Sociology and ideas about language
Getting things done: language and social interaction
Symbolic interactionism
The approach within social science that seeks most explicitly to develop Weber's insights about the meaningfulness of social action is symbolic interactionism, whose central figure is Mead. Weber was not the only influence on Mead; he was also strongly influenced by the work of Darwin, using the latter's evolutionary account of the natural world to ground a notion of human beings as dynamic and changing rather than as merely playing out a fixed repertoire of personality traits (Charon 1998). For Mead, the distinguishing feature of human beings was their capacity for symbolic communication, particularly linguistic communication. This capacity freed them from the passive, instinctual relation to nature of other animals, allowing them to think and reflect upon nature and, crucially, to act upon it. Indeed, as Charon notes, citing Becker, '... humans are emergent in nature precisely because of the symbol' (Charon 1998: 56). Meaning itself becomes an emergent product of social interaction, rather than being simply contained within the object being studied: for instance, the meaning of criminality is not given in the behavior of people identified by some as 'criminals', but rather is defined by the interaction between those doing the identifying and those being identified. This is an attractively radical notion and it can be applied to querying the meaning of many terms and concepts such as gender, race and ethnicity, deviance, identity and so on (although such application is not without its own methodological difficulties).
The signs and symbols that constitute language enable the development of a fund of common meanings, ideas and under standings, or what we refer to, following Popper (1972), as the 'World 3' of the products of human consciousness. In this schema, 'World l' is the physical world, 'World 2' is the subjective experiences emerging from the engagement of human consciousness with World 1, and World 3 is the realm of the externalized products of the engagement of human consciousness with the world beyond itself. World 3 is pre-eminently symbolic. Although Mead, and symbolic interactionists generally, do not dwell on the ontological status of such a concept as 'World 3', they do insist on the emergent nature of shared meanings, which, though the product of human social interaction, are irreducible to it. Furthermore, this allows for more and more complex forms of social interaction as people's access to, and manipulation of, common meanings and symbols becomes more extensive and sophisticated.
This active social conversation based upon these common meanings and symbols, and through which individuals come to negotiate their place in the world, is not only directed towards other people. Mead argues that we 'talkto ourselves', are constantly engaged in an inner conversation as we manage our social world: 'Give the human the self and the words to communicate with the self, and the active person emerges, manipulating words, thinking and creating' (Charon 1998: 100).
It should be clear, as Layder (1994) notes, that this emphasis on the importance of meaning is the key distinguishing feature of symbolic interactionism. Furthermore, meanings are mediated through an interpretive process that is, to a very considerable degree, linguistic. However, those who developed Mead's work (such as Blumer, Becker and Goffman) undertook little in the way of practical linguistic research. Their work focuses overwhelmingly on negotiated interaction, on the strategies- 'saving face', 'maintaining role distance', 'turn taking' and so on- that individuals deploy in the course of everyday life. That is to say, the concern of symbolic interactionism is less with the linguistic mediation of social interaction, and more with its dramaturgical (socially enacted) forms. This may be because, beyond the recognition that human beings are symbol-users, symbolic inter actionism (like many other traditions in social science) does not pay much attention to how people's social relations are related to the ways in which they use language. There is, in other words, an assumption that social relations and the languages people use to interpret and negotiate them are separate entities.
