George Herbert Mead
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George Herbert Mead | |
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20th-century philosophy | |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Pragmatism |
Institutions |
George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American
Biography
George Herbert Mead was born on February 27, 1863, in
In 1879, George Mead enrolled at the
In autumn 1887, Mead enrolled at Harvard University, where his main interests were philosophy and psychology. At Harvard, Mead studied with Josiah Royce, a major influence upon his thought, and William James, whose children he tutored. In 1888, Mead left Harvard after receiving only a B.A. and moved to Leipzig, Germany to study with psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, from whom he learned the concept of "the gesture", which would become central to his later work.
In 1891, Mead married Helen Kingsbury Castle (1860–1929), the sister of Henry Northrup Castle (1862–1895), a friend he met at Oberlin.[4] Despite never finishing his dissertation, Mead was able to obtain a post at the
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.[7][6]: 353 He also worked as treasurer for Chicago's Hull House.[8][9] He also collaborated closely with Jane Addams on matters of social justice.[10]
Mead died of heart failure on April 26, 1931.[11]
Theory
Pragmatism and symbolic interaction
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".[12]: 5 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 (as opposed to psychological 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.
Pragmatism is a wide-ranging philosophical position from which several aspects of Mead's influences can be identified into four main tenets:[13]
- 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.
Three of these ideas are critical to symbolic interactionism:
- 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.
Thus, to Mead and symbolic interactionists, consciousness is not separated from action and interaction, but is an integral part of both. Symbolic interactionism as a pragmatic philosophy was an antecedent to the philosophy of transactionalism.[14] Mead's theories in part, based on pragmatism and behaviorism, were transmitted to many graduate students at the University of Chicago who then went on to establish symbolic interactionism.[6]: 347–50 [15]
Social philosophy (social behaviorism)
Mead was a very important figure in 20th-century
Rooted intellectually in
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.[18] 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
Social acts
Mead argued, in tune with Durkheim, that the individual is a product of an ongoing, pre-existing
However, for Mead, unlike Dewey and
Nature of the self
A final piece of Mead's social theory is the mind as the individual importation of the social process.[17]: 178–79 Mead states that "the self is a social process", meaning that there are series of actions that go on in the mind to help formulate one's complete self. As previously discussed, Mead presented the self and the mind in terms of a social process. As gestures are taken in by the individual organism, the individual organism also takes in the collective attitudes of others, in the form of gestures, and reacts accordingly with other organized attitudes.[17]: 178–79 This process is characterized by Mead as the I and the Me. The 'Me' is the social self and the 'I' is the response to the 'Me'. In other words, the 'I' is the response of an individual to the attitudes of others, while the 'Me' is the organized set of attitudes of others which an individual assumes.[21][17]: 174–86
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, and so on. 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'. There is neither 'I' nor 'Me' in the conversation of gestures; the whole act is not yet carried out, but the preparation takes place in this field of gesture.[17]: 175 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'. Mead rooted the self's "perception and meaning" deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects", found specifically in social encounters.[19]: 166
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 'conscious'.
Philosophy of science
Mead was a major American philosopher by virtue of being—along with John Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James— one of the founders of pragmatism. 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.
In his work on philosophy of science, Mead sought to find the psychological origin of science in the efforts of individuals to attain power over their environment. The notion of a physical object arises out of manipulatory experience. There is a social relation to inanimate objects, for the organism takes the role of things that it manipulates directly, or that it manipulates indirectly in perception. For example, in taking (introjecting or imitating) the resistant role of a solid object, an individual obtains cognition of what is "inside" nonliving things. Historically, the concept of the physical object arose from an animistic conception of the universe.
