“Know thyself,” advised the oracle at Delphi. “Show thyself,” is the motto of today. The prevalence of selfies, sexting, Facebook pics and stories, tweets and Twitters, and new apps, all demonstrate the transition from a personal and private self to a public, even pubic, self.
This cult of the self may have emerged remotely from Delphi and Socrates but accelerated in the late 19th and 20th centuries with many philosophers, psychologists, and social psychologists, some of whom are mentioned here. These are now left behind by activists and the identity politics of gender, sexual orientation, gender orientation, and color. The front-page news in The New York Times recently (22 May) was the latest battle in the culture wars: bathrooms! We can fight about anything! — and everything, and we do.
Who are you? What are you? What is your self? Most people, in my limited research on this topic, tend to identify in three principal ways: their familial roles, or their occupational roles or the defining characteristics of their personality (warm, strong, a survivor, romantic, adventurer, nurturing were common responses). (Thomas Kuhn’s Twenty Statements Test is more scientific.) And if you really don’t know who and what you are, the are plenty of personality tests to tell you, and perhaps some frenemies to explain precisely what is wrong with you.
Some adopt a more existential vision. One respondent identified herself as “a butterfly” and as “a river. I have to keep moving or I’d die.” Active, but hopefully not all downhill. Performers are particularly demonstrative on the self. The Beatles: “I am the walrus” (A very strange self-concept, drawn from Lewis Carroll. “I am the emu” sounds much better). Michael Jackson: “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” Paul Simon: “I am a rock. I am an island.” (John Donne disagreed: “No man is an island.”) And Nietzsche: “I am… the Anti-Christ.” (1992:72.)
All sorts of different self-definitions and identities. All sorts of different people and types of people. What is also fascinating is how many people have tried to define this self, without too much agreement. It is elusive not least because it is constantly changing as we age, and enjoy or suffer different experiences: marriage, parenthood, promotion, job-change, sickness, disability, conversion, discrimination, lotto-winner, etc. Indeed the self is so mobile that Peg O’Connor described the self as a “unicorn” — “there is no authentic self. Identity is always a work in progress” (2014:50). One does have an identity, but it is fluid. You are not going to France or Indonesia in your gap year to “find yourself.” You are taking your self with you! Others believe it is a chameleon, for similar reasons. So this search for this unicorn-chameleon, albeit brief, looks useful, even fun.
1. Sigmund Freud: Self as Iceberg.
Influenced by Charcot’s work on hypnotism and especially post-hypnotic suggestion, Freud came to understand that there are two types of mental processes, conscious and unconscious. And the unconscious is not easily accessed, but it is possible in therapy through dreams (in The Interpretation of Dreams) and the analysis of symbolism, and through parapraxes (in The Psycho-Pathology of Everyday Life), which we now know as Freudian slips (verbal slips, slips of the pen or of the body, mislaying, misreading, forgetting, and errors generally). He gives numerous examples of these giveaways. These parapraxes are thought of as expressions of repressed psychic material. Also conversion: how psychic concerns can affect the physical self: a union, or communion, of mind and body. One friend said that whenever her husband was unfaithful, she got sick. They say that 90% of an iceberg is underwater. Freud suggested that much of the self is below consciousness, and that it was important to bring it to the conscious. Perhaps how much is below varies with degrees of repression.
Freud theorized the self far beyond the iceberg/unconscious to include the stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal, and phallic) and the stages of id, ego, and super-ego to include the many mechanisms of adaptation including fixation, regression, projection, repression, displacement, sublimation, transference, resistance (defense mechanisms), and more. While some of his contributions to self-understanding and to psychiatry have been contested, others have led to his being labeled among the top 10 intellectuals of the 20th century by Time magazine.
2. William James: Self as Multiple.
“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” But social selves may be contradictory, depending on the individuals. Your spouse will not have the same view of you as your ex-spouse. I think we can agree on that. And co-workers will not have the same image of him or her as the children do. But that is their concept of you, not your image of your self. So James does imply the possibility of contradictory, conflicting and multiple selves in the minds of others. Walt Whitman expressed this well: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” As did American best-selling novelist Karin Slaughter. Here the protagonist, a rookie cop, debates shooting a villain:
The fifth Kate reared her ugly head. This Kate wanted darkness…Then the other Kates took over. She wasn’t sure which ones. The daughter? The widow? The cop? The whore? The real Kate, she wanted to think…The real Kate was a good person (2014:392).
So that makes six Kates in one; a double trinity, multiple personalities, and even conflicted and contradictory. Some of these images may be negative. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W.E.B. Du Bois pondered the question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” He explained that “being a problem is a strange experience – peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in boyhood and in Europe.” He added, “I remember well when the shadow swept across me. “ When as a “little thing” in school, a girl refused to accept his play visiting card. “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others…shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Self as problem to self, and to others who create the problem.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. “One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (ch. 1).
3. C.H. Cooley: Self as Looking-Glass
His couplet:
Each to each a looking-glass,
Reflects the other that doth pass.
The couplet reflects not only how poetic sociologists may be (don’t you love the “doth?”), but also their insight. Our idea of our selves is deeply influenced by what other people think of us or, strictly, what we think other people think of us. (True, the looking-glass is a flawed metaphor since it does not judge, unlike people.) This is especially true for our primary groups of intimate personal relations, the families of birth and our closest friendships. Significant others mirror us back to our selves, ranging from invective (crooked Hillary, crazy Bernie) to labelling (he’s a sexist, racist, fascist) to positive reinforcement (you’re the best) and high self-esteem to narcissism (I’m the best!). But there are many mirrors, all with different reflections, so figuring out who or what the self is would be tricky; indeed this self too would be multiple and contradictory.
Cooley perhaps under-estimated the degree to which we can refuse to internalize and can resist these looking-glass reflections which may problematize us, as Du Bois made clear. Distorting mirrors reflect us, badly. And much as mirrors may influence us, they do not determine us. One can fight back, resist the reflection, smash the mirror, as Frederick Douglass showed. Reflecting on his victory over an overseer when he was a slave, Douglass wrote: “The battle with Mr. Covey… was the turning point in my “life as a slave.”… I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before — I was a man now” (1962:143). A new self. Dramatic identity change.
4. G. H. Mead: Self as Structure
“The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure and it arises in social experience” (1967: 140). Mead reflects both James and Cooley, but perhaps goes beyond them in his emphasis that the self is not only a reflection but is essentially a product, and reflexive. One can think about other people’s ideas about oneself, and react against them, like Douglass, (the boomerang effect,) or double-down and reinforce them, (the self-fulfilling prophecy). Yet Mead distinguishes between the core, the “me”, as object, developed out of past experiences and understandings, and the “I,” the sometimes impulsive subject, generating new ideas and new selves. So the self is both both solid and fluid.
5. Abraham Maslow: Self as Flower
Maslow is well known for moving psychology away from Freud to Humanistic Psychology: “It is as if Freud supplied us with the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.” (Not a very generous verdict!) He is also well-known for his “hierarchy of needs” which should be satisfied for optimal psychic health. The self in this view is like a flower, potentially growing into full bloom. The seven needs are: 1) physiological: warmth, food, etc. for the baby; 2) safety needs; 3) psychological needs: love, belonging; 4) esteem needs: self-satisfaction; 5) cognitive needs: education, skills; 6) aesthetic needs: harmony, order; 7) self-actualization: maturity, joy, creativity. The process is not automatic, like an elevator, but it can be linked to changes in the life cycle as discussed by Eric Erikson, Daniel Levinson, George Vaillant, and Gail Sheehy.
6. Jean-Paul Sartre: Self as Self-Creative
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” (1957:15). Rejecting any traditional, essentialist idea of human nature, Sartre adds: “In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom” (p.23). To clarify: “You are nothing less than your life” (p.33) combining all your projects, actions, and choices. We are who and what we make our selves to be. We create our selves. If we persistently cheat, we become cheats. The meaning of our lives is the meaning we give it. Again: “Man makes himself” (p.43). There is a choice of ethics, and a freedom to choose, whether we want it or not. Hence his idea that “man is condemned to be free” (p.23). He insists that “life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning…” (p.43). The self, in his view, is not an iceberg, nor a passive reflection, nor a flower that may grow; it is what we make it. But it is somewhat atomistic.
Two dissenting opinions are worth noting. Schopenhauer insists on luck as the prevailing wind. That would include the luck of parents, genetics, country of birth, status, war, plague, etc.: pure chance, no freedom there.
A man’s life is like the voyage of a ship, where luck…acts the part of the wind, and speeds the vessel on its way or drives it far out of its course. All that a man can do for himself is of little avail; like the rudder, which if worked hard and continuously, may help in the navigation of the ship; and yet all may be lost again by a sudden squall (n.d.:169)
He was a bit of a pessimist: “We are like lambs in a field, disporting ourselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.” (n.d. 382)
The second opinion, of a physicist, is also deterministic, not luck but neurons, but less pessimistic:
We have 100 billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy, with an even more astronomical number of links and potential combinations through which they can interact… “We” are the process formed by this entire intricacy, not just by the little bit of it of which we are conscious (in Lapham, 2016:17).
