The Role of Abstract Reference in Mead's Account of Human Origins

Tom Burke The Role of Abstract Reference in Mead's Account of Human Origins Classical American Pragmatism was strongly influenced by the theory of evolution, having emerged and developed for more than half a century following the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species (Darwin 1859). C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) was concerned with evolution in a technical and broadly "cosmological" sense but wrote sporadically on human origins as such (see Section 6 of Peirce 1902, CP7:378-387, for one example). He gave relatively scant attention to ordinary communication, casting it as a kind of transference if not a continuity of information among minds. He thus contributed only indirectly to an account of the social genesis of mind and language that will be a central focus in the present paper. His semiotics has in any case supplied a good bit of the terminology now used to discuss the evolutionary emergence of natural language and human culture. William James (1842-1910) also paid a good deal of attention to evolutionary themes, particularly in regard to sorting out different conceptions of evolution and to exploiting the naturalistic prospects they engender for displacing a static, Cartesian view of human nature and moral agency. He occasionally drew on a fairly common matter-of-fact view of similarities and differences between animal and human experience, but gave little attention to the details of human origins. One exception, though sketchy, is a treatment of common sense ("our fundamental ways of thinking about things") as the product of a marked stage of "the human mind's [early] development" resulting from "discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time" (1907/1978a, Lecture V; 1909/1978b, pp. 208Õ F). It was G. H. Mead (1862-1931), though, who "made the most ambitious and comprehensive attempt of the pragmatists to set forth a [Darwinian] theory of mind and behavior" (Thayer 1973; Mead 1934, 1936, 1938, 1956, 1964; Joas 1985). John Dewey (1859-1952) augmented some crucial elements of Mead's story in ways that help to render it more relevant than it already is to contemporary issues regarding human origins (Dewey 1902a, 1902b, 1910, 1920b, 1922a, 1938). The present paper will focus specifically on spelling out Mead's account of human origins, along with some of Dewey's contributions to that account. Specifically, Mead's account of the evolutionary Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Summer, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 3 568 Tom Burke emergence of thinking (as a succession of attitudes that is not unlike reflexive discourse addressed to a "generalized other") can be clarified by drawing on Dewey's naturalistic conception of abstract reference. A Great Leap in Human Evolution To set the stage for a detailed examination of Mead's views about human origins, consider several commonly recognized advances or milestones in human evolution (Feder and Park 1997, Jolly 1999, Klein and Edgar 2002, Stringer and McKie 1996). For the sake of brevity these milestones are presented in a simple list: • The story begins with the slow emergence of living, sentient creatures (3.5 billion to 750 million years ago); • Sentient creatures eventually acquire distance-detection abilities: percipience versus mere sentience (500 million years ago); • Primates appear, with stereoscopic vision, having dexterous hands with an opposable thumb (50 million years ago); • Hominids appear, capable of bipedal locomotion. This accompanies a transition to the ground/plains/ savannas out of the trees/forests/jungles. Hands are freed for functions other than locomotion (for instance, the use of natural objects as tools) (5 million years ago); • Australopithecines later exhibit habitual bipedal locomotion (Lucy, Laetoli footprints) and probably regular tool use (3.5 million years ago); • The genus Homo appears: Homo habilis are so-named because of their Oldowan tool industry: tool-making, not just tool-use (2.1 million years ago); • Homo erectus (ergaster) appears with a fully upright posture, with early Acheulian-type tools, shelter construction, and eventually (probably) the control of fire, migrating extensively throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia (1.5 million years ago); • Homo heidelbergensis (archaic Homo sapiens) show a notable increase in brain size and thus a cognitive advance evidenced by late Acheulian...