George Herbert Mead - Definition and Overview

George Herbert Mead (February 27,1863 - April 26,1931) was a United States philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, who did much of his work at the University of Chicago as one of the founding members of the pragmatist school. He is regarded as the father of symbolic interactionism.

Mead, as a pioneering philosopher of social psychology, was instrumental in further developing the view that individuals are products 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, for example, grounded human perception in an "action-nexus" (Joas, 1985, p. 148), ingraining the individual in a "manipulatory phase of the act" as the fundamental “means of living” (Mead, 1982, p. 120). In this manipulatory sphere “the individual abides with the physical objects” of everyday life (Mead, 1938, p. 267). Mead also rooted the self’s “perception and meaning” (Joas, 1985, p. 166) deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects" (p. 166) found specifically in social encounters. Mead’s self, in other words, proves to be noticeably entwined within a sociological existence: For Mead, existence in community comes before individual consciousness. For more metaphysically and ontologically inspired philosophers like Heidegger (a European contemporary of Mead), the story was more about 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. For more pragmatic philosophers like Mead, the story is about the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: that "[t]he individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings" (Miller, 1982, p. 5).