Stephen Turner

Naturalizing the Tacit1

The brain is a natural object of great complexity with identifiable physical

mechanisms-synapses, chemical reactions, and so forth-that is spatially
differentiated in ways that correspond, roughly, to various cognitive and
bodily functions. The mechanisms can be activated, and the brain's geog-
raphy mapped, through experiments that parallel actual experiences and
brain activities outside the lab. In this way we can match descriptions that
we give in ordinary language, the language of intention, seeing, speaking,
decision-making, and so forth, to the physical features and processes of
the brain, that is to say finding neural correlates. Correspondences are
generally not very exact, or involve surprises-functions which seem dif-
ferent turn out to be closely related on the neuronal level, or things which
we think of as reducible to one another or two sides of the same coin turn
out to involve different processes entirely. Some things, such as con-
sciousness, don't seem to match very well at all. There are also a number
of oddities about the relation of brain and bodily processes to subjective
experience. And in each case the matching is incomplete: what mecha-
nisms can be identified operate to do something, but the something they
do is typically described in terms that derive from folk psychology and
amount to attributing intention-like properties to processes that are not
intentional, or accessible to conscious introspection. But the matching
proceeds, more is matched, and some old ideas, such as the notion that
people are motivated or get rewarded by pleasure for acts of altruism, turn
out to have a match in the brain. Surprises turn up as well, for example the
case of empathic cruelty, where some people turn out to respond with
pleasure to the suffering of others, or where the experience of performing
an intentional action seems to be a trick that the brain plays on us.
There is another matching relationship, which was also once im-
portant to social theory, especially at the end of the nineteenth and be-
ginning of the twentieth century: the match between the logical and theo-
retical sequence of accounts of the development of the mind in the child,
especially the development of the child's sense of self and understanding
of other minds, and the actual developmental phases observable in chil-
dren. The two matching processes relate to one another: the mechanisms

Portions of this paper originally appeared in "Teoria social e neurocie'ncia," Tempo

Social, revista de sociologia da USP (2014).