Contact experience includes experiences of position, balance, and support, and these are used by the organism when it creates its conceptions of the physical world. Our scientific concepts of space, time, and mass are abstracted from manipulatory experience. Such concepts as that of the electron are also derived from manipulation. In developing a science we construct hypothetical objects in order to assist ourselves in controlling nature. The conception of the present as a distinct unit of experience, rather than as a process of becoming and disappearing, is a scientific fiction devised to facilitate exact measurement. In the scientific worldview, immediate experience is replaced by theoretical constructs. The ultimate in experience, however, is the manipulation and contact at the completion of an act.[16]
Play and game and the generalized other
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 that he/she observes in "adult" society, and plays them out to gain an understanding of the different social roles. For instance, a child may first play the role of police officer and then the role of thief while playing "Cops and Robbers", and play the roles of doctor and patient when playing "Doctor". As a result of such play, the child learns to become both subject and object and begins to become able to build a self. However, it is a limited self, because the child can only take the role of distinct and separate others; they still lack a more general and organized sense of themself.[6]: 360
In the next stage, the game stage, it is required that a person develop a full sense of self. Whereas in the play stage the child takes on the role of distinct others, in the game stage the child must take on the role of everyone else involved in the game. Furthermore, these roles must have a definite relationship to one another. To illustrate the game stage, Mead gives his famous example of a baseball game:[17]: 151
But in a game where a number of individuals are involved, then the child taking one role must be ready to take the role of everyone else. If he gets in a ball nine he must have the responses of each position involved in his own position. He must know what everyone else is going to do in order to carry out his own play. He has to take all of these roles. They do not all have to be present in consciousness at the same time, but at some moments he has to have three or four individuals present in his own attitude, such as the one who is going to throw the ball, the one who is going to catch it and so on. These responses must be, in some degree, present in his own make-up. In the game, then, there is a set of responses of such others so organized that the attitude of one calls out the appropriate attitudes of the other.
In the game stage, organization begins and definite personalities start to emerge. Children begin to become able to function in organized groups and, most importantly, to determine what they will do within a specific group.[6]: 360–61 Mead calls this the child's first encounter with "the generalized other", which is one of the main concepts that Mead proposes for understanding the emergence of the (social) self in human beings. "The generalized other" can be thought of 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.
Some may find that social acts (e.g. games and routine forms of social interaction) enable perspective taking through "position exchange".[22] Assuming that games and routine social acts have differentiated social positions, and that these positions create our cognitive perspectives, then it might be that by moving between roles in a game (e.g. between hiding and seeking or buying and selling) we come to learn about the perspective of the other. This new interpretation of Mead's account of taking the perspective of the other has experimental support.[23] Other recent publications argue that Mead's account of the development of perspective taking is relevant not only with respect to human ontogeny but also to the evolution of human sociality.[24]
Writings
In a career spanning more than 40 years, Mead wrote almost constantly and published numerous articles and book reviews in both philosophy and psychology. However, he did not publish any books. Following his death, several of his students put together and edited four volumes from records of Mead's social psychology course at the University of Chicago, his lecture notes (Mead's Carus Lectures, 1930, edited by Charles W. Morris), and his numerous unpublished papers.
In his lifetime, Mead published around 100 scholarly articles, reviews, and incidental pieces. Given their diverse nature, access to these writings is difficult. The first editorial efforts to change this situation date from the 1960s. In 1964, Andrew J. Reck collected twenty-five of Mead's published articles in Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead.[25][18] Four years later, John W. Petras published George Herbert Mead: Essays on his Social Psychology, a collection of fifteen articles that included previously unpublished manuscripts.
More recently, Mary Jo Deegan (2001) published Essays in Social Psychology, a book project originally abandoned by Mead in the early 1910s.[26] In 2010, Filipe Carreira da Silva edited G.H. Mead. A Reader, a comprehensive collection including thirty of Mead's most important articles, ten of them previously unpublished.[27] Likewise, the Mead Project at Brock University in Toronto intends to publish all of Mead's 80-odd remaining unpublished manuscripts.[28]
Bibliography
Collected volumes (posthumous)
- 1932. The Philosophy of the Present.[29]
- 1934. Mind, Self, and Society.[17]
- 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century.[30]
- 1938. The Philosophy of the Act.[31]
- 1964. Selected Writings.[32] — This volume collects articles Mead himself prepared for publication.
