Symbolic Interactionism rests on three primary premises. First, that human beings act towards things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them, second that such meanings arise out of the interaction of the individual with others, and third, that an interpretive process is used by the person in each instance in which he must deal with things in his environment.

It was Blumer’s perception that the first premise was largely ignored, or at least down-played, by his contemporaries. If mentioned at all, he asserted, meaning is relegated to the status of a causative factor or is treated as a "mere transmission link that can be ignored in favour of the initiating factors" by both sociologists and psychologists. Symbolic Interactionism, however, holds the view that the central role in human behaviour belongs to these very meanings which other viewpoints would dismiss as incidental.

As to the second premise, Blumer identified two traditional methods for accounting for the derivation of meaning and highlights how they differ from the Interactionist approach. First, meaning is taken to be innate to the object considered (i.e., it inheres in the objective characteristics of the object). In this view, meaning is given and no process is involved in forming an understanding of it, one need only recognize what is already there. Second, meaning is taken to be the cumulative "psychical accretion" of perceptions carried by the perceiver for whom the object has meaning. "This psychical accretion is treated as being an expression of constituent elements of the person’s psyche, mind, or psychological organization." The constituents of the individual’s psychological makeup that go to form meaning, then, are all of the sensory and attitudinal data that the person brings to the instance of meaning formation with her.

In marked contradistinction to these viewpoints, Social Interactionism holds that meaning arises out of the "process of interaction between people. The meaning of a thing for a person grows out of the ways in which other persons act toward the person with regard to the thing," which is to say that the actions of others are instrumental in the formation of meaning for any given individual and in regard to any specific object.

The third premise further distinguishes Symbolic Interactionism from other schools of thought, insofar as it is the actual process of interpretation that is primary to Blumer’s explication of the formation of meaning. The other points of view, he avers, view the uses of meaning as being simply the calling upon and application to specific situations of previously established meanings. Blumer insisted that the interpretive process and the context in which it is done are a vital element in the person’s use of meaning and formation thereof.

This process has two distinct steps. First, the actor indicates to himself the things toward which he is acting; he has to point out to himself the things that have meaning. The making of such indications is an internalized social process in that the actor is interacting with himself. This interaction with himself is something other than an interplay of psychological elements; it is an instance of the person engaging in a process of communicating with himself. Second, by virtue of this process of communicating with himself, interpretation becomes a matter of handling meanings. The actor selects, checks, suspends, regroups, and transforms meanings in the light of the situation in which he is placed and the direction of his action.

This being the case, interpretation is vastly more important than a simple application of previously integrated meanings, but is, rather, an active process of formulation, reconsideration, and revision. "Like other Pragmatists, Blumer has insisted that the meanings of objects are primarily a property of behaviour and depend only secondarily upon the intrinsic character of the objects themselves. Meanings, furthermore, are constructed and re-affirmed in social interaction; they are shaped largely by the actual and anticipated responses of others." Meanings, for Blumer, are a dynamic part of any action through this self-interactive process.

Resting upon the three premises are a large body of basic ideas, what Blumer thought of as "root images.... These root images refer to and depict the nature of the following matters: human groups or societies, social interaction, objects, the human being as an actor, human action, and the interconnection of the lines of action." Taken in sum, these "images" constitute the foundation of the Social Interactionist view of human conduct and human society and form the skeleton around which Interactionist theory and interpretation is built. What follows is a brief description of each of these ideas, as explicated by Blumer himself.

Human Groups Or Societies are defined as being composed of human beings engaged in all the varied actions which they perform as they move through life and encounter one another and the massive array of situations imposed on them. Action may be taken by an individual, collectively, on behalf of others, or as the representative for an individual or group of others. However, action remains the property of the individual and is carried out in light of the current situational context in which the individual carries out the action.

This characterization of human society existing in action is the starting point from which social interactionism views human conduct. "A cardinal principle of symbolic interactionism is that any empirically oriented scheme of human society, however derived, must respect the fact that in the first and last instances human society consists of people engaging in action. To be empirically valid the scheme must be consistent with the nature of the social action of human beings."