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by which the child accesses the world, learns, and constructs the self
might also and would be expected to be matched in the brain. But the se-
quence in which the developmental process occurs tells us something
about the way in which one process is a condition for another.
We are limited in these matching exercises by what is available on the
non-brain side of the match as well as by the limitations, on the brain side,
of our technology. And these limitations pose interesting problems. What
does it mean if we can't find a neuronal match for our ordinary concepts?
What if our experiences seem not to have a plausible cognitive science
match? Does it mean there is something "irreducible" about mind? These
kinds of questions have set much of the tone over debates in this area, es-
pecially philosophical debates.
These are themes that Dimitri Ginev has explored in relation to prac-
tice, in such papers as "Social Practices from the Viewpoint of Trans-
Subjective Existentialism" (2014) and "Ethnomethodological and Herme-
neutic-Phenomenological Perspectives on Scientific Practices" (2013),
from a different, non-naturalistic point of view. There are, however,
points of convergence.We agree on the need to de-essentialize such social
concepts as the concept of practice. We agree in rejecting the neo-Kantian
idea that the disclosure of reality is a "discovering" of meaning or reality
that we have produced by a kind of behind the back exercise in which we
have already pre-constituted reality or meaning. We differ, as he has
pointed out, (2014: 80) on how this needs to be done. He has advocated
salvaging the notion of practices by constructing a reflexive theory of
practices, modeled on hermeneutic phenomenology. From this he has de-
veloped an account of practices in terms of their "potentiality of articulat-
ing domains of meaningful objects" (2014: 81). While I am sympathetic
with the existentialist implications of this project as he outlines them, I
am skeptical about the phenomenological route he takes to get there. Part
of this skepticism comes from a naturalistic skepticism about the relation
of our brains to subjective experience: too much of practice, in my view,
lies beyond consciousness and beyond what can be said to be phenomeno-
logically accessible.
Kant Meets Social Science
One kind of naturalistic matching, that would have been completely nor-
mal to a nineteenth century social theorist, would be to match brain pro-
cesses and developmental stages of children to observable social facts and
processes. Why did this approach die out? And why has it returned? To
answer this question would require a long excursion into the history of
sociology and social science, and even more importantly into the history
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of philosophy, but it is a question worth asking. Much of what academics
take to be normal talk about social life, such as the concept of culture, are
products of the rejection of the "matching" approach, so to ask this ques-
tion is also to call into question the "standard social science mod-
el" (Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Simpson et al. 2007: 4-6).
The "philosophy" answer and the social science answer to the ques-
tion of why this approach died out in the early twentieth century have a
lot to do with each other. The relationship is epitomized by the geogra-
pher and anthropologist-to-be Franz Boas who traveled to live among the
Eskimos, bringing with him, and reading, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
It is crude, but nevertheless true, that the standard social science model is
based on an account of culture that makes culture into something like the
categories and presuppositions that Kant attributed to the cognizing
mind. The connections between Kant and the problem of culture and so-
ciety were made explicit by Durkheim, but most explicitly of all by Georg
Simmel in such texts as "How is Society Possible?" (1910). As Simmel
explains Kant,
The question then, How is nature possible?, i.e., what are the conditions
which must be present in order that a "nature" may be given, is resolved by
him through discovery of the forms which constitute the essence of our
intellect and therewith bring into being "nature" as such. (1910: 373)
Simmel observes that "it is at once suggested that it is possible to treat in
an analogous fashion the question of the aprioristic conditions on the ba-
sis of which society is possible" (1910: 373).
How does this work, exactly? Kant's idea was that we all had the
same essential intellect would relate to the principles built into experience
in the same way. This seems to imply that the aprioristic conditions by
which society is possible would also need to be essentially the same for
everyone in the society. More simply, "society" requires shared presuppo-
sitions. So how does this happen, exactly? How do we get to the point that
we share other people's presuppositions, and manage the relation between
us as individuals and the forms of society. His answer is this: "The empirical
society becomes 'possible' only through the apriori" (1910: 391). Simmel's
successors in social science, the inventors of the standard social science
model, assumed that there were shared presuppositions without explaining,
in a serious way, how they got there. They thought there were good reasons
for not wo~rying about such questions. But Simmel worked in an earlier en-
vironment in which this question could not be so easily dismissed. In what
follows I will explain more about this environment. But it is important to
see this particular aspect of the prehistory of the standard social science
model to understand the contrast with Simmel's contemporaries, and the
nature of the conflict over these basic ideas.
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 Simmel starts out with the problem of other minds. We relate to one
another as minded beings, or as he puts it, "the soul of another has for me
the same reality which I myself have, a reality which is very different from
that of a material thing" (1910: 375). But here things get complicated. Re-
lating as minded beings whose minds are, as Clifford Geertz once put it,
full of presuppositions, is not enough. For "society'' to be possible for
Simmel, they need to be the same presuppositions. We start out, not with
these presuppositions-they need to be acquired somehow in order to
make us social members (Simmel calls this socialization)-but with some-
thing more basic and universal, something part of the essence of the intel-
lect, namely a conscious sense of our own ego and of the contents of our
consciousness.
Within our own consciousness we distinguish very precisely between the
fundarnentality of the ego (the presupposition of all representation, which
has no part in the never wholly suppressible problematics of its contents)
and these contents themselves, which as an aggregate, with their corning
and going, their dubitability and their fallibility. (Sirnrnel 1910: 376)
We can't doubt our ego, the condition of our consciousness. The contents
of our consciousness, however, are fallible and transient. This makes for a
problem about the presuppositions of "society." We know that other
souls are like ours, that they have the same ego and therefore relation be-
tween ego and contents of consciousness. But our knowledge of others is
fallible and transient. So there are, as Simmel puts it, two dimensions:
In the first place we see the other party in some degree generalized. This
may be because it is not within our power fully to represent in ourselves an
individuality different from our own. Every reconstruction (Nachbilden)
of a soul is determined by the similarity to it ... It appears as though every
man has in himself a deepest individuality-nucleus which cannot be subjec-
tively reproduced by another whose deepest individuality is essentially dif-
ferent. (1910: 378)
In other words, people are in fact irreducibly different and our only access
to their minds is through stereotypes, or representations, which we un-
consciously presuppose and apply, but which necessarily "fragment" the
person we are attempting to understand into these stereotypical represen-
tational forms. It is these a priori forms which must be the answer to the
question of what makes society possible, or as he puts it:
Now, the question is: What lies then, universally and a priori at the basis,
what presuppositions must be operative, in order that the particular concrete
procedures in the individual consciousness may actually be processes of social-
ization; what elements are contained in them which make it possible that the
