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Mead and self-embodiment: imitation, simulation, and the problem of taking the attitude of the other

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Abstract

George Herbert Mead was, arguably, the first philosopher and social psychologist to advance what we might now call the embodied theory of social mind. In his view, the human self emerges out of relationships of bodies interacting with each other while pursuing common social goals. The human self and language originate in a bodily conversation of gestures and in the uniquely human ability of taking the attitude/role of the other. In the first part, the paper analyzes Mead’s treatment of embodiment and briefly contrasts it with contemporary theories of “mind-reading” (theory-theory, simulation theory). Next, it focuses on the findings of mirror neuron research and tries to answer the question of whether mirror neurons provide sufficient mechanisms for imitation, thus, undermining Mead’s lifelong conviction that imitation cannot predate taking the attitude/role of the other (a line of criticism recently taken up by Stephen Turner). The author concludes that mirror neurons, by themselves, do not represent a sufficient condition for imitation and further suggests that we ought to understand the functioning of mirror neuron mechanisms in terms of simulation rather than imitation. Adoption of such a position, as the author argues, reinforces Mead’s pragmatist emphasis on the role of embodiment in human social interaction.

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Notes

  1. Cf. Joas (1985: 33–63).

  2. Both these authors, however, influenced Mead’s thinking immensely. Between 1888 and 1891 young Mead was studying in Germany where he attended (for about 6 months) Wundt’s lectures.

  3. It is often overlooked that Mead not only shared Dewey’s pragmatism but also helped to shape a considerable part of it. As Jane M. Dewey writes in the authorized biography of her father: “The psychologists and philosophers who, up to that time, had recognized any connection between psychological phenomena and the human body had found the physical basis of mind in the brain alone or at most in the nervous system isolated from the whole organism, and thus from the relations of the organism to its environment. Mead, on the contrary, started from the idea of the organism acting and reacting in an environment; in this view the nervous system, brain included, is an organ for regulating the relations of the organism as a whole with objective conditions of life. Psychological phenomena, including processes of thought and knowledge, must then be described from this point of view. Mead had also developed an original theory of the psychical as the state occurring when previously established relations of organism and environment break down and new relations have not yet been built up; and, through inclusion of relations of human beings with one another, a theory of the origin and nature of selves. Dewey did not attempt a development of these special ideas, but he took them over from Mead and made them a part of his subsequent philosophy…” (Dewey 1939: 25–26, original italics). Similarly, in the preface to Mind, Self, and Society Charles W. Morris contends: “Neither stands to the other in the exclusive relation of teacher to student; both, in my opinion, were of equal, though different intellectual stature; both shared in a mutual give-and-take according to their own particular genius. If Dewey gave range and vision, Mead gave analytical depth and scientific precision” (Morris in Mead 1934/1967: xi).

  4. With regard to the relevance of Mead’s texts today it is worth noting, that nowadays, the discussions taking place in the cognitive sciences about so called “neural correlates of consciousness” in many respects remind the old parallelistic controversies.

  5. Jerry Fodor’s idea that scientific psychology should focus exclusively on the processes taking place in our heads (cf. Fodor 1980).

  6. Authors like David L. Miller argue that Dewey’s cardinally important paper “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” must have been an outcome of mutual intellectual interchange between Dewey and Mead at the start of their careers first in Ann Arbor and later in Chicago in the 1890s (cf. Miller 1973a: 32). Whether this is really the case is probably going to remain an open question. However, considering the interest that both of them paid to the psychology of William James (the example of the child reaching to the candle which Dewey uses comes originally from James’ Principles of Psychology [1890]) and the fact that Mead, at that time, intended to finish his dissertation on the reformulation of Kant’s category of space in terms of the bodily relation of eye and hand— Miller’s interpretation, indeed, cannot be ruled out.

  7. Cf. also Joas (1997: 184–195).

  8. The final constructive depart from Wundt’s theory of language can be found in Mead (1910).

  9. Cf. Mead (1934/1967: 5–13).

  10. As an illustration of such a process, Mead gives an example of an individual approaching a hammer: “If one approaches a distant object he approaches it with reference to what he is going to do when he arrives there. If one is approaching a hammer he is muscularly all ready to seize the handle of the hammer. The later stages in the act are present in the early stages—not simply in the sense that they are all ready to go off, but in the sense the they serve to control the process itself. They determine how we are going to approach the object, and the steps in our early manipulation of it. We can recognize, then, that the innervation of certain groups of cells in the central nervous system can already initiate in advance the later stages of the act” (Mead 1934/1967: 11). Recent research into mirror neurons has proven the validity of this Mead’s insight. For instance, according to Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, there, indeed, exists a class of neurons (which has been called canonical neurons) responsible for such a process of transforming visual information regarding an object into appropriate motor acts. In this respect, both these authors explicitly acknowledge the validity of Mead’s theories with regard to what he called “attitudes.” Cf. Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia (2008: 79–115).