7. Self as Onion
We might think of others, or ourselves, as like onions, layer upon layer, level upon level, or as a many-sided diamond, or like those Russian dolls, the matryoshka, one inside another, inside another. Someone might say: “I’ve never seen this side of you before!” (self as polygon). The novelist Dick Francis described this layering:
I was amazed by his compassion and felt I should have recognised earlier how many unexpected layers there were to Tremayne below the loud executive exterior: not just his love of horses, not just his need to be recorded, not even his disguised delight in Gareth [his son], but other, secret, unrevealed privacies…(1990:50).
But the funniest has to be Shrek. Ogres are like onions, not layer-cakes.
This model is indicated by the phrase “hidden depths” (wherein monsters may lurk) and reflects the notion that one may not really know someone, just the Goffmanesque presentations of the different selves acting in different roles and circumstances, which may be camouflage and masks. But the better one gets to know someone under very different circumstances, the more clearly one can see different selves emerging — or not. The self may be remarkably opaque, not only to the self, as Freud indicated, but also to others.
Two classic examples are Kim Philby and Bernie Madoff. They were not who they seemed to be. Shakespeare got it, as Julius Caesar mused: “One may smile and smile and be a villain.” And as Lady Macbeth instructed her husband: “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.” It took years before investigators “uncovered” who Philby and Madoff were — and their double lives, double selves. “Uncovering” indicates the utility of this onion/layer metaphor.
In a less lethal application, spouses may take years to realize (and hopefully appreciate more and more) who and what their beloved “really” is. (Not as in the comic phrase: “deep down you’re shallow”). Onions do not have cores as dates and avocados do, so the metaphor is somewhat inadequate, but it does capture the layering.
Winston Churchill expressed this well speaking of Russia: “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” (Much like their nesting dolls.) Banyan in the Economist just applied exactly the same phrase to China (2 July 2016:36). The journalist Kim Barker wrote something similar about India: “India was a series of challenges wrapped up in a mystical blanket covered in an existential quandary” (2016:82-3). It seems that we do not know each other very well.
8. Self as Identity
Our self-concept is our identity, but identities are socially constructed according to cultural norms, which are not universal. Consider Barack Obama, widely described as the first black President of the USA, in accord with American norms, specifically in the tradition of the “one-drop” rule. But his mother was white. In accord with another possible rule, “one drop of white blood,” he would be considered white. He is really a shade of brown, anyway, and would be described as such in many other cultures, more sensitive to shades of color.
James McBride offers a classic example. His father was black, his mother white. He remarks about his 11 siblings: “We were all clearly black, of various shades of brown, some light brown, some medium brown, some very light-skinned, and all of us had curly hair” (1997:22). The usual confusion of chromatic and social color. The terms “black” and “white” are symbolic, cultural, and political. Malcolm X noted: “…when he says he’s white, he means he’s boss. That’s right. That’s what white means in this language.” (1966:163).
Then again, Rachel Dolezal exemplifies the issue of who defines us. The daughter of white parents, she identified as black, darkened her hair and her skin and passed as black for years, and worked for the NAACP; but when her parentage became known, her self-defined identity was largely rejected by others as a lie and a fraud. She defended herself insisting that her identity was not biological, but presumably political or psychological. Color identity is seemingly problematic.
Consider too how gender identities have suddenly been spotlighted, most publicly by Caitlin Jenner. We used to recognize two genders, biologically defined and immutable; now we recognize that they are psychologically defined and are mutable. India, however, recognizes three on visa applications. Other cultures also recognize three. As do some individuals who refuse to be labeled male or female. If even such apparently basic identities as color and gender are culturally constructed, not to mention age, beauty, and more, then so, clearly, are ideas of the self. Identity is slippery.
9 & 10. Self as Unicorn and Chameleon
In sum, the self is both unicorn and chameleon. From the fog or flashlight brilliance of identity, theorists we might conclude that the self is a unicorn since it is partly unknown, even unknowable because it is so below consciousness and “in progress”; and a chameleon because it is multiple, mutable, adaptable, and selective in presentation. These selves may be complementary, contradictory, or conflicted.
So while the self is constantly presented to numerous “friends,” it is itself both one and many: unicorn and chameleon, iceberg and onion, a mask and camouflage, a flower and what you create, a looking-glass and a distorting mirror, fluid, a work in progress, a polygon with hidden depths and many layers. Given all these ideas and models, I suspect that there are not many selves who are an “open book.” If nothing else, the self and other selves are: “Surprise!” “Know thyself” is hard enough. Know someone else… really?
Yet surely all this fixation with the self is a trifle unhealthy — me! me! me! — since it may vitiate against community, and concern with and for others: a cultural narcissism.
References
Barker, Kim 2016. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. New York: Anchor.
Douglass, Frederick. 1962 [1892]. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. London: Collier-Macmillan.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1995 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet.
Francis, Dick 1990. Long Shot. London: Michael Joseph.
Lapham, Lewis H. 2016 “Dame Fortune” Lapham’s Quarterly Summer 13-19.
McBride, James 1997. The Color of Water. A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother. New York: Riverhead Books.
Mead, G.H. 1967 [1934]. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1992 [1888]. Ecce Homo. Penguin Classics.
O’Connor, Peg 2014. “Searching for the Self, and Other Unicorns.” Psychology Today Nov/Dec 50-1.
Sartre, J-P. 1957. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: The Wisdom Library.
Schopenhauer, Arthur n.d. Essays. New York: Burt.
Slaughter, Karin 2014. Cop Town. New York: Delacorte.
X, Malcolm 1966. Malcolm X Speaks. New York: Grove Press.
Theories of Individual Social Development
Source: Ch 5: Theories of Individual Social Development
Freud’s Theory of the Id, Ego & Superego
Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development
Carol Gilligan’s Theory of Moral Development
George Herbert Mead: The Self, ”Me” & ”I”
Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development: Theory & Examples
Freud’s Structure of Personality
Let’s talk about the id, the ego and the superego, the three parts of the structure of personality and a theory that was developed by Sigmund Freud. He’s probably someone you’ve heard of; he’s a pretty famous psychologist from the late 19th early 20th centuries. While his theory of personalities is outdated, it was monumental in influencing how we think about personality today.
When you think of Freud, you might think about going into therapy and lying down on a couch, telling your therapist about your problems. But if someone goes into therapy today, the therapist isn’t going to say ‘Oh, of course! Aha! It’s the id, the ego and the superego. They’re just not talking to each other right. Nevertheless, these three personality parts have entered the mainstream understanding of how we think about internal conflict.
Let’s think about an average person who’s pushed and pulled in lots of directions by different drives, like sex and food, but also ethics and a wish to maintain a healthy body. These drives are pushing them and pulling them in different directions, and maybe they’re not even aware.
This is the idea of internal conflict. It’s the conflict between basic desires (the id), morality and being a good person (the superego) and consciousness (the ego.)
The Id
So first let’s start with the id. This is an unconscious part of your personality. It is basically the childish and impulsive part of you that just does what it wants, and it wants things really intensely and doesn’t really think about the consequences. Freud describes this as operating on a pleasure principle, which essentially means what it sounds like, which is that it’s always seeking to try to increase pleasure and decrease pain.
Now, as an example of this, let’s say you come home and you find to your delight that your roommate has baked a cake. Your id would think ‘Oh! I want that cake right now! That looks delicious!’ You know your roommate’s not going to be happy if you eat it, so first, you eat a little piece of the corner, and then you have to cut yourself a slice so it doesn’t look disgusting, and then soon enough you’ve eaten the whole thing; it’s gone.
How did you manage to eat the whole cake? Blame your id for taking over. That’s what your id aims to do in life. It wants you to eat whole cakes because it wants you to increase pleasure. Cakes are going to make you feel good – why not eat the whole thing? Now, what it also wants to do is decrease pain. So let’s say you wake up the next morning and you think, ‘Oh no, I just ate a whole cake. That’s really bad, maybe I’ll get some exercise.’ You think to yourself about how you will go hiking in the mountains all day, and you tell yourself, ‘Alright, let’s get some exercise!’ No, your id says, ‘That’s not gonna happen; that’s gonna hurt. We don’t want to do that.’ So if you’re totally id driven, you’d basically eat the whole cake and then you would not go hiking the next day to burn off the calories. That’s the pleasure principle.
The Superego
Now, we usually don’t eat whole cakes and lay on the couch all day every day. What helps to control the rampaging id? There is another part of your personality that’s mainly unconscious, and it’s the superego. The superego is the part of you that’s super judgmental and moralizing and is always trying to get you to behave in a socially appropriate way. Now let’s see what the superego would do if you come home and you find the cake.
If the superego is in charge, you wouldn’t eat the cake at all. You’d still think it looks delicious and want to eat it, but the superego would say, ‘No, it’s my roommate’s cake. I’m not gonna eat this cake!’ Remember, the superego wants you to behave morally and appropriately, and it’s not that socially appropriate to eat other people’s baked goods.
