G.H. Mead and the cognitive sciences

For some years now, we have witnessed in cognitive science what has been called the “pragmatist turn,” i.e., an increasing use of pragmatist theories and concepts for studying cognition and human experience. The pragmatist turn is the most recent expression of the second generation of cognitive science that, since the mid-1970s, has developed in the various fields of linguistics, psychology, biology and neuroscience and, since the 1990s, has seen the proliferation of new approaches to cognition. Overcoming the cognitivism and computationalism of classical cognitive science – which regarded the human mind as a kind of abstract brain program guided by logical rules and understanding as something disembodied, formal, and internal to the skull box – embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and affective approaches to cognition arise from the need to provide an empirically reliable account of the nature and workings of human cognition, mind, and experience. All of these approaches attribute a central role to the body and the environment in determining cognitive processes, and they consider the mind rooted in an organism in action, immersed in the environment and therefore investigable only from the ecological context in which it is situated. Yet although these approaches move from a common conceptual ground – their theoretical assumptions are mainly derived from phenomenology, autopoietic theory and ecological psychology – they have perspectival differences regarding cognitive research and highlight different conceptions of the human mind and experience. The recent interest in pragmatist authors arises precisely to respond to a possible integration of the different, sometimes conflicting, perspectives into a unified inquiry program. Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George H. Mead have written extensively on cognition from a naturalistic perspective, and many of their theses are compatible with contemporary approaches to cognition. Their non-reductive naturalism allows us to rethink the nature of the mind and brain, human action, perception, cognition, and the very concept of nature, not accepting a mechanistic definition of nature as presupposed by science. Accordingly, their anti-dichotomic and anti-dualistic approaches offer functional elements to develop an integrated view of human cognition that aims at constructing integrated explanatory hypotheses about how the organism interacts with the environment. Furthermore, their pluralistic methodologies may contribute to incorporating different perspectives: physicalist, mentalist, and phenomenalist. Of all pragmatists, however, Mead is perhaps the least popular among today's philosophers of mind and neuroscientists but most likely the most suitable for an integrated approach of different perspectives on cognition. Indeed, when properly investigated, some of his theories show themselves extremely useful for a cognitive 4EA approach to mind and self. Among these, the “act” and gesture theories prove particularly interesting when compared and integrated within a pragmatically oriented perspective of the cognitive sciences.