Glenda B. Claborne
Sociology 500b
Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society (pp. Ix - 226). Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press.
How does Mead go from a theory of gestures to get self-reflexivity as an outcome? Be very specific!
In contrast to theories which assume that individual minds and selves exist prior to the social process in which they are involved, Mead forwarded a theory which presupposes the existence of an ongoing social process upon which individual minds, selves, and self-consciousness depend and develop. This ongoing social process, according to Mead, is rooted in social conduct or social act, which has a structure.
The social act has a beginning and a completion. It begins with an organism making a gesture, which effects in another organism an adjustive response, which points to the completion of the act as indicated by the gesture. This basic mechanism of the gesture is what makes the social process go on. It is the mechanism by which the meanings of symbols, which constitute language, are acquired. The meanings of words, according to Mead, cannot be traced to the intent, awareness, or consciousness of an individual mind or self existing independently of a social situation but to the social act in which a gesture acquired meaning in the process of being enacted by one organism and then responded to by another. The adjustive response to the gesture is the meaning of the gesture. Language then does not symbolize ideas that were already existing in an individual mind nor does language symbolize objects that are already there prior to a social process. Language symbolizes ideas and objects that have been constituted and have come into a field of experience through the responses of one individual to the gestures of another in a social act.
The social process starts with gestures acquiring meanings in the adjustive responses to the gestures in social conduct, the meanings giving rise to whole new sets of objects, and advances to where these objects are then brought within a field of experience common to the individuals in society. The objects become appropriate stimuli in a cooperative process in which the objects are depended on to arouse the same attitude or gesture among the individuals in a community. A common meaning is only possible to the extent that the individuals in that cooperative social process are able to take on the roles of others in the community in their reaction or attitude toward an object.