Abstract
This article presents a reconstruction of Mead’s naturalistic argument in order to assess its significance for today’s sociological analysis. To do so, it goes back to the early criticisms Garfinkel has addressed to Mead in a manuscript written in 1948. It considers the three points of contention that are discussed in this text (the Self versus action; the social act versus practical activity; role versus practice) and claims that Garfinkel’s objections to Mead’s work are similar to those that have been raised against Blumer’s interpretation of Mead in the 1970s. The article then contends that this common misunderstanding of Mead’s naturalistic stance stems from a misinterpretation of his conception of the “significant symbol” which has often been mistaken for as a conception of meaning. This might shed light on the reasons why social naturalism has by and large been ignored by sociologists as well as outline the uses sociology should still make of Mead’s proposals.
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Notes
M. L. Schwalbe (1987).
The book has been published with a far less “garfinkelian” title: Seeing Sociologically: the Routine Grounds of Social Action.
This notion is crucial in the pragmatist account: “Both Mead and Dewey insisted that action is present in the living organism from the very outset. What has to be accounted for is not action but the direction which action takes. The process of responding is present in the entire act determining the very entertainment of stimuli […] The use of the term ‘attitude’ in this connection is highly important. Mead recognized that the functioning of the nervous system is as yet only partially explored, but he regarded the results already obtained as substantial enough to indicate an organization of the act in terms of social attitudes.” (Troyer 1946 , p.198)
As Troyer recalls: “[Mead] declared that mentality ‘resides in the ability of the organism to indicate that in the environment which answers to his responses, so that he can control these responses in various ways.’ In his discussion of society and the self, this indicating process is designated as ‘taking the role of the other’ or participation in the ‘conversation of attitudes’. As a self can arise only in a society where there is communication, so mind can arise only in a self or personality within which this conversation of attitudes or social participation is taking place.” (Troyer 1946, p. 200). On the later uses of the notion of attitude, see Kuhn and McPartland (1954); Blumer (1955); Lewis and Smith (1983).
Mead’s conception of the institution is summed up this way: “One of the greatest advances in the development of the community arises when this reaction of the community on the individual takes on what we call an institutional form. What we mean by that is that the whole community acts toward the individual under certain circumstances in an identical way.” (Mead 1934, p. 167)
Goffman (1963) claims that “G. H. Mead’s distinction between ‘significant’ and ‘nonsignificant’ gestures is not enterily satisfactory here. Body idioms involves something more than a nonsignificant ‘conversation of gestures’ because this idiom tends to evoke the same meaning for the actor as for the witness, and tends to be employed by the actor because of its meaning for the witness. Something less than significant symbolism seems to be involved, however: an extended exchange of meaningful acts is not characteristic; an impression must be maintained that a margin of uncalculating spontaneous involvement has been retained in the act; the actor will usually be in a position to deny the meaning of his act if he is challenged for performing it.” (p. 34, note 2).
Habermas adds: “The creative introduction of new, evaluative, meaning conventions into an existing, already propositionnally differenciated, language system is far from the emergence of a signal language… It remains, nonetheless, that Mead never did become sufficiently clear about the important step of internalizing the other’s response to a mistaken use of symbols.”(Ibid., p. 15).
According to the view he exposes in his Philosophy of the Present (1932).
A notion for which Garfinkel will later substitute the one of “member”.
One should however remember that Mead differentiates significance (which refers to what is normally intelligible) from signification (meaning as it is conceived of by theories of meaning). As he wrote: “Significance belongs to things in their relations to individuals. It does not lie in mental processes which are enclosed within individuals.” (Mead 1922, p. 19).
A comparison which has been made on other grounds: see Hinckle (1960); Stone and Farberman (1967).
To reckon the problem, see the way Tyler (2011) has empirically tried to tackle this question.
As Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) and Goffman (1983) have advocated.
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Ogien, A. Garfinkel reading Mead. What should sociology do with social naturalism?. Österreich Z Soziol 38 (Suppl 1), 97–113 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-013-0099-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-013-0099-x