Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason

Translator’s Preface

V The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action

1. The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of Communication

2. The Authority of the Sacred and the Normative Background of Communicative Action

3. The Rational Structure of the Linguistification of the Sacred

VI. Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld

1. The Concept of the Lifeworld and the Hermeneutic Idealism of Interpretive Sociology

2. The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld

VII. Talcott Parsons: Problems in Constructing a Theory of Society

1. From a Normativistic Theory of Action to a Systems Theory of Society

2. The Development of Systems Theory

3. The Theory of Modernity

B..

VIII. Concluding Reflections: From Parsons via Weber to Marx

1. A Backward Glance: Weber’s Theory of Modernity

2. Marx and the Thesis of Internal Colonization

3. The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society

Notes

Index

Analytical Table of Contents for Volumes 1 and 2

First published in 1981 as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band 2: Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

This edition first published in 1987 by Polity Press in association with
Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
First published in paperback 1989
Reprinted in 1992, 1995, 1998, 2004, 2006

Editorial office:
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd
108 Cowley Road
Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0–7456–0770–5 (pbk)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Translator’s Preface

In preparing this translation, I was greatly reassured by the author’s willingness to read through a first draft and suggest whatever changes he thought appropriate. The reader should be advised that, while these changes were introduced to capture more precisely his meaning or to make the translation more readable, they often resulted in minor departures from the original text. At such points, then, the correspondence between the German and English versions is not exactly that of translation.

I am indebted to Victor Lidz and Jeffrey Alexander for reading and commenting upon the translation of Chapter VII, and to Robert Burns and Carol Rose for helping with the legal terminology in Chapter VIII. I am particularly grateful to Sydney Lenit, Marina Rosiene, and Claudia Mesch for undertaking the hardly inconsiderable task of typing and retyping the manuscript.

Thomas McCarthy
Northwestern University

V

The Paradigm Shift in Mead and Durkheim: From Purposive Activity to Communicative Action

In the Marxist reception of Weber’s theory of rationalization, from Lukacs to Adorno, the rationalization of society was always thought of as a reification of consciousness. As I have argued in Volume 1, the paradoxes to which this conceptual strategy leads show that rationalization cannot be dealt with adequately within the conceptual frame of the philosophy of consciousness. In Volume 2 I will take up the problematic of reification once again and reformulate it in terms of, on the one hand, communicative action and, on the other, the formation of subsystems via steering media. Before doing so I shall develop these basic concepts in the context of the history of social theory. Whereas the problematic of rationalization/reification lies along a “German” line of social-theoretical thought running from Marx through Weber to Lukacs and Critical Theory, the paradigm shift from purposive activity to communicative action was prepared by George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim. Mead (1863– 1931) and Durkheim (1858–1917) belong, like Weber (1864–1920), to the generation of the founding fathers of modern sociology. Both developed basic concepts in which Weber’s theory of rationalization may be taken up again and freed from the aporias of the philosophy of consciousness: Mead with his communication-theoretic foundation of sociology, Durkheim with a theory of social solidarity connecting social integration to system integration.

The ideas of reconciliation and freedom, which Adorno—who in the final analysis remained under the spell of Hegelian thought—merely circled around in a negative-dialectical fashion, stand in need of explication. They can in fact be developed by means of the concept of communicative rationality, toward which their use by Adorno points in any case. For this purpose we can draw upon a theory of action that, like Mead’s, is concerned to project an ideal communication community. This Utopia serves to reconstruct an undamaged intersubjectivity that allows both for unconstrained mutual understanding among individuals and for the identities of individuals who come to an unconstrained understanding with themselves. The limits of a communication-theoretic approach of this sort are evident. The reproduction of society as a whole can surely not be adequately explained in terms of the conditions of communicative rationality, though we can explain the symbolic reproduction of the life world of a social group in this way, if we approach the matter from an internal perspective.

In what follows, I will (1) examine how Mead develops the basic conceptual framework of normatively regulated and linguistically mediated interaction; he arrives at this point by way of a logical genesis, starting from interaction mediated by gestures and controlled by instincts, and passing through the stage of symbolically mediated interaction in signal languages. (2) In the transition from symbolically mediated to normatively guided interaction, there is a gap in the phylogenetic line of development which can be filled in with Durkheim’s assumptions concerning the sacred foundations of morality, the ritually preserved fund of social solidarity. (3) Taking as our guideline the idea of a “linguistification” [Versprachlichung] of this ritually secured, basic normative agreement, we can arrive at the concept of a rationalized lifeworld with differentiated symbolic structures. This concept takes us beyond the conceptual limitations of the Weberian theory of action, which is tailored to purposive activity and purposive rationality.

