Theory

Much of Mead's create focused on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: he insisted that "the individual mind can survive only in description to other minds with shared up meanings.": 5  The two almost important roots of Mead's work, and of symbolic interactionism in general, are the philosophy of pragmatism and social behaviorism.

Social behaviorism as opposed to psychological behaviorism talked to Mead's concern of the stimuli of gestures and social objects with rich meanings, rather than bare physical objects which psychological behaviourists considered stimuli.

Pragmatism is a wide-ranging philosophical position from which several aspects of Mead's influences can be identified into four leading tenets:

Three of these ideas are critical to symbolic interactionism:

Thus, to Mead and symbolic interactionists, consciousness is not separated from action and interaction, but is an integral component of both. Symbolic interactionism as a pragmatic philosophy was an antecedent to the philosophy of transactionalism. Mead's theories in part, based on pragmatism and behaviorism, were transmitted to numerous graduate students at the University of Chicago who then went on to established symbolic interactionism.: 347–50 

Mead was a very important figure in 20th-century social philosophy. One of his almost influential ideas was the emergence of mind and self from the communication process between organisms, discussed in Mind, Self and Society 1934, also asked as social behaviorism. This concept of how the mind and self emerge from the social process of communication by signs founded the symbolic interactionist school of sociology.

Rooted intellectually in neurophysiology of the organic individual, but is emergent in "the dynamic, ongoing social process": 7  that constitutes human experience.

For Mead, mind arises out of the social act of communication. Mead's concept of the social act is relevant, non only to his theory of mind, but to all facets of his social philosophy. His abstraction of "mind, self, and society" is, in effect, a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of a social process involving the interaction of many individuals, just as his theory of cognition and service is a philosophy of the act from the standpoint of the experiencing individual in interaction with an environment. Action is very important to his social theory and, according to Mead, actions also arise within a communicative process.

The initial phase of an act constitutes a J. J. Gibson.

Mead argued in tune with Durkheim that the individual is a product of an ongoing, pre-existing society, or more specifically, social interaction that is a consequence of a sui generis society. The self arises when the individual becomes an thing to themselves. Mead argued that we are objects first to other people, and secondarily we become objects to ourselves by taking the perspective of other people. Language provides us to talk about ourselves in the same way as we talk approximately other people, and thus through Linguistic communication we become other to ourselves. In joint activity, which Mead called social acts, humans learn to see themselves from the standpoint of their co-actors. A central mechanism within the social act, which provides perspective taking, is position exchange. People within a social act often alternate social positions e.g., giving/receiving, asking/helping, winning/losing, hiding/seeking, talking/listening. In children's games there is repeated position exchange, for example in hide-and-seek, and Mead argued that this is one of the main ways that perspective taking develops.

However, for Mead, unlike Dewey and J. J. Gibson, the key is not simply human action, but rather social action. In humans the "manipulatory phase of the act" is socially mediated, that is to say, in acting towards objects humans simultaneously develope the perspectives of others towards that object. This is what Mead means by "the social act" as opposed to simply "the act" the latter being a Deweyan concept. Non-human animals also manipulate objects, but that is a non-social manipulation, they do not take the perspective of other organisms toward the object. Humans on the other hand, take the perspective of other actors towards objects, and this is what enables complex human society and subtle social coordination. In the social act of economic exchange, for example, both buyer and seller must take used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other's perspectives towards the thing being exchanged. The seller must recognize the return for the buyer, while the buyer must recognize the desirability of money for the seller. Only with this mutual perspective taking can the economic exchange occur. Mead was influenced on this ingredient by Adam Smith.

A final bit of Mead's social theory is the mind as the individual importation of the social process.: 178–79  Mead states that "the self is a social process," meaning that there are series of actions that go on in the mind to guide formulate one's ready self. As before discussed, Mead submission the self and the mind in terms of a social process. As gestures are taken in by the individual organism, the individual organism also takes in the collective attitudes of others, in the form of gestures, and reacts accordingly with other organized attitudes.: 178–79  This process is characterized by Mead as the . The 'Me' is the social self and the 'I' is the response to the 'Me'. In other words, the 'I' is the response of an individual to the attitudes of others, while the 'Me' is the organized classification of attitudes of others which an individual assumes.: 174–86 

Mead develops perception and meaning" deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects," found specifically in social encounters.: 166 

Understood as a combination of the 'I' and the 'Me', Mead's self proves to be noticeably entwined within a sociological existence. For Mead, existence in community comes ago individual consciousness. first one must participate in the different social positions within society and only subsequently can one use that experience to take the perspective of others and thus become 'conscious'.

