New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

New Ideas in Psychology

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/
newideapsych

Intersubjectivity and egocentrism: Insights from the

relational perspectives of Piaget, Mead, and Wittgenstein
Jeremy I.M. Carpendale*, Timothy P. Racine
Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Ave, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada

a b s t r a c t

Keywords: Beginning with Piaget’s concept of egocentrism, we explicate

Egocentrism a view of differentiating and coordination perspectives on which
Meaning language and cognition are based by also drawing on insights from
Perspective-taking
Mead and Wittgenstein. The concept of egocentrism is linked to
Mead
Piaget
Piaget’s view of knowledge and development. In overcoming
Wittgenstein egocentrism, infants differentiate the world from their action. We
extend a Piagetian approach to overcoming egocentrism with
regard to children’s social knowledge by drawing on Mead’s view
that minds and selves emerge from the social process. Children
must take the role of others for selves to emerge, a process that is
rooted in interaction, requiring sufficient experience with others to
be able to anticipate others’ response or attitude to their act. Then
the self can respond to one’s own act as the other would. From
Piaget’s perspective, these are schemes or patterns of action that
develop with repeated experience. From Wittgenstein’s perspec-
tive, these patterns are embedded in forms of life; natural ways of
reacting to and interacting with others that are characteristic of
our species. Overcoming egocentrism or developing perspective
taking is required for understanding and for human forms of
cognition.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The ability to understand and coordinate perspectives with others is a foundational skill on which
language and culture are based; thus, it is an essential aspect of what it means to be human. This raises
the question of how human infants come to understand that they have a perspective that differs from

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 604 291 5483.

E-mail address: jcarpend@sfu.ca (J.I.M. Carpendale).

0732-118X/$ – see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2010.03.005
 J.I.M. Carpendale, T.P. Racine / New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354 347

that of others. Piaget’s concept of egocentrism is linked to this problem and we address this issue by
drawing on three scholarsdPiaget, Mead, and Wittgensteindwho, although they may differ greatly in
their respective focus and motivations, have contributed to what we will call a relational conceptu-
alization of understanding. Much can be gained from explicating and interpreting important aspects of
their work in this light.
Currently, there is a great deal of interest in the question of how infants come to understand others’
perspectives. Research on social development in infancy is now discussed in terms of infants’ emerging
ability to share attention with others, referred to as joint attention. Many approaches take what we
consider an individualistic perspective based either on simulation, acquiring an insight about other
people, or on the assumption that this ability is based on the maturation of innate modules. Elsewhere
we have critiqued these positions (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004, 2006; Racine & Carpendale, 2007a,
2007b); here we elaborate a relational approach to infant social development.
We begin with the notion of egocentrism, a central concept in Piagetian theory that follows from
Piaget’s constructivist view of knowledge and development. According to Piaget, “early childhood
egocentrism is the unconscious confusion of one’s own point of view with that of the other” (Piaget,
1977/1995, p. 279), or “a lack of differentiation of the self from its surroundings” (p. 305). These are
slightly different definitions in that the first refers to the infant’s lack of awareness of having
a perspective, and development involves a process of coming to understand that she and others have
points of view and that they differ. The second concerns knowledge of the physical world and the
infant’s lack of differentiation of her own action from the world. In this article we extend a Piagetian
approach to the issue of infant social development and draw on Mead and Wittgenstein in explicating
the process of how forms of understanding are rooted in shared practices. If overcoming egocentrism
involves the ability to differentiate and coordinate others’ perspectives in a social sense, then it will be
related to social understanding and language. Thus, the concept of egocentrism is central in child
development.