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product of the elements is, abstractly expressed, the construction of the indi-
vidual into a societary unity? (1910: 377; emphasis in the original)
The phrasing is awkward, but the answer turns out to be simple.
Within a sphere which has any sort of community of calling or of interests,
every member looks upon every other, not in a purely empirical way, but
on the basis of an a priori which this sphere imposes upon each conscious-
ness which has part in it. In the circles of officers, of church members, of
civil officials, of scholars, of members of families, each regards the other
under the matter of course presupposition-this is a member of my group.
(Sirnrnel 1910: 380)
We recognize others as members of the same group- a notion we will re-
encounter shortly in the writings of Franklin Giddings, one of the found-
ing American sociologists, under the name "consciousness of kind."
For Simmel, these presuppositions are what is constitutive of socie-
ty-what "makes society possible." But there is a large problem here: this
is a transcendental argument, an argument about the conceptual condi-
tions for something, namely the specific belief and concepts that Simmel
assumes are conditions for social life. But the argument is a causal one,
about how something is produced or originates in something else. And
the something else that is produced is a teleological fact. How can all this
work? The causal part is explicit: "From the common basis of life certain
suppositions originate." Simmel of course does not explain how these
suppositions originate out of common life, any more than Kant explained
where the categories came from. The transcendental argument is this: so-
ciety happens, and for it to happen there must be shared presuppositions,
such as those about vocations, through which people organize their un-
derstanding of others in order to be genuinely socially related to others;
this unavoidable, quite automatically operative presupposition is one of
the means of bringing his personality and reality in the representation of
another up to the quality and form demanded of his sociability (Soziabil-
itat). The teleological element is produced out the causal interdependence
of the elements of social life through a transformation:
The causal interdependence which weaves each social element into the be-
ing and doing of every other, and thus brings into existence the external
network of society, is transformed into a teleological interdependence, so
soon as it is considered from the side of its individual bearers, its produc-
ers, who feel themselves to be egos, and whose attitude grows out of the
soil of the personality which is self-existing and self-determining. (Simrnel
1910: 391)
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How a causal process gets "transformed" in this way is also not explained.
So there are three conflicting explanatory ideas here: presupposition,
causal process, and teleology. Presuppositions are there because it would
be impossible for something to be true if the presuppositions were not al-
so true. The relation is logical, not causal or teleological. Causes cannot
produce presuppositions. So there has to be some other way that they get
there. And the "there" in this account is the shared mental world pro-
duced by socialization.
The Standard Social Science Model and Its Enemies
Simmel's is one path to the "Standard Social Science Model." The general
form of the model is this: individuals internalize culture. Culture consists
of such things as norms and values. For sociologists, this is the familiar
model of functionalism, in which shared values, what Parsons called the
central value system, or what his successors now call culture, habitus, and
the like, have an identifiable social or collective purpose, reproduce them-
selves, and which the members of the society are "socialized" into or "in-
troject" or otherwise internalize, and have the form of presuppositions or
a priori truths. The model is that there is a set of norms or a culture out
there in "society" that gets inserted into people's heads via socialization,
and the individuals in society use this culture or enact it. It is programmed
into them. Culture is internally coherent, varies widely between different
societies, and is largely unconstrained by biology in the sense of instincts,
biological patterns of morality, and so on.
This model was itself a reaction, a reaction to a previous form of so-
cial science that worked with a different set of ideas. In the period before
the institutionalization of sociology- before the first chairs of sociology
and the first national sociology societies, there was an international net-
work of sociologists. "Sociology" as it then existed was an activity carried
on part-time by thinkers with interests in ethics, progress, the possibilities
of socialism and anarchism, world peace, and the philosophy of history
who understood it in terms of progress, and with the overarching problem
of how to reconcile Darwinism with socialism, or with the general fact of
man's dependence on others. The problem of man's social nature was thus
developed through the critique of the "nature red in tooth and claw" view
of Darwin. In its place, they developed an alternative image of social na-
ture as biologically rooted, characterized by interdependencies, forward
looking in the sense that individuals sacrificed for the future of the group,
and pacific. Among the classics of the period were the writings of Kro-
potkin on mutual aid (1902), rooted in his participation in field studies of
animal life, and Espinas on animal society ([1877] 1924). One aspect of
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this literature that stands out is its more or less consistent rejection of the
idea of a group mind. Giddings, who was a major progenitor of what was
to become standard American statistical sociology, is explicit about this:
"Literally there is no 'group mind' or 'social mind'." Such things as "the
medieval mind" were properly understood as "a prevailing attitude and
usual performance" at a given time and place, which was the product of
"reacting at a given time to a common situation or circumstance, and per-
haps interacting to one another" (1922: 154).
The term "interact" is the tell-tale phrase here, and it points to two
radical differences with the standard social science model, and to a general
difference in explanatory strategy. As we see with Simmel (though Durk-
heim or Boas could be used as examples as well), the standard social sci-
ence model works backwards from the things it wants to explain to de-
termine the conditions for the possibility of the thing it wants explained,
and arrives at the result that there is something collective and mental, a
"culture" if not a group mind, which does the explaining. The problem is
then to account for how this mind or culture interacts with or gets into
the head of the child so that it is shared. For Giddings, the problem is
quite different: it is to explain how the apparent commonalities of reac-
tion-the prevailing attitudes and usual performances, came to occur in
the first place, and to prevail.
The explanatory approach, in short, was a ground-up one. Any an-
swer to the problem of commonalities of behavior or attitudes among
people had to come from more elementary processes or facts, and they
had to be the result of a causal process rather than derived transcendental-
ly as a condition for the possibility of some outcome. The two distinctive
ways in which this approach proceeded involved an interest in child de-
velopment and in interaction as the way in which prevailing attitudes were
sustained and developed. They did not reject the idea that there were such
facts as the special attitudes prevailing in the medieval period to be ex-
plained. They regarded appeals to the Medieval Mind understood as a
group mind or a shared collective. set of presuppositions to be a ground-
less short cut, a point to which we will return.
The alternative approach through the problem of child development
produced a distinctive result. Recall Simmel's claim that we know our own
ego. This was a staple of the Kantian approach, and of phenomenology
which followed it. The problem of other minds was a problem to be
solved by the existence of necessary presuppositions, which the sociolo-
gist could illuminate. The approach of students of childhood development
stressed the idea that there was a sequence of developmental stages that
produced the opposite result. James Mark Baldwin, the American psy-
chologist who pioneered this approach based on the observation of his
