Notes on, and quotations from:

GEORGE MEAD'S (1934) "MIND, SELF AND SOCIETY,"

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.

“Mind arises through communication by a conversation of gestures in a social process or context of experience – not communication through mind” (p.50).

G.H. Mead (1934) Mind, Self and Society.

-             1. Social behaviorist - primacy of the social process.

-             2. Pragmatist: reasoning conduct appears where impulsive conduct breaks down.

-             3. Distinction between 'biologic individuals' and 'socially conscious' individuals:

* rational conduct must grow out of impulsive conduct

* the 'fitting' of an organism to its environment

* humans: neither a unified environment nor a unified individual

* a past, present and future rather than an 'undifferentiated now'

-             4. Conversation of gestures: 'intentionality' - completion of tendencies by self or by others - gestures not yet 'significant symbols'.

-             5. Meaning: meaning in the social process before awareness or consciousness of meaning occurs.

-             6. Self:

* experience of self given in terms of one's relations to others

* organization of one's past involvements with others

* reflexive: both subject and object (perhaps better, both agent and patient, i.e., actor and sufferer)

* "I" the active source of acts in response to "my" situation - in that sense "I" can be experienced by us moderns as unlimited.

-             7. Significant symbols: experiencing one's own acts as others experience them.

-             8. Games, play, play-selves, and the Generalized Other.

1. Mead as a Social Behaviorist.

Rather than mind and mentality being present from birth and working to inform our interactions with other people, Mead makes the opposite assumption: that our minds or mentalities develop as a result of our interactions with our surroundings, especially with the other people around us.

“For if... you presuppose the existence of mind at the start, as explaining or making possible the social process of experience, then the origins of minds [and their growth and development: js] become mysteries. But if, on the other hand, you regard the social process of experience as prior (in a rudimentary form) to the existence of mind and explain the origins of minds [and their development: js] in terms of the interaction among individuals within that process, then not only the origin of minds, but also the interaction among minds... cease to seem mysterious or miraculous [communication becomes the forming or structuring, or restructuring of each other's mentality: js]. Mind arises through communication by a conversation of gestures in a social process or context of experience – not communication through mind" (p. 50).

Mead called himself a "social behaviorist," or an "objective psychologist," but not in John Watson's sense.

“An objective psychology is not trying to get rid of consciousness, but trying to state the intelligence of the individual in terms which will enable us to see how that intelligence is exercised, and how it may be improved" (p. 39).

2. Mead as a Pragmatist.

 Mead was influenced by Darwin and took an evolutionary approach to psychology. In particular he saw a continuity between biological or organic activity and human reasoning.

“... it is true that reasoning conduct appears where impulsive conduct breaks down. Where the act fails to realize its function, when the impulsive effort to get food does not bring the food - and, more especially, where conflicting impulses thwart and inhibit each other - here reasoning may come in with a new procedure that is not at the disposal of the biological individual. The characteristic result of the reasoning procedure is that the individual secures a different set of objects to which to respond (as if from a new standpoint, within a new role), a different field of stimulation. There has been discrimination and analysis, and a rebuilding of the things that called out the conflicting impulses and that now call out a response in which the conflicting impulses have been adjusted to each other. The individual who was divided within himself is unified again in his reaction” (p.348)

3. The `biologic individual'.

Mead begins by imagining minimal societies composed of `biologic individuals'. Such beings must be distinguished from `socially-conscious' individuals.

“The distinction answers roughly, to that drawn between conduct which does not involve conscious reasoning and that which does, between the conduct of the more intelligent of the lower animals and that of man. While these types of conduct can be clearly distinguished from each other in human behavior they are not on separate plains, but play back and forth into each other, and constitute, under most conditions, an experience which appears to be cut by no lines of cleavage (e.g. as in playing tennis)... And yet the distinction is of real and profound importance, for it marks the distinction between our biologic inheritance from lower life and the peculiar control which the human social animal exercises over his environment and himself” (p.347).

People's activities are split between things they themselves do and can be accounted responsible for, and things which just happen in, through, and along with their activities. Responsible action seems to grow out of spontaneous activities.