1. Individualistic versus relational interpretations of egocentrism

Piaget felt that the notion of egocentrism was so misunderstood that he instead emphasized the
idea of centration and the development of decentration. One reason that the concept of egocentrism
tends to be misunderstood is that it is linked to and follows from the particular view of knowledge on
which Piaget based his work, and it can mean something quite different if assimilated to different
epistemological frameworks (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004, 2006; Jopling, 1993; Müller & Carpendale,
2004; Overton, 1994; Racine & Carpendale, 2007b). Such general frameworks can be grouped into
two families: individualistic and relational. From the individualistic perspective, or what Jopling (1993)
labels the philosophy of subjectivity, the starting point is the individual self and her own inner
experience from which the social and physical world are derivatively understood. Thus, the problem is
how the individual comes to understand and communicate with other minds. This framework seems
evident in Descartes and some approaches in cognitive science. In contrast, from the relational
perspective, or what Jopling refers to as the philosophy of intersubjectivity, development begins with
the infant’s activity, and the infant’s understandings of self, other, and the world are gradually
differentiated out of this activity. That is, relations to the physical and social world are not derivative
but primary and self and mind are a developmental outcome. The problem here is the simpler one of
coordination and integration of experience rather than the philosophically complex problem of early
introspection and understanding minds via analogy. This framework is assumed by scholars such as
Piaget, Mead, and Wittgenstein, as well as by some approaches in embodied cognitive science.
From the perspective of an individualistic epistemological framework, being egocentric is to be
aware of your own perspective but not that of others. That is, the individual’s own perspective is
assumed as a given. In everyday use the word is used to refer to someone who thinks only about
himself. Piaget’s concept of egocentrism has often been interpreted in this way due to being assimi-
lated to an individualistic framework, even though Piaget explicitly tried to block this interpretation.
From Piaget’s relational perspective, in contrast, the infant begins with no awareness of different
perspectives or of the fact that she has a perspective at alldthis gradually develops. So, for Piaget,
egocentrism is “narcissism without a Narcissus” (Piaget, 1970/1972, p. 21). That is, infants focus on their
348 J.I.M. Carpendale, T.P. Racine / New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354

own perspective because they have no awareness of differing perspectives. It is “the unconscious
primacy of the subject’s own point of view, lacking discovery of the diversity of viewpoints and, even
more, lacking the ability to coordinate them” (Piaget, 1977/1995, p. 306). In contrast to the individu-
alistic perspective, Piaget began from a radically different epistemological framework, and Piaget’s
concept of egocentrism only makes sense from the perspective of a relational perspective; or rather, it
only makes the sort of sense that Piaget intended from this perspective.
The individualistic framework is linked to a view of knowledge as based on perceptual recordings of
the external worldda process of making a copy of the world. A number of problems with this common
view of knowledge have been pointed out. For example, Piaget (1970/1972) argued that such a view has
difficulty accounting for the emergence of novel forms of knowledge that are not given by immediate
sensory experience. Furthermore, such a “copy theory” of knowledge fails to explain how it is possible
to compare a copy of the world against reality. Such a view already presupposes knowledge in order to
make the copy but does not explain how this knowledge is acquired or how it could be checked because
a copy could only be compared to another copy. As an alternative view of knowledge, Piaget argued that
knowledge, including knowledge of the points of view of others, develops through action on the world.
This view entails a very different starting point in development. Rather than the individual, Piaget
began from the infant’s action on the world: “the young infant relates everything to his body, as if it
were the centre of the universedbut a centre that is unaware of itself” (Piaget, 1970/1972, p. 21). An
infant’s isolated actions such as sucking, looking, and grasping are centred on her own body. Decen-
tration occurs as the infant’s actions on objects become coordinated and “actions are decentred in
relation to the subject’s body” (p. 21). Infants begin from a point of relative lack of differentiation, and
self, object, and other are gradually differentiated out of the infant’s action. This amounts to “a kind of
Copernican revolution” (p. 21) during the infant’s first two years because the infant no longer feels at
the centre of the universe but now recognizes herself as part of a world of other objects. At first, such
decentration and differentiation occur only on the level of the infant’s practical action on the world. At
the same time, however, infants are also developing knowledge of other people.

