Aboulafia, Mitchell, Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead, SUNY, 1991.

"When the new form has established its citizenship the botanist can exhibit the mutual adjustments that have taken place. The world has become a different world because of the advent, but to identify sociality with this result is to identify it with system entirely. It is rather the stage betwixt and between the old system and the new that I am referring to." Mead, cited in Aboulafia, p. 14.

"Sociality is the key concept for Mead, and it denotes a prevalent feature of reality. For Mead, we live in a universe of various physical, biological, and social systems, which undergo transformations. The introduction of something novel into a system can begin a transition from an old to a new system..... [H]uman beings, whether in taking specific roles or in being the totalities we call selves, not only change, they have the unique capacity to be aware of states of transformation. They are aware of their sociality. In other words, we are challenged by the environment, by the novel, and by the unexpected. We change and find out that we are not exactly who we thought we were." Aboulafia, "Self-consciousness and the Quasi-Epic of the Master", in 1991, pp. 239-40.

BURKE

Burke, Kenneth, On Symbols and Society, Chicago, 1989.

"I have discussed elsewhere what an eye-opener the chapter "The Idea of Nothing" was to me, in Bergson's Creative Evolution. It jolted me into realizing that there are no negatives in nature, where everything is simply what it is and as it is. To look for negatives in nature would be as absurd as though you were to go hunting for the square root of minus-one. The negative is a function peculiar to symbol systems, just as the square root of minus-one is an implication of certain mathematical systems." p. 63

"Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must also function as a deflection of reality..... Here the idea of deflection I have in mind concerns simply the fact that any nomenclature necessarily directs the attention into some channels rather than others..... When I speak of "terministic screens" I have particularly in mind some photographs I once saw. They were different photographs of the same objects, the difference being that they were photographed with different color filters. Here something so "factual" as a photograph revealed notable distinctions in texture, and even in form, depending on which color filter was used for the documentary description of the event being recorded." pp. 115-6

"And the difference between a thing and a person is that the one merely moves, whereas the other acts. For the sake of argument, I'm even willing to grant that the distinction between things moving and persons acting is but an illusion. All I would claim is that, illusion or not, the human race cannot possibly get along with itself on the basis of any other intuition. The human animal, as we know it, emerges into personality by first mastering whatever tribal speech happens to be its particular symbolic environment." p. 124

"The term "rhetoric" is no substitute for "magic", "witchcraft", "socialization", "communication", and so on. The term "rhetoric" designates a function which is present in areas covered for those other terms. And we are only asking that this function be recognized for what it is: a linguistic function by nature as realistic as a proverb, though it may be quite far from the kind of realism found in strictly "scientific realism". For it is essentially a realism of the act: moral, persuasive -- and acts are not "true" or "false" that in the sense that propositions of "scientific realism" are." p. 189

"But returning to the pun as it figures in the citation from Locke, we might point up the pattern as sharply as possible by observing that the word "substance", used to designate what a thing is, derives from a word designating something that a thing is not. That is, though used to designate something within a thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or otherwise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an attribute of the thing's context, since that which supports or underlies a thing would be part of the thing's context. And a thing's context, being outside or beyond a thing, would be something that the thing is not."
p. 237 ["substance" <-- "sub + stand" = "stand under; foundation"]

COOK / MEAD

Cook, Gary, "The Development of G. H. Mead's Social Psychology" (in Aboulafia)

"For the task of subjective consciousness, as we have seen, is to introduce novelty into a situation in which the old has broken down, and this can be accomplished only by a consciousness which is not essentially tied to the world of accepted meanings and objects.... It is here "in the construction of the hypotheses of the new world, that the individual qua individual has his functional expression, or rather is that function"."pp. 94-5

DEWDNEY

Dewdney, A. K., "Photovores", Scientific American, September, 1992.

"In fact, Tilden traces the development of his passion for lifelike mechanisms to a talk that Brooks gave in October 1989. Brooks described his notion of subsumption architecture. This view holds that complex behavior becomes possible in a robot only when there are simpler behaviors present that they may subsume." p. 42

FINGARETTE

Fingarette, Herbert, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, Harper, 1972.

"What we have come to see, in our own way, is how vast is the area of human existence in which the substance of that existence is the ceremony. Promises, commitments, excuses, pleas, compliments, pacts -- these and so much more are ceremonies or they are nothing. It is thus in the medium of ceremony that the peculiarly human part of our life is lived..... The ceremonial act is the primary, irreducible event; language cannot be understood in isolation from the coneventional language that defines and is part of it. No purely physical motion is a promise; no word alone, independent of ceremonial context, circumstance, and roles, can be a promise." p. 14

GERGEN

Gergen, Kenneth, and Davis, Keith, eds., The Social Construction of the Person, Springer-Verlag, 1985.

