George Herbert Mead's 'Epistemological Behaviorism'

George Herbert Mead’s Epistemological Behaviorism Guido Baggio Both in A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol and The Genesis of the Self and Social Control, as well as in the course of social psychology Mead gave in 1928 at the University of Chicago, he referred to behaviorism as to the science that describes conscious activities in terms of human conduct and he considered the observation of individual behavior as the starting point in the study of psychic processes. However, Mead looked at behaviorism as oneamong useful psychological methods, instead to consider it, as Watson did, the sole method to approach human psyche. Mead could not agree with Watson’s solution to eliminate consciousness and the method of introspection from the study of psychology and accused his attitude to be that of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland when she claims, referring to the gardeners, “Off with their heads!” In Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century Mead distinguished two ways of elaborating the general point of view belonging to behaviorism: Watson’s psychology, which considers the organism’s process itself in an external way thus excluding consciousness, and Dewey’s theory of reflex arc concept, in which the notion of consciousness plays instead a central role. Also, Dewey’s point of view, like Watson’s, departs from conduct itself; however, it carries with it the notion of consciousness as a normal relationship between organism and the environment. Mead argued that introspection has a certain definite meaning even for behavioristic psychology: it is the expression of the thinking process. This is the most important part of what an individual does and it is composed of vocal gestures, consisting in the marks of the elements which will lead to certain responses. In complementing Dewey’s “behaviorism” with the gestural interaction theory, Mead’s social psychology seems to reveal some analogies with the “Epistemological Behaviorism” Rorty outlined in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty argued that any knowledge, even the nonconceptual, nonlinguistic knowledge of what a raw feel is like, is attributed to beings on the basis of their potential membership in human community. From this point of view it is possible to admit the existence of “interior” or “abstract” entities without making it premises of a privileged, internal, private, non-social knowledge. By giving up the special ghostly status often assumed to justify the phenomenon of privileged access, we might vindicate the methodological respectability of the appeals to introspection, thus undermining the reasons which brought behaviorists like Watson and Ryle to deny (the importance of?) mental processes.