George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago. He was one of the key figures in the development of pragmatism. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, and was an important influence on what has come to be referred to as the Chicago School of Sociology.
George Herbert Mead was born on February 27, 1863, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He was raised in a Protestant, middle-class family comprising his father, Hiram Mead, his mother, Elizabeth Storrs Mead (née Billings), and his sister Alice. His father was a former Congregationalist pastor from a lineage of farmers and clergymen and who later held the chair in Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology at Oberlin College's theological seminary. Elizabeth taught for two years at Oberlin College and subsequently, from 1890 to 1900, served as president of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
In 1879, George Mead enrolled at the Oberlin Academy at Oberlin College and then the college itself, graduating in 1883 with a Bachelor of Arts. After graduation, Mead taught grade school for about four months. From the end of 1883 through the summer of 1887, he worked as a surveyor for the Wisconsin Central Railroad Company.
In 1891, Mead married Helen Kingsbury Castle (1860–1929), the sister of Henry Northrup Castle (1862–1895), a friend he met at Oberlin.
Despite never finishing his dissertation, Mead was able to obtain a post at the University of Michigan in 1891. There, Mead met Charles Horton Cooley and John Dewey, both of whom would influence him greatly. In 1894, Mead moved, along with Dewey, to the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death. Dewey's influence led Mead into educational theory, but his thinking soon diverged from that of Dewey, and developed into his famous psychological theories of mind, self and society.
He was active in Chicago's social and political affairs; his many activities include work for the City Club of Chicago. Mead believed that science could be used to deal with social problems and played a key role in conducting research at the settlement house in Chicago. He also worked as treasurer for Chicago's Hull House. He also collaborated closely with Jane Addams on matters of social justice.
Mead died of heart failure on April 26, 1931. He had submitted his resignation to the University of Chicago three months earlier over the hiring of Mortimer J. Adler and was intending to join Columbia University, but died before that could happen.
Pragmatism and symbolic interactionism
Much of Mead's work focused on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: he insisted that "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings". The two most 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) refers 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. Mead was a critic of John B. Watson's form of behaviorism.
Pragmatism is a wide-ranging philosophical position from which several aspects of Mead's influences can be identified into four main tenets:
True reality does not exist "out there" in the real world, it "is actively created as we act in and toward the world".
People remember and base their knowledge of the world on what has been useful to them and are likely to alter what no longer "works".
People define the social and physical "objects" they encounter in the world according to their use for them.
If we want to understand actors, we must base that understanding on what people actually do.
Three of these ideas are critical to symbolic interactionism:
the focus on the interaction between the actor and the world;
a view of both the actor and the world as dynamic processes and not static structures; and