Chicago. Mead believed that science could be used to deal with social problems and played a key role in conducting research at the settlement house in Chicago. He also worked as treasurer for Chicago's Hull House. Mead died of heart failure on April 26, 1931. Theory Pragmatism and symbolic interaction Much of Mead's work focused on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: he insisted that "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings." The two most important roots of Mead's work, and of symbolic interactionism in general, are the philosophy of pragmatism and social behaviorism. Social behaviorism (as opposed to psychological behaviorism) refers to Mead's concern of the stimuli of gestures and social objects with rich meanings, rather than bare physical objects which psychological behaviourists considered stimuli. Pragmatism is a wide-ranging philosophical position from which several aspects of Mead's influences can be identified into four main tenets: True reality does not exist "out there" in the real world, it "is actively created as we act in and toward the world." People remember and base their knowledge of the world on what has been useful to them and are likely to alter what no longer "works." People define the social and physical "objects" they encounter in the world according to their use for them. If we want to understand actors, we must base that understanding on what people actually do. Three of these ideas are critical to symbolic interactionism: The focus on the interaction between the actor and the world A view of both the actor and the world as dynamic processes and not static structures and The actor's ability to interpret the social world. Thus, to Mead and symbolic interactionists, consciousness is not separated from action and interaction, but is an integral part of both. Symbolic interactionism as a pragmatic philosophy was an antecedent to the philosophy of transactionalism. Mead's theories in part, based on pragmatism and behaviorism, were transmitted to many graduate students at the University of Chicago who then went on to establish symbolic interactionism. Social philosophy (behaviorism) Mead was a very important figure in 20th-century social philosophy. One of his most influential ideas was the emergence of mind and self from the communication process between organisms, discussed in Mind, Self and Society (1934), also known as social behaviorism. This concept of how