1. The Foundations of Social Science in the Theory of Communication

Early in the twentieth century, the subject-object model of the philosophy of consciousness was attacked on two fronts—by the analytic philosophy of language and by the psychological theory of behavior. Both renounced direct access to the phenomena of consciousness and replaced intuitive self-knowledge, reflection, or introspection with procedures that did not appeal to intuition. They proposed analyses that started from linguistic expressions or observed behavior and were open to intersubjective testing. Language analysis adopted procedures for rationally reconstructing our knowledge of rules that were familiar from logic and linguistics; behavioral psychology took over the methods of observation and strategies of interpretation established in studies of animal behavior.¹

Despite their common origins in the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, these two approaches to the critique of consciousness have gone their separate ways and have, in their radical forms, developed independent of one another. Moreover, logical positivism and behaviorism purchased their release from the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness by reducing the traditional roster of problems with a single coup de main—in one case through withdrawing to the analysis of languages constructed for scientific purposes, in the other by restricting itself to the model of the individual organism’s stimulus-induced behavior. The analysis of language has, of course, freed itself from the constrictions of its dogmatic beginnings. The complexity of the problematic developed by Peirce has been regained along two paths—one running from Carnap and Reichenbach through Popper to postempiricist philosophy of science, the other from the early Wittgenstein through the late Wittgenstein and Austin to the theory of speech acts. By contrast the psychological theory of behavior has, notwithstanding occasional moves for liberalization, developed within the bounds of an objectivistic methodology. If we want to release the revolutionary power of the basic concepts of behavior theory, the potential in this approach to burst the bounds of its own paradigm, we shall have to go back to Mead’s social psychology.

Mead’s theory of communication also recommends itself as a point of intersection of the two critical traditions stemming from Peirce.² Although Mead took no notice of the linguistic turn in philosophy, looking back today one finds astonishing convergences between his social psychology and the analysis of language and theory of science developed in formal-pragmatic terms. Mead analyzed phenomena of consciousness from the standpoint of how they are formed within the structures of linguistically or symbolically mediated interaction. In his view, language has constitutive significance for the sociocultural form of life: “In man the functional differentiation through language gives an entirely different principle of organization which produces not only a different type of individual but also a different society.”³

Mead presented his theory under the rubric of “social behaviorism” because he wanted to stress the note of criticism of consciousness. Social interactions form symbolic structures out of sentences and actions, and analyses can deal with them as with something objective. There are however two methodological differences separating Mead’s approach from behaviorism. The model from which he starts is not the behavior of an individual organism reacting to stimuli from an environment, but an interaction in which at least two organisms react to one another and behave in relation to one another: “We are not, in social psychology, building up the behavior of the social group in terms of the behavior of the separate individuals composing it; rather, we are starting out with a given social whole of complex activities, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it.”⁴ Mead rejects not only the methodological individualism of behavior theory but its objectivism as well. He does not want to restrict the concept of “behavior” to observable behavioral reactions; it is to include symbolically oriented behavior as well, and to allow for the reconstruction of general structures of linguistically mediated interactions: “Social psychology is behavioristic in the sense of starting off with an observable activity—the dynamic, ongoing social process, and the social acts which are its component elements—to be studied and analyzed scientifically. But it is not behavioristic in the sense of ignoring the experience of the individual—the inner phase of that process or activity.”⁵ In comparison with the aspect of behavior, the meaning embodied in social action is something nonexternal; at the same time, as something objectivated in symbolic expressions, it is publicly accessible and not, like phenomena of consciousness, merely internal: “There is a field within the act itself which is not external, but which belongs to the act, and there are characteristics of that inner organic conduct which do reveal themselves in their own attitudes, especially those connected with speech.”⁶

