with scientific experimentation evolving toward solving problems. Dewey’s
reputation faded in the long run; in his day he was the most publicly prominent
American philosopher, above all by legitimating scientific research and educa-
tion through connecting it with the core political ideology.
The pragmatism of George Herbert Mead came from a background close
to Dewey’s (Miller, 1973; Joas, 1985). Mead’s milieu was that of Protestant
missionaries; his father was a theology professor, his mother a pious college
president. Mead was inducted into intellectual networks as a tutor in James’s
family, as a student of Royce, and, while sojourning in Germany, of Wundt.
Finally, he was a loyal protégé of Dewey, who brought him to Chicago in 1894,
where they participated together in the Social Gospel movement. Like other
Americans of his generation seeking to mitigate parental religious strictness,
he became attracted to experimental psychology as the amalgam of science and
spirituality. But psychology was secularizing, and Mead was exposed to its
militant side by his friendship with the behaviorist John B. Watson (a graduate
student at Chicago, 1900–1903). Against this tide, Mead preserved Idealist
themes of the sociality and connectedness of mind by transforming them into
a naturalistic social psychology.
In Mead’s system, mind emerges from the social interaction of human
animals. Words are verbal gestures whose significance is the intended action
they convey to their hearers; understanding a language is made possible by
taking the role of the other person. Universals do not exist in the world, but
are produced by symbols, by virtue of meaning the same thing for everyone.
It is the Generalized Other—the open-ended capacity of humans to take the
point of view of anyone at all—which constitutes a world of permanent objects
for the individual mind. Thinking is internalized conversation, the human
animal’s interchange of gestures carried out by splitting oneself into speaker
and hearer. The upshot of Mead’s philosophy is that mind is no longer mys-
terious; it is an empirical process whose variations are explainable by the
methods of sociological research.
Mead’s theory of mind was little recognized among philosophers. It was in
the 1930s, after his death, that sociologists at Chicago made Mead famous in
their own discipline as the founder of what they called symbolic interactionism.
Mead resembles Peirce in leaving scattered unfinished manuscripts (notably
Mead, 1938) but publishing little major work in his lifetime; his blockage of
creative confidence is related to his ambivalent position in the intellectual field.
Mead himself was never wholeheartedly a naturalistic sociologist; he retained
a commitment to Idealism to the end. In lectures given in 1930 he describes
time as a construct of human projects, and past history as constantly reshaped
by the emergent concerns of the present. Objects are constituted as discrete
units and definite forms only as these become the focus of action upon them;
682 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths