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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