- 1982. The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Essays by G. H. Mead.[33]
- 2001. Essays in Social Psychology.[26]
- 2010. G.H. Mead. A Reader.[27]
Notable papers
- "Suggestions Towards a Theory of the Philosophical Disciplines" (1900);[34]
- "Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning" (1910);[35]
- "What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose" (1910);[36]
- "The Mechanism of Social Consciousness" (1912);[37]
- "The Social Self" (1913);[38]
- "Scientific Method and the Individual Thinker"(1917);[39]
- "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol" (1922);[40]
- "The Genesis of Self and Social Control" (1925);[41]
- "The Objective Reality of Perspectives" (1926);[42]
- "The Nature of the Past" (1929);[43] and
- "The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting" (1929).[44]
See also
- James Mark Baldwin
- Lev Vygotsky
- Chicago School (sociology)
Notes
- ^ This has been a contentious issue in the burgeoning field of Human Animal Studies. For a discussion see: Wilkie, Rhoda, and Andrew McKinnon. 2013. "George Herbert Mead on Humans and Other Animals: Social Relations after Human-Animal Studies." Sociological Research Online 18(4):19.
References
- ISBN 978-0-8039-2320-1.
- ^ "George herbert mead".
- ^ "Mead, George Herbert | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". Retrieved 2024-03-25.
- ISBN 978-0-252-06272-8.
- ISBN 978-0-292-72700-7.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-07-352818-2.
- ^ George H. Mead (1907). "The Social Settlement: Its basis and function". University of Chicago Record: 108–110.
- ISBN 0-7619-2611-9.
- ^ "George Herbert Mead, Philosophy". www.lib.uchicago.edu. 2003. Archived from the original on 2020-11-24.
- ^ Lowe, Barbara J. (2923)'The Complementary Theory and Practice of Jane Addams and George Herbert Mead: Bending Toward Justice', in Patricia M. Shields, Maurice Hamington, and Joseph Soeters (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams Oxford Academic, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197544518.013.32
- ^ "New York Times: Prof. George H. Mead, Philosopher, Is Dead". brocku.ca. Retrieved 2024-03-25.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-608-09479-3
- ISSN 2161-0002.
- ^ Phillips, Trevor J.; Tibbels, Kirkland; Patterson, John (2015). Transactionalism: An Historical and Interpretive Study (2 ed.). Influence Ecology. p. 54. Archived from the original on 2016-09-24.
- ^ Nungesser, Frithjof. 2021. "Pragmatism and Interaction." In: Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism, edited by Dirk Vom Lehn, Natalia Ruiz-Junco, and Will Gibson. London; New York: Routledge: 25-36. ISBN 9780367227708
- ^ ISBN 0-02-865786-1.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-226-51668-4.
- ^ a b c Cronk, George (2005), "George Herbert Mead", in Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.), The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- ^ a b Joas, Hans. 1985. George Herbert Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- ISBN 978-1-59311-230-1.
- ^ Margolis, Joseph; Jacques Catudal (2001). The Quarrel between Invariance and Flux. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.
- ^
Alex Gillespie (2012). "Position exchange: The social development of agency". New Ideas in Psychology. 30 (1): 32–46. hdl:1893/2492.
- ^
Alex Gillespie (2011). "Exchanging social positions: Enhancing intersubjective coordination within a joint task". European Journal of Social Psychology. 41: 608–616. doi:10.1002/ejsp.788.
- ^ Nungesser, Frithjof. "The Social Evolution of Perspective-taking. Mead, Tomasello, and the Development of Human Agency" (PDF). Pragmatism Today. 11: 84–105.
- ^ Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead. Bobbs-Merrill, The Liberal Arts Press. 1964.
- ^ ISBN 0-765-80082-9.
- ^ a b da Silva, Filipe Carreira, ed. 2010. G.H. Mead. A Reader. London: Routledge.
- ^ The Mead Project at Brock University
- ^ Mead, George Herbert. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Open Court Publishing.
- ^ Mead, George Herbert. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Merritt H. Moore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- ^ Mead, George Herbert. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act, edited by C. W. Morris, et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- ISBN 978-0-226-51671-4.
- ISBN 978-0-608-09479-3.