“It would be a mistake to assume that a man is a biologic individual plus reason, if we mean by this definition that he leads two separable lives, one of impulse and instinct, and another of reason - especially if we assume that the control exercised by reason proceeds by means of ideas considered as mental contents which do not arise within the impulsive life and form a real part thereof. On the contrary, the whole drift of modern psychology has been toward an undertaking to bring will and reason within impulsive life. The undertaking may not have been fully successful, but it has been impossible to avoid the attempt to bring reason within the scope of evolution; and if this attempt is successful, rational conduct must grow out of impulsive conduct. My own attempt will be to show that it is in the social behavior of the human animal that this evolution takes place” (pp.347-348).

With regard to the life and experience of the biologic individual Mead suggests that the:

“...material of instinct or impulse in the lower animals is highly organized. It represents the adjustment of the animal to a very definite and restricted world. The stimuli to which the animal is sensitive and which lie in its habitat constitute that (world) and answer to the possible reactions of the animal. The two fit into each other and mutually determine each other, for it is the instinct-seeking-expression that determines the sensitivity of the animal to the stimulus, and it is the presence of the stimulus that sets the instinct free. The organization represents not only a balance of attitude and the rhythm of movement but the succession of acts upon each other, the whole unifies structure of the life of the form and the species. In any known human community, even of the most primitive type, we find (1) neither such a unified world (2) nor such a unified individual. There is present in the human world a past and an uncertain future, a future which may be influenced by the conduct of the individuals of the group. The individual projects himself into varied possible situations and by implements and social attitudes undertakes to make a different situation exist, which would give expression to different impulses. ... The biologic individual lives in an "undifferentiated now"; the social reflective individual takes this up into a flow of experience within which stands a fixed past and a more or less uncertain future” (pp. 350-1).

4. The Conversation of Gestures.

Mead imagines, then, language as beginning in a society of biologic individuals, a society in which "conversations of gestures" may take place. In introducing this view, he says:

“Language is a part of social behavior. There are an indefinite number of signs or symbols which may serve the purpose of what we term "language". We are reading the meaning of the conduct of other people when perhaps they are not aware of it. There is something that reveals to us what the purpose is - just the glance of an eye, the attitude of the body which leads to the response. The communication set up in this way between individuals may be very imperfect. Conversations in gestures may be carried on which cannot be articulated into articulate speech. This is also true of the lower animals. Dogs approaching each other in a hostile attitude carry on such a language of gesture. They walk around each other, growling and snapping, and waiting for the opportunity to attack. Here is a process out of which language might arise, that is, a certain attitude of one individual that calls out a response in the other, which in turn calls out a different approach and a different response, and so on indefinitely” (p.14).

However, he goes on later to point out that in the dog fight

“...the stimulus which one dog gets from the other is to a response which is different from the response of the stimulating form. One dog is attacking the other and is ready to spring at the other dog's throat; the reply on the part of the second dog is to change its position, perhaps to spring at the throat of the first dog. There is a conversation of gestures, and reciprocal shifting of the dog's positions and attitudes. (But) the stimulus in the attitude of one dog is not to call out the response in itself that it calls out in the other ...It is not a stimulus to the dog to take the attitude of the other dog” (p.63).

“The meaning of what we are saying is the tendency to respond to it” (p.67).

“A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata in a triple or threefold relationship... and this threefold relationship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises” (p.76) – i) meaning is “given in terms of” the ii) response to iii) the gesture.

But, just as Vygotsky suggests, Mead also talks of the “conversation of gestures as “becoming internalized:”

“That process... of responding to one’s self as another responds to it, taking part in one’s own conversation with others, being aware of what one is saying and using that awareness of what one is saying to determine what one is going to say thereafter – that is a process with which we are all familiar... We are finding out what we are going to say, what we are going to do, by saying and doing, and in the process we are continually controlling the process itself. In the conversation of gestures what we say calls out a certain response in another that in turn [end 140] changes our own action, so that we shift from what we started to do because of the reply the other makes. The conversation of gestures is the beginning of communication” (pp.140-141).