2. Knowledge of the physical versus social world

Piaget’s work on sensorimotor development focused on infants’ interaction with the physical world
and their construction of schemes concerning objects, time, and causality. Infants develop action
patterns or schemes to do with aspects of their world, and through the coordination of these schemes
gradually develop increasingly complex practical knowledge of the world. The idea of egocentrism has
also been drawn on in social cognitive development, and the development of social understanding has
been thought of as the process of the child overcoming egocentrism and coming to understand others’
perspectives. Piaget and Inhelder’s (1948/1967) research on visual perspective taking with the 3-
mountain task was a starting point for researchers interested in social perspective taking. This led to
the role taking or perspective taking literature, which focused on searching for the age at which
egocentrism declines. But there is no single age at which this happensdit depends on the task. It is not
a generalized ability to take other perspectives that develops. For Piaget there are forms of egocentrism
linked to all levels of development. Taking others’ perspectives might be easy in some situations but
more difficult in other, more complex situations (Carpendale & Lewis, 2006). Development in infancy
involves the infant differentiating her perspective from others, differentiating her own action from the
world, and developing objectivity. These differentiations and developments are needed to even begin
to take part in the 3-mountain task. And even the youngest children in this research had some
recognition that someone else looking at the model of three mountains from a different location would
see something different. However, determining exactly what the other would see is difficult, and the
ability to do this takes some time to develop.
From Piaget’s perspective on infants’ developing knowledge of the physical world, they develop
schemes or patterns of action with repeated experience. Overcoming egocentrism is a way of talking
about the development of knowledge. That is, differentiating the world from one’s own action on the
world and being able to take others’ perspectives are manifestations of forms of knowledge. When the
infant conceives of objects only in terms of her actions on them, she has not yet differentiated the
object from her own action on it. Although the majority of Piaget’s empirical work concerned children’s
 J.I.M. Carpendale, T.P. Racine / New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354 349

developing knowledge of the physical world, he did remark on personal or affective schemes con-
cerning infants’ knowledge of other people and infants’ interactions with others (Piaget, 1945/1962, pp.
205–209). Piaget also noted that the form of interaction infants experience with people differs from
that which they have with objects, and, therefore, they will come to differentiate these two aspects of
their world and develop knowledge of each: “People are, moreover, rapidly distinguished from physical
objects because they, in turn, react and adapt to the child” (Piaget, 1977/1995, p. 291).
Thinking about the process of taking others’ perspectives tends to be viewed in terms of coordi-
nating visual perspectives, much as Piaget had done in research with the 3-mountain task. This is
certainly part of what infants have to learn about, and a great deal of research on joint visual attention
has focused on how infants gradually get better at this perceptual coordination. But because this visual
dimension is so obvious, researchers tend to think it is everything and that learning how to coordinate
visual perspectives with others includes understanding others’ perspectives in the sense of under-
standing their orientation or reaction to events and objects (Akhtar & Gernsbacher, 2008; Hobson,
2009). One way to show that coordinating direction of gaze is insufficient to convey meaning is to
consider research with nonhuman primates. For example, great apes in general are quite good at
looking where others are looking or pointing (Bräuer, Call, & Tomasello, 2005), so they can take
perspectives in this sense. But chimpanzees are not so good at understanding that, for example,
a human is pointing at a bucket to show them where food is located, even though they can look at the
bucket indicated (Hare & Tomasello, 2004). This illustrates that understanding this task is not only
about simple visual perspective taking, but rather presupposes such abilities. In this example, having
a capacity for joint attention necessarily includes having experience in (human) social practices as well
(Leavens, Racine, & Hopkins, 2009). Conversely, if humans are not familiar with the context of
a pointing gesture they will also fail to understand what another means by using such a gesture. That is,
they will fail to understand the others’ psychological attitude despite being quite capable of coordi-
nating visual perspectives in the sense of converging lines of gaze (Carpendale & Lewis, 2008). So, how
is it that infants come to understand others’ perspectives in this sense of understanding the meaning of
others’ attitudes? To address this issue we turn to ideas from George Herbert Mead.