Mead was a major American philosopher by virtue of being, along with John Dewey, Charles Peirce and William James, one of the founders of pragmatism. He also introduced significant contributions to the philosophies of nature, science, and history, to philosophical anthropology, and to process philosophy. Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead considered Mead a thinker of the first rank. He is a classic example of a social theorist whose work does not fit easily within conventional disciplinary boundaries.

As far as his work on the philosophy of science, Mead sought to find the psychological origin of science in the efforts of individuals to attain power to direct or determine to direct or instituting over their environment. The notion of a physical object arises out of manipulatory experience. There is a social explanation to inanimate objects, for the organism takes the role of matters that it manipulates directly, or that it manipulates indirectly in perception. For example, in taking introjecting or imitating the resistant role of a solid object, an individual obtains knowledge of what is "inside" nonliving things. Historically, the concept of the physical object arose from an animistic conception of the universe.

Contact experience includes experiences of position, balance, and support, and these are used by the organism when it creates its conceptions of the physical world. Our scientific concepts of space, time, and mass are abstracted from manipulatory experience. such(a) concepts as that of the electron are also derived from manipulation. In development a science we construct hypothetical objects in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to assistance ourselves in controlling nature. The conception of the present as a distinct unit of experience, rather than as a process of becoming and disappearing, is a scientific fiction devised to facilitate exact measurement. In the scientific worldview immediate experience is replaced by theoretical constructs. Thein experience, however, is the manipulation and contact at the completion of an act.

Mead theorized that human beings begin their apprehension of the social world through "play" and "game". Play comes first in the child's development. The child takes different roles he/she observes in "adult" society, and plays them out to gain an apprehension of the different social roles. For instance, he first plays the role of policeman and then the role of thief while playing "Cops and Robbers," and plays the role of doctor and patient when playing "Doctor." As a total of such play, the child learns to become both subject and object and begins to become a adult engaged or qualified in a profession. to build a self. However, this is the a limited self because the child can only take the role of distinct and separate others, they still lack a more general and organized sense of themselves.: 360 

In the next stage, the game stage, it is known that a person develop a full sense of self. Whereas in the play stage the child takes on the role of distinct others, in the game stage the child must take the role of entry else involved in the game. Furthermore, these roles must have a definite relationship to one another. To illustrate the game stage, Mead gives his famous example of a baseball game:: 151 

But in a game where a number of individuals are involved, then the child taking one role must be family up to take the role of programs else. if he gets in a ball nine he must have the responses of regarded and identified separately. position involved in his own position. He must know what everyone else is going to do in format to carry out his own play. He has to take any of these roles. They do not all have to be present in consciousness at the same time, but at some moments he has to have three or four individuals present in his own attitude, such as the one who is going to throw the ball, the one who is going to catch it and so on. These responses must be, in some degree, present in his own make-up. In the game, then, there is a set of responses of such others so organized that the attitude of one calls out the appropriate attitudes of the other.

In the game stage, company begins and definite personalities start to emerge. Children begin to become professionals to function in organized groups and most importantly, to determine what they will do within a specific group.: 360–61  Mead calls this the child's first encounter with "the generalized other," which is one of the main concepts Mead proposes for understanding the emergence of the social self in human beings. "The generalized other" can be thought of as understanding the condition activity and the actors' place within the activity from the perspective of all the others engaged in the activity. Through understanding "the generalized other" the individual understands what kind of behavior is expected, appropriate and so on, in different social settings.

Some may find that social acts e.g. games and routine forms of social interaction enable perspective taking through 'position exchange'. Assuming that games and routine social acts have differentiated social positions, and that these positions create our cognitive perspectives, then it might be that by moving between roles in a game e.g. between hiding and seeking or buying and selling we come to memorize about the perspective of the other. This new interpretation of Mead's account of taking the perspective of the other has experimental support. Other recent publications argue that Mead's account of the development of perspective-taking is not only relevant with respect to human ontogeny but also to the evolution of human sociality.