George Herbert Mead: Symbolic Interaction and Social Change

Abstract

By showing how the subject, the self, emerges out of a social process and why it is essentially a phase of that process, Mead evades phenomenalism, extreme behaviorism, reductionism, dualism, solipsism, and supernaturalism. He assumes that the social act is the unit of existence and that every such act, which takes place in a present, has both past and future in it, both efficient and final causes. Every self has, of necessity, a social component, the generalized other, which serves both as stabilizer and foundation for new proposals for modifying social action. Mead is a process philosopher, an organicist, interbehavioralist, clarifying the nature and function of symbolic interaction.