Mead George Herbert (1863–1931), American philosopher, social theorist, and social reformer. He was a member of the Chicago school of pragmatism, which included figures such as James Hayden Tufts and John Dewey. Whitehead agreed with Dewey’s assessment of Mead: ‘a seminal mind of the very first order.’ Mead was raised in a household with deep roots in New England puritanism, but he eventually became a confirmed naturalist, convinced that modern science could make the processes of nature intelligible. On his path to naturalism he studied with the idealist Josiah Royce at Harvard. The German idealist tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (who were portrayed by Mead as Romantic philosophers in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century) had a lasting influence on his thought, even though he became a confirmed empiricist. Mead is considered the progenitor of the school of symbolic interaction in sociology, and is best known for his explanation of the genesis of the mind and the self in terms of language development and role playing. A close friend of Jane Addams (1860–1935), he viewed his theoretical work in this area as lending weight to his progressive political convictions. Mead is often referred to as a social behaviorist. He employed the categories of stimulus and response in order to explain behavior, but contra behaviorists such as John B. Watson, Mead did not dismiss conduct that was not observed by others. He examined the nature of self-consciousness, whose development is depicted in Mind, Self, and Society, from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. He also addressed behavior in terms of the phases of an organism’s adjustment to its environment in The Philosophy of the Act.
His reputation as a theorist of the social development of the self has tended to eclipse his original work in other areas of concern to philosophers, e.g., ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. Influenced by Darwin, Mead sought to understand nature, as well as social relationships, in terms of the process of emergence. He emphasized that qualitatively new forms of life arise through natural and intelligible processes. When novel events occur the past is transformed, for the past has now given rise to the qualitatively new, and it must be seen from a different perspective. Between the arrival of the new order – which the novel event instigates – and the old order, there is a phase of readjustment, a stage that Mead describes as one of sociality. Mead’s views on these and related matters are discussed in The Philosophy of the Present. Mead never published a book-length work in philosophy. His unpublished manuscripts and students’ notes were edited and published as the books cited above.
See also PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCI- ENCES , PRAGMATIS. M.Ab.