- ^ [1] "Suggestions Towards a Theory of the Philosophical Disciplines" (1900)
- ^ [2] "Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning" (1910)
- ^ [3] "What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose" (1910)
- ^ [4] "The Mechanism of Social Consciousness"
- Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods10:374–80. – via Classics in the History of Psychology, transcribed by C. D. Green. Toronto: York University. Also available via The Mead Project. Toronto: Brock University.
- ^ [5] "Scientific Method and the Individual Thinker" (1917)
- ^ [6] "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol" (1922)
- ^ "George Herbert Mead: The Genesis of the Self and Social Control". Brocku.ca. Retrieved 2013-08-01.
- ^ "George Herbert Mead: The Objective Reality of Perspectives". Brocku.ca. Retrieved 2013-08-01.
- ^ "George Herbert Mead: The Nature of the Past". Brocku.ca. Retrieved 2013-08-01.
- ^ "George Herbert Mead: The Philosophies of Royce, James and Dewey in their American setting". Brocku.ca. Retrieved 2013-08-01.
Further reading
- Aboulafia, Mitchell, ed. 1991. Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead. Albany: SUNY Press.
- — 2001. The Cosmopolitan Self: George Herbert Mead and Continental Philosophy. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
- Biesta, Gert, and Daniel Tröhler, ed. 2008. G. H. Mead: the Philosophy of Education. Boulder, CO: ISBN 9781594515309
- Blumer, H. & Morrione, T. J. 2004. George Herbert Mead and Human Conduct. New York: Altamira Press.
- Burke, Thomas, and Skowroński, Krzysztof Piotr, eds. 2013. George Herbert Mead in the Twenty-first Century, Lexington.
- 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). Estonia: Tartu University.
- da Silva, Filipe Carreira. 2007. G.H. Mead. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- — 2008. Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood and Democratic Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
- Gillespie, Alex. 2001. "The Mystery of G.H. Mead's First Book" (Essays in Social Psychology book review). Theory & Psychology 13(3):422–24. Archived from the original 17 June 2010.
- — 2005. "G. H. Mead: Theorist of the social act."[permanent dead link] Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35:19–39.
- — 2006. "Games and the development of perspective taking."[permanent dead link] Human Development 49:87–92.
- Joas, Hans. 1985. G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. "Individuation through socialization: On George Herbert Mead's theory of socialization." in Postmetaphysical Thinking, by J. Habermas, translated by W. M. Hohengarten. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Honneth, Axel. 1996. "Recognition and socialization: Mead's naturalistic transformation of Hegel's idea." Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, by A. Honneth, translated by J. Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Lewis, J. D. 1979 "A social behaviorist interpretation of the Meadian 'I'." American Journal of Sociology 85:261–87.
- Lundgren, D. C. 2004. "Social feedback and self-appraisals: Current status of the Mead-Cooley hypothesis." Symbolic Interaction 27:267–86.
- Miller, David L. 1973 G. H. Mead: Self, Language and the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Nungesser, Frithjof. 2016. "Mead Meets Tomasello. Pragmatism, the Cognitive Sciences, and the Origins of Human Communication and Sociality" in: The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead. Ed. by H. Joas and D. R. Huebner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 252–275.
- Nungesser, Frithjof. 2020. "The Social Evolution of Perspective-taking. Mead, Tomasello, and the Development of Human Agency" Pragmatism Today, 11(1): 84–105.
- Sánchez de la Yncera, Ignacio. 1994. La Mirada Reflexiva de G.H. Mead. Montalbán, ES: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas.
- Shalin, Dmitri. 1988. "G. H. Mead, socialism, and the progressive agenda." American Journal of Sociology 93:913–51.
External links
- Works by or about George Herbert Mead at Internet Archive
- Works by George Herbert Mead at Project Gutenberg
- Works by George Herbert Mead at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Mead Project 2.0 — Mead's published and unpublished writings, many of which are available online, along with others.
- George Herbert Mead — Mitchell Aboulafia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Review materials for studying George Herbert Mead
- Guide to the George Herbert Mead Papers 1855-1968 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center