3. George Herbert Mead: the roots of understanding in conversations of gestures

We can elaborate on the idea of egocentrism with regard to children’s social knowledge with ideas
from Mead because Mead also took a relational approach, according to which minds and selves emerge
from communication, not the other way around (Carpendale & Racine, 2006). For Mead (1925, p. 262),
“Selves exist only in relation to other selves.” And this development is grounded in actual interactions.
Developing the ability to understand or take others’ perspectives does not involve a mystical process of
reading minds. For Mead, it is all there in activity; others’ attitudes are manifest in interaction. Suffi-
cient experience in interacting with others is needed in order to be able to anticipate how they will act
in particular situations. Then the self can respond to one’s own act as the other would, taking the self as
a social object. This is the process through which a self emerges. All of this is manifest in actual
interaction; it is not mental in a private, individualistic sense, it is embodied. From Piaget’s perspective,
these are schemes or patterns of action, here, to do with other people, that develop with repeated
experience and gradually become combined.
For Mead (1934), communication begins as organisms form patterns of coordinated actions that he
called conversations of gestures. A gesture in this sense is the beginning of an act that comes to serve as
a signal to another organism of the upcoming act.
There exists thus a field of conduct even among animals below man, which in its nature may be
classed as gesture. It consists of the beginnings of those actions which call out instinctive
responses from other forms. And these beginnings of acts call out responses which lead to
readjustments of acts which have been commenced, and these readjustments lead to still other
beginnings of response which again call out still other readjustments. Thus there is a conver-
sation of gesture, a field of palaver within the social conduct of animals (Mead, 1910, p. 398).
Mead’s examples of conversations of gestures include, a hen’s cluck for her chick and the chick’s
response, a thrust in fencing and the parry response, and a baby crying resulting in her parents
350 J.I.M. Carpendale, T.P. Racine / New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354

responding. These gestures are early indicators of action: “All of these gestures, to the intelligent
observer, are significant symbols, but they are none of them significant to the form that make them”
(Mead, 1922, p. 160). That is, these gestures are understood by othersdthey function to communicate,
but the organism making the gesture does not understand these gestures in the way that another
might. Crying, for a young infant, serves to communicate its distress to its parents. The crying is
meaningful for the parents. Whatever capabilities and forms of understanding might be exhibited by
the crying infant, she clearly is not able to appreciate her actions from her parents’ perspective. In
contrast, an older child may understand the meaning of crying for her parents and may cry with the
intention of attracting attention. These are radically different forms of communication. The first form is
common in animal communication; the second may be the basis for human forms of understanding
(Tomasello, 2008). However, Mead, Piaget and Wittgenstein would agree that intention is not some
private mental state that the infant can experience and by which understand the actions of others. To
say that an action is intentional is to point out a change in the capabilities of an infant or an animal. It is
not to point out some inner revolution in the child that is causally related to the observed pattern of
activity.
From this approach, sharing meaning or understanding others’ perspectives begins in practical
activities as a process of anticipating others’ reactions within routine situations of shared under-
standing. For example, many infants acquire an “arms up” gesture. This likely begins from the infant’s
natural reaction of reaching toward a parent and, because the parent recognizes what the infant wants,
the beginning of the act of reaching toward the parent begins to serve as a signal. The infant’s desire is
manifest in her action and parents respond to this. Infants learn what to expect when they extend their
arms toward their parentdthey get picked up. This is similar to Vygotsky’s (1978) explanation for the
development of pointing gestures to make requests from the infant’s action of reaching. An infant
reaches toward a desired object and the unsuccessful reach is completed by an adult who understands
the goal of the action. The infant’s initial action serves to indicate to the adult what the infant wants
and this gradually becomes a request. Vygotsky’s idea apparently came from Wundt (1897/1973). This
explanation, however, would require modification in order to account for the emergence of other forms
of pointing gestures such as to direct attention, to inform others, or to ask questions. Franco and
Butterworth (1996) criticize Vygotsky’s position. However, they assume that Vygotsky was claiming
that reaching is the origin of all forms of pointing (that is declarative as well as imperative), which does
not follow from his theory.
Further examples of conversations of gestures can be drawn from research with nonhuman
primates. Michael Tomasello (1999) describes the development of gestures in chimpanzees in this way
through a process of social shaping, or what he calls “ontogenetic ritualization.” For example, the “arm
touch” gesture develops as an infant chimpanzee initially moves his mother’s arm so that he can nurse.
Gradually, just the infant’s touch of her arm, the beginning of his action, serves to indicate the meaning
of the act for her, and she moves her arm. These are all forms of interaction in which more complex
forms of understanding can potentially emerge. And the coordination of activity with others in shared
routines provides a foundation for a child’s action to begin to serve as a signal for the parent.
It has been argued that Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin also dealt with these topics that Mead
grappled with and reached the same conclusions as Mead (Farr, 1980). Thus, we turn to Wittgenstein
for further elaboration of the way in which understanding is rooted in shared practices.

