Roman Madzia gives a paper on 'Mind, Symbol, and Action-Prediction: George H. Mead and the "Embodied" Roots of Language'

The pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead is arguably one of the most original but at the same time neglected thinkers of embodiment. The paper ‘Mind, Symbol, and Action-Prediction: George H. Mead and the ‘Embodied’ Roots of Language’ presents Mead’s radically embodied and anti-intellectualist view of language and symbolic behavior. The paper develops a Meadian perspective on the phenomenon of the participatory, embodied sense-making called language and connects it with Jakob Hohwy’s theory of ‘prediction error minimization’ in order to elucidate the role which symbolic thinking plays in the process of action-understanding. It also demonstrates the way in which Mead understood significant symbols as encoding environmental and social affordances. Further, the paper re-defines some key concepts of philosophy of language like that of meaning, reference, intension and extension, etc. Finally, it also demonstrates that the classical pragmatist understanding of concepts such as goal-directedness of action, resolution of action-problems, etc., is indispensable if we want to come up with a persuasive account of embodied roots of linguistic behavior.