George Herbert Mead

This article explores the social value of privacy and the intricate relationship between personal autonomy and societal cohesion within the realm of privacy. It contrasts George Herbert Mead’s two models of social organization—hostility and integration—in terms of their impact on the interplay between individuals and society. The model of hostility envisions individuals and society engaged in a zero-sum game, resulting in diminished individuality and an atomistic view of autonomy. In contrast, the model of integration recognizes the interdependence of entities, fostering (...) individuality and promoting a relational understanding of autonomy. Applying these models to privacy theory, the article argues that privacy has often been conceived in terms of hostility, pitting individuals against society. Instead, the article advocates for embracing the model of integration, in which privacy is seen as fundamental to a society where individuals maintain their uniqueness while pursuing a common good. The right to privacy, rooted in this integrative model, allows individuals to preserve their distinct social selves while participating in joint social organization. Furthermore, understanding privacy through the lens of integration highlights the importance of the common good as a necessary condition for both individuality and autonomy. This relational perspective positions privacy as an essential aspect of a democratic and moral society, where diverse individuals mutually constitute themselves and the broader social fabric. By presenting this view, the article offers a fresh understanding of privacy's social value and its implications for societal organization, democracy, and morality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reintroducing George Herbert Mead by Daniel R. HuebnerAndrea ParraviciniDaniel R. Huebner Reintroducing George Herbert Mead Routledge, 2022, 116 pp.Reintroducing George Herbert Mead is the second book of a brand new series recently inaugurated by Routledge and dedicated to major sociology theorists who contributed to the discipline with significant works. The book reflects the intent of the series to offer concise and accessible texts that appeal to scholars and (...) students interested in the most relevant themes in thought of a particular figure, the context in which it emerged, as well as its reception and importance to contemporary studies. George Mead is, however, such a rich and complex figure that the text inevitably overflows the banks of studies dedicated to sociology and the social sciences and offers a wider glimpse into the boundless interdisciplinary territory of philosophy and natural sciences.Daniel R. Huebner, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina (USA), has contributed in the past years with other influential books on Mead, such as Becoming Mead (Huebner, 2014), and co-edited with Hans Joas both the definitive edition of Mind, Self and Society (Mead, 2015) and the multi-authored volume The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead (Joas & Huebner, 2016).Huebner's latest book cleverly condenses into little more than a hundred pages the most important aspects of Mead's life and work, and places them in close connection with the world in which he lived and with the people he influenced. At the same time, it highlights the legacy that this thinker left to research and studies of contemporary thought in social sciences and philosophy.In contrast to his more famous colleague and friend John Dewey, a very prolific writer who had no difficulties to develop his ideas through a number of important books and essays, Mead never managed, due to various reasons, to articulate his groundbreaking ideas in the more systematic form of books or treatises. As Dewey (1931: 310–311) witnessed in his obituary of Mead, although Mead could be judged as "the most original mind in philosophy in the America of the last generation", he "experienced great difficulty in finding adequate verbal expression for his philosophical ideas". It was his students, colleagues, and friends (Charles Morris above all) who, aware of the outstanding force of his philosophic mind, collected papers, manuscripts, notes, and transcripts from his classroom teaching, and published posthumously [End Page 249] his most famous books. Thanks to those publications, and especially to Mind, Self, and Society, Mead is now considered one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, despite the fact that he neither taught in that discipline, nor wrote that book for which he is especially known, as Huebner (p. 3) pointed out. Indeed, Mead's ideas have had a major influence not only on sociology, social psychology, and the behavioral and social sciences more generally, but his transdisciplinary philosophy crossed in many other fields as well, such as physical science, biology, history, and the religious literature of the world (Dewey, 1931: 312). Despite his encyclopedic mind and culture, his ideas were always in search of practical connections with the problems of concrete life. As a pragmatist thinker, Mead used his theories as practical tools for better understanding how to face the urgent issues of his time and society.As regards its structure, the book is divided into four main chapters, further articulated into various subsections. The text is enriched by several useful figures (three per chapter) which serve as information boxes illustrating interesting aspects related to Mead. The first section introduces the life and influence of the North American philosopher, in the wake of recent scholarship, which has partially changed what we know about him. The chapter focuses particularly on his social reform efforts, but it also highlights his engagement with colonization and war by providing a critical reinterpretation of the texts published after his death, and the rediscovery of important aspects of his work that had been lost. The way the author closely connects Mead's philosophy to different aspects of his life is particularly interesting. Noteworthy aspects related to Mead's life concern also the importance of the Hull House Social Settlement... (shrink)