own children (a practice that was soon copied by other early social think-
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ers, notably, as we will see, C. H. Cooley), argued the following in his ac-
count of the "dialectic of personal growth":
My thought of self is in the main, as to its character as a personal self,
filled up with my thought of others, distributed variously as individuals;
and my thought of others, as persons, is mainly filled up with my thought
of myself. In other words, but for certain minor distinctions in the filling,
and for certain compelling distinctions between that which is immediate
and that which is objective, the ego and the alter are to our thought one
and the same thing. (Baldwin [1902] 1906; quoted in Giddings 1922: 162)
This suggested, in the context of child studies, that the self, the ego, is a
by-product and late development out of a social or interactive process,
and not the starting point from which the ego, aware fundamentally only
of its own consciousness, constructs the social world, as Simmel suggests,
namely by presupposing the consciousness of other minds and acquiring
such things as shared presuppositions.
These writings produced a vast secondary literature, a philosophical
literature on the problem of what is prior in the creation of the self, and
on the nature of the social world out of which the child's self arises. Much
of the dispute over such claims focused on the problem of the ego itself,
and on forms of the homunculus problem. It was difficult to imagine or
theorize about the fundamental starting point of the child, the point at
which the child begins to process inputs from the social environment,
without imagining some sort of processor with a list of capacities that al-
lowed them to process-meaning a homunculus, a little human within the
human, a scientist in the crib, which was already an ego or something
close to it.
The second distinctive aspect of this approach involved the notion of
interaction itself. For the "no-group mind" thinkers, the subject matter
to be accounted for by such notions as "society," culture, and the like
were fundamentally the product of interaction. Variants of "inter" terms
appear very early in Gabriel Tarde, where they are specifically understood
as alternatives to the Durkheimian-Kantian picture of shared presupposi-
tions. The group mind appears in the writings of these interactionist
thinkers as a summary notion for all of the accounts in which there is
something akin to collective belief or collective intentionality: for them
the term pointed to the central embarrassment for these accounts, the fact
they depended on the collective. And writers like Durkheim played their
part in making this distinction, complaining, as Durkheim himself did,
when the term social psychology, associated with Tarde, was used instead
of collective psychology.
The source of diversity for interactionist thinkers was not hypothet-
ical choices of presuppositions or values, as in the Kantian approach, but
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differences in the circumstances, and especially the social interactions that
produced the beliefs and conduct of the people doing the interacting. One
could construct a basic sketch of the answers to the same kinds of ques-
tions that had animated the Kantian approach with these premises. As
Giddings put it, individuals related to themselves and the environment in
terms of stimulus and response. There were responses that led to agree-
ment, and those that diverged. Similar responses would be recognized as
similar- people would come to consciousness of kind, consciousness of
their similarity to others. Divergent responses in turn produced different
types, which could then become the basis of the consciousness of new
kinds. The similarities produce social cohesion; the differences allow for a
division of labor. Over time, selection analogous to Darwinian selection
and the approvals and disapprovals that result from consciousness of kind
select for types or solidaristic groupings that are adequate. The only tele-
ology here is blind selection.
Theories like these, and there were many, with many variations, had
the advantage of not appealing to problematic entities. "Consciousness of
kind" as a psychological mechanism was not implausible, and easily illus-
trated. And a story could be told about how consciousness of kind, to-
gether with the phenomenon of like liking like, could lead to behavioral
conformity and then to concerted action (Giddings 1922: 117). Jam es
Mark Baldwin and Tarde stressed imitation, for which the same was true.
In addition there was a plethora of other mechanisms equally plausible
and easily illustrated: habit, instinct, herd habit, sympathy, empathy, and
impression. Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man (1874), supplied a list
of his own which fit this list closely: group cohesion, sympathy as a basis
for group cohesion, the importance of fidelity and unselfish courage, and
the importance of praise and blame in bringing these about (Giddings
1922: 7)
The Revival
So why did this apparently promising starting point peter out to nothing,
and why did the standard social science model win out by the end of the
1920s? The answer to this question is complex. What has changed since
1900 on the side of brain science and developmental psychology is the list
of processes and facts that can be used to match. Changes on the side of
social theory have lengthened the list of things to match with, but at the
same time confused the question of what needs to be matched. Contem-
porary neuroscience applications to social science do not help matters
much: most of the interesting work is being done in neuro-economics,
where the target theory, namely rational choice egoism, is clear. The tar-
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get in social theory, other than the standard social science model, is not
clear. There are many concepts in the tradition of social theory, however,
that fall outside or have a problematic relation to the standard social sci-
ence model.
Nevertheless, a few distinctions are clear. Empathy, simulation, mir-
roring, Verstehen, sympathetic introspection, taking the role of the other,
learning, habit, and similar concepts go together. Norms, "society," cul-
ture, sharing frameworks, and "socialization" as "internalization of
norms" also go together: they are what makes up the standard social sci-
ence model, as well as a large part of the philosophical literature con-
cerned with normativity, where they are combined with ideas like collec-
tive intentionality and shared presuppositions. The division is related to
others-between conceptual and non-conceptual, embodied and ideal,
implicit and explicit, and so forth.
These two families of concepts don't mix with each other very well.
Each has some claim to matching with the neuroscience and developmen-
tal literature. Each also has some claim to account for the relevant "social"
facts, or to provide sufficient mechanisms to account for them. Similarly
for the philosophically relevant material, such as "meanings." Whether
there is something that neither group of concepts can account for-and
what in fact is needed to account for these things-is a source of intense
dispute today as it was in the past. Yet there is also some bleeding be-
tween the categories, and there are terms used, sometimes in a naive way,
without attention to the differences between the two families. Michael
Tomasello and Melinda Carpenter (2005), for example, discuss empathy
and helping or altruistic behavior, which they show to begin very early, in
the prelinguistic and presumably preconceptual stage, but suggest that the
cooperative behavior they describe is an example of shared or collective
intending. Whether there is an empirical difference between the two, or
even whether the notion of shared intention is a meaningful term, is an
open question which the data they present do not decide. And this is
characteristic of these discussions. It is routinely the case that different
theoretical accounts can be revised to square with the data. It is also rou-
tinely the case that there are questions about what suffices as an explana-
tion and what it is that needs to be explained. In many of these discus-
sions, there is an issue about explanatory gaps, in which an explanation is
claimed to fail to close the gap between the explainer and the fact to be
explained. 2
So what does the evidence show now? Experiments are always sub-
ject to interpretation, but some general results are relevant. In the first
place, the general idea of concern to international sociology at the end of
For an extensive discussion of this problem as it relates to normativity, see Turner
