1. George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)
“The individual experiences himself as such not directly, but only from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs…and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself.”
(1934/1962: 138)

2. GHM’s key questions When you are thinking, what are you doing?
What’s the link between thinking & behavior?
When you are thinking, what are you doing?
What role does an individual’s thinking play in the evolution of society?
society: “generalized social attitudes” that continually emerge through coordinated interaction between individuals and groups”
GHM’s key questions

3. George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)
Most important ‘Chicago’ sociologist
even more influential in field of social psychology
Mind, Self & Society, his only book, a compilation of his lectures, was published by his former students after his death
Mead laid foundations for what came to be known as Symbolic Interactionism, the leading school of micro-sociology
George Herbert Mead ( )

4. Intellectual influences
Mead’s thought arises out of synthesis of:
Pragmatism
Evolutionism
Behaviorism
Intellectual influences

5. American philosophical tradition developed by Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey
Unlike other, European philosophical traditions, pragmatism not oriented toward uncovering general “Truths”
American Pragmatism emphasizes “practical instrumental relationship of the human actor to the environment”
Mead sought to describe historical development of the individual and the social world grounded in everyday life
Goal: to understand emergence of the individual social world out of the interaction b/w individual and environment
not an abstract ideal movement occurring through history
In contrast to German idealists (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Dilthey)
Pragmatism

6. Meaning and substance of social development comes out of the confrontation with problems we face in the real world
Meaning evolves out of immediate context
Pragmatism (cont’d)

7. Human mind, self, morals and society evolve in a gradual process, from lowest forms of animal to most complex forms of human society
animals and humans engage in processes of adjustment and adaptation to their environments
language emerges gradually out of simpler forms of communication that involve gestures
Morals and Mind emerge out of concrete human action and experience
Fits well w pragmatists because language doesn’t emerge out of some a priori Kantian framework of concepts, but as pragmatic response to environment
partly a critique of a priorism
Evolutionism

8. Mead refines behaviorist psychology of the time by overcoming behavioristic refusal to study mind
Behaviorists considered mind a “black box,” impenetrable
Psychological behaviorism employs reflex arc idea
e.g., if a hot stove is a stimulus, we pull away reflexively before our brain becomes involved
American Pragmatism, esp GHM, emphasizes observation of what people do in concrete settings and focuses on immediate character of mind and cognitive processes in developing and responding
GHM makes a place for Mind in this reflex arc
Mind becomes a central category of analysis
Social behaviorism

9. Social behaviorism (cont’d)
Whereas behaviorism conceives of mechanistic stimulus-responses, GHM’s social behaviorism interposes the interpretation of meaning by focusing on gesture
gesture: part of an action that elicits a response
difference b/w gesture and stimulus is the meaning attributed to it by the person gesturing and the person responding
Social behaviorism (cont’d)

10. “Mind,” Mind, Self, and Society (1934)

11. Mind
Symbols and Language
Meaning
Key themes

12. Mind is a process or behavior that allows for the conscious control of one’s actions
Mind involves an internal conversation of gestures that makes possible the imagined testing of alternative lines of conduct
The crux of intelligent behavior lies between stimulus and response: controlling one’s present action with reference to ideas about possible future consequences
Mind

13. Gesture: a part of an action that elicits response
To have significance, gesture must call out in a 2nd organism a response functionally identical to the response that the 1st organism anticipates
for a gesture to be significant it must “mean” the same thing to both organisms
“meaning” entails the capacity to consciously anticipate how other organisms will respond to symbols or gestures
When responses of others become internalized and part of an accessible repertoire, we have Language
is social all the way down.) According to Mead, through the use of vocal gestures one can turn “experience” back on itself through the loop of speaking and hearing at relatively the same instant. And when one is part of a complex network of language users, Mead argues that this reflexivity, the “turning back” of experience on itself, allows mind to develop.
Symbols and Language

14. Significant symbol: a gesture which has the same meaning for the individual making it and for the individual responding to it
assumes that anticipatory experiences are fundamental to the development of language
We can place ourselves in the positions of others—to anticipate their responses—with regard to our linguistic gestures
Significant symbol