Gergen, Kenneth, "Social Constructionist Inquiry" (in Gergen and Davis).

"The explanatory focus of human action shifts from the interior reason of the mind to the processes and structure of human interchange. The question "why" is answered not with a psychological state or process but with the consideration of persons in relationship." p. 12

"To the extent that psychological theory (and related practices) enter into the life of the culture, sustaining certain patterns of conduct and destroying others, such work should be evaluated in terms of good and ill. The practitioner can no longer justify any socially reprehensible conclusion on grounds of being a "victim of the facts"; he or she must confront the pragmatic implications of such conclusions within society more generally." p. 15

KRIPKE

Kripke, Saul, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Harvard, 1982.

"[W]e do not pity others because we attribute pain to them, we attribute pain to them because we pity them. (More exactly: our attitude is revealed to be an attitude toward other minds in virtue of our pity and related attitudes." p. 142

LENNON

Lennon, Kathleen, Explaining Human Action, Duckworth, 1990

"Arguments which establish that mental (construed as intentional) kinds cannot be reduced to physical kinds do not necessarily rule out psycho-physical laws, and therefore do not necessarily rule out causal explanation at the intentional level." p. 104

"The causal explanatory theorist who is an anti-reductionist therefore accepts intentional kinds as natural kinds, but argues that natural kinds at one level of description need not be reducible to natural kinds at some other level, even where the further level may be ontologically more fundamental. A consequence of this position, is that if we were to abandon our psychological mode of classification we would both lose a way of capturing law-like generalizetions which transcend those expressible in purely physical vocabulary. Thereby we would lose a way of capturing some of the real structural features of the world." p. 122

MEAD

Mead, George Herbert, On Social Psychology, Chicago, 1964

"It is the characteristic of the self as an object to itself that I want to bring out. This characteristic is represented by the word "self", which is a reflexive, and indicates that which can be both subject and object." p. 201

"The unity and structure of the complete self reflects the unity and structure of the social process as a whole." p. 208

"The organized community or group which gives to the individual his unity of self can be called the "generalized other"." p. 218

"The man who says "This is my property" is taking the attitude of the other person. The man is appealing to his rights because he is able to take the attitude which everybody else in the group has with reference to property, thus arousing in himself the attitude of others." p. 226

"Of course we are not only what is common to all; each one of the selves is different from everyone else; but there has to be such a common structure as I have sketched in order that we may be members of a community at all.... Selves can exist only in definite relationships to other selves. No hard-and-fast line can be drawn between our own selves and the selves of others, since our own selves exist and enter as such into our own experience only insofar as the selves of others exist and enter as such into our experience also." p. 227

"The 'I' then, in this reflection of the "I" and the "me", is something that is, so to speak, responding to a social situation which is in the experience of the individual. It is the answer which the individual makes to the attitude which others take toward him when others take an attitude toward him. Now the attitude he is taking toward them is present in his own experience but his response to them will take a novel element. The "I" gives the sense of freedom, of initiative." p. 232*

"The fact that all selves are constituted by or in terms of the social process and are individual reflections of it -- or rather of this organized behavior pattern which it exhibits and which they prehend in their respective structures -- is not in the least incompatible with, or destructive of, the fact that every individual self has its own peculiar individuality, its own unique pattern. Because each individual self within the process reflects in its organized structure the behavioral pattern of that process as a whole from its own particular and unique standpoint within that process, it thus reflects in its organized structure a different aspect or perspective of this whole social behavior pattern from that which is reflected in the organized structure of any other individual self within that process. This is similiar to every monad in the Leibnizian universe which mirrors that universe from a different point of view and thus mirrors a different aspect or perspective of that universe." p. 234

"The individual, as we have seen, is continually reacting back against this society. Every adjustment involves some sort of change in the community to which the individual adjusts himself. And this change, of course, may be very important." p. 235

"It is that "I" which we may said to be continually trying to realize, and to realize through the actual conduct itself. One does not ever get it fully before oneself. Sometimes somebody else can tell him something about himself that he is not aware of. He is never sure about himself, and he astonishes himself about his conduct as much as he astonishes other people." p. 236

"Values do definitely attach to this expression of the self which is peculiar to the self; and what is peculiar to the self is what it calls its own. And yet this value lies in the social situation and would not be apart from that social situation. It is the contribution of the individual to the situation, even though it is only in the social situation that the value is obtained." p. 240

"The situation in which one can let himself go, in which the very structure of the "me" opens the door for the "I", is favorable to self-expression. I have referred to the situation in which a person can sit down with a friend and say just what he is thinking about to someone else. There is a satisfaction in letting oneself go in this way. The sort of thing that in other circumstances you would not say and not even let yourself think is now naturally uttered. Should you get in a group which thinks as you do, you can go to lengths that may surprise you. The "me" in the above situations is definitely constituted by the social relations. Now if this situation is such that in opens the door to impulsive expression, one gets a peculiar satisfaction, high or low, the source of which is the value which attaches to the expression of the "I" in the social process." p. 241

NATANSON

Natanson, Maurice, and Johnstone, H., Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Argumentation, Penn State, 1965.