2010.
364
the nineteenth century, the idea that there was a vast amount of pro-
social, altruistic behavior built into normal human instinctual behavior, is
amply confirmed. It is worth recalling that this focus was jettisoned by
later social psychology and later sociological theory in favor of a focus on
attitudes and values as the main drivers of behavior. Tomasello (2009)
and others have identified a vast array of altruistic and helping behavior,
which appears in infants. Evidence from neuro-economics points to the
role of oxytocin in trust, which is behavior that overrides the rational cal-
culation of outcomes characteristic of prisoner's dilemma games. Moreo-
ver, the results allow for finer grained distinctions. Cooperation itself
produces pleasure, and exploitation produces pain-beyond any external
benefits or costs of cooperation or exploitation. Oxytocin operates by af-
fecting exploitation aversion and trust-but not through any effect on
risk aversion. This literature also found that punishing free riders was a
source of pleasure, above and beyond any costs or benefits to the punisher.
A crucial finding of the development literature confirms C.H. Coo-
ley's idea of the looking glass self, and puts the looking glass phenomenon
at an early spot in the developmental process. In general, knowing or re-
sponding to (for example by recognizing and distinguishing) other minds
and acts goes hand in hand with performing those acts or being able to in-
trospect on those topics. When children learn about themselves, they also
learn about others, and learn the two in parallel. But what they do tacitly
and what they do explicitly or discursively turn out to be two different
things. At a very young age they become capable of detecting the inten-
tions of other people, and even of detecting false beliefs (Onishi and Bail-
largeon 2005; Baillargeon et al 2010; Choi and Luo 2015). Children as
young as 18 months could sense others' desires when they made faces
(Repacholi and Gopnik 1997). Before three, they learn about love, percep-
tion, desire, but can't answer questions about false beliefs and issues about
belief (this requires additional skills or cognitive capacities, including
... at least three processes: (i) a false-belief-representation process, carried
out by SS2 in the psychological-reasoning system (children must represent
the agent's false belief); (ii) a response-selection process (when asked the
test question, children must access their representation of the agent's false
belief to select a response) and (iii) a response-inhibition process (when se-
lecting a response, children must inhibit any prepotent tendency to answer
the test question based on their own knowledge). (Baillargeon et al 2010:
113-15)
She goes on to argue that
Spontaneous-response tasks, by contrast, involve only the false-belief-
representation process. Young children fail elicited-response tasks because
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 simultaneously executing the false-belief-representation, response- about? But raising this question raises many questions about the relation
selection, and response-inhibition processes overwhelms their limited re- of actual mental processes to speech and also to consciousness that prove
sources, and/or because the connections between the brain regions that to be perplexing to all parties to these discussions. The phenomenology
serve these processes are still inefficient. (Baillargeon et al 2010: 113-15) or subjective aspect is especially puzzling. In some of these cases, such as
the groups for whom discussion of intentions is frowned upon, there
And suggests a developmental explanation: must be a conscious subjective sense of the intentions of others. But does
the infant whose expectations are confounded have this kind of conscious
... it could be that, in early childhood, the response-selection process has subjective experience? And if subjective experience does not more or less
difficulty tapping the false-belief-representation process (SS2) because the directly mirror brain processes, what is its status, and what is its role in
connections between the relevant brain regions are still immature. (Baillar-
the developmental process? In these cases, the three things, brain process-
geon et al 2010: 113-15)
es, subjective experience, and verbal reporting seem to pull apart. In what
follows I will give some examples from the history of social theory in
Verbalization follows its own developmental path, and typically this in-
which these differences seem to matter, and give rise to puzzles.
volves applying concepts to the self and to others at the same develop-
mental point. The ego could not be talked about until others could be
talked about. From three to five they learn how to talk about beliefs and
Giddings' Alternative
sources of knowledge, the rudiments of mind; after five they learn how to
talk about their own and others' traits. But the verbalization of these
"Consciousness of kind," Giddings's centerpiece concept, was dust
things lags what they know, as indicated by other means, such as studies
binned in favor of attitude concepts in the 1920s. The difference between
of the violation of expectations, expectations which can be made evident
the two kinds of concepts can be summarized thus: attitudes were under-
by the increased attention the inarticulate infant pays to novel events.
These lags are ubiquitous. Small children are not good at reporting their stood to be the kinds of mental contents that were accessible and reporta-
ble, and thus measurable. It was also assumed that they were determinants
own desires or when they were satiated, even at three (Gopnik and
of action. They were not understood to be quite rational-indeed, racial
Slaughter 1991), though obviously they have desires and are satiated be-
fore three. Also, if they could not identify the sources of knowledge for "prejudice" was the paradigm case of an attitude. The promise of produc-
ing attitude change through psychological techniques was a major basis
others, they could not themselves report their sources of knowledge: this
for the funding of the "behavioral sciences" in the postwar period. Con-
too seems to be a discursive skill, a reporting skill, rather than a fact about
sciousness of kind was pitched at a different level, just beyond stimulus
their own knowledge (O'Neill and Chong 2001).
The ego depicted by Simmel, prior to social life and given access to and response itself. The term consciousness is perhaps misleading in a way
Giddings did not intend: when he actually constructed a measure of it, he
social life only through the subsequent (and inexplicable) acquisition of
was testing something akin to implicit bias, by asking people to allocate
presuppositions about social life, does not exist in this spectrum of devel-
opmental stages. The ego with its own self-identifiable, verbalizable, traits emigration quotas to different ethnic groups. It did not mean "having a
racial ideology," nor did it need to be as conscious as an "attitude," which
does not exist until the child is school age and able to identify the traits of
others. Consciousness of self is, in short, a long process which is thor- is perhaps only partly conscious, but is revealed by more direct means, in
oughly social, but the process of reporting is distinct from, and some- the form of questionnaires which ask more or less direct questions about
opm10ns.
times appears much later, than tacit social understanding. Indeed, in some
So how do self-reported, explicit, attitudes fare in comparison to the
cultures, speculation about the intentions of others is disapproved of, and
implicit responses that are detectable in experiments concerned with im-
explicit intentional evaluation takes place later than among children in the
plicit bias and group distinctions? Consciousness of kind, in the implicit
West. An obvious issue here, which clearly affects arguments in philoso-
sense, turns out to be highly detectable using methods that deal with re-
phy like Brandom's denial that such things as intentions can precede
sponses that are too fast to involve deliberation. In American research on
speech, is this: without some sort of tacit basis for recognizing what
implicit racial bias, comparisons of responses to stimuli using black and
speech is about, in this case the intentions of others, how would one learn
white faces as primes, for example, produce such results as this: both
the language of intention in the first place? If talk about intention can be
black and white subjects are more likely to correctly identify a gun and
tabu, how could there not be knowledge of intentions for the tabu to be