  11. See Mead’s favorite example of the dog-fight in Mead (1934/1967: 42–43).

  12. “Meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture. If that gesture does so indicate to another organism the subsequent (or resultant) behavior of the given organism, then it has meaning. In other words, the relationship between a given stimulus—as a gesture—and the later phases of the social act of which it is an early (if not the initial) phase constitutes the field within which meaning originates and exists. Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there as a relation between certain phases of the social act; it is not a psychical addition to that act and it is not an ‘idea’ as traditionally conceived” (Mead 1934/1967: 75–76).

  13. When talking about more developed interactions within social matrices Mead preferred using the term “taking the role of the other” (cf. Mead 1934/1967: 152).

  14. Whether this opinion of Mead’s is true or not is a question of further empirical inquiry. For quite a compelling contemporary defense of the Meadian position cf. Booth (2007).

  15. The theory-theory of empathy is based primarily on the work of the philosophers like Wilfrid Sellars or Donald Davidson. According to this account, folk psychology (everyday practice of attributing mental states like beliefs and desires) takes up the form of creating theories about mental states of others that we subsequently verify in the course of action. Simulation theory (Alvin Goldman), in turn, holds that we understand the minds of others by means of placing ourselves “in their shoes” and drawing up pretend beliefs and desires that we then project to their mind. The way the concept of embodied simulation is being used in this article is not to be confused with the classical simulation theory which (like the theory-theory) presupposes that the contents of the minds of others are basically inaccessible to us unless we are able to reflect upon them.

  16. We can, of course, deliberate about the beliefs and desires of others in case our social action comes to a halt in which case we start to theorize about what they think. However, the generalization of this special case into the “problem of other minds” would be, most assuredly, rejected by Mead with reference to the fact that, for most of the time, we know what others think without the necessity of consciously deliberating about their each and every mental state.

  17. For a similar critique from a Meadian point of view see Rochat (2009: 187–190).

  18. A very similar point was recently made by Shaun Gallagher and Katsunori Miyahara (2012), from the standpoint of what they call operative intentionality.

  19. For details cf. Booth (2013).

  20. As David L. Miller argues, functional identity of response should be seen as the core of symbolic communication and, consequently, of selfhood itself (cf. Miller 1973b: 3–24).

  21. For Mead, any kind of symbol (be it a spoken or written word, conventional signs, etc.) is a gesture.

  22. To get a fair grip on the historical context of the debates between Mead and the abovementioned authors (and especially Royce) see Joas (1985: 98–100), Cook (1993: 58–59, 84–91), Kegley (2013).

  23. Most recently, Kelvin Booth (2013: 141–142) raised the question whether the “natural flowing” of memory images into the images of our own responses and the resulting self-stimulation that Mead talks about in his essay “The Social Self”, is not essentially a kind of imitation. Booth, however, does not make it very clear why that should be the case. Contrary to his position, it could be argued that mere mental imagery of responses of others to our own actions does not really fit the classical definition of imitation (replication of behavior).

  24. For a more detailed treatment of the extensive research in this area of cognitive science cf. Gallese et al. (1996), Fadiga et al. (2000), Iacoboni (2008), Rizzolatti (2005), Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2008).

  25. Cf. Fadiga et al. (1995), Rizzolatti et al. (1996), Iacoboni et al. (1999).

  26. For a more detailed discussion see Hurley (2008), Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia (2008: 34–38), Franks (2010: 86–87).

  27. Cf. Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia (2008: 131–138).

  28. In order to facilitate imitation, Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia assume that the mirror neuron system would have to be accompanied by another system which would have to execute at least two additional tasks: facilitatory and inhibitory. These systems develop gradually in the process of human ontogenesis and are different in kind from the mirror neuron system as such (cf. 2008: 150).

  29. Cf. also Hutto (forthcoming).

  30. By terms like “responding into” or “enacting others” it is meant to directly perceive their actions in terms of our possibilities of responding to social affordances offered by them. See also Gallagher (2012: 83–86).

  31. Similarly, Hutto contends that “what mirror neuron activity reliably targets becomes visible if we rethink basic mentality in terms of purposeful, end-directed engagements of organisms with their environments” (Hutto, forthcoming).

  32. Cf. Gallagher & Miyahara (2012: 123–129).

  33. See also Joshua A. Skorburg’s (forthcoming) for a discussion of how the classical American pragmatists advocated for widening our understanding of the self by broadening our general notion of cognition to include both bodily and worldly structures and processes.

  34. This effort has been already taken up, albeit mainly from the phenomenological perspective, by Kelvin Booth (2013).

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    Roman Madzia

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Madzia, R. Mead and self-embodiment: imitation, simulation, and the problem of taking the attitude of the other. Österreich Z Soziol 38 (Suppl 1), 195–213 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-013-0104-4

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