Because Mead incorporated a nonreductionist concept of language into behaviorism, we find combined in him the two approaches critical of consciousness that otherwise went their separate ways after Peirce: the theory of behavior and the analysis of language. His communication theory is not restricted to acts of reaching understanding; it deals with communicative action Linguistic symbols and languagelike symbols interest him only insofar as they mediate interactions, modes of behavior, and actions of more than one individual. In communicative action, beyond the function of achieving understanding, language plays the role of coordinating the goal-directed activities of different subjects, as well as the role of a medium in the socialization of these very subjects. Mead views linguistic communication almost exclusively under these last two aspects: the social integration of goal-directed actors, and the socialization of subjects capable of acting. He neglects the achievement of mutual understanding and the internal structures of language. In this respect, his communication theory stands in need of supplementary analyses of the sort carried out since in semantics and speech-act theory.⁷

The paradigm shift prepared by Mead’s social psychology interests us here because it clears the way for a communication concept of rationality, to which I shall return later. In this section I want (A) to characterize the problem that serves as the point of departure for Mead’s theory of communication, in order (B) to show how he explains the transition from subhuman interaction mediated by gestures to symbolically mediated interaction. (C) The results of Mead’s theory of meaning can be rendered more precise by drawing upon Wittgenstein’s investigations of the concept of a rule. (D) I would like then to show how language is differentiated in respect to the functions of mutual understanding, social integration, and socialization, and how this makes possible a transition from symbolically mediated to normatively guided interaction. (E) A de-socialized perception of things, a norming of behavioral expectations, and a development of the identity of acting subjects serve as the basis for a complementary construction of the social and subjective worlds. Mead did not develop the basic concepts of objects, norms, and subjects from a phylogenetic perspective—as he did the basic categories of the theory of meaning—but only from an ontogenetic perspective. This gap can be closed by drawing upon Durkheim’s theory of the origins of religions and ritual.

A.

—Mead sets himself the task of capturing the structural features of symbolically mediated interaction. What interests him here is that symbols that can be used with the same meaning make possible an evolutionarily new form of communication. He views the conversation of gestures found in developed vertebrate societies as the evolutionary starting point for a development of language that leads first to the signal-language stage of symbolically mediated interaction and then to propositionally differentiated speech. Mead uses the term ‘significant gesture’ for simple, syntactically unarticulated symbols that have the same meaning for at least two participants in the same (i.e., sufficiently similar) contexts, for he regards such symbols as having developed from gestures. Examples would be vocal gestures that have taken on the character of languagelike signals, or the one-word utterances with which the child’s acquisition of language begins, but which are usual among adult speakers as well, albeit only as elliptical forms of linguistically explicit utterances.

Calls such as “Dinner!” or “Fire!” or “Attack!” are context-dependent, propositionally nondifferentiated, and yet complete speech acts, which can be used only quasi-imperatively, quasi-expressively. One-word utterances are employed with communicative intent, but as syntactically un-articulated expressions they do not yet permit grammatical distinctions among different modes. Thus “Attack!” is a warning when, for example, the context is such that enemies have turned up suddenly and unexpectedly; the same call can be a command to confront an enemy that has suddenly appeared in this way; it can also be an expression of alarm at the fact that the unexpected enemy is threatening one’s own life or the lives of close relations, and so on. In a way, the exclamation signifies all of these at once; in cases such as this we speak of a “signal.”

Signals or one-word utterances can be used only situation-dependently, for singular terms by means of which objects could be identified relative to a situation and yet context-independently are lacking.⁸ Signals are embedded in interaction contexts in such a way that they always serve to coordinate the actions of different participants—the quasi-indicative meaning and the quasi-expressive meaning of the utterance form a unity with the quasi-imperative meaning. Both the warning statement of the fact that enemies have suddenly and unexpectedly turned up and the express of alarm at the threat posed by their sudden appearance point to the same expectation of behavior—and this is given direct expression in the command to offer resistance to the unexpected enemy For this reason there is an unmistakable relation between the meaning of a signal—in all its modal components of signification—and the sort of behavior that the sender expects from the addressee as an appropriate response.

Linguistic signals can be replaced by manufactured symbols (such as drumming or the tolling of a bell) that are languagelike without being linguistic. Likewise, the beginning of a significant action can take on signal functions (as when a leader demonstratively reaches for his weapon). In such cases we are, however, already dealing with signs that have a conventional meaning; their meaning no longer derives from a naturelike context. It is characteristic of the stage of symbolically mediated interaction that the language community in question has at its disposition only signals—primitive systems of calls and signs. For analytical purposes, Mead simplifies the situation by disregarding the fact that the meaning of a symbol holds for all the members of a language community. He starts from the situation in which two independent participants can employ and understand the same symbol with the same meaning in sufficiently similar circumstances. To be sure, the condition that meaning conventions be fixed in the same way for a plurality of participants holds only for genuine signal languages and not for the gesture languages that are found at the subhuman level.

