Rethinking George Herbert Mead: Implications for contemporary theories of knowledge, science, and technology.

摘要

George Herbert Mead has contributed centrally to an understanding of the self and social action. While various intellectual camps have interpreted Mead differently in order to bolster their own theoretical positions, Herbert Blumer and the symbolic interactionists have been the most successful in expositing and defining his relevance to the sociological public. The interactionists have made central the self-reflective, voluntary, and symbolic aspects of Mead's thought, while largely neglecting Mead's social pragmatism and the non-symbolic processes that would provide a fuller conception of the self, meaning, and social action. This thesis takes these more neglected aspects of his thought seriously, and shows how a greater attention to non-symbolic processes may contribute fruitfully to contemporary sociological theory. I accomplish this broad task in three separate but related research articles. The first article reflects back on the debate surrounding Herbert Blumer's interpretation of Mead, and argues that the pre-reflective and implicit aspects of Mead's analysis of the social act stand to enrich interactionist theory. The second article assesses a specific school of thought termed the "social construction of technology." I show that Mead's non-dualist conception of the social, combined with his theory of emergence, would allow scholars in this field to move beyond the various pitfalls associated with traditional social constructionist approaches. The third article presents Mead's much neglected yet surprisingly modern social theory of scientific practice. Uncovering this multi-faceted understanding of science further helps to elaborate Mead's positions on meaning and knowledge in ways that differ from social constructionist interpretations of his thought. The thesis concludes by considering Mead's theoretical position on meaning and knowledge in broad terms, assessing his theory of creativity and innovation, and presenting the shortcomings in the present study to suggest directions for future research.