4. Wittgenstein, natural reactions and forms of life

From Wittgenstein’s perspective, understanding emerges within particular forms of life or patterns
of interaction that may involve natural reactions within which a child has come to acquire expectations
about what usually happens.
The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction: only from this can more
complicated forms develop.
It is characteristic of our language that the foundation on which it grows consists in steady ways
of acting (Wittgenstein, 1976, p. 420).
 J.I.M. Carpendale, T.P. Racine / New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354 351

These routine ways of acting or mini-customs that are part of human ways of interacting are the
grounds on which an understanding of others is built. For example, human infants and their parents
tend to be happy to see each other. From this natural reaction, a social custom of greeting may develop.
Such a pattern has been described by Canfield (1995) as a proto language game because it provides
a basis on which a language of greeting can occur. Human infants are also helpless to begin with and are
cared for by adults (Portmann, 1944/1990). This problem space they encounter in which others do
things for them leads to the emergence of natural gestures that serve to make requests.
The natural gesture is a stylization of action that occurs in the proto language-game. That is, such
an action is in some way modified, emphasized, or added to, in a way that brings it to the other’s
attention, and thus it becomes a natural gesture. One of the main ways of turning an action into
a gesture by emphasizing it is by performing it in the absence of the interactive behaviours that
normally precede it.. The natural gesture seems to say this: take up the usual interaction
pattern at this point (Canfield, 1995, pp. 199–200, emphasis original).
Like Mead, Wittgenstein insists that such ground level forms of interaction and understanding do
not arise as a result of prior thinking or insight. Rather, as Malcolm (1982) has pointed out, according to
Wittgenstein knowledge is manifest in appropriate action:
if a child has not yet begun to speak, but has learned to respond with discrimination to the
orders, ‘Sit on a chair’ and ‘Sit on a stool’, we are ready to say that the child ‘knows’ that a chair is
a chair and that a stool is not a chair. We are ready to say the same of a dog. The word ‘knows’
merely refers here to that learned discriminative behaviour, not to some mental state that
explains the differential response (Malcolm, 1982, pp. 21–22, emphasis original).
But how far have we got in building on these foundations to understand perspective taking and the
meaning of more complex activities? A dog scratching at a door and then being let into the house is an
example of an activity pattern that has been learned. The dog has learned what happens in this sit-
uationdthe door opens. How is this different from a person knocking at the door? The dog has learned
what happens but does not understand this reciprocally; that is, the dog does not understand the
meaning of its action from the perspective of the person responding. It is this next step to the person
knocking while aware of the potential meaning for others that we have to explain.