Mead illustrates the latter with examples of gesture-mediated interactions between animals belonging to the same species, such as a fight between two dogs. The interaction is set up in such a way that the beginnings of movement on the part of one organism are the gestures that serve as the stimulus eliciting a response on the part of the other; the beginnings of this latter movement become in turn a gesture that calls forth an adaptive response on the part of the first organism: “I have given the illustration of the dog-fight as a method of presenting the gesture. The act of each dog becomes the stimulus to the other dog for his response. There is then a relationship between these two; and as the act is responded to by the other dog, it, in turn, undergoes changes. The very fact that the dog is ready to attack another becomes a stimulus to the other dog to change his own position or his own attitude. He has no sooner done this than the change of attitude in the second dog in turn causes the first dog to change his attitude. We have here a conversation of gestures.”⁹

Interaction between animals that is mediated through gestures is of central importance in genetic considerations if one starts, as Mead does, with the concept of objective or natural meaning. He borrows this concept of meaning from the practice of research into animal behavior. Ethologists ascribe a meaning to a certain pattern of behavior that they observe from a third-person perspective, without supposing that the observed behavior has this meaning (or indeed any meaning) for the reacting organism itself. They get at the meaning of behavior through the functional role that it plays in a system of modes of behavior. The familiar functional circuits of animal behavior serve as a foundation for these ascriptions of meaning: search for food, mating, attack and defense, care of the young, play, and so on. Meaning is a systemic property. In the language of the older ethnology: meanings are constituted in species-specific environments (von Uexküll), they are not at the disposition of the individual exemplar as such.

Mead traces the emergence of linguistic forms of communication using as his guideline the step-by-step transformation of objective or natural meanings of systemically ordered mean-ends relations between observed behavioral responses into the meanings that these modes of behavior take on for the participating organisms themselves. Symbolic meanings arise from a subjectivizing or internalizing of objective struc- turcs of meaning. As these structures are mainly found in the social behavior of animals, Mead tries to explain the emergence of language through the fact that the semantic potential residing in gesture-mediated interaction becomes symbolically available to participants through an internalization of the language of gestures.

Mead distinguishes two steps in this process. At the first stage, a signal language emerges that converts the objective meanings of typical behavior patterns into symbolic meanings and opens them up to processes of reaching understanding among participants in interaction. This is the transition from gesture-mediated to symbolically mediated interaction, and Mead studies it from the standpoint of meaning theory as a semanticization of natural meanings. At the second stage, social roles make the natural meaning of functionally specified systems of behavior—such as hunting, sexual reproduction, care of the young, defense of territory, status rivalry, and the like—not only semantically accessible to participants but normatively binding on them. For the time being I shall leave this stage of normatively regulated action to one side and concentrate on the stage of symbolically mediated interaction. I want to elucidate how Mead understands his task of “explaining,” by way of reconstructing the emergence of this early stage of languagelike communication.

He begins with an analysis of gesture-mediated interaction because he finds there the beginnings of a process of semanticization. A certain segment of the meaning structure embedded in the functional circuit of animal behavior is already made thematic in the language of gestures: “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. A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, arc the relata in a triple or three-fold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to second organism, and of gesture to subsequent phases of the given social act; and this three-fold relationship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises, or which develops into the field of meaning.”¹⁰ Thus in the language of gestures the relations obtaining between the gesture of the first organism and the action that follows upon it, on the one side, and the response it stimulates in the second organism, on the other, form the objective basis of the meaning that the gesture of one participant assumes for the other. Because the gesture of the first organism is embodied in the beginnings of a repeatedly occurring movement, and is in that respect an indication of the state in which the completed movement will result, the second organism can respond as if the gesture were an expression of the intention to bring about this result. It thereby gives to the gesture a meaning—which, to begin with, it has only for the second organism.

If we assume that the first organism undertakes a similar ascription, the situation looks as follows. Inasmuch as the second organism responds to the gesture of the first with a certain behavior, and the first organism responds in turn to the beginning of this behavioral response, each organism expresses how it interprets the gesture of the other, that is, how it understands it. In this way, each participant in the interaction connects with the gestures of the other a typical meaning—which obtains only for that participant.

