Required Reading:
Transition notes |
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Early in the progression of his argument, G.H. Mead directly criticizes "philology" for assuming that language is a distinct entity with sui generis properties that individuals would use. He asserts that interaction, conversation, society, precedes symbolization. Saussure properly belongs with the "philologists" and he has been criticized (as well as his structuralist and post-modern followers) for making of language precisely one of these properties of humanity that could be studied outside or independently from the uses to which it can be put. But Saussure also asserts the priority of society and experience. Above all he is concerned with something that is essential to Mead: the "field" within which personal meaning arises. Mead does not develop how this field is organized ("synchronically," as a system), or gets to be organized ("diachronically," in history) . The structuring of the field, and particularly of the symbolic field within which interaction proceeds, is precisely Saussure's concern--as it was Benedict's. But understanding the systematicity of fields (how they make "whole" for certain purposes and from certain points of view must take us on a new journey that Benedict barely started. |
Conversation? (struggles with the source and control of meaning) |
George Herbert Mead is grouped with John Dewey as a "pragmatist." While Dewey is classified as a philosopher, Mead is classified as a social scientist who greatly influenced generations of sociologists and is considered one of founder of social psychology, though one that stood as a critic of it as when he wrote:
The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. (Mind, Self and Society 1934:1)
Let us back up briefly to summarize the core issues first from their philosophical/political angle, and then from their analytic angle.
Some questions (in the context of this lecture on G.H. Mead) [note that all questions should start with " For G.H. Mead ..." and consist of at least one paragraph in his style. You might weave your objections as something that he might address with a comment like "some might say that ... but..."] |
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