But, let’s imagine that your id takes over, so you do eat the cake. The same thing happens: you eat a little bit, you eat a little bit more, and somehow you end up eating it all. But now your superego jumps back into action. What happens now that you already ate the cake? Guilt is what’s going to happen. Your superego makes you feel really guilty when you do things that are not socially appropriate.
What do you do now? If your superego is in control again, you would certainly go jogging, but you would also apologize to your roommate and bake them a new cake, maybe an even better one than before. The superego controls our sense of right and wrong. We feel bad when we do things that are wrong, and we feel good when we do things that are right, and that’s what the superego controls.
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Introduction
Mark, a two-year-old, and Ally, an eight-year-old, are sitting at the table waiting for a snack. Their mom presents them each with a cup of juice, the same amount in each cup. Mark begins to cry and point, saying ‘You gave her more.’ Mark’s mom tries to reason with the young child, explaining that the same amount of juice is in each cup, but he is insistent that he is being treated unfairly. What is happening in this situation? In this lesson, we will learn about the stages of cognitive development while watching Mark proceed through infancy to adolescence.
Jean Piaget proposed stages of cognitive development through which children and adolescents proceed based on maturation and experience. They are: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operations and formal operations.
Sensorimotor Intelligence and Preoperational Thinking
The first two sequential stages deal with the cognitive development of infants and young children. They are sensorimotor intelligence and preoperational (prelogical) intelligence.
The sensorimotor intelligence stage occurs from birth to approximately 1-2 years. In the child’s first year, the processes of intelligence are both presymbolic and preverbal. For the infant, the meaning of an object involves what can be done with it. These actions include pushing, opening, pulling, closing and so forth. In the second year of life, the young child develops the identity of his or her own body and others in time and space. The infant develops action schemes, such as reaching for an object or grasping something or pulling it towards them. At this stage of development, Mark can pull a string to reach the object at the end of it. He can pull a blanket to get an out-of-reach toy and so on. Another example is Mark putting objects into his mouth to determine the shape and structure. This is something that many infants and young toddlers do.
Our next stage is preoperational thinking. This occurs from around 2-3 years to approximately 7 years of age. Partially logical thinking or thought begins during these years. For example, the child recognizes that water poured from one container to another is the same water. However, the child reasons only from one specific item of information to another and makes decisions based on perceptual cues. Preoperational thinking can and usually is illogical. For example, Mark, based on his perceptions, thought that the taller, slender glass had more juice in it than the shorter, wider glass that he received. In other words, perceptual cues, such as the height of the juice in the glass, dominate the child’s judgment. Also, children in this stage have difficulty accepting another person’s perspective or point of view. Piaget referred to this as egocentrism.
Concrete Operational and Formal Operational Thinking
The basic units of logical thinking are particular kinds of cognitive activity that Piaget referred to as operations. The two levels of logical thinking identified by Piaget are concrete operational and formal operational thinking.
The concrete operational stage occurs from around 7-8 years of age to 12-14 or older. Concrete operational thinking is linked to the direct manipulation of objects. It involves situations that require an understanding of simultaneous changes in multiple characteristics of objects. An example is flattening a ball of clay into a hot dog shape – as the shape becomes longer, it also becomes thinner.
The child at the level of concrete operational thinking can demonstrate the following:
A transformation in one feature or characteristic of a situation is exactly balanced by a transformation in another characteristic.
The essential nature of the object or data remains consistent.
The transformation in the object can be returned to the original form by an opposite or inverse action.
Let’s discuss these more specifically and put some terms in. The capability of recognizing the unchanging characteristic of an object is referred to as conservation. The child can demonstrate conservation by returning the object to its original form or organization. For example, Mark has a ball of clay. It’s first in a ball shape. He can flatten it out. He understands now that the same amount of clay exists whether it’s in the ball form or the flat form. This is conservation.
Moral Decision
At some point in your life, you’ve probably been faced with a moral dilemma. Consider this example: a father tells his daughter, Lauren, that she can have a bike if she saves enough money from her weekly allowance to pay for half of it. Finally, when Lauren tells her father she’s saved up all the money, her father gives her the other half and tells her to buy her bike. Lauren goes to the store to buy her bike and sees the one she’s been saving up for is on sale, so she will have money left over. She deliberates if she should return the extra money to her father or keep it and not tell him. They both kept their end of the agreement, so the extra money is a bonus surprise, but if she doesn’t tell him, it feels like she’s deceiving him.
Lawrence Kohlberg: Stages of Moral Development
Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was especially interested in how children develop their ability to make moral decisions like this one. He came up with several stages of moral development, which, though not without criticism from other psychologists, form a good starting point to think about these questions. It is important to remember that not everyone, even adults, necessarily make it into all of the higher stages.
Pre-Conventional Level
People first pass through two stages known collectively as the pre-conventional level. In the first stage, people are motivated by trying to avoid punishment; their actions are bad if they get punished and good if they don’t. In this stage, Lauren would give her father the money because she doesn’t want him to punish her.
At the second stage, people are motivated purely by self-interest. Lauren at this stage would likely keep the money, thinking that, even if she has the bike, she can’t use it unless she can buy a helmet.
Conventional Level
The next level of moral development, the conventional, also contains two stages. Adolescents typically operate at this level, as do some adults. In stage three, people make moral decisions based on getting people to like them. Lauren might decide to give her father the money because this will improve her relationship with him; but if her mother is upset that her father spent money they needed for bills, she might decide to give the money to her mother in order to be a ‘good girl’ in her eyes. Her decision would be based on whichever social relationship seemed most important.
In stage four, moral reasoning centers around maintaining a functioning society by recognizing that laws are more important than individual needs. In this stage, Lauren probably would give her father the extra money because not doing so, in her eyes, equates to stealing from her family.
Carol Gilligan: Moral Development
A community of moles gives shelter to a homeless porcupine. The moles, however, are constantly stabbed by the porcupine’s quills. What should they do?
This scenario was used to aid in the development of a theory that argued women and men may have differing paths to moral development. This lesson will introduce and apply that theory, developed by Carol Gilligan.
The field of moral development encompasses prosocial behavior, such as altruism, caring and helping, along with traits such as honesty, fairness, and respect. Many theories of moral development have been proposed, but this lesson will focus on the specific theory proposed by Psychologist Carol Gilligan.
Gilligan was a student of Developmental Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who introduced the theory of stages of moral development. Gilligan, however, felt as though her mentor’s theory did not adequately address the gender differences of moral development due to the fact that participants in Kohlberg’s study were predominately male and because his theory did not include the caring perspective.
Gilligan argued that males and females are often socialized differently, and females are more apt than males to stress interpersonal relationships and take responsibility for the well-being of others. Gilligan suggested this difference is due to the child’s relationship with the mother and that females are traditionally taught a moral perspective that focuses on community and caring about personal relationships.
Care-Based Morality & Justice-Based Morality
Gilligan proposed the Stages of the Ethics of Care theory, which addresses what makes actions ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Gilligan’s theory focused on both care-based morality and justice-based morality.
Care-based morality is based on the following principles:
Emphasizes interconnectedness and universality.
Acting justly means avoiding violence and helping those in need.
Care-based morality is thought to be more common in girls because of their connections to their mothers.
Because girls remain connected to their mothers, they are less inclined to worry about issues of fairness.
Justice-based morality is based on the following principles:
Views the world as being composed of autonomous individuals who interact with another.
Acting justly means avoiding inequality.
Is thought to be more common in boys because of their need to differentiate between themselves and their mothers.
Because they are separated from their mothers, boys become more concerned with the concept of inequality.
Returning to our mole/porcupine scenario, researchers found individuals approached the problem with two perspectives: justice-based morality or care-based morality. Gender differences were also evident.
Individuals with a justice-based perspective tend to see any dilemma as a conflict between different claims. The moles want one thing; the porcupine wants something incompatible. They can’t both have a valid claim on the burrow, so only one of them can be right. A solution to the dilemma is not a resolution of the conflict; it’s a verdict, in which one side gets everything and the other side gets nothing.
The care-based perspective approaches the problem differently. Rather than seeing all the parties as separate individuals with their own valid or invalid claims, it sees them as already in a difficult situation together. If there is a conflict between them, that is part of the problem. The point is not to decide the conflict one way or the other but to find a way to get around it or remove it. This perspective starts from the particular case and the actual people within it and hopes to find a solution that will not damage anyone. It will be ready to embrace compromise and creative solutions.
Researchers have found a tendency for males to adopt the justice perspective and for females to be more likely than males to adopt the caring perspective.
Stages of Ethics of Care
George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Self
In sociological conceptions of the Self, the development of the Self is examined in the context of social phenomena like socialization. George Herbert Mead, an American sociologist, pioneered an essential theory in sociology. The mentality is viewed by George Herbert Mead’s theory as an individual’s incorporation of the collective. Mead used a social process to describe the person and the mind. A person’s body takes in gestures and the collective sentiments of others and responds accordingly with other structured mindsets that are also absorbed by the human organism.
