George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead (February 27,1863 - April 26,1931) was a 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.
Mead is a major American philosopher by virtue of being, along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, 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 social theorist whose work does not fit easily within conventional disciplinary boundaries.
Mead the social psychologist argued the antipositivistic view that the individual is a product of society, the self arising out of social experience as an object of socially symbolic gestures and interactions. Rooted intellectually in Hegelian dialectics, theories of action, and an amended "anti-Watsonian" social behaviourism, Mead’s self was a self of practical and pragmatic intentions.
Mead grounded human perception in an "action-nexus" (Joas 1985: 148), ingraining the individual in a "manipulatory phase of the act" as the fundamental “means of living” (Mead 1982: 120). In this manipulatory sphere “the individual abides with the physical objects” of everyday life (Mead 1938: 267).
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.
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. At the moment of death, he was correcting the galleys to what would have been his first book Essays in Social Psychology, published only in 2001. 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 at Brock University in Ontario intends to publish eventually all of Mead's 80-odd remaining unpublished mss.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Cook, Gary A. 1993. G. H. Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. University of Illinois Press.
- Joas, Hans 1985. G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. MIT Press.
- Mead, G. H. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Ed. by C. W. Morris. University of Chicago Press.
- Mead, G. H. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Ed. by C. W. Morris et al. University of Chicago Press.
- Mead, G. H. 1982. The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Essays by G. H. Mead. Ed. by David L. Miller. University of Chicago Press.
- Mead, G. H. 2001. Essays in Social Psychology. Ed. by M. J. Deegan. Transaction Books.
External Links
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Home page of the Mead Project at Brock University, Ontario.
- A bibliography of Mead's published and unpublished writings, most of which are available online.
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