366 367
more likely to misidentify a tool as a gun, and are quicker to "shoot" at,
armed Blacks than Whites and more likely to shoot unarmed Blacks than
unarmed Whites (Amodio and Mendoza 2010: 357). Here, and elsewhere,
we find a discrepancy with attitudes: detection of implicit biases using
such methods as startle eye-blink amplitudes were unrelated to self-
reported racial attitudes. There were also results that supported Gid-
dings's idea that people like people who are like themselves: Blacks re-
sponded negatively, and Whites positively, to White face primes (Amodio
and Mendoza 2010: 358). This body of research is underpinned with
fMRI analysis as well. Giddings' own attempt to measure consciousness
of kind was an attempt to solve the problem that later became an im-
portant part of the discussion of attitudes-the attitude action problem
(LaPiere 1934). The study he proposed asked the respondents to take an
action. But of course he had no access to the neural determinants or pre-
cursors to action. And this leads to a novel problem: what is the relation
of implicit bias as measured in these neuroscience ways to action? Or to
the subjective feelings that we would normally regard as involving bias,
prejudice, or negative attitudes? As we will see, this is a bigger and more
pervasive problem than it might seem, and one which is especially rekvant
and perhaps important in "social" contexts.
The Empathy Family
Two other classical social theorists who fall outside the standard social
science model also say things that fit with cognitive neuroscience: George
H. Mead and Max Weber. Weber explicitly appealed to empathy, and used
it in a very broad way. Mead presents a more puzzling case. Mead was in-
fluenced by the functional psychology of John Dewey and was Dewey's
junior collaborator in the 1890s when his arguments against the stimulus
response model were being formulated. The point of functional psycholo-
gy, which had a vogue in later philosophy of cognitive science, was that
the usual sequential divisions of psychological phenomenon did not make
sense, that action was an adaptive process that needed to be understood
holistically and in terms of what it did. This general idea is what led to
Mead's later lectures that came to be taken up as his social psychology.
His account of this process included such notions as the mental rehearsal
of courses of action prior to action; consciousness of kind was taken to be
more fundamental, evidenced by behavior, shared with animals, but not
necessarily part of consciousness in the phenomenological sense, except
indirectly, and not a presupposition or reportable attitude. As we will see
in the conclusion, this apparently minor difference has some large conse-
368
quences for our sense of what is accessible hermeneutically or phenome-
nologically.
The part of this account that fits with a large but controversial body
of later thinking is the idea of rehearsal or simulation. Simulation theo-
rists argue that the brain runs through courses of action "off-line," and, in
effect, chooses actions based on the outcomes of these off-line simula-
tions. This simulating is done on a preconscious level, though one can
consciously simulate, and it is also basic to understanding others, because
in assessing the intentions and meanings of the actions of others, we can
(and according to the simulation account do) tacitly simulate in our own
minds the actions and through this infer the associated emotions, ex-
pected outcomes, and so forth. Simulation is a means of understanding
others through using ourselves as instruments of understanding, as a
model for the actions of others we are trying to understand. This fits
Mead's idea of taking the role of the other, and incidentally is a way of
dealing with the kinds of social cognition that Simmel focused on: under-
standing the actions of people in occupational roles.
The problematic part of this account is the homunculus: Mead's ac-
count operates on conscious action, and applies it analogically. We do not
consciously take the role of the police we obey. But for Mead we act as if
we are doing so: as if we have a theory of the role which we unconsciously
apply. The analogical reasoning here is precisely what produces the need
for a presuppositions account. To complete the analogical reasoning, we
need an analogical presuppositions, and an analogical presupposer-a Eu-
clid in the crib-as the homunculus.
Simulation is a broader phenomenon, and one of the purposes of the
simulation account is to eliminate the need for an "as if" here, which re-
quires a homunculus doing such things as constructing a theory of the
minds of others in order to understand them. We do the simulating off-
line on a preconscious, pretheoretical, preconceptual, and tacit level. Like
other mental processes, this is a process that can be intermittently and in-
accurately introspected or monitored, one which we may be able to ar-
ticulate but in which we normally "know more than we can say." Mead's
account veers between a fully simulationist account and the theory-
theory, the alternative to the simulation account in which the problem of
development and understanding other minds is one of the child acquiring
a rudimentary theory of other minds that allows them to make inferences
about the beliefs of others. Learning to take the role of the other seems
like a theoretical task rather than a primary process. Simulation, in con-
trast, is a primary process inseparable from action itself, and indeed the
intervention of simulation in the process is what distinguishes an action
from a response.
369
 With the concept of simulation, as well as empathy, we enter into
deeply controversial territory-but for our purposes crucial territory. The
case for the cultural, presuppositional account of the problem of explain-
ing society I have associated here with Simmel is that conscious, concep-
tual, ideational thought and action-especially the realm of spirit and the
symbolic-cannot be reduced to lower level psychological processes, such
as stimulus and response, and that the only solution to this gap between
the causal and the conceptual is a "conceptual all the way down" account,
involving the kind of analogical projection of theories into the precon-
scious and ending in a kind of transcendental psychology or sociology
that includes the presuppositions necessary for social life as part of the
theory. These presuppositions, where they vary, are "cultural": this gets
us the standard social science model.
The key question, then, is this: does the controversial family of em-
pathy related concepts provide us with a genuine alternative to this mod-
el? In psychology, accounts which seem to bear on the Kantian problem
of the a priori have the same kind of interest. The baby experiments of
James and Eleanor Gibson, which show that young infants do not need to
learn not to crawl off the edge of a table, also suggest that the experienced
world is one which comes pre-equipped, so to speak, with handles, which
tell us what we can do with them. Indeed, the term J. J. Gibson intro-
duced for these handles, affordances (1977), is widely used by present day
Kantians such as Robert Brandom (1994, 2009) and John McDowell
(1994).
Is there a strong neuroscience basis for any of these potential ana-
logues? Empathy has gained a great deal of attention because of the dis-
covery, in macaque monkeys, of mirror neurons, a small group of neurons
that connects to both the action system and the perceptual system. Some-
thing analogous occurs in humans, though it is not clear that it works in
the same way, and there is a partiality problem: even if there is some mir-
ror neuron involvement, much more needs to be added to account for the
totality of the functional phenomenon and the subjective experience that
is associated with it (Decety and Lamm 2006; Hickock 2009, 2014). 3
The "mirroring" is this: the same neural paths and neurons are acti-
vated both when a person acts and when they see an action taking place:
they link the perceptual and action systems, though there is much that is
puzzling about what is actually going on here (Hickok 2009; Filimon et
al. 2015). However, to some extent, people respond sympathetically or
empathically to seeing actions that are painful, and fMRI evidence shows
that the relevant action neurons activate when the pain is observed. For
There are, it should be noted, many skeptics about the role of mirror neurons in
humans as well. For the skeptics, see Hickcok 2009; Dinstein 2008. For the enthu-
siasts, see Rizzolati 2006; Iacoboni 2008; Decety and Ickes (eds.) 2009.
370
some people, however, the brain is wired so that they respond with pleas-
ure to the pain of others-this is the phenomenon of empathic cruelty. It
appears that the areas activated in the case of self-awareness are a subset
of those activated in social awareness or third-person perspective-taking,
which are also (but less strongly) activated at the same time, suggesting
the priority of the social and learned, and that self awareness involves in-
hibitors that separate out the first person perspective (Decety and Lamm
2009: 206; Pfieffer and Dapretto 2009: 186).Both emotional and cognitive
parts of the brain, as well as, and especially, integrative parts, are involved
in empathy, as well as the autonomic system.