5. From conversations of gestures to significant gestures

What we have discussed so far is only a first step in coming to understand others’ perspectives in
a human way; that is, reciprocally. Gestures such as the “arms up” gesture are at first not understood by
the infant from the adult’s perspective. The gesture would not be meaningful to the infant if the infant
observed someone else making it; it is not yet reciprocal or two-sided. That is, even if infants under-
stood the visual orientation of the other, they would not understand the social significance of the
other’s action. The infant is communicating but not intentionally, not in a meaningful sense of
understanding the gesture from the other’s perspective. What has to be explained is the development
of meaning that is common for self and other. This is when the infant becomes aware of the meaning
that was already there for others. This is when gestures become reciprocal or two-sided.
For Mead, in the development of a conversation of gestures the beginning of an action is an indicator
of the upcoming action. A child’s act of reaching is a social stimulus to her parents, but to begin with the
child is not aware of this social fact. This changes when the individual begins to be affected by the
gestures in the way others are.
If the gesture simply indicates the object to another, it has no meaning to the individual who
makes it, nor does the response which the other individual carries out become a meaning to him,
unless he assumes the attitude of having his attention directed by an individual to whom it has
a meaning. Then he takes his own response to be the meaning of the indication (Mead, 1922, p.
161).
Taking the perspective or the attitude of the other in a social and not simply visual sense occurs
when the individual “responds or tends to respond to his own social stimulus as another individual
352 J.I.M. Carpendale, T.P. Racine / New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354

would respond” (Mead, 1922, p. 160). Put more metaphorically, “it is through the ability to be the other
at the same time that he is himself that the symbol becomes significant” (Mead, 1922, p. 161). Humans
develop the ability to consider various courses of action and select among them. Similarly, we develop
the ability to hold in our experience others’ attitudes toward our acts, and thus, can experience the
meaning of our acts for others.1
Although this behavioural meaning of attitude has fallen into disuse (Farr, 1980), this is not
a magical process of mind reading by stepping mentally into another’s shoes. Rather, it is rooted in
interaction and coming to learn how others react to one’s gestures. Others’ attitudes are evident in
interaction, and within routine situations children experience and develop expectations about others’
responses. This is the process through which symbols become reciprocal and significantdthey have
a meaning that is common to both self and other. All of this is manifest in actual embodied interaction.
Mind is then a field that is not confined to the individual much less located in a brain. Signifi-
cance belongs to things in their relations to individuals. It does not lie in mental processes which
are enclosed within individuals (Mead, 1922, p. 163).
This is Mead’s view of the nature of thinking and how it is derived from a social process (Cottrell,
1978). Others, such as Vygotsky, Piaget, and Plato, had similar views of thinking, but Mead also
provides an adequate view of meaning on which to rest this view. Thus, individualistically imagining
oneself in the shoes of others cannot be the source of such abilities; instead an adult’s feeling that this is
possible is the outcome of a gradual process of social development.
Significant gestures are different from forms of interaction and communication common in other
animals. As Mead (1925, p. 262) notes, “There is no convincing evidence that an ant or a bee is obliged
to anticipate the act of another ant or bee, by tending to respond in the fashion of the other, in order
that it may integrate its activity into the common act.” Social insects engage in forms of coordination
that appear very complex at the global level, based on one ant, for example, responding to another ant.
This complex organization does not, however, require that the first ant must learn the second ant’s
response to it. Human forms of social coordination are different in this sense. Humans do learn how
others respond to their acts.
Human social acts are inherently learned in a two-sided fashion, and this ability to anticipate how
another will respond to one’s own act makes it possible to take the other’s role and to communicate in
a meaningful sense. This is the process in which persons are constituted. Although a biological level of
explanation is required to account for how such forms of interaction emerge in humans, and how
human infants can profit from such experience, a human mind and self cannot be a biological given
because they can only develop within forms of interaction with others. Thus, Mead’s approach is both
biological and social without assuming a separation. For Mead human minds and selves emerge in the
process of conduct. Although Mead referred to his approach as “social behaviorism,” it is not behav-
iorism according to which attitude is separated from physical movement. In contrast, for Mead human
activity is tied up with purpose and directedness.