“The thinking or intellectual process - the internalization and inner dramatization, by the individual, of the external conversation of significant gestures which constitutes his chief mode of interaction with other individuals belonging to the same society - is the earliest experiential phase in the genesis and development of the self” (p.173).

5. Meaning: gestures and "significant symbols."

This does not mean to say that such reciprocal exchanges do not involve meanings; they do. Mead says, most importantly:

“The mechanism of meaning is present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning it has” (pp 77-78).

The fact that a gesture and its response have a meaning does not imply, however, that the gesture is `significant' to the individuals involved. Gestures only become significant under what might be called "Mead's reflexivity condition:"

“The response of the lion to its roar is of very little importance in the response of the form [lion] itself, but our response to the meaning of what we say is constantly attached to out conversation. We must by constantly responding to the gesture we make if we are to carry on successful vocal conversation. The meaning of what you are saying is the tendency to respond to it. You ask somebody to bring a visitor a chair. You arouse the tendency to get the chair in the other, but if he is slow to act you get the chair yourself. The response to the vocal gesture is the doing of a certain thing, and you arouse that same tendency in yourself” (p.67).

“I have contrasted two situations to show what a long road speech or communication has to travel from the situation where there is nothing but vocal cries over to the situation in which significant symbols are utilized. What is peculiar to the later is that the individual responds to his own stimulus in the same way as other people respond. Then the stimulus becomes significant; then one says something. As far as a parrot is concerned, its 'speech' means nothing, but where one significantly says something with his own vocal process he is saying it to himself as well as to everyone else within reach of his voice. It is only the vocal gesture that is fitted for this sort of communication, because it is only the vocal gesture to which one responds or tends to respond as another person tends to respond to it” (p.67, cf. Bakhtin's notion of responsive understanding).

6. The ‘attitudes’ implicit in gestures.

“Our ‘ideas’ (my emphasis) of or about future conduct are our tendencies to act in several alternative ways in the presence of a given environmental situation – tendencies or attitudes which can appear, or be implicitly aroused, in the structure of the central nervous system in advance of the overt response or reaction to that situation, and which thus can enter as determining factors into the control or selection of the overt response” (p.99).

“Delayed reaction is necessary to intelligent conduct. The organization, implicit testing, and final selection by the individual of his overt responses or reactions to the social situations which confront him and which present him with problems of adjustment, would be impossible if his overt responses or reactions could not in such situations be delayed until this process of organizing, implicitly testing, and finally selecting is carried out; that is, it would be impossible if some overt stimuli had to be immediate” (p.99).

“An attitude of any sort represents the beginning, or potential initiation, of some composite act or other, a social act in which, along with other individuals, the individual taking the given attitude is involved or implicated... But the study of the nature of the central nervous system shows that in the form physiological attitudes (expressed in specific physiological sets) different possible completion, and that through them the earlier parts of the given act are affected or influenced (in the present conduct) by its later phases; so that the purposive element in behavior has a physiological seat, a behavioristic basis, and is not fundamentally nor necessarily conscious or psychical” (p.100).

7. The Self.

Along with the emergence of language, Mead also sees what we want to call people's "selves" as emerging out of their spontaneous activities.

“The self has a character which is different from that of the physiological organism proper. The self is something which has a development; it is not initially there at birth but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that so, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process... One must, of course, distinguish between the experience that immediately takes place and our own organization of it into the experience of the self... I think it is obvious, when one comes to consider it that the self is not necessarily involved in the life of the organism, nor involved in what we term our sensuous experience, that is, experience in a world about us for which we have habitual reactions” (pp.135-136).

“We can distinguish very definitely between the self and the body. The body can be there and can operate in a very intelligent fashion without there being a self involved in the experience. The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body. It is the characteristic of the self, as an object to itself, that I want to bring out. This characteristic is represented in the word "self" which is reflexive, and indicates that we can be both subject and object. This type of object is essentially different from other objects, and in the past it has been distinguished as conscious, a term which indicates an experience with, an experience of, one's self. It was assumed that consciousness in some way carried this capacity of being an object to itself. In giving a behavioristic statement of consciousness we have to look for some sort of experience in which the physical organism can become an object to itself” (p.136).