When this is clear, we can specify the transformations that have to take place along the way from gesture-mediated to symbolically mediated interaction. First, gestures are transformed into symbols through replacing meanings that exist for individual organisms with meanings that are the same for both participants. Second, the behavior of participants changes in such a way that an interpersonal relation between speaker and addressee replaces the causal relation between stimulus-response-stimulus—in interacting with one another, participants now have a communicative intent. Finally, there is a transformation of the structure of interaction, in that the participants learn to distinguish between acts of reaching understanding and actions oriented to success. The problem of the transition from the stage of gesture-mediated interaction to the stage of symbolically mediated interaction is resolved in these three steps.

Mead tries to explain this transition by means of a mechanism he calls “taking the attitude of the other.” Piaget and Freud also introduced learning mechanisms of internalization—one in the sense of “interiorizing” action schemata, the other in the sense of “internalizing” relations to social objects, that is, to given reference persons. Similarly, Mead conceives of internalization as making objective structures of meaning internal [Verinnerlichung]. Unlike the case of the reflective relations that come about when a subject turns back upon itself in order to make itself an object for itself, the model of internalization says that the subject finds itself again in something external, inasmuch as it takes into itself and makes its own something that it encounters as an object. The structure of assimilation [Aneignung] differs from the structure of reflection [Spiegelung] by virtue of its opposite direction: the self relates itself to itself not by making itself an object but by recognizing in an external object, in an action schema or in a schema of relations, something subjective that has been externalized.

To be sure, these elucidations remain tied to the model of the philosophy of consciousness. Mead takes his orientation from an older model, which was already employed by Augustine—the model of thought as an inner dialogue, a dialogue made internal: “Only in terms of gestures and significant symbols is the existence of mind or intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures that are significant symbols can thinking—which is simply an internalized or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of such gestures—take place.”¹¹

This model illuminates the mechanism of “taking the attitude of the other” from one side only. It makes clear that the intersubjective relation between participants in interaction, who adjust to one another and reciprocally take positions on one another’s utterances, is reflected in the structure of the relation-to-self.¹² However, a higher-level subjectivity of this type, distinguished by the fact that it can turn back upon itself only mediately—via complex relations to others—alters the structure of interaction as a whole. The more complex the attitudes of the other are, which participants “internalize in their own experience” the more there is a shift in what connects the participants (to start with, organisms) beforehand, in virtue of systemic features—from the level of innate, species-specific, instinctual regulations to the level of intersubjectivity that is communicatively generated, consolidated in the medium of linguistic symbols, and secured finally through cultural tradition.

In his chapters on the social constitution of the self, Mead gives the mistaken impression that taking the attitude of the other and the corresponding internalization of objective meaning structures are to be understood primarily as a mechanism for generating higher-level subjectivity. But this mechanism has consequences for an entire system; its operations bear on all the components of the interaction system—on the participants engaging in interaction, on their expressions, and on the regulations that secure the continued existence of the interaction system through coordinating actions to a sufficient degree. If Mead wants to use the mechanism of taking the attitude of the other to explain how symbolically mediated interaction arises from gesture-mediated interaction, he has to show how the regulative accomplishments of gestures, which function as economical release mechanisms for instinctually anchored discharges of movement, devolve upon communication in signal language; he has to show how an organism responding to stimuli grows into the roles of speaker and addressee, and how communicative acts differ from noncommunicative actions, that is, how processes of reaching understanding with one another differ from exerting influence upon one another with a view to consequences. This is not merely a question of the emergence of the relation-to-self that is reflected in itself, or of a higher-level subjectivity; these ideas are still tied to the subject-object model Mead is trying to overcome. It is a question of the emergence of a higher-level form of life characterized by a linguistically constituted form of intersubjectivity that makes communicative action possible. There are, however, problems with the way Mead carries out his analysis, for he does not adequately distinguish the stage of symbolically mediated interaction from the stage of linguistically mediated and normatively guided interaction. I shall begin by sketching the way in which Mead develops his theory from the three viewpoints mentioned above.

B.

