Discuss Mead’s definition of meaning as a “threefold” relationship and the role significant symbols plays in this relationship. Be sure to use specific quotes from Mind to support your discussion.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Mead defines meaning as a “threefold relationship” between an individual’s gesture the adjustive response by another to that gesture the completion of the social act initiated by the gesture of the first individual. A gesture thus signifies: what the individual making it intends to do, what the individual to whom it is directed is expected to do, the coordinated activity that is to take place. Meaning, in turn, is not an idea, but a response to a gesture developed within a social act. In other words, meaning is not intrinsic to a given object or action, nor does it exist within one’s own consciousness independently of interaction, as the earlier German idealist philosophers argued.