Why is this relevant? The point of Simmel's appeal to presupposi-
tions was to account for the fact that we can understand one another-
shared presuppositions was the explanation. If we can account for under-
standing one another directly and as a neural process, we can skip the ap-
peal to presuppositions. Terms for the social bond, such as sympathy, sol-
idarity, empathy, and the like all relate to the same combine of affect,
thought, and understanding. If the mirror neuron system is what some re-
searchers think it is, we will have arrived at a physical match to these con-
cepts. We would find also evidence that there is nothing that corresponds
to the presuppositions model. Presumably the presuppositions model
would imply more reason-like, calculative processing. Even if matters are
more complex, and they certainly are, and even if mirror neurons are not
themselves the prime mechanism, there are brain correlates to sympathy,
solidarity, empathy and the like, which involve activation of a number of
parts of the brain, a pattern that differs from the pattern of calculative
reasonmg.
The Puzzles
When we come to affect, disgust, and such concepts as consciousness of
kind understood as a form of implicit bias, we reach the edges, or go be-
yond the limits of consciousness as it is accessible to phenomenology. It
would be a long excursion to discuss this problem from the inside, so to
speak, in terms of the limits of phenomenologically based reflection. But
we can pose some basic issues. The first is raised by the neuroscience ap-
proach to empathy, which in effect naturalizes and gives a different shape
to the concept but at the same time replaces, without the theoretical and
metaphysical baggage, the model of mutual understanding favored by
phenomenology and neo-Kantianism. The second involves the issue of the
limits of consciousness and therefore of conscious reflection itself. We
tend to think of these as fixed and not determined by the social environ-
ment. But there is good reason to reject this way of thinking, and to re-
371
gard consciousness itself as extremely limited with its limits in part de-
termined by the social environment. I will consider an extreme case of it
below. The two issues here cut in different directions: the implication of
the first is that the explanatory work done by the phenomenological ap-
proach in connection with actual cognition and human interaction can be
done by empathy; the second implies that the conscious and phenomeno-
logically accessible is insufficient to account for such a thing as a practice.
Begin with the difference between empathic responses as measured in
the brain and phenomenology: empathy and phenomenology were histor-
ically opposed, and empathy was opposed also to neo-Kantianism and the
model of the constitution of reality it employed. The antipathy of phe-
nomenology to empathy is especially evident in Schutz's denunciation of
Dilthey, which was done in the name of Weber and was part of Schutz's
own project of providing a proper phenomenological foundation for We-
ber's thinking (Schutz [1932] 1967). But Weber by the end of his career
had embraced empathy-not in the phenomenological sense, but in the
sense of direct understanding. Ideal-types were useful in interpretation,
but only in those cases in which direct interpretation and its near cousin,
indirect interpretation (which involved setting an action in a course of
events) was not possible, such as when the actions or beliefs being inter-
preted were those of an alien culture, or where there was some other pur-
pose, such as understanding strategic errors or modeling economic ration-
ality (Weber [1968] 1978: 1-62). If we accept direct empathy both as a
part of our "scientific" understanding and as a social process between
people we need not accept either the presuppositions model or the phe-
nomenological forms of this model exemplified by Schutz's notion of
"typically comprehended meaning-adequate relations" ([1932] 1967: 233).
The more important issue concerns the limits of consciousness
themselves. What Thomas Metzinger calls the "ego tunnel" (2009) is our
limited capacity to monitor and thematize our own mental processes.
They are not simply repressed, as in psychoanalysis, and available to ther-
apeutic thematization, as Habermas used to say ([1981] 1984-1987: 82).
There is a genuine fact of inaccessibility here. I have argued elsewhere that
our ability to reflect on our assumptions is an illusion: our "assumptions"
are themselves a retrospective theoretical constrnction of a tacit content
that is inaccessible to us (Turner 2012, 2014a, 2014b ). But self-
consciousness itself seems to be limited not only by intrinsic limitations
of the brain, but by tacit socially learned processes. Consciousness of kind
is the example I have discussed here. On one plausible interpretation it is
a case of implicit bias. In studies of implicit bias such things as eye-blinks
are measured as evidence of immediate response to stimuli of various
kinds. The subjects routinely report no conscious bias in cases where the
eye-blinks reveal bias. This suggests that what we are conscious of is part-
372
ly determined by what is socially approved and disapproved of: the denials
of bias represent conformity that is based on some form of tacit learning.
An even more dramatic example that goes even deeper is this: the
discrepancy, for women, between sexual arousal as evidenced in brain pat-
terns and physical changes and the conscious experience of arousal. This
was a case of searching for neural and physiological correlates that pro-
duced a surprising result: the stimulus of erotica, some male produced,
some female produced, resulted in strong genital arousal response, but not
in a subjective experience of arousal, and indeed, in the case of erotica
produced by men, despite the genital response, produced feelings of
shame and disgust (Laan et al. 1994; Laan and Everaerd, 1995; Rellini et
al., 2005; Both et al., 2011; Laan and Both 2011 ). The disconnect is clearly
socially learned. Without going into the details of these cases, the implica-
tion is clear: what we experience consciously is constrained and limited, in
these cases very dramatically, by tacit social learning.
Tacit social learning is by definition outside the reach of conscious-
ness and therefore of phenomenology. One cannot get a transcendental
account of an experience one does not have. Hermeneutic readings of
texts can read between the lines. But they cannot read where there are no
lines. Yet the tacitly learned responses, which are called "automatic asso-
ciations" in this literature, and treated as following "from the direct acti-
vation of simple associations in memory," to distinguish them from "ex-
plicit cognitions" (Borg et al. 2010: 2150), are the very stuff of "practice."
And we can only access them as "naturalistic" facts. This does not mean
we cannot constrnct a hermeneutic phenomenological approach of the
sort proposed by Ginev. But it does mean that practice cannot be fully
understood within it.
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376
Maja Soboleva
Animal rationale und animal symbolicum:
Was heit es rational zu sein?
Philosophie ist wie bekannt aus Staunen geboren worden. Aus dem Stau-
nen i.iber die Ordnung und Gesetzmaigkeit der Welt und aus dem Stau-
nen i.iber die eigene Fahigkeit des Menschen, diese Ordnung der Natur
und diese ihre Gesetzmaigkeit erkennen zu konnen. Die Selbstbewunde-
rung des Menschen fand ihren Ausdruck in der Selbstbestimmung des
Menschen als animal rationale. Die Rationalitat ist in dieser Definition
zur dijferentia specifica geworden, zu dem Merkmal, das uns, Menschen,
von allen anderen Lebewesen unterscheiden sol! und uns einer gottlichen,
perfekten Macht ebenbi.irtig macht.
Trotz seiner scheinbaren Verstandlichkeit und weitverbreiteten Ver-
wendung besteht sowohl im Alltagsleben als auch in der Philosophie we-
nig Klarheit dari.iber, was mit dem Begriff ,Rationalitat' gemeint ist. In
ji.ingster Zeit ist Rationalitat wieder zum Brennpunkt einer Debatte in der
Handlungstheorie, der Philosophie des Geistes und in der philosophi-
schen Anthropologie geworden. Zu den Problemstellungen der Hand-
lungstheorie gehoren Fragen wie etwa die, worin verni.inftige Handlungs-
gri.inde bestehen oder was unter rationaler Entscheidung und
Zwecksetzung zu verstehen ist. Die Philosophie des Geistes befasst sich
mit Fragen nach dem phanomenalen Charakter unserer Erlebnisse, nach
dem Verhaltnis von Rationalitat, Volition und Emotionalitat, von Urteils-
fahigkeit und Sprachfahigkeit oder danach, was es heit, in Sprache und
Denken auf Gegenstande Bezug zu nehmen. Die philosophische Anthro-
pologie umfasst Themenbereiche wie Bewusstsein und <lessen normative
Grundlage, Denken und Wertorientierung, Denken und Handeln.
Die gemeinsame Frage, die den Hintergrund fiir alle diese Fragestel-
lungen bildet und zu klaren ist, kann man folgendermaen formulieren:
Was kann als Rationalitatskriterien gelten. Welche Voraussetzungen muss
ein Lebewesen erfiillen, um rational genannt werden zu konnen? Die i.ibli-
che Forderung ist die Forderung nach Bewusstsein und den sogenannten
intentionalen Zustanden und je nach Theorie auch die Forderung nach
Sprachfahigkeit und logisch-begrifflichen Denken.
377
 Das interpretative Universum
Dimitri Ginev zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet

Herausgegeben von
Paula Angelova
Jassen Andreev
Emil Lensky

I
I
Die Herausgeber:
:I
Paula Angelova ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der U niversitat Sofia.
Sie hat Texte in Divinatio, Problems of Sociology, Philosophical Alternatives
veroffemlicht. Mitgliederin in ,,Association pour la promotion de la phenome-
nologie".
Dr. Jassen Andreev is unabhangiger Geleherter. Er war Assistent-Professor !
for Phanomenologie, Hermeneutik und Geschichte der Kultur- und Geistes-
wissenschaften an der Universitat zu Sofia, wo er von 2003 bis 2011 lehrte. Er
ist Verfasser von zahlreichen Aufsatzen in Studia Culturologica, Studia Phae-
nomenologica, Phanomenologie, Divinatio und Problems of Sociology, sowie
Kapitel von Sammelbanden. Er war Mitbegriinder der internationalen Zeit-
schrift ,,Studia Culturologica". Zusammen mit Professor Ginev hat er zwei
imernationale Forschungsprojekte zur Identitatskrise der Ku!turwissenschaften
orgranisiert.
Dr. Emil Lensky ist freier Autor und Publizist, der sich seit mehr als 10 Jahren
mit der Entwicklung der Doktrin vom kognitiven Existenzialismus engagiert.
Veroffentlichungen in Philosophische Rundschau, Estudio Filosoficos und
Sammelbanden. Konigshausen & Neumann
 Inhaltsverzeichnis

Vorwort .......................................................................................................... 9

Geschichtlichkeit und Traditionsbildung in der Philosophie.

Jean Grondin
Entering the hermeneutical circle also means
that one wants to get out of it ..................................................................... 17

Gunter Scholtz
Interpretation und Tatsache.
Uberlegungen im Ausgang von Boeckh und Droysen ............................... 27

Gudrun Kuhne-Bertram
Wilhelm Diltheys Begriff der Philosophie ................................................. .47

Helmuth Vetter
Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger
Bibliografische Information der De1ttschen Nationalbibliothek
und Heideggers Antisemitismus ................................................................. 67
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet Renato Cristin
tiber http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.
Tradition in Husserl's phenomenological thought .................................. 121

Nicholas Rescher
Verlag Konigshausen & Neumann GmbH, Wilrzburg 2017
Prismatic Pragmatism ................................................................................. 131
Gedruckt auf saurefreiem, alterungsbestandigem Papier
Umschlag: skh-softics I coverart Alfredo Marini
Umschlagabbildung: Frank Rohde: Futuristic background design illustration;
#71859199 Fotolia.com
Bewusstsein als Verengung. Freiheit, Moglichkeit
Bindung: docupoint GmbH, Magdeburg und Zeit bei Nicolai Hartmann ................................................................. 151
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about Deleuze ............................................................................................. 167
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