Self - Cooley and Mead

Intro:

• Meaningful reality requires
• people to convey meanings to themselves
• people to convey meanings to others
• conveying meanings occurs symbolically
• one must act towards oneself as if one was someone else

Self is : to be both object and subject of one's own thoughts, feelings, and actions.

The Self as Sentiment and Reflection, by Charles Horton Cooley

• immediately excludes philosophers' discussions of self (Uuggghh!!! Why?)
• establishes that he will be discussing the empirical self as apprehended by ordinary observation
• "I" includes reference to other persons simply by the fact that language itself is social not private
• "Where there is no communication there can be no nomenclature and no developed thought." p 152
• looking glass self; we imagine how others see us; has three principles
• "the imagination of our appearance to the other person"
• "the imagination of his judgment of that appearance"
• "some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification" p 153

The Self as Social Structure, by George Herbert Mead

• self is an object to itself
• self is "a social structure, and it arises in social experience" p 157
• we experience ourselves from the perspective of other individuals in our social group or from the general view of the group as a whole
• gesture are the beginning of communication; we first gesture with ourselves
• "I" is one's reaction to one's experience of the attitude of his group
• "I" appears in memory
• "me" is our adjustment to the world present in our nature
• language is more than gesture; language is significant symbol
• because social stimuli affect us in similar way as it affects others
• by this we understand the meaning of what we say to others
• Play - to take the role of another and how he/she sees you
• Game - to take the role of the group and how it as a whole sees you
• "in the game then, there is a set of responses of such others so organized that the attitude of the one calls out the attitude of the others" p 159
• this organization is thought of as the "rules of the game" p 159

2011, Inside social life, 6th ed. Cahill, S., & Sandstrom, K.L. eds. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.