George Herbert Mead

Mind, Self and Society

• Mead’s main contribution was his attempt to show how the human
self arises in the process of social interaction.
• He thought that spoken language played a central role in this
development.
• Through language the child can take the role of other persons and
guide his behaviour in terms of the effect his contemplated behaviour
will have upon others.
• In philosophy, Mead was one of the major thinkers among the American
Pragmatists.
• In common with a number of his contemporaries, he was much-influenced
by the theory of relativity and the doctrine of emergence.
• His philosophy might be called objective Relativism.
• Just as some objects are edible, but only in relation to a digestive system,
so Mead thought of experience, life, consciousness, personality, and value
as objective properties of nature which emerge only under (and hence are
relative to) specific sets of conditions.
• John Dewey acknowledged his own great indebtedness to Mead’s
philosophy.
• Mead never published his work.
• After his death his students edited four volumes from stenographic
recordings and notes on his lectures and from unpublished papers:
• The Philosophy of the Present (1932);
• Mind, Self, and Society (1934); Movements of Thought in the
Nineteenth Century (1936); and The Philosophy of the Act (1938).
• The two most significant intellectual roots of Mead’s work in particular and
of symbolic interactionism in general are the philosophy of pragmatism and
psychological behaviorism.
• His ideas are contained in Mind, Self and Society 1934 a work compiled
from notes of Herbert Blumer.
• His major theoretical work in the field of symbolic interactionism is his idea
of Self.
• In Mead’s view traditional social psychology began with the psychology of
the individual in an effort to explain social experience;
• In contrast Mead always gave priority to the social world in understanding
a social experience.
• Thinking, self-conscious individual is logically impossible in Mead’s
theory without a prior social group;
• the social group comes first and it leads to the development of self-
conscious mental states.
• To explain his view point Mead took help of various concepts like
gesture, symbols, mind and self.
• 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.
• Physical gestures can also be significant symbols but they are not
ideally suited to be significant symbols because people cannot easily
see or hear their own physical gestures.
• It is the vocal utterances made by us that are most likely to become
significant symbols although not all vocalizations are symbols.
• The gesture is the basic mechanism in the social act and in the social
process.
• What distinguishes humans is their ability to employ significant
gestures or those that require thought on the part of the actor before
a reaction.
• The vocal gesture is particularly important in the development of
significant gestures.
• It is the development of vocal gestures in the form of a language that
is the most important factor in making possible the distinctive
development of human life.
• In a conversation of gestures ,only the gestures are communicated
and not the meanings.
• With language the gestures and their meanings both are
communicated.
• Another effect of language is that it stimulates the person speaking as
it does to others by eliciting the same response.
• A significant symbol works better in the social world than a non-
significant gesture as the former has better potential of making an
effective communication.
• In Mead’s theory, significant symbols perform another crucial
function as they make the mind, mental processes possible.
• It is only through significant symbols especially language that human
thinking is possible.
• Use of language has made it possible that we can think beyond the
limited.
• Mead defines thinking as simply an internalized or implicit
conversation of the individual with himself, by means of such gestures
or it is a conversation between I and Me.
• Thinking involves talking to oneself and it is possible only when there
is a language or significant symbols to facilitate that.
• Significant symbols perform another crucial function – they make the
mind, mental processes and so on possible.
• It is only through significant symbols especially language that human
thinking is possible.
• Use of language has made it possible that we can think beyond the
limited.
• Mead defines thinking as simply an internalized or implicit conversation of
the individual with himself by means of such gestures or it is a conversation
between I and Me.

• Thinking involves talking to oneself and it is possible only when there is a

language or significant symbols to facilitate that.
• Significant symbols like language also make possible symbolic interaction.
Mead sees mind as a process.
• It is as an inner conversation with one’s self. It arises and develops within the
social process and is an integral part of that process.
• The social process precedes the mind.
• Mind can be distinguished from other concepts like consciousness by its ability to respond to the
overall community and put forth an organized response.
• Mind involves thought processes, oriented towards problem solving.
Conclusion
• Mead states that "the self is a social process”
• Mead develops 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'.