The approach which came to be known as ‘symbolic interactionism’ (SI) was first articulated by the philosopher George Herbert Mead at the University of Chicago from 1893 to 1931.1 Mead elaborated the philosophical underpinnings of a social psychology which was founded both upon earlier and upon contemporaneous behaviorist and pragmatist thought, notably that of John Dewey. The acquiring, sustaining and transforming of experience and competence (or competent conduct) was, for Mead, fundamentally a communicative process which could be analyzed developmentally and functionally. It is this central focus upon communicative interaction which subsequent social scientists and linguisticians took up, and which renders Mead’s writings of particular interest to practitioners in pragmatics. It must be said that those who subsequently took up symbolic interactionism have not always made full use of Mead’s work, and have often interpreted Mead in divergent ways. The most explicitly faithful of disciples is, perhaps, the sociologist Herbert Blumer (1969). Often, symbolic interactionist themes simply operate as a patina on what is otherwise a relatively conventional ethnography. A classic, and often vivid, ethnographic study in the Hughes/Chicago School tradition is that of Ned Polsky’s (1969) chapter on ‘The Hustler’. One of the relatively rare contemporary SI analyses which — unlike Polsky — examine language extensively and explicitly in ‘self’ and ‘other’ terms is Thomas S Weinberg’s (1983) study of homosexual identities. Strauss, then, at least treats language as a foundational phenomenon and this allows him to address some Meadian analytic issues such as language acquisition and concept formation during primary socialization (see e.g. Lindesmith, Strauss & Denzin 1977). Notwithstanding this distinctiveness, the work of contemporary SI analysts — particularly those dealing with developmental issues — also reveals striking de facto features of this approach, namely its absorptive tendencies. A major contributor to the study of communication in social life has been Erving Goffman (see e.g. Verhoeven 1993). His espousal of SI was so ambivalent and allusive that it eludes any formalization by a third party. Goffman’s work also exemplifies what has sometimes been termed the ‘histrionic’ aspects of G. H. Mead’s philosophy.SI, then, has its strong and weak programmes. Taking the strong program — i.e. that having an explicit and extensive provenience in Mead’s philosophy — one can see many fruitful relevances to pragmatics. The first set of relevances is that SI is a genuinely praxiological approach to language use. Moreover, SI potentially espouses an explicative rather than an ironic analytic stance to communicative actions and interactions. The best work of SI is typically found in the superbly-crafted intimate empirical explorations of specific (sub-)cultural and occupational settings.The programmatic statements by SI practitioners tend to be less secure, especially when they have taken it upon themselves to fight a rearguard action with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis — surely a needless battle from both vantage points, though comparisons can be instructive. The overriding relevance of SI to pragmatics is that it offers a non-positivistic approach which does not rely upon decontextualized meanings and mentalistic presuppositions. For SI, ‘language’ and ‘mind’ are eminently social.