Download 1 Glossary: Addendum III, Mead* Communication: `What is essential

Glossary: Addendum III, Mead*
Communication: 'What is essential to communication is that the symbol (see significant symbol) should
arouse in one's self what it arouses in the other individual. It must have that sort of universality to any
person who finds himself in the same situation. There is a possiblity of language whenever a stimulus can
affect the individual as it affects the other' (p. 149).
Consciousness. In one widely used sense, consciousness refers to the subjective experience of a subject.
For Mead, there is no necessary connection between this sense, and the self (q.v.). In another sense,
consciousness refers to what Mead (and Dewey) called 'reflective intelligence' (q.v.). This implies an 'I'.
Finally, 'according to the social theory of consciousness, what we mean by consciousness is that peculiar
character and aspect of individual human experience which is due to human society (q.v.).
Generalized Other: 'The organized community or social group which gives the individual his unity of self'
(p. 154). E.g., 'the team is the generalized other in so far as it enters--as an organized process or social
activity--into the experience of any one of the members of it. It so enters in that the individual takes the
attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward one another within the social process, but also in
that he takes their attitudes toward the various phases or aspects of the common social activity.
'Property' furnishes a more abstract example. 'If we say, "This is my property, I shall control it,"
that affirmation calls out a certain set of responses which must be the same in any community win which
property exists... He is calling out the response of what I have called the generalized other' (p. 161).
'It is in the form of the generalized other that the social process influences the behavior of the
individuals involved in it and carrying it on...for it is in this form that the social process or community enters
as a determinate factor into the individual's thinking' (p. 155). This is not reducible to what is generally
called socialization, but, for Mead, is an ongoing factor of social interaction.
Gesture: A term taken from Wundt but, inspired by Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals, given an important technical meaning by Mead. A gesture is a 'stimulus' to another which calls
forth a response which in turn becomes a stimulus (another gesture) for the first to alter his own action. (the
so-called 'conversation of gestures.) See 'Reflex-Arc Concept.'
For Mead human gesturing is not restricted to human interaction, but human gestures involve
'significant symbols' (q.v.).
I-Me: 'The "I" is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the "me" is the organized set of
attitudes which one himself assumes' (p. 175). For Mead, this is a functional not a metaphysical distinction.
There is not some 'part' of the self which is "I" and another which is "me." Rather, the self is a continuously
I-me-ing. Thus, 'the "I" in memory is there as the spokesmen of the self of the second, or minute, or day
ago. As given, it is a "me," but it is a "me" which was an "I" at the earlier time' (p. 174).
The response of the "I" is uncertain and contains a novel element. "The situation is there for us to
act in a self-conscious fashion, but exactly how we will act never gets into experience until after the action
takes place" (p. 177f.). It is thus that 'the "I" gives the sense of freedom, of initiative' (ibid.).
______________________________________________________________________________________
*All quotations, unless otherwise indicated are from George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society, edited
by Charles W. Morris (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1967).
1
'The self is essentially a social process going on with these two distinguishable phases. If it did not have
these two phases there could not be conscious responsibility, and there would be nothing novel in
experience' (p. 178). And, one should add, there would be nothing novel in society either!
Interpretation (of gestures) is not 'a process going on in the mind a such, or one necessarily involving a
mind; it is an external, overt [public], physical, or physiological process going on in the actual field of
social experience (q.v.)...Language simply lifts out of the social process a situation which is logically or
implicitly there already' (p. 79).
Meaning: (Following Peirce), found or implicit in 'a triadic relation of a gesture of one individual, a response
to that gesture (q.v.) by a second individual, and completion of the given social act initiated by by the
gesture of the first individual' (p. 81).
'Meaning is thus not to be conceived, fundamentally, as a state of consciousness ['in one's head'
'mentalism'], or as a set of organized relations existing or subsisting mentally outside the field of expereince
into which they enter [as in platonisms, some recent structuralisms]; ...it should be conceived objectively,
has having its existence entirely within [the field of experience] itself...[That is], 'objects [things and events
as roses, or earthquakes] are in a genuine sense constituted within the social process of experience, by the
communication and mutual adjustment of behavior by individual organisms which are involved in that
process and carry it on. Just as in fencing the parry is an interpretation of the thrust, so, in the social act
(q.v.), the adjustive response of one organism to the gesture of another is the interpretation of that gesture
(q.v.) by that organism--it is the meaning of the gesture' (p. 78).
