George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago. He was one of the key figures in the development of pragmatism. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, and was an important influence on what has come to be referred to as the Chicago School of Sociology.
Biography
George Herbert Mead was born on February 27, 1863, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He was raised in a Protestant, middle-class family comprising his father, Hiram Mead, his mother, Elizabeth Storrs Mead, and his sister Alice. His father was a former Congregationalist pastor from a lineage of farmers and clergymen and who later held the chair in Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology at Oberlin College's theological seminary. Elizabeth taught for two years at Oberlin College and subsequently, from 1890 to 1900, served as president of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.In 1879, George Mead enrolled at the Oberlin Academy at Oberlin College and then the college itself, graduating in 1883 with a Bachelor of Arts. After graduation, Mead taught grade school for about four months. From the end of 1883 through the summer of 1887, he worked as a surveyor for the Wisconsin Central Railroad Company.
In 1891, Mead married Helen Kingsbury Castle, the sister of Henry Northrup Castle, a friend he met at Oberlin.
Despite never finishing his dissertation, Mead was able to obtain a post at the University of Michigan in 1891. There, Mead met Charles Horton Cooley and John Dewey, both of whom would influence him greatly. In 1894, Mead moved, along with Dewey, to the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death. Dewey's influence led Mead into educational theory, but his thinking soon diverged from that of Dewey, and developed into his famous psychological theories of mind, self and society.
He was active in Chicago's social and political affairs; his many activities include work for the City Club of Chicago. Mead believed that science could be used to deal with social problems and played a key role in conducting research at the settlement house in Chicago. He also worked as treasurer for Chicago's Hull House. He also collaborated closely with Jane Addams on matters of social justice.
Mead died of heart failure on April 26, 1931.
Theory
Pragmatism and symbolic interactionism
Much of Mead's work focused on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: he insisted that "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings". The two most important roots of Mead's work, and of symbolic interactionism in general, are the philosophy of pragmatism and social ''behaviorism.Social behaviorism refers to Mead's concern of the stimuli of gestures and social objects with rich meanings, rather than bare physical objects which psychological behaviourists considered stimuli. Mead was a critic of John B. Watson's form of behaviorism.
Pragmatism is a wide-ranging philosophical position from which several aspects of Mead's influences can be identified into four main tenets:
- True reality does not exist "out there" in the real world, it "is actively created as we act in and toward the world".
- People remember and base their knowledge of the world on what has been useful to them and are likely to alter what no longer "works".
- People define the social and physical "objects" they encounter in the world according to their use for them.
- If we want to understand actors, we must base that understanding on what people actually do.
- the focus on the interaction between the actor and the world;
- a view of both the actor and the world as dynamic processes and not static structures; and
- the actor's ability to interpret the social world.
Social philosophy (social behaviorism)
Mead was a very important figure in 20th-century social philosophy. One of his most influential ideas was the emergence of mind and self from the communication process between organisms, discussed in Mind, Self and Society '', also known as social behaviorism. This concept of how the mind and self emerge from the social process of communication by signs founded the symbolic interactionist school of sociology.Rooted intellectually in Hegelian dialectics and process philosophy, Mead, like John Dewey, developed a more materialist process philosophy that was based upon human action and specifically communicative action. Human activity is, in a pragmatic sense, the criterion of truth, and through human activity meaning is made. Joint activity, including communicative activity, is the means through which our sense of self is constituted. The essence of Mead's social behaviorism is that mind is not a substance located in some transcendent realm, nor is it merely a series of events that takes place within the human physiological structure. This approach opposed the traditional view of the mind as separate from the body. The emergence of mind is contingent upon interaction between the human organism and its social environment; it is through participation in the social act of communication that individuals realize their potential for significantly symbolic behaviorthat is, thought. Mind, in Mead's terms, is the individualized focus of the communication process. It is linguistic behavior on the part of the individual. There is, then, no "mind or thought without language"; and language "is only a development and product of social interaction". Thus, mind is not reducible to the neurophysiology of the organic individual, but is emergent in "the dynamic, ongoing social process" that constitutes human experience.
For Mead, mind arises out of the social act of communication. Mead's concept of the social act is relevant not only to his theory of mind, but to all facets of his social philosophy. His theory of "mind, self, and society" is, in effect, a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of a social process involving the interaction of many individuals, just as his theory of knowledge and value is a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of the experiencing individual in interaction with an environment. Action is very important to his social theory and, according to Mead, actions also occur within a communicative process.
The initial phase of an act constitutes a gesture. A gesture is a preparatory movement that enables other individuals to become aware of the intentions of the given organism. The rudimentary situation is a conversation of gestures, in which a gesture on the part of the first individual evokes a preparatory movement on the part of the second, and the gesture of the second organism in turn calls out a response in the first person. On this level no communication occurs. Neither organism is aware of the effect of its own gestures upon the other; the gestures are nonsignificant. For communication to take place, each organism must have knowledge of how the other individual will respond to its own ongoing act. Here the gestures are significant symbols. A significant symbol is a kind of gesture that only humans can make. Gestures become significant symbols when they arouse in the individual who is making them the same kind of response they are supposed to elicit from those to whom the gestures are addressed. Only when we have significant symbols can we truly have communication. Mead grounded human perception in an "action-nexus''". We perceive the world in terms of the "means of living." To perceive food is to perceive eating. To perceive a house is to perceive shelter. That is to say, perception is in terms of action. Mead's theory of perception is similar to that of J. J. Gibson.
Social acts
Mead argued, in tune with Durkheim, that the individual is a product of an ongoing, pre-existing society; or, more specifically, of social interaction that is a consequence of a sui generis society. The self arises when the individual becomes an object to themself. Mead argued that we are objects first to other people, and secondarily we become objects to ourselves by taking the perspective of other people. Language enables us to talk about ourselves in the same way as we talk about other people, and thus through language we become other to ourselves. In joint activity, which Mead called social acts, humans learn to see themselves from the standpoint of their co-actors. A central mechanism within the social act, which enables perspective taking, is position exchange. People within a social act often alternate social positions. In children's games there is repeated position exchange, for example in hide-and-seek, and Mead argued that this is one of the main ways that perspective taking develops.However, for Mead, unlike Dewey and J. J. Gibson, the key is not simply human action, but rather social action. In humans the "manipulatory phase of the act" is socially mediated; that is to say, in acting towards objects humans simultaneously take the perspectives of others toward that object. This is what Mead means by "the social act" as opposed to simply "the act". Non-human animals also manipulate objects, but that is a non-social manipulation; they do not take the perspective of other organisms toward the object. Humans, on the other hand, take the perspective of other actors towards objects, and this is what enables complex human society and subtle social coordination. In the social act of economic exchange, for example, both buyer and seller must take each other's perspectives toward the object being exchanged. The seller must recognize the value for the buyer, while the buyer must recognize the desirability of money for the seller. Only with this mutual perspective taking can the economic exchange occur.