But how can individuals get `outside' themselves, so to speak, to experience themselves objectively?

“The individual experiences himself, as such, not directly, but only indirectly, 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. For he enters his own experience as a self or individual, not directly or immediately, not by becoming a subject to himself, but only in so far as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within and social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he and they are involved” (pp 138-139).

Indeed:

“Organisms may be conscious without being self-conscious. One may hear without listening; one may see things that he does not realize; do things that he is not really aware of. But it is when one does respond to that which he addresses to another, and when that response of his own becomes part of his conduct, when he not only hears himself but responds to himself, talks and replies to himself as truly as the other person replies to him, that we have behavior in which individuals become objects to themselves” (p. 139).

A dialogue with oneself is as if having a dialogue with another.

“I talk to myself, and I remember what I said and perhaps the emotional content that went with it. The 'I' of this moment is present in the 'me' of the next moment. There again I cannot turn around quick enough to catch myself. I become a 'me' in so far as I remember what I said. The 'I' can be given, however, this functional relationship. It is because of the 'I' that we say that we are never fully aware of what we are, that we surprise ourselves by our own action. It is as we act that we are aware of ourselves. It is in memory that the 'I' is constantly present in experience. We cab go back directly only a few moments in our experience, and then we are dependent upon memory images for the rest. So that the 'I' in memory is there as the spokesman of the self of the second, or minute, or day ago. As given, it is 'me', but it is a 'me' which was the 'I' at the earlier time” (p.174).

“The self is something which has a development: it is not initially there at birth but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individual within that process” (p.199).

8. The "I" and the "me" as parts of the Self.

“The individual enters as such into his own experience only as an object, not as a subject; and he can enter as an object only on the basis of social relations and interactions, only by means of his experiential transactions with other individuals in an organized social environment” (p. 225, my emphasis).

Mead thus distinguishes between the subjective and the objective aspects of oneself: the "I" and the "me":

“The “I” reacts to the self which arises through the taking of the attitudes of others. Through taking those attitudes we have introduced the “me” and we react to it as an “I” (p.174).

“”I talk to myself, and I remember what I said and perhaps the emotional content that went with it. The “I” of this moment is present in the “me” of the next moment... As given, it is a “me,” but it is a “me” which was the “I” at the earlier time. If you ask, then, where directly in your experience the “I” comes in, the answer is that it comes in as a historical figure. It is what you were a second ago that is the “I” of the “me” (p.174).

“The "I" is the response of the organism to the attitudes of others; the "me" is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes" (p. 175).

“The self is not something that exists first and then enters into relationship with others, but is, so to speak, an eddy in the social current and so still a part of the current. It is a process in which the individual is continually adjusting himself in advance to the situation to which he belongs, and reacting back on it. So that the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, this thinking, this conscious adjustment, becomes then a part of the whole social process and makes a much more highly organized society possible (p.182).

9. ‘Participatory’ thinking.

“An engineer who is constructing a bridge is talking to nature in the same sense that we talk to an engineer. There are stresses and strains there which he meets, and nature comes back with other responses that have to be met in another way. In his thinking he is taking the attitude of physical things. He is talking to nature and nature is replying to him. Nature is intelligent in the sense that there are certain responses of nature toward our action which we can present and which we can reply to, and which become different when we have replied. It is a change we can then answer to, and we can finally reach a point at which we can co-operate with nature “ (p.185).

“Such is the development of modern science out of what we term magic. Magic is just this same response, but with the further assumption that physical things do think and act as we do” (p.185).

10. Delay (pausing), and the nature of reflective intelligence.

“I wish to add one further factor to our account: the relation of the temporal character of the nervous system to foresight and choice.

              The central nervous system makes possible the implicit initiation of a number of possible alternative responses with reference to any given object or objects for the completion of any already initiated act, in advance of the actual completion of that act; and thus makes possible the exercise of intelligent or reflective choice in the acceptance of that one among these possible alternative responses which is to be carried into overt effect.

