George Herbert Who? A Critique of the Objectivist Reading of Mead*

Abstract

Lewis (1972, 1976, 1979), Lewis and Smith (1981), and McPhail and Rexroat (1979) have presented a new reading of George H. Mead's work. They argue that Mead's principal epis‐temological position was realist (Lewis and Smith, 1981) and that his theories are convergent with objective, experimental methods (McPhail and Rexroat, 1979). They argue further that the symbolic interactionists misinterpret Mead in their naturalist (Blumer, 1969) methodologies. This objectivist reading of Mead contains two fundamental errors: (1) a faulty conceptualization of epistemology that forces the dichotomy of realism and nominalism; and (2) a misrepresentation of Mead's epistemological concerns as a narrow, prescriptive methodology. The present study attempts to reconcile the new reading of Mead with the old by focusing on the problem of objectivity in Mead.