Mead’s theory of self refers to this as the “I” and the “me” phase. The “I” is the answer to the “me,” which is the interpersonal Self. Put another way, “I” is a person’s reaction to other people’s emotions, whereas “me” is the ordered set of those perceptions that one acquires. How one assumes one’s organization sees oneself is what one refers to as the “me,” which is the total of the “generalized other“. The “I” stands for a person’s feelings and instincts. Self-as-subject and self-as-object are synonymous in the “I.” The “I” is the one who knows, and the “me” is the one who is being understood. “I” and “me” are constantly interacting, and this interaction is what we refer to as the “stream of thought.” The human cognition concept is based on these processes, which go beyond the idea of selfhood in a restricted sense. Mead sees the internal debate between “I” and “me” as the thinking process.
Mead’s “I” and “me,” when viewed as a synthesis of the “I” and the “me,” reveal a profoundly social nature. In Mead’s view, a person’s place in a community is more important than individuality. Being aware of one’s self-consciousness can only come about when one has actively participated in various social roles.
According to Mead and Charles Cooley, the Self is determined by people’s social interactions. How one appears to others determines one’s social identity, or looking-glass self (a term coined by Cooley). In other words, the stage is attached to the concept of developing self. Cooley’s assertions about the social development of children formed the basis of this initial theory. People get the most direct feedback about themselves from the responses of others to their actions. This idea means that solitary activities cannot contribute to the development of the Self as it requires external interactions.
As per Cooley and Mead, self-identity is formed in three phases. First, people perceive how they look in the eyes of others. Additionally, individuals imagine how others judge them by relying on looks and how they display themselves. Finally, individuals perceive how others feel about them due to the moral judgments they create.
However, Heinz Kohut, a psychologist from the United States, proposed a bipolar self, which he claimed was composed of two processes of narcissistic brilliance, one of which contained goals and the other constituted ideals. The narcissistic Self, according to Kohut, seems to be the pinnacle of aspiration. He referred to the idealized parental image as the pole of standards. According to Kohut, the two poles of Self portray the regular advancement of a child’s psychic life.
On the other hand, according to Jungian theory, the Self is one of several archetypes. It’s a metaphor for a person’s entire mind, including their subconscious and conscious thoughts, defined by Jung as the procedure of combining one’s personality that leads to the Self.
What is the Role of Self in the Socialization Process?
In both Cooley and Mead’s view, a person’s identity is formed through self-socialization. For anyone to develop a precise self-image, self-socialization provides an opportunity to reflect and contend with themselves.
Developing an image of oneself predicated on how one thinks or appears to others is known as the “looking-glass self”. Through one’s reactions to a behavior, other people serve as a reflector, referring to others the image they project. In Mead’s view, the first step is to see oneself as others do.
Sociological theories of Self attempt to describe how social processes like socialization impact the growth of the Self. It is common to use the concept of “self-concept” to describe how an individual views, assesses and interprets their own identity. To have a notion of oneself is to be self-aware.
Mead believed that the Self is formed through the child’s interactions with those around them. The newborn child’s needs, including clothes and food, are pressing and must be met. The mother meets these needs, and the baby develops a strong emotional attachment to her and grows to rely heavily on her.
According to Mead’s theory, as the child grows older, they separate from their mother and must learn to submit to the mother’s authority over them. The child then repeats this for their dad. They distinguish the father from the mother before assimilating him into society. In this sense, the child’s number of significant others grows, and the child integrates the role of such others in their development. Using his own words, the child responds to them and behaves according to what they mean to the other individual.
Mead’s Theory of Self: Development of Self
Mead held the notion that humans form their self-images via connections with others. He contended that the Self results from society’s experience, which would be the part of a person’s personality that includes self-awareness or self-image. Mead laid out three concepts on how one’s Self grows:
Language
Symbols are exchanged in social interactions. According to Mead, language and other symbolic representations are uniquely human in how they carry sense. Therefore, the best way to understand others is to imagine the scenario from their point of view first. He formulated the term “taking the other’s role” to describe the way people perceive themselves concerning others. When children are in this phase, they begin to mimic their surroundings. Because of this, parents usually avoid using foul language in front of their children.
Play
At this stage, children assume and break the rules of structured games such as sports or freeze tag. Playing along with whatever rules they create throughout the game will be much more convenient than enforcing guidelines on them. Here, children pretend that they are the ones they love. As a result, they attempt to be their mothers and fathers when they role-play.
Forming Psychological Identities / Erik Erikson
What are Erikson’s stages of development? Learn about Erikson life stages, psychosocial development theory, and the history and contributions to the theory.
How do we develop an identity, or a sense of self? Psychologists have many theories. One, named Erik Erikson, believed that we work on constructing psychosocial identities throughout our whole lives. By ‘psychosocial,’ he meant an interplay between our inner, emotional lives (psycho), and our outer, social circumstances (social).
Erikson believed that as we grow and age, we pass through eight stages of development. He thought that each stage was defined by a specific conflict between a pair of opposing impulses or behaviors. The resolution (or inability to resolve) these conflicts affects our personalities and identities.
Erikson defines four childhood stages and three adult stages, bridged together by one stage of adolescence. We’ll go through each stage and define it by its central conflict, as well we give some examples of behaviors and patterns of thinking characteristic of the stage.
Oral-Sensory Stage
The first is the oral-sensory stage, encompassing the first year of life and defined by a conflict between trust and mistrust. Infants during this time learn to trust their parents if they’re reliably cared for and fed; if not, if they’re neglected or abused, they’ll develop mistrust instead. Infants at this stage either learn that they can trust others to fulfill their needs, or that they can’t, that the world is a dangerous and unreliable place.
Muscular-Anal Stage
The second stage is called muscular-anal and defined by the conflict between autonomy and shame and doubt. Parents who allow their toddlers, between the ages of about 1-3, to explore their surroundings and develop interests of their own help to foster a sense of autonomy. But parents who are too restrictive or cautious with their children can instead leave them with doubt about their abilities. Like learning mistrust instead of trust, this can have longstanding consequences.
Locomotor Stage
A related conflict between initiative and guilt defines the next stage, the locomotor stage. Children in this stage, between the ages of three and six, need to develop initiative, or independent decision-making, about planning and doing various activities. If they are not encouraged to do this, or if their efforts are dismissed, they may learn to feel guilt instead about their desire for independence.
Latency
The last childhood stage is called latency and is defined by a conflict between industry and inferiority. Children in this stage are between the ages of six and twelve, and during this time are starting to gain real adult skills like reading, writing and logic. If they’re encouraged, they’ll develop industry, or motivation to keep learning and practicing; they’ll start to want to be productive instead of just wanting to play. Children who aren’t encouraged to work hard at learning new skills will instead feel inferior and unmotivated.
Adolescence
Variations on the self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
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Summary: Carol Dweck and others have Identified two implicit theories of intelligence. Those learners who have an “entity” theory view intelligence as being an unchangeable, fixed internal characteristic. Those who have an “incremental” theory believe that their intelligence is malleable and can be increased through effort.
Originators: Carol Dweck, based on over 30 years of research on belief systems, and their role in motivation and achievement.
Key Terms: entity theory, incremental theory
Self-Theories (Dweck)
Carol Dweck (currently at Indiana University) describes a series of empirically-based studies that investigate how people develop beliefs about themselves (i.e., self-theories) and how these self-theories create their psychological worlds, shaping thoughts, feelings and behaviors[1]. The theories reveal why some students are motivated to work harder, and why others fall into patterns of helplessness and are self-defeating. Dweck’s conclusions explore the implications for the concept of self-esteem, suggesting a rethinking of its role in motivation, and the conditions that foster it. She demonstrated empirically that students who hold an entity theory of intelligence are less likely to attempt challenging tasks and are at risk for academic underachievement[1][2].
Students carry two types of views on ability/intelligence:
Entity View – This view (those who are called “Entity theorists”) treats intelligence as fixed and stable. These students have a high desire to prove themselves to others; to be seen as smart and avoid looking unintelligent.
Incremental View – This view treats intelligence as malleable, fluid, and changeable. These students see satisfaction coming from the process of learning and often see opportunities to get better. They do not focus on what the outcome will say about them, but what they can attain from taking part in the venture.
Entity theorists are susceptible to learned helplessness because they may feel that circumstances are outside their control (i.e. there’s nothing that could have been done to make things better), thus they may give up easily. As a result, they may simply avoid situations or activities that they perceive to be challenging (perhaps through procrastination, absenteeism, etc.). Alternatively, they may purposely choose extremely difficult tasks so that they have an excuse for failure. Ultimately, they may stop trying altogether. Because success (or failure) is often linked to what is perceived as a fixed amount of intelligence rather than effort (e.g., the belief that “I did poorly because I’m not a smart person”), students may think that failure implies a natural lack of intelligence. Dweck found that students with a long history of success may be the most vulnerable for developing learned helplessness because they may buy into the entity view of intelligence more readily than those with less frequent success[1].
Those with an incremental view (“Incremental theorists”) when faced with failure, react differently: these students desire to master challenges, and therefore adopt a mastery-oriented pattern. They immediately began to consider various ways that they could approach the task differently, and they increase their efforts. Unlike Entity theorists, Incremental theorists believe that effort, through increased learning and strategy development, will actually increase their intelligence.
Carol Dweck’s book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dweck explains how to achieve success — and how approaching problems with a fixed vs. growth mindset makes a big difference. Praising intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. This book is an excllent read for helping people motivate their children and reach one’s one personal and professional goals.
References
Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Psychology Press.
Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
The Oxford Handbook of the Self is an interdisciplinary collection of articles that address questions across a number of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, psychopathology, and neuroscience. Research on the topic of self has increased significantly in recent years in all of these areas. In philosophy and some areas of cognitive science, the emphasis on embodied cognition has fostered a renewed interest in rethinking personal identity, mind-body dualism, and overly Cartesian conceptions of self. Poststructuralist deconstructions of traditional metaphysical conceptions of subjectivity have led to debates about whether there are any grounds (moral if not metaphysical) for reconstructing the notion of self. Questions about whether selves actually exist or have an illusory status have been raised from perspectives as diverse as neuroscience, Buddhism, and narrative theory. With respect to self-agency, similar questions arise in experimental psychology. In addition, advances in developmental psychology have pushed to the forefront questions about the ontogenetic origin of self-experience, while studies of psychopathology suggest that concepts like self and agency are central to explaining important aspects of pathological experience. These and other issues motivate questions about how we understand, not only the self, but also how we understand ourselves in social and cultural contexts.
This article examines the historical conception of the words self and person in philosophical theory. It discusses John Locke’s definition of the self as the conscious thinking thing and the person as a thinking intelligent being. It describes the Platonist view of the self as spiritual substance and Aristotelian belief that the self is a hylomorphic substance. It also explores the relevant topics of Epicureanism atomism, Cartesian dualism, and the developmental and social origin of self-concepts.
“A Contrast of Individualistic and Social Theories of the Self”,
George Herbert Mead.
Section 29 in Mind Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Edited by Charles W. Morris). Chicago: University of Chicago (1934): 222-226 .
Understand the difference between psychological and sociological theories of self-development
Explain the process of moral development
When we are born, we have a genetic makeup and biological traits. However, who we are as human beings develops through social interaction. Many scholars, both in the fields of psychology and in sociology, have described the process of self-development as a precursor to understanding how that “self” becomes socialized.
Psychological Perspectives on Self-Development
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was one of the most influential modern scientists to put forth a theory about how people develop a sense of self. He believed that personality and sexual development were closely linked, and he divided the maturation process into psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. He posited that people’s self-development is closely linked to early stages of development, like breastfeeding, toilet training, and sexual awareness (Freud 1905).
According to Freud, failure to properly engage in or disengage from a specific stage results in emotional and psychological consequences throughout adulthood. An adult with an oral fixation may indulge in overeating or binge drinking. An anal fixation may produce a neat freak (hence the term “anal retentive”), while a person stuck in the phallic stage may be promiscuous or emotionally immature. Although no solid empirical evidence supports Freud’s theory, his ideas continue to contribute to the work of scholars in a variety of disciplines.
Sociology or Psychology: What’s the Difference?
You might be wondering: if sociologists and psychologists are both interested in people and their behavior, how are these two disciplines different? What do they agree on, and where do their ideas diverge? The answers are complicated, but the distinction is important to scholars in both fields.
As a general difference, we might say that while both disciplines are interested in human behavior, psychologists are focused on how the mind influences that behavior, while sociologists study the role of society in shaping behavior. Psychologists are interested in people’s mental development and how their minds process their world. Sociologists are more likely to focus on how different aspects of society contribute to an individual’s relationship with his world. Another way to think of the difference is that psychologists tend to look inward (mental health, emotional processes), while sociologists tend to look outward (social institutions, cultural norms, interactions with others) to understand human behavior.
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was the first to make this distinction in research, when he attributed differences in suicide rates among people to social causes (religious differences) rather than to psychological causes (like their mental wellbeing) (Durkheim 1897). Today, we see this same distinction. For example, a sociologist studying how a couple gets to the point of their first kiss on a date might focus her research on cultural norms for dating, social patterns of sexual activity over time, or how this process is different for seniors than for teens. A psychologist would more likely be interested in the person’s earliest sexual awareness or the mental processing of sexual desire.
Sometimes sociologists and psychologists have collaborated to increase knowledge. In recent decades, however, their fields have become more clearly separated as sociologists increasingly focus on large societal issues and patterns, while psychologists remain honed in on the human mind. Both disciplines make valuable contributions through different approaches that provide us with different types of useful insights.
Psychologist Erik Erikson (1902–1994) created a theory of personality development based, in part, on the work of Freud. However, Erikson believed the personality continued to change over time and was never truly finished. His theory includes eight stages of development, beginning with birth and ending with death. According to Erikson, people move through these stages throughout their lives. In contrast to Freud’s focus on psychosexual stages and basic human urges, Erikson’s view of self-development gave credit to more social aspects, like the way we negotiate between our own base desires and what is socially accepted (Erikson 1982).
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a psychologist who specialized in child development who focused specifically on the role of social interactions in their development. He recognized that the development of self evolved through a negotiation between the world as it exists in one’s mind and the world that exists as it is experienced socially (Piaget 1954). All three of these thinkers have contributed to our modern understanding of self-development.
Sociological Theories of Self-Development
One of the pioneering contributors to sociological perspectives was Charles Cooley (1864–1929). He asserted that people’s self understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them—a process termed “the looking glass self” (Cooley 1902).
Later, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) studied the self, a person’s distinct identity that is developed through social interaction. In order to engage in this process of “self,” an individual has to be able to view him or herself through the eyes of others. That’s not an ability that we are born with (Mead 1934). Through socialization we learn to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and look at the world through their perspective. This assists us in becoming self-aware, as we look at ourselves from the perspective of the “other.” The case of Danielle, for example, illustrates what happens when social interaction is absent from early experience: Danielle had no ability to see herself as others would see her. From Mead’s point of view, she had no “self.”
How do we go from being newborns to being humans with “selves?” Mead believed that there is a specific path of development that all people go through. During the preparatory stage, children are only capable of imitation: they have no ability to imagine how others see things. They copy the actions of people with whom they regularly interact, such as their caregivers. This is followed by the play stage, during which children begin to take on the role that one other person might have. Thus, children might try on a parent’s point of view by acting out “grownup” behavior, like playing “dress up” and acting out the “mom” role, or talking on a toy telephone the way they see their father do.
During the game stage, children learn to consider several roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other. They learn to understand interactions involving different people with a variety of purposes. For example, a child at this stage is likely to be aware of the different responsibilities of people in a restaurant who together make for a smooth dining experience (someone seats you, another takes your order, someone else cooks the food, while yet another clears away dirty dishes).
Finally, children develop, understand, and learn the idea of the generalized other, the common behavioral expectations of general society. By this stage of development, an individual is able to imagine how he or she is viewed by one or many others—and thus, from a sociological perspective, to have a “self” (Mead 1934; Mead 1964).
Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development
Moral development is an important part of the socialization process. The term refers to the way people learn what society considered to be “good” and “bad,” which is important for a smoothly functioning society. Moral development prevents people from acting on unchecked urges, instead considering what is right for society and good for others. Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) was interested in how people learn to decide what is right and what is wrong. To understand this topic, he developed a theory of moral development that includes three levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.
In the preconventional stage, young children, who lack a higher level of cognitive ability, experience the world around them only through their senses. It isn’t until the teen years that the conventional theory develops, when youngsters become increasingly aware of others’ feelings and take those into consideration when determining what’s “good” and “bad.” The final stage, called postconventional, is when people begin to think of morality in abstract terms, such as Americans believing that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At this stage, people also recognize that legality and morality do not always match up evenly (Kohlberg 1981). When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians turned out in 2011 to protest government corruption, they were using postconventional morality. They understood that although their government was legal, it was not morally correct.
Gilligan’s Theory of Moral Development and Gender
Another sociologist, Carol Gilligan (1936–), recognized that Kohlberg’s theory might show gender bias since his research was only conducted on male subjects. Would females study subjects have responded differently? Would a female social scientist notice different patterns when analyzing the research? To answer the first question, she set out to study differences between how boys and girls developed morality. Gilligan’s research suggested that boys and girls do have different understandings of morality. Boys appeared to have a justice perspective, by placing emphasis on rules and laws. Girls, on the other hand, seem to have a care and responsibility perspective; they consider people’s reasons behind behavior that seems morally wrong.
While Gilligan is correct that Kohlberg’s research should have included both male and female subjects, her study has been scientifically discredited due to its small sample size. The results Gilligan noted in this study also have not been replicated by subsequent researchers. The differences Gilligan observed were not an issue of the development of morality, but an issue of socialization. Differences in behavior between males and females is the result of gender socialization that teaches boys and girls societal norms and behaviors expected of them based on their sex (see “What a Pretty Little Lady”).
Gilligan also recognized that Kohlberg’s theory rested on the assumption that the justice perspective was the right, or better, perspective. Gilligan, in contrast, theorized that neither perspective was “better”: the two norms of justice served different purposes. Ultimately, she explained that boys are socialized for a work environment where rules make operations run smoothly, while girls are socialized for a home environment where flexibility allows for harmony in caretaking and nurturing (Gilligan 1982; Gilligan 1990).
What a Pretty Little Lady!
“What a cute dress!” “I like the ribbons in your hair.” “Wow, you look so pretty today.”
According to Lisa Bloom, author of Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed Down World, most of us use pleasantries like these when we first meet little girls. “So what?” you might ask.
Bloom asserts that we are too focused on the appearance of young girls, and as a result, our society is socializing them to believe that how they look is of vital importance. And Bloom may be on to something. How often do you tell a little boy how attractive his outfit is, how nice looking his shoes are, or how handsome he looks today? To support her assertions, Bloom cites, as one example, that about 50 percent of girls ages three to six worry about being fat (Bloom 2011). We’re talking about kindergarteners who are concerned about their body image. Sociologists are acutely interested in of this type of gender socialization, by which societal expectations of how boys and girls should be—how they should behave, what toys and colors they should like, and how important their attire is—are reinforced.
One solution to this type of gender socialization is being experimented with at the Egalia preschool in Sweden, where children develop in a genderless environment. All the children at Egalia are referred to with neutral terms like “friend” instead of “he” or “she.” Play areas and toys are consciously set up to eliminate any reinforcement of gender expectations (Haney 2011). Egalia strives to eliminate all societal gender norms from these children’s preschool world.
Extreme? Perhaps. So what is the middle ground? Bloom suggests that we start with simple steps: when introduced to a young girl, ask about her favorite book or what she likes. In short, engage with her mind … not her outward appearance (Bloom 2011).
Summary
Psychological theories of self-development have been broadened by sociologists who explicitly study the role of society and social interaction in self-development. Charles Cooley and George Mead both contributed significantly to the sociological understanding of the development of self. Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan developed their ideas further and researched how our sense of morality develops. Gilligan added the dimension of gender differences to Kohlberg’s theory.
Section Quiz
Socialization, as a sociological term, describes:
how people interact during social situations
how people learn societal norms, beliefs, and values
a person’s internal mental state when in a group setting
the difference between introverts and extroverts
Answer
B
The Harlows’ study on rhesus monkeys showed that:
rhesus monkeys raised by other primate species are poorly socialized
monkeys can be adequately socialized by imitating humans
food is more important than social comfort
social comfort is more important than food
Answer
D
What occurs in Lawrence Kohlberg’s conventional level?
Children develop the ability to have abstract thoughts.
Morality is developed by pain and pleasure.
Children begin to consider what society considers moral and immoral.
Parental beliefs have no influence on children’s morality.
Answer
C
What did Carol Gilligan believe earlier researchers into morality had overlooked?
The justice perspective
Sympathetic reactions to moral situations
The perspective of females
How social environment affects how morality develops
Answer
C
What is one way to distinguish between psychology and sociology?
Psychology focuses on the mind, while sociology focuses on society.
Psychologists are interested in mental health, while sociologists are interested in societal functions.
Psychologists look inward to understand behavior while sociologists look outward.
All of the above
Answer
D
How did nearly complete isolation as a child affect Danielle’s verbal abilities?
She could not communicate at all.
She never learned words, but she did learn signs.
She could not understand much, but she could use gestures.
She could understand and use basic language like “yes” and “no.”
Answer
A
Short Answer
Think of a current issue or pattern that a sociologist might study. What types of questions would the sociologist ask, and what research methods might he employ? Now consider the questions and methods a psychologist might use to study the same issue. Comment on their different approaches.
Explain why it’s important to conduct research using both male and female participants. What sociological topics might show gender differences? Provide some examples to illustrate your ideas.
Further Research
Lawrence Kohlberg was most famous for his research using moral dilemmas. He presented dilemmas to boys and asked them how they would judge the situations. Visit http://openstax.org/l/Dilemma to read about Kohlberg’s most famous moral dilemma, known as the Heinz dilemma.
References
Cooley, Charles Horton. 1902. “The Looking Glass Self.” Pp. 179–185 in Human Nature and Social Order. New York: Scribner’s.
This dissertation is about the concept of self, specifically I seek to answer the question of what constitutes the self. To deal conceptually and theoretically with the concept of self is to consider what the nature of self is, how the self develops, and under what conditions. I explore the dialectical relationship between self and society at three levels, the complexity of social structure and its influence upon the formation of the self, the relationship between the self and the “generalized other,” and the relationship between the “I” and the “me.” The goal of the dissertation is a synthesis of theories of self which includes both a micro and a macro perspective. The model of self is based on Markus and Katayama’s (1994) Enculturation Model, modified extensively to include macro components. The model has four levels, moving from the social structure to the individual: collective reality, socio-psychological processes, local worlds, and habitual psychological tendencies. Part one and part two review symbolic interactionist theorists and structural Marxist theorists, respectively. Part three elaborates the model of self by plugging into the four levels each theorist, where appropriate. Marx’s base/superstructure conceptualization of social structure, Althusser’s materialist dialectic, and Mead’s conceptualization of mind are used to deal with collective reality. Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” is used to link the core ideologies associated with collective reality to socio-psychological practices occurring in the institutions of social structure. Stryker’s identity theory is used to connect social structure to the interaction networks in the local world, out of which individuals construct and identity and self. Lastly, all the theorists are brought together and their theories synthesized in the section dealing with habitual psychological tendencies.
How people define themselves in relation to others greatly influences how they think, feel, and behave, and is ultimately related to the construct of identity. Self-development is a continuous process throughout the lifespan; one’s sense of self may change, at least somewhat, throughout one’s life. Self-representation has important implications for socio-emotional functioning throughout the lifespan.
Philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) was one of the first to postulate a theory of the self in The Principles of Psychology. James described two aspects of the self that he termed the “I Self” and “Me Self.” The I Self reflects what people see or perceive themselves doing in the physical world (e.g., recognizing that one is walking, eating, writing), whereas the Me Self is a more subjective and psychological phenomenon, referring to individuals’reflections about themselves (e.g. characterizing oneself as athletic, smart, cooperative). Other terms such as self-view, self-image, self-schema, and self-concept are also used to describe the self-referent thoughts characteristic of the Me Self. James further distinguished three components of the Me Self. These include: (1) the material self (e.g., tangible objects or possessions we collect for ourselves); (2) the social self (e.g., how we interact and portray ourselves within different groups, situations, or persons); and (3) the spiritual self (e.g., internal dispositions).
In the late twentieth century, researchers began to argue that the self is a cognitive and social construction. Cognitive perspectives suggest that one’s self-representation affects how one thinks about and gives meaning to experiences. Like James, psychologist Ulric Neisser distinguished between one’s self-representation connected to directly perceived experiences and that resulting from reflection on one’s experiences. The “ecological self,”connections of oneself to experiences in the physical environment, and the “interpersonal self,” connections of oneself to others through verbal or nonverbal communication, comprise direct perception of experience. Neisser proposed that these two types of self-representation develop early in infancy. Regarding reflections on one’s experiences, Neisser identified three types of self-representation that emerge in later infancy and childhood with cognitive and social maturation. The temporally “extended self”is based on memories of one’s past experiences and expectations for the future. The “private self”emerges with the understanding that one’s experiences are not directly perceived by others, but rather must be communicated to be shared. The “conceptual self,” one’s overarching theory or schema about oneself based on one’s reflection on experiences within social and cultural context, parallels terms such as self-concept and self-schema. In a 1977 article, psychologist Hazel Markus showed that one’s self-representation or self-schema guides information processing and influences one’s behavior.
As psychologist Roy Baumeister pointed out in Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self, because self-representation develops through one’s experience of the world, cultural and social factors are important in who we are and what we think about ourselves. Philosopher George Herbert Mead (in Mind, Self, and Society ) postulated that acquisition of self-representation emerges from socialization practices. Mead argued that individuals are socialized to adopt the values, standards, and norms of society through their ability to perceive what others and society would like them to be. Psychologists Tory Higgins, Ruth Klein, and Timothy Strauman further suggested that self-representation includes ideas about who we are (actual self), who we potentially could be (ideal self), and who we should be (ought self), both from one’s own perspective and from one’s perception of valued others’ perspectives. Discrepancies between the actual self and the ideal self or ought self may result in depression or anxiety, respectively.
Attachment theory likewise demonstrates how the self is socially constructed and, in turn, affects how people evaluate themselves (i.e., their self-esteem). Thus, relationships with others play an important role in people’s self-representation and self-esteem. Psychologist John Bowlby focused on caregiver-child relationships. Securely attached children feel safe in the environment and are able to actively explore their surroundings. Through experiencing secure attachment to a consistent caregiver, children develop a belief that they are good and worthy of love. This forms the basis of self-esteem. In contrast, an insecure attachment, in which the child does not feel confident in the caregiver’s protection, may result in feeling unworthy of love, anxious and distressed, and relatively low self-esteem.
The beginnings of self-representation emerge early in infancy, with the recognition that one is a separate physical being from others. Self-representation development continues throughout adulthood. Because self-representation involves social and cognitive constructions, changes in self-representation occur with individuals’ cognitive and social development. Psychologist Susan Harter has conducted highly influential research on the developmental course of self-representation. Excerpts from Harter’s summary of self-representation development from early childhood through adolescence (Harter, 1988) are presented in the Table 1.
In addition to cognitive and social maturation, changes in one’s social context may be equally important influences on self-representation. For example, Susan Cross (in “Self-construals, Coping, and Stress in Cross-cultural Adaptation”) notes that cultural values influence self-development. As an individual moves from one cultural context (e.g., Eastern culture) to another (e.g., Western culture), changes in self-representation may emerge. Individuals can learn to adopt a self-representation that embraces multiple cultures.
SEE ALSOAttachment Theory; Bowlby, John; Child Development; Developmental Psychology; James, William; Mead, George Herbert; Mental Health;Psychology; Self-Awareness Theory; Self-Consciousness, Private vs. Public; Self-Guides; Self-Perception Theory; Self-Schemata; Social Psychology; Stages of Development
Table 1
Early childhood
Middle childhood
Adolescence
Content
specific examples of observable physical characteristics, behaviors, preferences, etc.
trait labels, focusing on abilities, interpersonal characteristics, and emotional attributes
abstractions about the self involving psychological constructs, focusing on different relationships and roles
Organization
little coherence, due to inability to logically organize single self-descriptors
logically organized, integrated within domains that are differentiated from one another
ability to construct a formal theory of the self in which all attributes across and within role domains are integrated and should be internally consistent
Stability over time
not stable over time
recognition of and interest in continuity of self-attributes over time
Intrapsychic conflict and confusion over contradictions and instability within the self, concern with creation of an integrated identity
Basis
fantasies and wishes dominate descriptions of behaviors and abilities
use of social comparison due to ability to simultaneously observe and evaluate the self in relation to others
intense focus on the opinions that significant others hold about the self, especially peers and close friends
Baumeister, Roy F. 1986. Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bowlby, John. 1969. Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books.
Cross, Susan. 1995. Self-construals, Coping, and Stress in Cross-cultural Adaptation. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 26 (6): 673–697.
Harter, Susan. 1988. Developmental Processes in the Construction of the Self. In Integrative Processes and Socialization: Early to Middle Childhood, eds. Thomas D. Yawkey and James E. Johnson, 45–78. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Harter, Susan. 1999. The Construction of the Self: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Guilford.
Higgins, Tory, Ruth Klein, and Timothy Strauman. 1985. Self-concept Discrepancy Theory: A Psychological Model for Distinguishing Among Different Aspects of Depression and Anxiety. Social Cognition 3: 51–76.
James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.
Kanagawa, Chie, Susan Cross, and Hazel Rose Markus. 2001. Who Am I?: The Cultural Psychology of the Conceptual Self. Personality and Social PsychologyBulletin 27 (1): 90–103.
Markus, Hazel. 1977. Self-schemata and Processing Information about the Self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (2): 63–78.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Neisser, Ulric. 1988. Five Kinds of Self Knowledge. Philosophical Psychology 1 (1): 35–59.
The popularity of such books as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Kathryn Harrison’s controversial The Kiss, has led columnists to call ours “the age of memoir.” And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary, scientific, and experiential concerns, How Our Lives Become Stories enhances knowledge of the complex forces that shape identity, and confronts the equally complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are.
Using life writings as examples—including works by Christa Wolf, Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Melanie Thernstrom, and Philip Roth—Paul John Eakin draws on the latest research in neurology, cognitive science, memory studies, developmental psychology, and related fields to rethink the very nature of self-representation. After showing how the experience of living in one’s body shapes one’s identity, he explores relational and narrative modes of being, emphasizing social sources of identity, and demonstrating that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. Eakin concludes by engaging the ethical issues raised by the conflict between the authorial impulse to life writing and a traditional, privacy-based ethics that such writings often violate.
Author / Editor information
Eakin Paul John :
Paul John Eakin is Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. He is the author of How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves; The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells, and James; Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention; and Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. He is the editor of The Ethics of Life Writing, also from Cornell; On Autobiography by Philippe Lejeune, and American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect.
Reviews
“In How Our Lives Become Stories, Paul John Eakin explains why he prefers ‘to think of self less as an entity and more as a kind of awareness in process.’… Eakin makes the ethics of reading integral to his project…. Eakin attends to those who are repelled by the ‘urge to confess’ and he talks about telling all as a cultural imperative that may, for example, be costly to the families of memoirists despite the therapeutic value such confessions might have. The ethics of privacy, the fact of relational lives, and the moral strictures that shadow autobiographical tellings bring Eakin to ask, ‘What is right and fair?’.”
“In this intriguing book, Paul John Eakin problematizes the notion of autobiography as ‘the story of the self’ and argues that in the act of narration one is engaged in a process of making a self…. How Our Lives Become Stories is a concise and engaging synopsis of the state of the art for anyone interested in the subject.”
Nancy K. Miller, author of Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death:
“Paul John Eakin has accomplished here what many preach and few practice: a genuinely cross- disciplinary study. How Our Lives Become Stories is a fascinating account of the creation of an autobiographical self seen from the multiple vantage points of literature, philosophy, neurology, and psychology. Eakin shows the infinitely complex ways in which we become and remember who we are in our bodies and our brains. Equally important in this pioneering study is Eakin’s penetrating analysis of how as a culture we negotiate the changing boundaries of private and public life. How Our Lives Become Stories offers a subtle and intelligent guide to the ethical dilemmas of disclosure and confession, memory and narrative, that pervade contemporary American life. A book for our times.”
“This fascinating new book… offers an engaging introduction to identity and narrative…. This is a well-written, timely, and progressive book—a surprisingly rare mix.”
H. Porter Abbott, University of California, Santa Barbara:
“Paul John Eakin has always been a few steps ahead of the rest of us. Now, with How Our Lives Become Stories, he has contributed another indispensable reassessment of the field of autobiography, this time keyed to the disturbingly fluid sense of the self that has emerged from recent research throughout the cognitive sciences.”
Susanna Egan, University of British Columbia:
“Rethinking what he calls ‘registers of self and self-experience,’ Paul John Eakin once again offers new and necessary work in autobiography studies. A most accessible and engaging book, How Our Lives Become Stories draws on recent scholarship in neurology, cognitive sciences, memory studies, developmental psychology, cultural narratives, and ethics in order to demonstrate that ‘there are many stories of self to tell, and more than one self to tell them.’.”
“When we write about our lives, the complex work of constructing the story is intertwined with all that constitutes the process of identity formation. In this book, Eakin expertly guides us through the thorny terrain of research in neurology, developmental psychology, and memory theory and revisits philosophy and literary theory. By the end of the journey, we have a far richer understanding of how individuals construct their lives and how they tell the story of that construction, as well as a sense of the dynamic interplay between the two processes.”
The reflexive self and culture: a critique
Matthew Adams
Identity in Question
edited by Anthony Elliott, Paul du Gay
Self and Identity: Personal, Social, and Symbolic
edited by Yoshihisa Kashima, Margaret Foddy, Michael Platow
Narrative Psychology, Trauma and the Study of Self/Identity.
This paper aims to provide an overview of a narrative psychological approach towards the study of self and identity. The narrative psychological approach can be classified as broadly social constructionist insofar as it attempts to examine the cultural structuration of individual experience. However, building on recent criticism of certain social constructionist approaches (such as discourse analysis), it is argued that these approaches tend to lose touch with the phenomenological and experiential realities of everyday, practical life. Accordingly, they overplay the disorderly, chaotic, variable and flux-like nature of self-experience. Drawing on recent research on traumatizing experiences such as living with serious illness, this paper argues that the disruption and fragmentation manifest in such experiences serves as a useful means of highlighting the sense of unity, meaning and coherence (the `narrative configuration’) more commonly experienced on an everyday level. Moreover, when disorder and incoherence prevail, as in the case of trauma, narratives are used to rebuild the individual’s shattered sense of identity and meaning.
Self and social identity.
Brewer, M. B., & Hewstone, M. (Eds.). (2004).
Blackwell Publishing.
Handbook of Dialogical Self Theory
edited by Hubert J. M. Hermans, Thorsten Gieser
Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway
What am I referring to when I say ‘I’? This little word is so easy to use in daily life, yet it has become the focus of intense theoretical debate. Where does my sense of self come from? Does it arise spontaneously or is it created by the media or society? Do I really know myself?
This concern with the self, with our subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it come to be so important? What are the different ways in which we can approach subjectivity?