Mind: 'The mechanism of the central nervous system enables us to have now present, in terms of attitudes
or implicit responses, the alternative possible overt completions of any given act...When...we speak of
reflective conduct we very definitely refer to the presence of the future in terms of ideas (p. 117, p. 119).
'We generally confine the term 'mental' and so 'mind,' to the human organism, because there we
find that body of symbols that enables us to isolate...meanings (q.v.). But 'it is absurd to look at the mind
simply from the the standpoint of the individual human organism; for, although it has its focus there, it is
essentially a social phenomenon; even its biological functions are primarily social [being functions whose
emergent properties are social]...We must regard mind, then, as arising and developing with the social
process, within the empirical matrix of social interactions....The process of experience which the human
brain makes possible are made possible only for a group of interacting individuals.' (p. 133). See Self,
Consciousness.
Reflective intelligence: '...the entrance of the alternative possibilities into the determination of present
conduct in any given environmental situation, and their operation, through the mechanism of the central
nervous system, as part of the factors of conditions determining present behavior..[is what] decisively
contrasts intelligent conduct or behavior with reflex, instinctive, and habitual conduct or behavior...That
which takes place in present organic behavior is always in some sense emergent from the past, and never
could have been precisely predicted in advance--never could have been predicted on the basis of a
knowledge, however complete, of the past, and the conditions of the past which are relevant to its
emergence' (pp. 98-99). See I-Me, Mind.
Reflex-Arc Concept: A concept introduced by Dewey (1896), in which there is always a correlativity of
stimulus and response such that aspects of the world become part of an agents world and, then, 'stimuli'
only in so far they affect further response from the agent. As Morris neatly concluded: 'Thus, the sensitivity
and activity of the organism determine its effective environment as genuinely as the physical environment
affects the sensitivity of the [organism].' See Praxis.
2
Self: 'The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from
other objects and from the body' (p. 136). '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 to which he belongs. For he enters his own experience as a self or
individual, not directly or immediately...but only in so far as he first becomes an object to himself just as
other individual are objects to him or in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking
the attitudes of other individuals toward hmself within a social environment...'( p. 138). 'The importance of
what we term "communication" (q.v.) lies in the fact that it provides a form of behavior in which the...
individual may become an object to himself...communication in the sense of significant symbols (q.v.),
communication which is directed not only to others but also to the individual himself' (p. 138f.). 'The self,
as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience' (p.
140). The full development of self requires 'the generalized other' (q.v.).
Significant symbol: A symbol which answers to a meaning (q.v.) in the experience of an individual which
also calls out that meaning in the responding individual. 'Gestures become significant symbols when they
implicitly arouse in an individual making them the same response which they explicityly arouse, or are
supposed to arouse, in other individuals' (p. 47).
'Only in terms of gestures (q.v.) as significant symbols is the existence of mind (q.v.) and
intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures which are significant symbols can thinking--which is
simply an internalized or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of gesture--take
place' (ibid.).
Social act: Any act involving a conversation of gestures (q.v.), or, similarly, involving communication
(q.v.).
[Social] experience: Were it not for Cartesian (subjectivist) notion of experience as 'private,' 'inner'
'inaccessible except to the subject,' and 'a knowledge-affair,' 'social experience' would be redundant. For
Mead (following James and Dewey), experience is 'an affair of doings and sufferings.' As Dewey wrote,
'what experience suggests about itself [that is, without Cartesian presumptions] is a genuinely objective
world which enters into the actions and sufferings of [persons] and undergoes modifications through their
responses' ('Need for the Recovery of Philosophy' (1917).
Society: Any association of selves who take the attitude of the other toward themselves; it must pre-exist if
there are to be selves. In non-human social organizations, there can be co-operation, but 'the socialized
non-human animal...does not take the attitude of the other toward himself and toward the given social
situation in which they are both involved...Hence, also, he cannot adjustively and co-operatively control his
own explicit response to the given social situation in terms of an awareness of that attitude of the other, as
the socialized human animal can' (p. 235 note).
Manicas, Spring 1998
3