Mead is usually described as a social psychologist who explained the emergence of mind and self through symbolic social interaction. Mead developed a philosophical system that allowed him to construct a social theory that unifies all facets of society and social experience-subjective and objective events, small-scale Micro) and large-scale (macro) social processes.  Major strands in his methodology are :-

Firstly, he advocated analyzing all ideas via the scientific method, thereby bringing all realms of knowledge into one organized scientific worldview – an empirical pragmatic cosmology.

Secondly, mead was strongly opposed to mind-body dualism in all its forms because it split the world into two irreconcilable parts; and he succeeded in developing a non dualistic theory that unifies mind and body, mental and physical, subjective and objective – an evolutionary and unified theory.

The philosophical pragmatism created by Mead and the Chicago-school philosophers is an integrated philosophical system that is designed to advance all facets of human knowledge and improve the human condition by the rigorous application of scientific methods.  Dewey noted that “roughly speaking” seven- tenths-century science dealt with astronomy and general cosmology; eighteenth-century science with physics and chemistry; and nineteenth-century science with geology and biology.  Only the moral and social issues remained to be analyzed scientifically. “Does it not seem to be the intellectual task of the twentieth century to take this last step? Starting with the ancient Greeks, Mead stated that “ancient philosophy was entirely metaphysical.”  Later, Renaissance thinkers mixed contemplation and scientific research in an attempt to decipher the “goal of the universe”.  Mead presented considerable evidence that the scientific method is superior to all other methods of gaining knowledge and regulating human affairs. The pragmatists attempted to evaluate all ideas empirically and organize the entire range of human knowledge in one well-integrated empirical cosmology. Because we live in an ever-changing and evolving world in which new and unexpected data are always emerging, Mead anticipated that scientific knowledge would always be changing and evolving. An empirical cosmology is always open to further elaboration, adjustment and refinement, this view is Mead adds flexivity and dynamism to the analysis.

Taking an evolutionary perspective, Mead (1932:68) described consciousness as existing on a continuum from low levels of feeling in simple organisms to high levels of symbolic thought in human’s and he described the  preconditions for the emergence of the successively higher levels of  awareness and consciousness.  When socially living humans began to  use arbitrary symbols for communication and originated early languages, they created tool that made possible the emergence of one of the  most advanced levels of consciousness and intelligence, which Mead described as “ reflective intelligence” For Mead, the fullest development of reflective intelligence is to be founding the scientific method:’ Science is an expression of the highest type of intelligence, a method of continually adjusting itself to that which is new”.  Applying a modified version of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Mead saw human societies as evolving and changing over time.  “Societies develop, just as animal forms develop, by adjusting themselves to the problems that they find before them”. 

According to Mead, throughout most of history, evolution has taken place by relatively inefficient types of trial and –error adjustment.  “How life forms have developed slowly by the trial-and-error method”.  However, with the emergence of reflective intelligence and science, humans are learning to guide biological and social evolution in ways that are not as slow and wasteful as trial-and-error methods. Science provides’ and instrument by means of which mankind, the community, gets control over its environment” For example, science allows us to control the types of crops we grow, the fowl of rivers, population growth, and social reforms thus, science “is a technique which is simply doing consciously what takes place naturally in the evolution of life forms”

Mead took the evolutionary viewpoint: We think because we have evolved as social animals with the capacity for symbolic communication, thus with the ability to speak and think symbolically. Rather than assuming the primacy of the mind (as Descartes had), Mead explained how mind emerged during biological and social evolution. Comparing insects, lower vertebrates, and advanced species, Mead traced the gradual appearance of increasingly complex central nervous systems, increasingly subtle communicative gestures and eventually symbolic vocal gestures. Only when people began to use language for symbolic social interaction did mind and self emerge as private internal conversations in the head. In discussing the emergence of consciousness, Mead stated: “In evolution not only have new life forms appeared, but new qualities or contents in conscious experience.”

Mead stressed that biological evolution only provides part of the non-dualistic explanation of mind. Biology explains the human potential for symbolic interaction and mind; but verbal socialization is needed for the actualization of that biological potential. People must live in groups, learn language, and talk with others before they can talk with themselves in the inner conversation of the mind.

At numerous points in Mead’s published work there is evidence that he organized his scientific and philosophical thought in terms of a unified empirical worldview. There are two main strands in his writing which has bearing on the unified empirical worldview. Mead interwove theories of relativity, stellar evolution, biological evolution and the evolution of consciousness to create a unified empirical theory of emergence. Mead traced the history of ideas-especially those involving science-that shaped nineteenth-century philosophical thought. These and other writing reveal that Mead had organized an enormous range of the history of science and philosophy into a meaningful whole. Mead’s unified and organic worldview included society, too. For example, he placed his micro social theories within the context of the social whole: “For social psychology, the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole”.

Mead traced the traditional belief in mind-body dualism to the idealistic philosophies that were common before the development of modern scientific and evolutionary thinking.

In applying the scientific and evolutionary perspective to psychology and philosophy, Mead and Dewey concluded that the traditional dualistic model of mind and body was untenable. Traditional theories had dealt with mind and body separately, thus splitting the world into two parts: mental and physical. In the past, this bifurcation of the world into subjective and objective has been one of the major impediments to the development of a unified worldview. Mead and Dewey demonstrated that a scientific, evolutionary analysis of mind and body would produce a non dualistic cosmology n which all facets of the human condition- mental and physical, subjective and objective – could be dealt with in one unified model.

Using social evolutionary theories and the scientific method to return mind to the body and the natural order of the cosmos, Mead removed one of the most serious obstacles to developing a unified empirical cosmology.