15. communication with a common language is an evolutionary step only humans have attained
conversation of gestures  conversation w/ significant symbols
“Thinking becomes preparatory to action, the very process of thinking is of course simply an inner conversation of gestures which in its completion implies expression of that which one thinks to an audience”
[link with Phenomenonological idea of typification, you come to gesture w/ some kind of interpretive apparatus. Phen gives good account of what that interpretive apparatus looks like – typifications
Symbols and Language

16. Meaning Meaning is a threefold relationship b/w:
an individual’s gesture
another’s response to the gesture
completion of the social act
“Mind emerges as we point out to others and to ourselves the meaning of things”
Meaning

17. Language, reflexivity, and mind
Vocal gestures turn “experience” back on itself through the loop of speaking and hearing at relatively the same instant
Being part of a complex network of language users develops reflexivity of mind
Reflexivity of mind develops not only through use of vocal gestures, but in the taking of roles
Language, reflexivity, and mind

18. “Self,” Mind, Self, and Society (1934)

19. The Self and the Organism
The self exists as self-consciousness, i.e., the capacity to be both subject and object, an ‘I’ & ‘Me’
The self is a reflexive entity
The individual is aware of self as object “not directly, but indirectly, from the particular standpoints of others”
The self is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience
The Self and the Organism

20. “Me” is the self that arises in relationship to a specific generalized
“Me” is a cognitive object, which is only known retrospectively
When we act in habitual ways we are not typically self-conscious
We act at a non-reflective level
The “I” and the “Me”

21. Play and Games Play and games are like stages in child’s development
In Play, child takes role of Significant Others (Mom & Dad)
children do not organize their combined relations to form any coherent sense of self
Games involve several children in an organized way according to common rules
child is required to coordinate her conduct w others and needs to know how their conduct is coordinated in order to be a reliable participant
in process of learning how to play games, child begins to relate to Generalized Other
By relating to players in roles, as abstract participants (not “Mom”), players become interchangeable
 Child comes to form Coherent Self
Play and Games

22. As we grow older, we realize the rules are created socially, interactively, by the Generalized Other
The GO is the repository of social standards: rules, norms, values–but also language, signs & symbols
The GO is also Society, but it’s not external to us because we are a component part of it
Thus we both internalize social standards, and we can also influence social standards
The self is not completely determined from outside, but it also has element of freedom and initiative
The Generalized Other

23. The Generalized Other (II)
The organized community or social group which gives the individual unity of self may be called the Generalized Other
The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community, e.g.,
in a social group such as a ball team, the team is the generalized other in so far as it enters—as an organized process or social activity—into the experience of any one of the individual members of it (MSS, 154)
The Generalized Other (II)

24. These communities can take different forms, they should be thought of as systems, e.g.,
a family can be thought of systemically and can therefore give rise to a corresponding Generalized Other and Self
Generalized Others can also be found in
“concrete social classes or subgroups, such as political parties, clubs, corporations, which are all actually functional social units, in terms of which their individual members are directly related to one another. The others are abstract social classes or subgroups, such as the class of debtors and the class of creditors, in terms of which their individual members are related to one another only more or less indirectly” (MSS, 157).
Generalized Others

25. In Principles of Psychology, William James discusses various types of empirical selves, namely, the material, the social, and the spiritual
In addressing the social self, James notes how it is possible to have multiple selves
“Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him. But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups” (James 1890, 294).
From Mead's perspective, James was on the right track. However, the notion of audience is left undeveloped in James, as is the manner in which language is utilized in the genesis of the self and self-consciousness. For Mead, James's audiences should be thought of in terms of systemically organized groups, such as we find in certain games, which give rise to generalized others. Further, we need an account of how we come to view ourselves from the perspective of these groups that goes beyond the concept of “sympathetic attachments.” Such an account entails a notion of reflexivity that arises with vocal gestures and continues to develop as we take roles. Through a growing capacity to “view” ourselves from ever more “abstract” communities, we develop increasingly complex selves. Mead relates the latter capacity to a cosmopolitan political and cultural orientation, that is, an increasing degree of interaction with others makes possible selves that are capable of relating to a wider variety of individuals and communities. It's worth noting that for Mead a full account of the self should address the phylogenetic as well as the ontogenetic.
Multiple selves?