George Herbert Mead

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G.H. Mead
Not to be confused with General George Meade.

George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology.

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[edit] Biography

Mead was born February 27, 1863 in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He studied at Oberlin College from 1879–1883 and spent several years as a railroad surveyor prior to his enrollment in Harvard University in 1887. At Harvard, Mead studied with Josiah Royce, a major influence upon his thought, and William James, whose children he tutored. In 1888, Mead moved to Germany to study with psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, from whom he learned the concept of "the gesture," a concept central to his later work. Despite never finishing his dissertation, Mead was able to obtain a post at the University of Michigan in 1891. In 1894 Mead moved, along with John Dewey, to the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death. No detached philosopher, he was active in Chicago's social and political affairs; among his many activities include his work for the City Club of Chicago. Mead died of heart failure, April 26, 1931.

[edit] Work

Mead is a major American philosopher by virtue of being, along with John Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James, one of the founders of pragmatism. Mead is also an important figure in 20th century social philosophy. His theory of how the mind and self emerge from the social process of communication by signs founded the symbolic interactionist school of sociology and social psychology. He also made significant contributions to the philosophies of nature, science, and history, to philosophical anthropology, and to process philosophy. Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead considered Mead a thinker of the first rank. He is a classic example of a social theorist whose work does not fit easily within conventional disciplinary boundaries.

Rooted intellectually in Hegelian dialectics and process philosophy, Mead, like 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.

Mead the social psychologist argued the antipositivistic view that the individual is a product of society, or more specifically, social interaction. The self arises when the individual becomes an object to themselves. 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[1]. In joint activity, which Mead called 'social acts', humans learn to see themselves from the standpoint of their co-actors. It is through realizing ones role in relation to others that selfhood arises.

Mead grounded human perception in an "action-nexus" (Joas 1985: 148). We perceive the world in terms of the “means of living” (Mead 1982: 120). 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.

However, for Mead, unlike John 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 towards that object. This is what Mead means by "the social act" as opposed to simply "the act" (the latter being a Deweyan concept). 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 towards 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. (Mead was influenced on this point by Adam Smith)

Mead also rooted the self’s “perception and meaning” deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects" (Joas 1985: 166) found specifically in social encounters. Understood as a combination of the 'I' and the 'me', Mead’s self proves to be noticeably entwined within a sociological existence: For Mead, existence in community comes before individual consciousness. First one must participate in the different social positions within society and only subsequently can one use that experience to take the perspective of others and thus become self-conscious.

Mead theorized that human beings begin their understanding of the social world through "play" and "game". "Play" comes first in the child's development. The child takes different roles he/she observes in "adult" society, and plays them out to gain an understanding of the different social roles. For instance, he first plays the role of policeman and then the role of thief while playing "Cops and Robbers," and plays the role of doctor and patient when playing "Doctor." When more mature, the child can participate in the game, for instance the game of baseball. In the game he has to relate to others and understand the rules of the game. Through participating in the "game", he gains the understanding that he has to relate to norms of behavior in order to be accepted as a player. Mead calls this the child's first encounter with "the generalized other", which is one of the main concepts Mead proposes for understanding the emergence of the (social) self in human beings. "The generalized other" can be understood as understanding the given activity and the actors place within the activity from the perspective of all the others engaged in the activity. Through understanding "the generalized other" the individual understands what kind of behavior is expected, appropriate and so on, in different social settings. The mechanism of perspective taking within social acts is the exchange of social positions. In games, for example, children repeatedly exchange social positions[2]: in hide and seek children repeatedly change between hiding and seeking; in playing 'cops and robbers' children alternate between the two roles or social positions.

Mead develops William James' distinction between the "I" and the "me." The "me" is the accumulated understanding of "the generalized other" i.e. how one thinks one's group perceives oneself etc. The "I" is the individual's impulses. The "I" is self as subject; the "me" is self as object. The "I" is the knower, the "me" is the known. The mind, or stream of thought, is the self-reflective movements of the interaction between the "I" and the "me". These dynamics go beyond selfhood in a narrow sense, and form the basis of a theory of human cognition. For Mead the thinking process is the internalized dialogue between the "I" and the "me".

Philosophers whose inspiration is more metaphysical and ontological, e.g. Heidegger, emphasize the development of Being from the perspective of the experiencing human being, and how the world is revealed to this experiencing entity within a realm of things. Pragmatic philosophers like Mead focus on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: that "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings" (Mead 1982: 5).

In his lifetime, Mead published about 100 scholarly articles, reviews, and incidental pieces [3]. His students and colleagues, especially Charles W. Morris, subsequently put together five books from his unpublished manuscripts and from stenographic records of his lectures. The Mead Project [4]at Brock University in Ontario intends to publish eventually all of Mead's 80-odd remaining unpublished manuscripts.

[edit] See also

[edit] Books by Mead

  • 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Prometheus Books.
  • 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Ed. by Charles W. Morris. University of Chicago Press.
  • 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. by C. W. Morris. University of Chicago Press.
  • 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Ed. by C.W. Morris et al. University of Chicago Press.
  • 1964. Selected Writings. Ed. by A. J. Reck. University Chicago Press. This out-of-print volume collects articles Mead himself prepared for publication.
  • 1982. The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Essays by G. H. Mead. Ed. by David L. Miller. University of Chicago Press.
  • 2001. Essays in Social Psychology. Ed. by M. J. Deegan. Transaction Books. (Book review [5])

[edit] Writings about Mead

  • Aboulafia, Mitchell (ed.) (1991) Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead. SUNY Press.
  • Aboulafia, Mitchell (2001) The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy. University of Illinois Press.
  • Blumer, H. & Morrione, T.J. (2004) George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct. New York: Altamira Press.
  • Conesa-Sevilla, J. (2005). The Realm of Continued Emergence: The Semiotics of George Herbert Mead and its Implications to Biosemiotics, Semiotics Matrix Theory, and Ecological Ethics. Sign Systems Studies, September, 2005, Tartu University, Estonia.
  • Cook, Gary A. (1993) G.H. Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. University of Illinois Press.
  • Gillespie, A. (2005) "G.H. Mead: Theorist of the social act," [6] Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35: 19-39.
  • Gillespie, A. (2006). Games and the development of perspective taking [7]. Human Development, 49, 87-92.
  • Joas, Hans (1985) G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. MIT Press.
  • Habermas, Jürgen (1992) "Individuation through socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s theory of socialization," in Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, translated by William Mark Hohengarten. MIT Press.
  • Honneth, Axel (1996) "Recognition and socialization: Mead's naturalistic transformation of Hegel's idea," in Honneth, Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, translated by Joel Anderson. MIT Press.
  • Lewis, J.D. (1979) "A social behaviorist interpretation of the Meadian 'I'," American Journal of Sociology 85: 261-287.
  • Lundgren, D.C. (2004) "Social feedback and self-appraisals: Current status of the Mead-Cooley hypothesis," Symbolic Interaction 27: 267-286.
  • Miller, David L. (1973) G.H. Mead: Self, Language and the World. University of Chicago Press.
  • Sánchez de la Yncera, Ignacio (1994) La Mirada Reflexiva de G.H. Mead. Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas.
  • Shalin, Dmitri (1988) "G. H. Mead, socialism, and the progressive agenda," American Journal of Sociology 93: 913-951.
  • Silva, F. C. (2007) G.H. Mead. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  • Silva, F. C. (2008) Mead and Modernity. Science, Selfhood and Democratic Politics. Lanham: Lexington Books.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead"
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