point by contrast to a further set which are problematic and questionable and so in need of analysis and explanation* This kind of dichotomy— as, for example, Descartes1 "clear and distinct" ideas over against the "things that can be doubted~ is repudiated on the basis of an examination of what is involved in any utterance being meaningful.