The term Social Interaction presupposes that group life consists of interaction between members of a group (i.e., society consists in the interaction of individual human beings). While other schools of sociological thought treat the actual interaction of individuals as a medium or conduit along which other causative factors are channeled to produce behaviour, it is in the interactions themselves, seen as they are as a process, that Blumer places primary importance in the formation of human behaviour and, as described above, the formation of the meanings that underlie behaviour. The actions of others must be constantly considered in the decision-making process of the individual; thus it is the interaction -- real or imagined -- with those others that is the first and most important determinant of the behaviour of the individual.

Objects retain empirical reality outside of the process of social interaction but the significance of their relationship to human conduct is nonetheless a byproduct of interaction with others. Blumer devotes considerable energy to decrying ‘pure idealism’ and insists that, while reality is indeed comprised of the experiences of human beings, nevertheless, reality cannot be sought exclusively within the thoughts and images of human beings. The "empirical world can ‘talk back’ to our pictures of it or assertions about it -- talk back in the sense of challenging and resisting, or not bending to, our images or conceptions of it. This resistance gives the empirical world an obdurate character that is the mark of reality."

That said, Blumer distinguishes three classes of objects: 1) physical objects; 2) social objects; and 3) abstract objects. The environment in which a person conducts her life can consist only of the objects that have acquired meaning for her. The nature of this environment, on the other hand, is comprised of the content of those meanings. So, two persons living in largely similar physical environs may have subjectively different ‘actual’ environments.

Since a human being is an acting organism, therefore persons must be constituted such that they can interact with others, both on the non-symbolic level and in the sense of making indications as to their intended actions and interpreting the indications they perceive others as making. Blumer emphasizes the assertion, first made by G.H. Mead, that to do this the individual must possess a Self -- a recognizable object of one’s own actions. Just as is the case with other objects, it must be noted, "the ‘self-object’ emerges from the process of social interaction in which other people are defining a person to himself." Further, the possession of a Self enables the person to perform the all-important interaction with himself that Mead identified as the crux of the formation of social skills and which Blumer calls making indications to oneself -- in fact, Blumer says, this process of making indications to the Self is the distinguishing characteristic of consciousness.

The nature of human action follows from the ability to make indications to the Self. This facility allows the human being to engage the world as one who interprets it and forms decisions upon which to act from that interpretation rather than simply responding automatically to the environment bases on instinctually-given rules inherent in the organism’s makeup. "He has to cope with the situations in which he is called on to act, ascertaining the meaning of the actions of others and mapping out his own line of action in the light of this interpretation." The ‘objects’ confronted which must be taken into account, it should be noted, include not only physical objects, but the social and abstract objects that comprise the rest of the individual’s perceived reality, as well.

The interlinkages of human actions are the building blocks of human group life. It is the process of corresponding these lines of individual action to those of others that best characterizes human society. The ability to do this allows for ‘joint actions’ which are consciously entered into and which can then be referred to without the necessity of segregating out the various individual actions that make them up or identifying the individuals who perform them. Thus, it is actually the articulation of lines of action to the Self, an ability that distinguished human action from that of other species, which gives rise to the collective actions that serve to distinguish human society.

Blumer points out that

This distinction allows for Social Interaction, which concerns itself primarily with micro-level actions of individuals and small groups, to account for the macro-level phenomena which arise out of the actions of those individuals by re-asserting that all action begins in the interpretive process of the individual.

"Empirical science," Blumer avers, "is an enterprise that seeks to develop images and conceptions that can successfully handle and accommodate the resistance offered by the empirical world under study." Blumer decries the notion that the empirical world has an im-mutable character the discovery of which is the purpose of empirical study. Rather, he asserts that each new scientific discovery reveals a new vision of reality which demands that previously held conceptions be completely revised.

In Blumer’s judgment the