On McGee's Notion of "Ideograph"

McGee's argument is premised on "a brute, undeniable phenomenon: Human beings in collectivity behave and think differently than human beings in isolation" (McGee 2). McGee notes a pair of apparently conflicting explanations of this phenomenon, which, nevertheless (purportedly) agree that "the only possibility of "mind" lies in the individual qua individual". The result of this agreement is that the phenomenon of the apparent agency of human collectivities must be explained in terms of the agency of individuals, since a collectivity cannot (ex hypothesi) have "mind". Thus, the rival explanations revolve around opposing ways of conceiving how individuals are engaged in collective action. On one hand, the "symbolist" camp maintains that collective action involves "a voluntary agreement [on the part of the individuals] to believe in and participate in a "myth"" (ibid). Materialists, on the other hand, contend that the participation of (most?) individuals in a collectivity must be premised on a calculated deception about the existence of an ideologically grounded unity, which is "foisted on all members of the community by the ruling class" (ibid). McGee's response to this opposition between symbolist and materialist camps is that neither side, strictly speaking, is wrong because they are pursuing two different goals. McGee's proposition, then, is to conceive of the two sides as supplemental to one another rather than mutually exclusive explanatory frameworks. The synthesis of the two results in McGee's account of "Ideographs". However, it is unfortunate for McGee that he explicitly bases this account on the following commitment: "If a mass consciousness exists at all, it must be empirically "present," itself a thing obvious to those who participate in it" (McGee 4). Why it is that McGee (who is surely not alone in making this assumption) believes such a claim warranted is not immediately obvious. All consciousness is the consciousness of a collectivity. Human awareness is the product of a human brain, which is a complex network of highly specialized cells working in concert. How those cells produce the singular phenomenon of consciousness is, of course, still an enormous scientific mystery, but however it is produced, it remains clear that it emerges out of the collective activity of millions of individual cells participating in the same endeavor. Our conception of a human mass-consciousness and its characteristics ought to be based on what we know about the paradigmatic consciousness of individual persons. If there is a human mass-consciousness, our relation to it would be the relation of one of our neurons to our own consciousness. What kind of relation could that be? What seems certain is that pronouncements of the kind McGee makes here about what that relation must be like are unfounded, and invalidate any argument that follows from them. At the very least we can say that any mass-consciousness must be immediately obvious to itself (cogito ergo sum) but whether its constitutive participants must be immediately aware of it is far from clear.