Mead, Behaviorism and Indeterminacy

Abstract

Schleiermacher once said that every interpretation is the best. I would add, provided Lhe interpreter understands that his is an interpretation, not the final statement of whatever it is that one seeks to interpret. Collins' wide-ranging and provocative essay (to which I cannot do full justice here) on Mead generally avoids imposing on us the definitive reading of Mead.' The author correctly points out that have a legitimate choice between the various intellectual elements in Mead. Still, I would like to take issue with Collins' choice. Not because it does not have merit, but because it leaves out what I believe to be most important and original in Mead's writings. Collins variously refers to Mead's outlook as reductionist, utilitarian, naturalistic, individualistic, and at some point designates it as 'vulgar' behaviorism. True, Mead often used the adjective in describing his social psychology. He also had close personal ties with Watson, the founder of behaviorist psychology. Yet, I think it is misleading to call his general stance behaviorism, since Mead's usage of the term differed so much from the one championed by Watson. Watson sought to expunge all references to psychic phenomena from psychological discourse, substituting for them the description of overt behavior, stimulus situation, conditioning, and so forth. It is an article of faith with him that all responses can ultimately be reduced to and predicted from antecedent stimuli. By contrast, Mead not only affirmed the legitimacy of such concepts as image, self, consciousness, but also postulated unpredictability and novelty as generic features of human conduct. Mead explicitly warned his students not to confuse his position with Watson's: John B. Watson's attitude was that of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland-'Off with their heads!'-there were no such things. There was no imagery, and no consciousness. . . . The behaviorism which we shall make of is more adequate than that of which Watson makes use (Mead 1934, pp. 3, 2). Along with other pragmatists, Mead rejected introspectionism and urged the genetic primacy of action over thought, but this hardly makes him a behaviorist. Social psychol-