—Mead’s basic idea is simple. In gesture-mediated interaction, the gesture of the first organism takes on a meaning for the second organism that responds to it. This response expresses how the latter interprets the gesture of the former. If, now, the first organism “takes the attitude of the other,” and in carrying out its gesture already anticipates the response of the second organism, and thus its interpretation, its own gesture takes on for it a meaning that is like, but not yet the same as, the meaning it has for the other. “When, in any given social act or situation, one individual indicates by a gesture to another individual what this other individual is to do, the first individual is conscious of the meaning of his own gesture—or the meaning of his gesture appears in his own experience—in so far as he takes the attitude of the second individual toward that gesture, and tends to respond to it implicitly in the same way that the second individual responds to it explicitly. Gestures become significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in an individual making them the same responses which they explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals, the individuals to whom they are addressed.”¹³ Mead thinks he can explain the genesis of meanings that are the same for at least two participants by one organism internalizing the relation between its own gesture and the response of the other; the internalization comes about through one organism taking up the attitude in which the other responds to its gesture. If this were the case, it would remain only to specify the conditions under which taking the attitude of the other—that is, the process of internalizing objective meaning structures—can get under way.

On this point Mead vacillates between two lines of thought. The first rests on the thesis of inhibited or delayed reaction.¹⁴ By virtue of a break in the direct connection between stimulus and response, intelligent conduct arises, characterized by “the ability to solve the problems of present behavior in terms of its possible future consequence.”¹⁵ The organism pauses and becomes aware of what it is doing when it arouses certain responses to its own gestures in another party. Mead does not notice that this explanation of taking the attitude of the other already draws upon a mode of reflection that will itself have to be explained in terms of an orientation to the meaning that one’s own actions have for other participants—unless Mead wants to slide back into the philosophy of consciousness.

For this reason, his other line of thought—Darwinian in inspiration—is more consistent: the pressure to adapt that participants in complex interactions exert upon one another—whether from the need to cooperate or, even more so, in situations of conflict—puts a premium on the speed of reaction. An advantage accrues to participants who learn not only to interpret the gestures of others in light of their own instinctually anchored reactions, but even to understand the meaning of their own gestures in light of the expected responses of others.¹⁶

Furthermore, Mead stresses that acoustically perceptible gestures are especially suited for this. With vocal gestures it is easier for the organism that makes the sounds to take the attitude of the other, because the sender can hear acoustic signals as well as the receiver.¹⁷ Thus Mead sees in the fact that phonemes, vocal gestures, are the sign-substratum of linguistic communication confirmation of his assumption that taking the attitude of the other is an important mechanism in the emergence of language.¹⁸

I will not go into these empirical questions here, but will restrict myself to the conceptual question of whether it is possible for Mead to reconstruct the emergence of signal language from the language of gestures by appealing to one participant’s taking the attitude of another. Insofar as nothing more is meant by this than that one participant takes in advance the attitude with which the other will respond to its vocal gesture, it is not at all clear how languagelike symbols, vocal gestures with the same meanings, are supposed to arise from this. Mead could only explain by this the emergence of a structure with the characteristic that the first organism is stimulated by its own sounds in a way similar to the second. If the same gesture arouses in both a disposition to like (sufficiently similar) behavior, an observer can notice a concurrence in the way they interpret the stimulus, but this does not yet imply the formation of a meaning that is the same for the participants themselves. “It does not follow from the fact that the one is disposed to do the same as that to which the other is stimulated that there is something identical in relation to which both are behaving.”¹⁹ That both concur in the interpretation of the same stimulus is a state of affairs that exists in itself but not for them.

In many passages Mead understands the mechanism of “taking the attitude of the other” as “calling out the response in himself he calls out in another.” If we understand “response” not in behaviorist terms as the reaction to a stimulus, but in the full dialogical sense as an “answer,” we can give “taking the attitude of the other” the more exacting sense of internalizing yes/no responses to statements or imperatives. Tugendhat suggests this interpretation: “The reaction of the hearer which the speaker implicitly anticipates is the former’s response with ‘yes’ or ‘no’… when one deliberates, one speaks with oneself in yes/no responses in the way that one would speak with others with whom one was discussing what should be done.”²⁰ Apart from the fact that this way of reading Mead’s text does violence to it,²¹ it would rob the mechanism of taking the attitude of the other of the explanatory power that it is meant to have. Internalized dialogue cannot be constitutive for achieving understanding via identical meanings because participation in real or external dialogues already requires the use of linguistic symbols. What is more, if speakers and hearers are to be able to respond to statements and imperatives with a “yes” or a “no” they must be equipped with a propositionally differentiated language. Mead, however, locates languagelike communication one stage deeper, in the modally undifferentiated expressions of signal language.

Nevertheless, we have to look for the solution to the problem in the direction marked out by Tugendhat. Taking the attitude of the other is a mechanism that bears first on the response of the other to one’s own gesture, but it gets extended to additional components of interaction. Once the first organism has learned to interpret its own gesture in the same way as the other organism, it cannot avoid making the gesture in the expectation that it will have a certain meaning for the second organism. This consciousness means a change in the attitude of the one organism toward the other. The first organism encounters the second as a social object that no longer merely reacts adaptively to the first’s gesture; with its response it expresses an interpretation of that gesture. The second organism appears to the first as an interpreter of the first’s own behavior; this means a change in the attitude of the latter to the former as well. The first organism behaves toward the second as toward an addressee who interprets the coming gesture in a certain way, but this means that the first produces its gesture with communicative intent. If we further assume that this holds for the other organism as well, we have a situation in which the mechanism of internalization can be applied once again: to the attitude in which the two organisms no longer simply express their gestures straightaway as adaptive behavior, but address them to one another. When they can take this “attitude of addressing the other” toward themselves as well, they learn the communication roles of hearer and speaker; each behaves toward the other as an ego that gives an alter ego something to understand.

Mead does not distinguish adequately between two categories of attitudes that one organism takes over from the other: on the one hand, reacting to its own gesture; on the other hand, addressing a gesture to an interpreter. However there are numerous passages that show he has both in mind: “The process of addressing another person is a process of addressing himself as well, and of calling out the response he calls out in the other.”²² The expression “response” changes its meaning unawares when what is presupposed is not merely the simple operation of taking the attitude of the other, but the expanded one—for then the stimulated response does indeed become an “answer.” We have a situation “where one does respond to that which he addresses to another and where that response of his own becomes a part of his conduct, where he not only hears himself but responds [i.e., answers—J.H.] to himself, talks and replies to himself as truly as the other person replies to him.”²³

With the first taking of the attitude of the other, participants learn to internalize a segment of the objective meaning structure to such an extent that the interpretations they connect with the same symbol are in agreement, in the sense that each of them implicitly or explicitly responds to it in the same way. With the second taking of the attitude of the other, they learn what it means to employ a gesture with communicative intent and to enter into a reciprocal relation between speaker and hearer. Now the participants can differentiate between the social object in the role of speaker or hearer and the other as an object of external influence, between communicative acts addressed to one’s counterpart and consequence-oriented actions that bring something about. And this is in turn the presupposition for a third way of taking the attitude of the other, which is constitutive for participants ascribing to the same gesture an identical meaning rather than merely undertaking interpretations that are objectively in agreement.

There is an identical meaning when ego knows how alter should respond to a significant gesture; it is not sufficient to expect that alter will respond in a certain way. According to the first two ways of taking the attitude of the other, ego can only predict—that is, expect in the sense of prognosis—how alter will act if he understands the signal. As we have seen, ego does already distinguish two aspects under which alter can respond to his gesture: (a) alters response is a directed action oriented to consequences; (b) at the same time it expresses how alter interprets ego’s gesture. Since ego has already interpreted his own gesture by way of anticipating alter’s response, there is on his part a prognostic expectation in regard to (b), an expectation that can be disappointed. Let us suppose that ego, surprised in this regard by an unexpected response from alter, expresses his disappointment. His reaction reveals disappointment regarding a failed communication and not regarding, say, the undesirable consequences of alter’s actual course of action. If we further suppose that this also holds true of alter, we have a situation in which the mechanism of internalization can be applied for a third time—now to the responses through which ego and alter mutually express disappointment at misunderstandings. In adopting toward themselves the critical attitude of others when the interpretation of communicative acts goes wrong, they develop rules for the use of symbols They can now consider in advance whether in a given situation they are using a significant gesture in such a way as to give the other no grounds for a critical response. In this manner, meaning conventions and symbols that can be employed with the same meaning take shape.