(Natanson): "If you argue you choose to open yourself to the risk of discovering in the argument that the argument has a fundamental structure that has, in turn, profound implications for your own being." p. 15

(Natanson): "As a critique of suppositions, philosophy is a reflexive discipline, i.e., it not only takes for investigation objects and problems external to it, but it also seeks to understand itself." p. 100

(Natanson): ".... [T]he philosopher is trying to uncover something about himself.... Persuasion, however, will be treated as the dialectical transformation of the self through indirect argumentation."

RORTY

Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, The Identities of Persons, California, 1976

Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minnesota, 1982.

"James, when he said that "the true is what is good by way of belief", was simply trying to debunk epistemology; he was not offering "a theory of truth"." p. 97

"What people do believe is that it would be good to hook up our own views about democracy, mathematics, physics, God, and everything else, into a coherent story about how everything hangs together. Getting such a synoptic view often does require us to change radically our views on particular subjects. But this holistic process of readjustment is just muddling through on a large scale." p. 168

Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, 1981.

"Physicalism is probably right in saying that we shall someday be able, "in principle", to predict every movement of a person's body (including those of his larnyx and his writing hand) by reference to microstructures within his body." p. 354

SABINI / SILVER

Sabini, John, and Silver, Maury, Moralities of Everyday Life, Oxford, 1982.

"In condemning another, one asserts that the other's behavior is in violation of what is taken to be a preexisting mutually-binding rule. The difficulty in this is that, as the labelling theorists suggest, such rules crystallize in the process of their application to particular people in particular circumstances." p. 43

"Kelley's model, then, isn't an adequate account for what it means for an evaluation to be a true or false. It's more like a rule of thumb for simple cases. But a rule of thumb can't show that when people seem to be assessing truth they are really locating causes. And convincing us that assessing an evaluation is really finding its cause is what he and like theorists must do if they are to convince us that evaluations, tout court, are reactions. And they can't." p. 215

"The notion that people respond to the meaning of something is only troubled by circularity if it is offered as a general principle; in any particular case the circle is broken as long as the objective but particular meaning is supplied from the details of the situation. Our approach relies on the shared assumptions of commonsense actors in particular situations instead of Kelley's, or any, general theory. Of course, we don't account for these particular assumptions -- because we can't." p. 226

SHOTTER

Shotter, John, "Social Accountability and Self Specification" (in Gergen and Davis.)

"I shall not, however, propose any new theories; in fact, my approach will be an implicit argument for the repudiation of theories in any attempt to understand the workings of everyday social life." p. 167

"The different constraining and enabling influences upon us of our diffferent ways of talking, of our different modes of accountability, can only be appreciated by us comparing and contrasting them from the different positions of involvement in them that we can have within our social ecology -- and that is what I shall try to do. There is no Archimedean point to be had." p. 168

"This "double" or reflexive concern is crucial, for, while other scientists do not have evaluations or interpretations placed upon them by their own subject matter, social scientists do. While social scientists may claim third-person, external observer status for themselves in their conduct of their studies, (the position of uninvolved outsiders), such claims cannot be sustained. The nature of moral entailments in social life are such that it just is not up to individuals to assert their own moral statusses: part of what it is to have such a status is that it is conferred upon one by others." p. 169

"Reports assume in those to whom they are addressed a capacity to understand them; they leave the addressees untouched, unmoved in their being (they motivate no particular action upon their part). Tellings, on the contrary.... work as indicators of future action; they are used to produce changes in people's behavior; they tell them something, not of something. Rather than an epistemological device, they have an ontological function." p. 169

"Thus as tellings, our ways of talking about ourselves can work, not only to relate us in certain ways to other people, but to constitute or structure our being as living in this or that relation to others." p. 170

"I want to argue that there is no such things as a "self" within people to be investigated. And that if we feel a necessity to refer to an "inner self" in explaining people's conduct, that is because, in formulating and accounting for our experiences in a way that makes sense within our current dominant social order (an individualistic and scientific order), only talk from a third-person, external-observer point of view is officially authorized." p. 171

