Reply to Seeburger and Franks

The conflation of Meadian social behaviorism with Husserlian phenomenology is, in most respects, a misadventure. The paragraph in question was intended as a warning against loosely assimilating these philosophies without regard for their fundamentally different perspectives and methods (cf. Miller, 1973:7-9). Husserl's error was in not taking Kant seriously enough. Once an infant ceases to experience the world as an undifferentiated manifold of sensations and begins to perceive distinct objects, a bridge is crossed from which there can be no return. All objects of consciousness are constructed through cognitive categories and, although we may interpret the world of extramental physical phenomena through one theory rather than another, we can never perceive anything apart from all perspectives. Peirce similarly argued that even the most elementary perceptual judgment is tantamount to an inference, and the first impression of sense is never a direct object of conscious experience. Kant's own error was in relegating ultimate reality to a mystical transcendental world of noumenal phenomena. Husserl also postulated a realm of language-free pure essences but, unlike Kant, believed that he had developed a method capable of rendering them accessible. For Husserl, essences lie within the range of possible experience rather than outside it. While Husserl's epistemology shares the absolutist ambitions of classical rationalism, Mead's epistemology is relativistic in the pattern of Whitehead, Peirce, and other realist philosophers of science. For the epistemological relativist, there is no hope of stripping away all perspectively-related attributes of a phenomenon in order to somehow directly apprehend its essence. However, this is no cause for despair because, for all those who share any given perspective, it may still be possible to establish intersubjective agreement concerning the experimental consequences of certain courses of behavior. This is all that science requires or can ask, since truth claims necessarily are relative to the perspective through which they are formulated. In some cases (where the so-called incommensurability problem can be overcome), we can partially evaluate alternative perspectives in terms of the scope and accuracy of their experimental implications, but they can be compared only to each other, not to some mythical essence of the phenomena they concern. Seeburger and Franks draw special attention to introspection, intentionality, and bracketing. I will respond briefly to each below. The term is somewhat ambiguous. Phenomenology, at least in the early phases of its procedure, is not introspective in any sense which would allow one to infer judgments from what is phenomenally given, nor can the phenomenologist call the phenomenological activity introspective (in any sense), because the supposed locus of the phenomenon under analysis is part of what is placed in brackets. (As Husserl and others have noted, Descartes made this mistake.) Yet, there is an important sense of introspective, implied by Miller, in which it can be said fairly that Descartes' method and Husserl's

Epistemology · Sociology · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Social Representations and Identity

• Toward A Meadian Conceptualization of Role

  Open Access•Peter L Callero•Sociological Quarterly•1986

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• Cartesian Meditations

  Open Access•Edmund Husserl•Cartesian Meditations•1973

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• George Herbert Mead

  Open Access•Mary Katherine Tillman, Barbara Anderson et al.•Man and World•1974

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