6. Conclusion

To sum up, we started with Piaget’s idea of egocentrism and suggested that when this concept is
explicated in the social dimension where it involves understanding others’ perspectives, then it is
linked with social development, meaning, and language. Overcoming egocentrism and taking others’
perspectives is required for language and human forms of cognition. To explicate egocentrism in this
context, we drew on ideas from Mead and Wittgenstein. Within a relational approach, the infant comes
to understand that she has a perspective through interacting with others and experiencing others’
reactions or attitudes toward events and objects and toward the infant. So, rather than perspective
taking developing through simulation, theory or insight, or innate modules, we suggest that this

1
Gillespie (2005, 2006) and Martin (2005, 2006) emphasize the importance of exchanging positions in routine patterns of
activity in the process of developing the ability to take others’ perspectives, and they suggest that this is involved in acquiring at
least some significant gestures. (see also Martin & Sokol, this issue)
 J.I.M. Carpendale, T.P. Racine / New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354 353

development is grounded in the infant’s experience of interaction with others, and in this context
others’ attitudes are manifest in interactiondno mind reading is needed. Thus, developing an
understanding of others’ perspectives is rooted in shared histories of interacting with others in routine
situationsd“steady ways of acting,” that, at the most basic level are rooted in our biological and social
nature (Saari, 2004). Thus, perspective taking and self-awareness arise from interacting with others
within shared routines. Within these routine ways of acting or shared practices, infants develop
expectations about others’ attitudes toward their own actions and thus come to be able to take others’
attitudes or perspectives on themselves.
In addition, Wittgenstein draws attention to the importance of our natural reactions and such
steady ways of acting to the development of language. There is a reflexivity to language from Witt-
genstein’s point of view; although language is based on such patterns of interaction, language also
enables more complex forms of understanding.
The language of sensation provides finer descriptions of sensation than would be possible with
purely nonlinguistic behaviour. One says, ‘It still hurts but not as much as it did yesterday’; or
‘There is a slight pain in my hip but not enough to bother me’. These reports could not be
conveyed in prelinguistic behaviour (Malcolm, 1982, p. 4, emphasis original).
To have a conceptdto know the symboldis to be able to use the symbol-token in the language-
game. For instance, the child might say ‘up’ instead of gesturing with a look; the word, like the
gesture, tells the mother what the child is up to. In another case a symbol might function to
inform the hearer of what the child wants (Canfield, 1995, p. 200).
Canfield (1995) points out that we may well share a number of ground level practices with other
apes due to the commonality of our life forms. Canfield also suggests that Kanzi and other enculturated
apes participate in basic language games in the Wittgensteinian sense. Does this mean that such apes
have made or can make the transition from a conversation of gestures to significant gestures? Witt-
genstein and Mead’s non-mentalistic construal of significant gestures suggest that this is to some
extent possible. Recent anecdotal and experimental work with at least bonobos provides some support
for this notion (Savage-Rumbaugh, Fields, & Taglialatela, 2001; Pika & Zuberbühler, 2008).
Is the reason that a dog does not understand its master knocking at the door that it lacks a language
to make such discriminations? Although it might be true that it would make no sense to attribute such
complex forms of understanding to a dog because dogs lack a language, the issue is rather that such
discriminations would have no relevance for the dog. And this is why they do not answer doors or
possess human language, or as Wittgenstein would put it, such practices would play no role in their
form of life.

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this commentary was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada (SSHRC) grants to the first and second author. We thank Jack Martin for comments on
a previous draft.

References

Akhtar, N., & Gernsbacher, M. A. (2008). On privileging the role of gaze in infant social cognition. Child Development Perspectives,
2, 59–65.
Bräuer, J., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2005). All great ape species follow gaze to distant locations and around barriers. Journal of
Comparative Psychology, 119, 145–154.
Canfield, J. V. (1995). The rudiments of language. Language and Communication, 15, 195–211.
Carpendale, J. I. M., & Lewis, C. (2004). Constructing an understanding of mind: the development of children’s social under-
standing within social interaction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 79–151.
Carpendale, J. I. M., & Lewis, C. (2006). How children develop social understanding. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carpendale, J. I. M., & Lewis, C. (2008). Mirroring cannot account for understanding action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 23–
24.
Carpendale, J. I. M., & Racine, T. P. (2006). Mead and meaning: implications of views of meaning for developmental theories. In
T. Haukioja (Ed.), Papers on language theory (pp. 119). University of Turku: Publications in General Linguistics.
Cottrell, L. S. (1978). George Herbert Mead and Harry Stack Sullivan: an unfinished synthesis. Psychiatry, 41, 151–162.
354 J.I.M. Carpendale, T.P. Racine / New Ideas in Psychology 29 (2011) 346–354

