The relationship between action and sociality is one of the fundamental problems in social theory and philosophy. In this paper I strive to contribute to an action theoretical approach that conceives of individual action and sociality as intrinsically related. I will do so by drawing on two distinct strands of cultural and social theory: the sociological pragmatism of Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead, and the cognitive cultural psychology of Michael Tomasello. Since the work of Tomasello is – at (...) least in detail – relatively unknown to philosophers or social scientists, the primary focus will be on his seminal studies in comparative and developmental cognitive psychology. By means of a detailed analysis I will delineate a cognitive, motivational and cultural dimension of the sociality of action in Tomasello. The results of this discussion will then be compared with the central tenets of sociological pragmatism. In the end, it will become clear why cognitive scientists like Tomasello can help us to reformulate pragmatist social theory against the background of recent findings in the human sciences. By doing this, we can remain true to the transdisciplinary approach of pragmatist thought that has long been neglected in social theory. Conversely, such a comparison may reveal some of the limits of Tomasello’s account with regard to social theory. (shrink)

Histories of psychology regularly celebrate the foundational role played in the development of early American psychology by Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, and in particular the development of functional psychology and behaviorism. In this article it is argued that although Darwin's theory did play an influential role, early American psychology did not generally reflect the hereditarian determinism of his theory of evolution by natural selection. However, early American psychologists did accept one critical implication of Darwin's theory, which is (...) that evolution by natural selection does not ensure the highest development of the human race. This partly explains the social interventive zeal that was a distinctive feature of early American psychology. (shrink)

It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one’s own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey’s conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. (...) It claims that Dewey’s anti-substantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey—differently from enactivists—frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings’ interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey’s lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human–environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility. (shrink)

The article presents an interpretation of certain aspects of John Dewey’s psychological works. The interpretation aims to show that Dewey’s framework speaks directly to certain problems that the discipline of psychology faces today. In particular the reflexive problem, the fact that psychology as an array of discursive practices has served to constitute forms of human subjectivity in Western cultures. Psychology has served to produce or transform its subject-matter. It is shown first that Dewey was aware of the reflexive problem, and (...) found that it needed to be addressed. Next, three concepts of Dewey’s psychology are drawn in: subjectivity, habit and morality. Dewey is interpreted as articulating what we today would call a practice-orientated approach to psychology, in which moral and practical reasoning is seen as a dimension of all knowledge and action. Subjectivity is understood as a function emerging with complex interaction. Finally, a Deweyan approach to how psychology and other social sciences can cope with, and make positive use of, the reflexive problem, is outlined. By acknowledging their existence in the world they study, i.e. by becoming moral sciences that realize their moral and political implications, the social sciences can become problem-solving instruments that serve to help create a democratic public, a community as an actual social idea. It is pointed out that Dewey had an attractive view both of psychology – the subject-matter and of Psychology – the discipline and its practices – and ventured on the rare attempt at explicating how they are connected in what he called Great Societies, what we today would call post- or late-modernity, and how Psychology can help to constitute Great Communities in which human beings might flourish. (shrink)

This article seeks to reconstruct the early writings of George Herbert Mead in order to explore the significance of his work for the development of an intersubjective conception of education. The reconstruction takes its point of departure in Mead's claim that reflective consciousness has a social situation as its precondition. In a mainly chronological account of Mead's writings on psychology and philosophy from the period 1900–1925, it is shown how Mead explains the social origin of conscious reflection and self-consciousness. It (...) is further shown, how Mead redefines the social in terms of meaningful, creative, radically undetermined, but not yet conscious, interaction. Mead's position thereby implies a reversal of the traditional way in which the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity is conceived. The article ends with an outline of the main implications of this reversal for our understanding of education. (shrink)