              Human intelligence, by means of the physiological mechanism of the human central nervous system, deliberately selects one from among the several alternative responses which are possible in the given problematic environmental situation; and if the given response which it selects is complex – i.e., is a set or chain or group or succession of simple responses – it can organize this set or chain of simple responses in such a way as to make possible the most adequate and harmonious solution by the individual of the given environmental problem....

Our ideas of or about future conduct are our tendencies to act in several alternative ways in the presence of a given environmental situation – tendencies or attitudes which can appear, or be implicitly aroused, in the structure of the central nervous system in advance of the overt response or reaction to that situation, and which thus can enter as determining factors into the control or selection of this overt response.... Delayed reaction is necessary to intelligent conduct. The organization, implicit testing, and final selection by the individual of his overt responses or reactions to the social situations which confront him and which present him with problems of adjustment, would be impossible if his overt responses or reactions could not in such situations be delayed until this process of organizing, implicitly testing, and finally selecting is carried out; that is, would be impossible if some overt response or other to the given environmental stimuli had to be immediate. Without delayed reaction, or except in terms of it, no conscious or intelligent control over behavior could be exercised; for it is through this process of selective reaction – which can be selective only because it is delayed – that intelligence operates in the determination of behavior. Indeed, it is this process which constitutes intelligence” (pp.98-99).

11. Play, the Game and the Generalized Other.

For spontaneous activity, Mead uses the analogy of play, and sees in the transition from play to the playing of games the kind of transition involved in deliberate activity evolving out of spontaneous activity.

“We find something in children that can answer to this double [the sense of a ‘soul’ that is to be distinguished form the immediate organism of the person] , namely the invisible imaginary companions which a good many children produce in their own experience. They organize in this way the responses which they call out in other persons and call out in themselves... Play in this sense, especially the stage which precedes the organized games, is pay at something. A child plays at being a mother, at being a teacher, at being a policeman: that is, it is taking different roles, we say... If we contrast play with the situation in an organized game, we note the essential difference that the child who plays in a game must be ready to take the attitude of everyone else involved in that game, and that these different roles must have a definite relationship to each other. Taking a very simple game such as hide-and-seek, everyone with the exception of the one who is hiding is a person who is hunting” (pp.150-151).

“The game has a logic, so that an organization of the self is rendered possible, there is a definite end to be obtained; the actions of the different individuals are well related to each other with reference to that end so that they do not conflict; one is not in conflict with himself in the attitude of another man on the team” (p. 158).

An important notion in Mead's psychology which I have to mention is that of the Generalized Other. From the many specific roles assumed both successively and simultaneously (in games) by the individual, there arises within one, Mead feels, a sort of "generalized other," a role which may also be assumed. And it is this attitude of the generalized other or organized community that gives the individual his unity of self and provides him with his fundamental way of being in the world with others, and acting sensibly and responsibly toward them. It is this which may function for an individual as an indication of what, more than he already is, he may become - an ideal to be realized. But before playing games as such, th4e child just plays:

“At the first of these stages (in play) the individual's self is constituted simply by an organization of the particular attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward one another in the specific social acts in which he participates with them...(in) play there is a simple succession of one role after another, a situation which is, of course characteristic of the child's own personality... children play at being a parent, at being a teacher - vague personalities that are about them and which affect them and on which they depend. At the second stage (in the game) in the full development of the individuals self that self is constituted not only by an organization of these particular attitudes, but also by an organization of the social attitudes of the generalized other or the social group as a whole to which he belongs” (pp 152-159).

Mead envisages a child as beginning with many selves. It is only later that these discrete, ephemeral, `play-selves' become organized into a relatively stable, mature self.

12. Society

“We have seen that the individual organism determines in some sense its own environment by its sensitivity. The only environment to which the organism can react is one that its sensitivity reveals... If in the development of the form there is an increase in the responses of the organism to its environment, that is, the organism will have a corresponding larger environment” (p.245).