The Pragmatist Roots

Symbolic interactionism did not fall from the sky. It was a sociological translation of a distinctly American philosophical tradition — pragmatism — that developed through the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Understanding the tradition requires understanding the philosophical soil in which it grew, because the commitments that look distinctive in the sociological literature are largely inherited from philosophical arguments made decades earlier.

Peirce's 1878 essay 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' proposed what he called the pragmatic maxim: the meaning of a concept is exhausted by the practical consequences one would expect to follow from its truth (Peirce 1878, pp. 293-295). To know what 'hard' means when applied to a diamond is to know what one would expect to observe if the diamond were hard — its resistance to scratching, its effect on softer materials. Meaning, on this account, is not a mental atom detached from action; it is a pattern of anticipated consequences. The move is subtle but consequential. It relocates meaning from the head to the interactive loop between actor and world.

James extended the move toward psychology and the theory of the self. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), and more sharply in later essays, James argued that consciousness is a continuous stream rather than a succession of discrete ideas, and that the self is not a simple substance but a complex of roles, relationships, and self-images assembled in the course of living a life. One has, James suggested, as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion one cares. Different audiences pull different selves into focus.

Dewey carried the pragmatist program into a full social and educational philosophy. His 1922 Human Nature and Conduct argued against two then-dominant positions: the view that human conduct is driven by fixed biological instincts, and the view that conduct is the mechanical execution of stimulus-response associations. Both, Dewey argued, missed the interpretive moment in human action. A stimulus does not act on an organism as a billiard ball acts on another billiard ball. The organism responds to what the stimulus means — a loud bang is a threat or a celebration depending on context — and meaning is formed in the actor's ongoing transaction with a social environment (Dewey 1922, pp. 41-47).

This argument against behaviorism is the pragmatist move that symbolic interactionism would inherit most directly. Behaviorism, most forcefully developed in John B. Watson's program and later in B. F. Skinner's, proposed that psychology could be a natural science only by restricting itself to observable stimulus-response relations, bracketing the 'black box' of mind. The pragmatists did not deny that behavior has environmental determinants. They denied that the relation between environment and behavior could be specified without an account of meaning, because humans respond to situations as they interpret them, not as they objectively are. The Thomas theorem — 'if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences' (Thomas and Thomas 1928, p. 572) — is the sociological slogan that distills the point.

The pragmatist commitment has three implications that run through everything that follows. First, mind is social. Minds do not exist prior to interaction and then happen to enter it; minds emerge through participation in symbolic exchange with others. Second, meaning is processual. Meanings are not stored tokens retrieved from memory; they are produced, negotiated, and revised in the course of interaction. Third, method must respect the interpretive register. If humans act toward things on the basis of what those things mean to them, a science of human action cannot content itself with external measurement of behavior; it must recover the meanings that structure action for the actors involved. Each of these commitments would shape the sociological program that Mead and his successors built.