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

Trevor Pearce has done something remarkable and all too rare: written a book at the intersection of philosophy, science, and history that is equally excellent in all three respects.

This article focuses on the pragmatist feminist theories of social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. It begins by delineating Gilman's understanding of how the material-cultural environment affects the lives of women. Believing the American way of life to be too individualistic, Gilman developed a theory of social change aimed at generating more collectivist ways of living and promoting the economic independence of women. To achieve these ends, Gilman advocated for the reconstruction of the Victorian nursery, which (...) she believed would afford women the choice to pursue a professional career outside of the home, and promote the health of the community. Gilman's social theory is contrasted with that of Margaret Mead, who believed that plans for social reform are best left to readers. Rather than advocate for the adoption of an entirely new cultural practice, Mead sought to acquaint her culturally diverse American readership with the Samoan way of life, so that they might collectively decide how to best address the problem of choice facing young women in the 1920s. (shrink)

George Herbert Mead has long been known for his social theory of meaning and the 'self' - an approach which becomes all the more relevant in light of the ways we develop and represent ourselves online. But recent scholarship has shown that Mead's pragmatic philosophy can help us understand a much wider range of contemporary issues including how humans and natural environments mutually influence one another, how deliberative democracy can and should work, how thinking is dependent upon the body and (...) on others, and how social changes in the present affect our understandings of the past. Historical scholarship has also changed what we know of Mead's life, including new emphasis on his social reform efforts, his engagement with colonization and war, and critical reinterpretation of the works published after his death. This book provides an approachable introduction to Mead's contemporary relevance in the social sciences, showing how a pragmatic view of social action serves as the core of Mead's theory, offering striking insights into human agency, symbolism, politics, social change, temporality, and materiality. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and the social sciences more broadly, with interests in social theory and the enduring importance of the sociological classics. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the complementary nature of the theory and practice of Jane Addams (1860–1935) and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). When applied to intractable contemporary problems, the application of their combined insights “bends toward justice.” Both were theorist-activists who embraced a relational and interdependent conception of the self and insisted that, with empathetic understanding, progress toward justice could be incrementally achieved. This approach has contemporary relevance, particularly in today’s polarized society. Our social circles have narrowed, becoming more insular, our (...) political institutions have become more divisive, and the economic gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. Addams and Mead’s work help us see why these divisions are problematic and suggest possible paths for moving toward more just social, political, and economic arrangements. (shrink)

Abstract:In speaking of his analyses, George Herbert Mead (1863– 1931) announces: “It is behavioristic where the approach to experience is made through conduct.” He turns this approach to the practice of the arts and the aesthetic experience. His approach consists of an analysis of gestures and attitudes as the beginning of acts that we bring with us to the activities in which we are engaged. A gesture would be, for example, offering someone a chair who has entered a room. Usually (...) gestures and their responses form a conversation, in this case, acceptance or rejection of the offer. The attitude behind the offer would be generosity and friendliness—a sign of welcome. Within music, “a temporal dimension as that of the melody, or recognition of the notes and their distance from each other in the scale, and our appreciation of these as actually affected by the beginning of our response to the later notes, as when we are expecting a certain sort of ending.... It is that attitude that gives the character of our appreciation of all extended musical compositions.” Instead of the part–whole understanding of the arts, he argues for a whole–part relationship within a social context of the actions that make up a performance or object. How far will this thesis take us? I explore answers to this question. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to outline several valuable elements of Mead’s pragmatist theory of perception in action developed in his The Philosophy of the Act, in order to strengthen the pragmatist legacy of the enactivist approach. In particular, Mead’s theory of perception in action turns out to be a forerunner of sensorimotor enactivist theory. Unlike the latter, however, Mead explicitly refers to imagery as an essential capacity for agency. Nonetheless, the article argues that the ways in which Mead (...) refers to this capacity do not necessarily place it in opposition to enactivist non-representationalism. On the contrary, as a synthetic process of re-presenting of present and past sensorimotor elements, imagery can be seen as the hallmark of a pragmatically inspired sensorimotor enactivist approach that bypasses the opposition between representationalists and non-representationalists. (shrink)

