George Herbert Mead
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The work of George Herbert Mead, one of the leading figures in pragmatism, profoundly influenced the development of American social science. Mead published no books in his lifetime, and many of the articles he wrote dealt with education, psychology, and sociology. He communicated most effectively in oral discourse, and he developed his ideas in extemporaneous lectures at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1893 until his death. His style was involved and labored, and even his admirers stated that there were difficulties in deciphering his sentences. Still, his classes were well-attended, and he had considerable influence on his colleagues and his students, especially in sociology and social psychology. His students put together four posthumous volumes of his work based on stenographic notes of his lectures, fragmentary manuscripts, and tentative drafts (Shibutani, 1968, 83-84). Pragmatism as espoused by Mead represents an attempt to reformulate conceptions of man and his place in the universe in terms of the revolutionary implications of scientific method and evolutionary theory, and Mead considered the process of meeting and solving problems and the scientific method as the evolutionary process grown self-conscious. Various species developed their characteristics as they came to terms with life conditions, and Mead sought to account for the emergent properties in the human being--thinking in abstractions, self-consciousness, and purposive and moral cond
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ooley had proposed that we learn about ourselves from imagining how other people judge our appearance, and this means that the reflective mind not only sees itself as an object, but it is capable of seeing into the minds of others. Mead took this imaginative leap and saw it and the capacity to take the role of the other person toward oneself as central to the development of a self. The ideas of both Cooley and Mead depend on the fact that socialization experiences take place in primary groups, for the unity of the primary group, and the dependencies that are built up among its members, lead to shared meanings:
We can guess what others are thinking because we share language, symbols, gestures, and meanings. With similar sets of expectations, each knows how the other should behave and can judge performances by the same standards (Hess, Markson, and Stein, 1982, 122).
Collins (1994) sees Cooley as suggestive but superficial, while he finds Mead to have developed Cooley's line of thought into a sophisticated theory of the social mind. Mead was not a sociologist but a philosopher. He had studied at Harvard with Josiah Royce, an idealist philosopher noted for his extravagant beliefs in the divinity of the state. Mead was by co
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Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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