"This view as to the power of scientific modes of investigation is clearly partial and limited, however. For the conduct of science rests upon the prior possession by all of us of a much more basic form of knowledge -- let me call it simply "practical common sense" knowledge" -- in terms of which scientific activities themselves are conducted and in terms of which they must make sense". p. 174

"This illustrates another way in which our approach to our own self-understanding through theories is deficient: they lead to fragmentation, not integration. Currently, there is a near chaos of different theories about ourselves all clamoring for survival. Could an all-encompassing theory be devised to encompass them all? No. For it is in the nature of what theories are that, even if they were all "good" theories (in the sense of producing, when applied, the results they predict), they still could not be combined into one good theory. For as Marie Jahoda.... has pointed out, "each contains an extra theoretical element: the choice of the basic question the theory is meant to illuminate."" p. 176

"It is here that the difference between theories and accounts becomes acute: accounts may depict the value choices involved; theories suppress them, that is, they are rendered "rationally invisible".... As Winch points out, theories do not express their own principles of ordering; they do not, so to speak, apply themselves.... The main drift of what I have been arguing is this: that in our attempts to understand ourselves we have been somewhat blind (rationally blind) to the fact that in our everyday lives we are embedded within a social order which, morally, we must continually reproduce in all the mundane activities we perform from our place, position, or status within it. This blindness has been induced in us by the necessity to account for all our experiences in terms both intelligible and legitimate within our current social order, an order which is both individualistic and scientistic. As a result, we have concentrated far too much attention upon the isolated individual studied from the point of view of an uninvolved observer." pp. 176-7

"[A] discourse works to reconstitute in its conduct, both a certain social order and a corresponding psychological makeup in those who are conducting it, that prevents them from fully describing the nature of the world in which they operate. For the nature of a discourse is not, primarily, to represent a world, but to coordinate diverse social action." p. 179

"What Reddy objects to in the ""conduit metaphor" [for communication] is its current historical inappropriateness, and he offers as an alternative to it the "toolmaker's paradigm", which is essentially the paradigm that I have already been using previously, that is, that communication has an active formative function, working to specify further something already partly specified." p. 180

"The strangeness of the hermeneutical process is that the situation or context in which things come to be seen as the things they are, is articulated at the same time as the entities within it acquire their identity; the two develop together. As such, it is an originary process, a process in which the "whatness" of a situation is appreciated -- the construction of an initial grasp upon a circumstance prior to any critical reflection on it, and in which critical reflection can be grounded." p. 183

"For rather than within the deep, forever private, inaccessible domains of the "self", the ultimate sources of many of our "privately initiated acts" should be sought literally, in our society (i.e. directly), rather than metaphorically, within the "selves" we are each supposed to possess (or do they possess us?) If so -- if we do seek their roots in our social history -- their origins would not be inpenetrable so much because of their "deep and inaccessible privacy", but because of their being spread out in a "nonlocatable"fashion." p. 186

WHITE

White, James Boyd, "Rhetoric and Law" in Nelson, et. al.

"The third aspect of legal rhetoric is what might be called its ethical or communal character, or its socially constitutive nature. Every time one speaks as a lawyer, one establishes for the moment a character -- an ethical identity, or what the Greeks called an ethos -- for oneself, for one's audience, and for those one talks about, and proposes a relationship among them..... The law is an art of persuasion that creates the objects of its persuasion, for it constitutes both the community and the culture it commends." pp. 303-4

"It is the true nature of the law to constitute a "we" and to establish a conversation by which that "we" can determine what our "wants" are and should be. Our motives and values are not on this view to be taken to be exogenous to the system (as they are taken to be exogenous to the economic system) but are in fact its subject. The law..... is a process by which we make ourselves by making our language". p. 311

White, James Boyd, The Legal Imagination (abridged ed.), Chicago, 1985.

"One could describe institutions as separate ways of organizing experience through language (different language systems, if you will), each of which defines experience and people in its particular way. One might speak of the institution as a game set up on a permanent basis; and a simple definition of roles is typical of institutions, as it is of games. Each institution seems to use its own particular labels without regard for other possible ways of talking about people.,,,

The institutional way of talking about people is not simply a matter of the use of excessively abstract characteristics such as the social security number; sometimes, in fact, the institution's concern is with a very wide range of capabilities and experience, as in the Navy's idea of a good officer or the corporations's idea of a good president.....

The ordinary person comes to see that the official institutional views of mankind are impossible, and does not take them with complete seriousness. Yet he does not entirely reject them, and one might say that the important ingredient of maturity is the ability to live with institutions without ending up sounding like one." p. 165

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