In Pragmatism’s Evolution, Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. Many are familiar with John Dewey’s 1909 assertion that evolutionary ideas overturned two thousand years of philosophy—but what exactly happened in the fifty years prior to Dewey’s claim? What form did evolutionary ideas take? When and how were they received by American philosophers? Although the (...) various thinkers associated with pragmatism—from Charles Sanders Peirce to Jane Addams and beyond—were towering figures in American intellectual life, few realize the full extent of their engagement with the life sciences. In his analysis, Pearce focuses on a series of debates in biology from 1860 to 1910—from the instincts of honeybees to the inheritance of acquired characteristics—in which the pragmatists were active participants. If we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, Pearce argues, we need to understand the relationship between pragmatism and biology. (shrink)

The prompt development of the world's South and the stagnation in the evolution of the world's North altered the directions of policy diffusion. Up to date, the literature lacks a clear framework that captures these changes. This article contributes to research by offering a Generation Learning Framework to study the new paths of policy and technology dissemination around the globe. Anthropological propositions of Margaret Mead are adapted to capture a higher demand and popularity of the South-South transfers over the less (...) frequent South-North transfers. Illustrating the framework with the examples of South-Korean lesson-drawing, the study concludes that the era of knowledge transfer exclusively from the North to South is over. The proposed framework can be further applied to the fast-growing experiences in the learning practices that take place in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. (shrink)

In diesem Text versuche ich, die von G. H. Meads aus der Sicht des Behaviorismus skizzierte Auffassung des Anerkennungsbegriffs darzustellen. Dabei wird sich zeigen, dass eine derartige Auffassung auf die für das Selbst konstitutive Unterscheidung zwischen dem „Mich“ und dem „Ich“ beruht.

This essay—part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves”—concerns the second Move, “gesture,” the etymology of which reveals its close connection to the Greek word “metaphor.” More specifically, I examine the treatments of gesture by the philosophers George Herbert Mead and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, both of whom view it as the foundation of language. I conclude by showing how gesture can be used in analyzing (...) various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole. (shrink)

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of (...) visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce’s theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science. (shrink)

In 1998, Clark and Chalmers addressed a question that remained pivotal in the discussion afterwards: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Their inquiry, developed by many others, led to a questioning of the idea of the mind as a thing – a simple res cogitans – with a precise localization. I will discuss their theses, trying to show that the views of the pragmatists can provide us with a different scenario. For example, Peirce doesn’t (...) think we have to choose between an internalist stance and an externalist one, because “mind”, as any other thing, is “wherever it acts”, wherever it produces habits of behavior, wherever it guides action and produces “conscious” effects. For Peirce, as well as for Mead, habit is the key-word, not consciousness, not mind. Habit is not internal, and not properly external. It is something that lives “in the exercises that nourish it” and in the “actions to which it gives rise”. The social origin of consciousness, and the relevance of habits, as social and public structures that situate the mind, are effective pragmatist keys of interpretation that can enhance the actual field of the cognitive sciences. I will finally present a theoretical hypothesis on the role of the mind in cognition, based not on the extension of it, but, so to say, on the “intension”. In this sense, the cognitive can be read as the “intensive” trait of the pragmatic. (shrink)

George Herbert Mead is widely considered one of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work remains vibrant and relevant to many areas of scholarly inquiry today. The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead brings together a range of scholars who provide detailed analyses of Mead’s importance to innovative fields of scholarship, including cognitive science, environmental studies, democratic epistemology, and social ethics, non-teleological historiography, and the history of the natural and social sciences. Edited by well-respected Mead scholars (...) Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner, the volume as a whole makes a coherent statement that places Mead in dialogue with current research, pushing these domains of scholarship forward while also revitalizing the growing literature on an author who has an ongoing and major influence on sociology, psychology, and philosophy. (shrink)

Trevor Pearce examines Mead’s early intellectual development and shows in detail how difficult it was for a young Christian at the time to integrate Darwin into his worldview. Pearce explores the deep existential crisis that resulted from these difficulties. Based on new and newly reevaluated biographical material, Pearce traces the development of Mead’s views through his years in college, in a longer phase of existential reorientation, and as a student of philosophy and psychology. Pearce also shows how Mead’s education with (...) Josiah Royce at Harvard and Wilhelm Dilthey in Berlin—both authors who saw the doctrine of evolution as a means to come to a better understanding of the human being’s “spiritual” nature—was key to resolving his early intellectual and personal problems and continued to form the center of his later work. (shrink)

Good old-fashioned cognitive science characterizes human thinking as symbol manipulation qua computation and therefore emphasizes the processing of symbolic representations as a necessary if not sufficient condition for “general intelligent action.” Recent alternative conceptions of human thinking tend to deemphasize if not altogether eschew the notion of representation. The present paper shows how classical American pragmatist conceptions of human thinking can successfully avoid either of these extremes, replacing old-fashioned conceptions of representation with one that characterizes both representatum and representans in (...) externalist terms. (shrink)

De la psychologie sociale aux Théories critiques de J Habermas et A Honneth, en passant par l'interactionnisme symbolique ou la sociologie pragmatiste héritière de l'école de Chicago, l'oeuvre de GH Mead (1863-1931) constitue une source majeure de la théorie sociale. Cet ouvrage invite à la (re)découvrir. Tout en examinant les sources de la pensée de Mead et en discutant ses concepts fondamentaux, il propose de mettre en lumière le potentiel critique et créateur des perspectives qu'elle ouvre pour la théorie sociale. (...) Il montre comment ses développements consacrés au self, à l'Autrui généralisé, à l'interaction, au contrôle social, etc., ainsi que son traitement des problèmes liés, notamment, à la conscience de soi, à la communication, à la reconnaissance ou aux institutions peuvent être mis en dialogue et en confrontation avec les analyses de A Smith, GWF Hegel, W James, G Simmel, J Dewey, RE Park, E Goffman, H Blumer, A Schütz, H Garfinkel, J Habermas, A Honneth, R Collins. Il propose des traductions inédites de textes de GH Mead qui permettent de saisir le processus d'élaboration et la richesse de sa psychologie sociale. A la fois introduction, examen critique et mise en perspective de la pensée de Mead, ce livre s'adresse aux philosophes, sociologues et psychologues, étudiants ou chercheurs, intéressés par l'auteur et, plus généralement, par la théorie sociale d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. (shrink)

In short, he is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write. In Becoming Mead, Daniel R. Huebner traces the ways in which knowledge has been produced by and about the famed American philosopher.

This volume is composed of extended versions of selected papers presented at an international conference held in June 2011 at Opole University—the seventh in a series of annual American and European Values conferences organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. The papers were written independently with no prior guidelines other than the obvious need to address some aspect of George Herbert Mead’s work. While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context (...) in which that work was carried out, these papers have brought that work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. There is good reason to classify Mead as one of the original classical American pragmatists (along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) and consequently as a major figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his thought has been marginalized for the most part, at least in academic philosophy. It is our intention to help recuperate Mead’s reputation among a broader audience by providing a small corpus of significant contemporary scholarship on some key aspects of his thought. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 1 Seiten: 451-472.