Mead does not work out this third category of taking the attitude of the other in any precise way; he does touch upon it when explaining the emergence of meaning conventions in connection with the creative accomplishments of the lyric poet: “It is the task not only of the actor but of the artist as well to find the sort of expression that will arouse in others what is going on in himself. The lyric poet has an experience of beauty with an emotional thrill to it, and as an artist using words he is seeking for those words which will answer to his emotional attitude, and will call out in others the attitude he himself has … What is essential to communication is that the symbol should arouse in oneself what it arouses in the other individual. It must have that sort of universality to any person who finds himself in the same situation.”²⁴

The creative introduction of new, evaluative, meaning conventions into an existing, already propositionally differentiated, language system is far from the emergence of a signal language. Yet it is instructive on just the point that interests us here. A poet searching for new formulations creates his innovations from the material of existing meaning conventions. He has to make intuitively present to himself the probable responses of competent speakers so that his innovations will not be rejected as mere violations of conventional usage. 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. This gap can be filled with Wittgenstein’s analysis of the concept of a rule.

C.

—The system of basic concepts that permits us to demarcate ‘behavior’ from observable events or states,²⁵ and that includes concepts such as ‘disposition’, ‘response’, ‘stimulus’, was made fruitful for general semiotics in the wake of Mead and Morris, and later in the framework of language theory. Morris drew upon the basic concepts of behaviorism to develop the basic semiotic concepts of sign, sign interpreter, sign meaning, and the like. He did this in such a way that the structural relation of intention and meaning could be described objectivistically, without anticipating the understanding of rule-governed behavior.²⁶ In laying the foundations of semiotics in behavior theory, Morris appealed to his teacher, George Herbert Mead; but he missed the real point of Mead’s approach.²⁷ Mead understood the meaning structures built into the functional circuit of animal behavior as a feature of interaction systems that guarantees a prior, instinctually based commonality between participating organisms. The idea is that internalization of this objectively regulated pattern of behavior gradually replaces instinctual regulation with a cultural tradition transmitted via communication in language. Mead has to attach importance to reconstructing the linguistically sublimated commonality of intersubjective relations between participants in symbolically mediated interactions from the perspective of the participants themselves. He cannot content himself, as does Morris, with ascribing to individual organisms concurring interpretations of the same stimulus, that is, a constancy of meaning as viewed from the perspective of the observer. He has to demand sameness of meaning. The use of the same symbols with a constant meaning has to be not only given as such; it has to be knowable for the symbol users themselves. And this sameness of meaning can be secured only by the intersubjective validity of a rule that “conventionally” fixes the meaning of a symbol.

In this respect the transition from gesture-mediated to symbolically mediated interaction also means the constitution of rule-governed behavior, of behavior that can be explained in terms of an orientation to meaning conventions. I would like to recall here Wittgenstein’s analysis of the concept of a rule, in order, first, to elucidate the connection between identical meanings and intersubjective validity—that is, between following a rule and taking a critical yes/no position on rule violations—and second, to capture more precisely Mead’s proposal regarding the logical genesis of meaning conventions. In the concept of a rule, the two moments characteristic of the use of simple symbols are combined: identical meaning and intersubjective validity. The generality that constitutes the meaning of a rule can be represented in any number of exemplary actions. Rules lay down how someone produces something: material objects, or symbolic formations such as numbers, figures, and words (and we shall be dealing only with such formations). Thus one can explain the meaning of a (constructive) rule through examples. This is not done by teaching someone how to generalize inductively from a finite number of cases. Rather, one has grasped the meaning of a rule when one has learned to understand the exhibited formations as examples of something that can be seen in them. In certain situations a single example can suffice for this: “It is then the rules which hold true of the example that make it an example.”²⁸ The objects or actions that serve as examples are not examples of a rule in and of themselves, so to speak; only the application of a rule makes the universal in the particular apparent to us.

Not only can the meaning of a rule be elucidated in connection with examples of it; the rule can, inversely, serve to explain the meaning of examples. One understands the meaning of a particular symbolic action—a move in a chess game, say—when one has mastered the rules governing the use of the chess pieces. Understanding a symbolic action is linked with the competence to follow a rule. Wittgenstein stresses that a pupil learning a series of numbers through examples understands the underlying rule when he can go on by himself. The “and so on” with which the teacher breaks off a series of numbers—for example, one exemplifying a geometric progression—stands for the possibility of generating an indefinite number of further instances that satisfy the rule. A pupil who has learned the rule is, by virtue of his generative ability to invent new examples, potentially a teacher himself.

The concept of rule competence refers not only to the ability to produce symbolic expressions with communicative intent and to understand them; nevertheless it is a key to our problem because we can explain what we mean by the sameness of meaning in connection with the ability to follow a rule.²⁹

SsameisSS’