Farr, R. M. (1980). Homo socio-psychologicus. In A. J. Chapman, & D. M. Jones (Eds.), Models of man (pp. 183–199). Leicester, UK:
The British Psychological Society.
Franco, F., & Butterworth, G. E. (1996). Pointing and social awareness: Declaring and requesting in the second year. Journal of
Child Language, 23, 307–336.
Gillespie, A. (2005). G.H. Mead: theorist of the social act. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 35, 19–39.
Gillespie, A. (2006). Games and the development of perspective taking. Human Development, 49, 87–92.
Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2004). Chimpanzees are more skillful at competitive than cooperative tasks. Animal Behaviour, 68,
571–581.
Hobson, R. P. (2009). Wittgenstein and the developmental psychopathology of autism. New Ideas in Psychology, 27, 243–257.
Jopling, D. (1993). Cognitive science, other minds, and the philosophy of dialogue. In U. Neisser (Ed.), The perceived self (pp. 290–
309). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Leavens, D. A., Racine, T. P., Hopkins, W. D., Botha, R., & Knight, C. (2009). The ontogeny and phylogeny of non-verbal deixis. In
The cradle of language. Multidisciplinary perspectives, Vol. 1 (pp. 142–165). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Malcolm, N. (1982). Wittgenstein: The relation of language to instinctive behaviour. Philosophical Investigations, 5, 3–22.
Martin, J. (2005). Perspectival selves in interaction with others: re-reading G.H. Mead’s social psychology. Journal for the Theory
of Social Behaviour, 35, 231–253.
Martin, J. (2006). Reinterpreting internalization and agency through G.H. Mead’s perspectival realism. Human Development, 49,
65–86.
Mead, G. H. (1910). Social consciousness and the consciousness of meaning. Psychological Bulletin, 7, 397–405.
Mead, G. H. (1922). A behavioristic account of the significant symbol. The Journal of Philosophy, 19, 157–163.
Mead, G. H. (1925). The genesis of self and social control. International Journal of Ethics, 35, 251–277.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Müller, U., & Carpendale, J. I. M. (2004). From joint activity to joint attention: a relational approach to social development in
infancy. In J. I. M. Carpendale, & U. Müller (Eds.), Social interaction and the development of knowledge (pp. 215–238). Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Overton, W. F. (1994). Contexts of meaning: The computational and the embodied mind. In W. F. Overton, & D. S. Palermo (Eds.),
The nature and ontogenesis of meaning (pp. 1–18). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. New York: Norton. (Original work published 1945).
Piaget, J. (1972). The principles of genetic epistemology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1970).
Piaget, J. (1995). Sociological studies. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1977).
Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1967). The child’s conception of space. New York: Norton. (Original work published 1948).
Pika, S., & Zuberbühler, K. (2008). Social games between bonobos and humans: evidence for shared intentionality? American
Journal of Primatology, 69, 1–6.
Portmann, A. (1990). A zoologist looks at humankind. New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1944).
Racine, T. P., & Carpendale, J. I. M. (2007). The role of shared practice in joint attention. British Journal of Developmental
Psychology, 25, 3–25.
Racine, T. P., & Carpendale, J. I. M. (2007). Shared practices, understanding, language and joint attention. British Journal of
Developmental Psychology, 25, 45–54.
Saari, H. (2004). Wittgenstein on understanding other cultures. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 68, 139–161.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S., Fields, W. M., & Taglialatela, J. (2001). Language, speech, tools and writing. A cultural imperative.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, 273–292.
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2008). The origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1976). Cause and effect: intuitive awareness. Philosophia, 6, 409–425.
Wundt, W. (1973). The language of gestures. The Hague: Mouton.