Nick Mansfield explores how our understanding of our subjectivity has developed over the past century. He looks at the work of key modern and postmodern theorists, including Freud, Foucault, Nietzsche, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, and he shows how subjectivity is central to debates in contemporary culture, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postmodernism and technology.
I am who? No topic is more crucial to contemporary cultural theory than subjectivity, and Nick Mansfield has written what has long been lacking-a lucid, smart introduction to work in the field.
Professor Simon During, University of Melbourne
Effortlessly and with humour, passion and panache, Mansfield offers the reader a telling, trenchantly articulate d account of the complex enigma of the self, without resorting to reductively simple critical cliches.This book, in its graceful movements between disciplines, ideas, and areas of interest, deserves to become a benchmark for all such student introductions for some time to come.
Julian Wolfreys, University of Florida
Nick Mansfield is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. He is co-author of Cultural Studies and the New Humanities (Oxford 1997) and author of Masochism: The art of power (Praeger 1997).
Aspects of identity: From the inner-outer metaphor to a tetrapartite model of the self
Nathan N. Cheeka § and Jonathan M. Cheekb aDepartment of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA; bDepartment of Psychology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA
Self and Identity · July 2018 DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2017.1412347
The broad concept of the self is fundamental to psychology, serving as an anchor by which we perceive and make sense of the world as well as how we relate to and think about others. This book develops creative points of view of the self which have not previously been reviewed, creating a web of interconnected concepts under the umbrella of the self.
The various contributions to this book discuss these concepts, such as self-regulation, self-concept, self-esteem, self-awareness, social comparison, and self-reference. All of them are related to the self, and all would justify a review of their own, yet none of them have up to this point. As a whole, the book develops these new, creative points of view of the self—the integral (primary) component of our experience as social beings.
Offering numerous perspectives on various aspects of the self which can foster new thinking and research, this timely and important book makes suggestions for future research that will spur additional lines of work by readers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Self and Identity.
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Source: Collective Intentionality, Team Reasoning and the Example of Economic Behavior
Let us introduce a brief history of CI. This notion was introduced by John Searle (1990), but we can try to find some similar background ideas. Starting from sociology, Emile Durkheim (1898) presents a study on “collective consciousness” and Max Weber (1922) thinks that we have a “subjective meaning” of what he calls communal or consensual action. In the field of philosophy, the most important sources come from phenomenology and existential philosophy. Gerda Walther (1923) maintains that we can have empathetic experience and identification with others. Max Scheler (1954) and Martin Heidegger (1928/29) think that a common intentional attitude like a reciprocal awareness is not the combination of individual intentionality and reciprocal attitudes. In the ambit of analytic philosophy, Wilfrid Sellars (1980) presents an interesting account of what he calls “we-intentions”. We-intentions involve a shared point of view from which the participants may critically assess each other’s contributions.
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: Introduction to From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
Source: “We in Me or Me in We? Collective Intentionality and Selfhood”
We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.
“If I am I, because you are you, and you are you, because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you. But if I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you, and we can talk”. Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk
The capacity to engage in different types of collective intentionalityis often considered a key feature of human sociality. We can enjoy a symphony, solve a task, reach a decision, and make plans for the future together, just as we can share responsibilities, traditions and customs. After winning a match with a group of teammates, I might share feelings of joy at ourvictory, just as I might regret that we, the Danes,lost Scania to the Swedes in 1658, or inform my mother that we have nowfinished moving all her furniture.
But who or what is this we,to whom intentions, beliefs, emotions, and actions are attributed? When confronted with a question like this, it might be natural to think of it as an invitation to reflect on the features that characterize us as a group, a community, or a nation. What is it that makes us, say, Danes, and who belongs – and who does not belong – to that group? Another option is to engage in a kind of descriptive sociology and examine the varieties of we. How do dyads, groups of friends, members of a bridge club, business associates, and national communities relate to one another, and what kind of we, if any, do they each instantiate? What is the relation between an ephemeral form of we that is bound to the here and now of concrete face-to-face interaction and a more enduring, but at the same time also more normatively mediated, trans-generational form of collective identity? All these questions merit further examination, but in the following my focus will be on the relation between group-identity and self-identity. What is the relation between the we and the I? This type of question is not merely of theoretical interest. Depending on one’s account, different implications follow for how to approachcrucial legal, political, and social questions related to, for instance, the status of national identity.
If we look at the political discourse, for example, the answer is often taken for granted. On a view found across the political spectrum, your group identity is your most important identity marker. Some would even claim that it is your membership of certain groups (be it a nation, a religious community, a social class, an ethnicity, a sexual orientation) and their intersection that provides you with a self-identity in the first place. It might consequently be tempting to reverse the order ofexplanation. What we need first and foremost is not an explanation of how a number of individuals come together as a we, but rather an explanation of how each of us eventually manages to secure some degree of separation and independence.
In the contemporary philosophical debate on collective intentionality, attempts to prioritize the weand the group have, however, frequently been met with scepticism. When John Searle insists that the very notion of a group mind is “at best mysterious and at worst incoherent” he is speaking for many. But perhaps there is a way of defending the primacy of the we that can avoid what some would take to be excessive metaphysical commitments, e.g. a commitment to the existence of some kind of “hive mind”. One might, for example, argue that the I – the first-person perspective, the self – is communally grounded and enabled by certain kinds of social circumstances. As one translation of the Nguni Bantu term ubuntu has it: “I am because we are”.
The communityfirst view can take different forms. Some would argue that we first experience ourselves as part of a group, a family or tribe, and automatically partake in its way of life before we develop our own individuality and distinct perspective on the world. Others would defend the viewthat human selfhood presupposes the possession of the first-person concept. It requires the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself and the linguistic ability to use the first-person pronoun to refer to oneself. On this account, being an I requires concept possession and language acquisition, and therefore also membership of a linguistic community. A third option would be to defend the view that the community does not merely condition what we experience, but also that we have experiences. On this account, subjective experiences are social constructs. All these accounts would claim that the standard way of addressing the problem of collective intentionality and identity suffers from what might be called an individualist bias.
There are many good reasons to reject an aggregative account of community, i.e., the view that the relation between a community and its members can be understood in analogy with the relation between a heap of sand and its composite grains. But should one go so far as to defend the reverse view and ascribe primacy to the we? Are you a member of a collective, of a we, before you acquire your own individual identity, and is the latter derived from the former?
Here is one argument in favour of this view. On a certain understanding of selfhood, our self-identity is not something ready-made, something fixed by nature that simply awaits discovery. You do not have a self-identity in the same way you have a spleen, and you cannot use the same method to examine both. Who you are might partially depend on your biology, but it is certainly also a question of what matters to you and what you care about. In short, it is more an accomplishment than a given, more the result of an act than of a fact. It is a question of the values you embrace and the commitments you endorse. Indeed, it is by living a life in accordance with certain normative guidelines that you develop your own distinct point of view on matters, and thereby acquire a distinct individuality. This is why knowing that you are, say, pro-life and pro-gun rather than pro-choice tells me something about who you are. If you change your interests, political view, religion etc., you also change.
But of course, the community of which I am part influences what has significance and meaning for me. It is crucial to my personal flourishing and provides me with a background against which more individual choices about how to live can be made. To imagine that each of us develops our own preferences – be they culinary, religious or political – in splendid isolation, to imagine, as Hobbes did, that we each emerge from the earth like mushrooms without any obligations to each other, and that we only start to engage in social and communal activities because we deem this tobe conducive for the realization of our own individual goals, is clearly nothing but a fantasy. By implication, why not accept that you cannot be a self on your own, but only together with others, as part of a group?
But we need to tread carefully here. To argue that one owes one’s identity to the collective, and that one is what one is simply as a result of one’s group membership can quickly lead to the view that members of the same group(s) are alike in all essential respects. And that is obviously wrong. Indeed, just as one should not take groups and collective intentions to be simply the summation or aggregation of individuals and their intentions, one should not seek to reduce selfhood and self-identity to group identity and group membership. In what follows, I will consider two reasons why this kind of group-thinking is mistaken. First, it operates with too simplistic a conception of what itmeans to be a self and have a self-identity. Secondly, it fundamentally errs in its understanding of what it means to be (part of) a we.
The self is neither simple nor univocal. Rather, the self is something that is better viewed as multifaceted and multidimensional. This has often been recognized in the literature. Whereas William James, for instance, distinguishes between the material, social, and spiritual self, and Ulrich Neisser between the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private, and conceptual self, it has more recently become customary to distinguish a minimal experiential self from a more normatively enriched and extended self. Some dimensions of self are clearly social and first established in and through development and socialization. This would, for instance, include those aspects that are constituted by the values and norms we endorse. These dimensions can also be lost, for instance, in severe dementia.
But there are other, more fundamental dimensions that are present from very early on and which are linked to our embodiment and experiential life. Consider, for instance, the fact that we encounter the world from an embodied perspective. The objects I perceive are perceived as being to the right or left of me, or as being close by or further away from me. According to some developmental psychologists, from early infancy children are able to discriminate their own body from the surrounding environment; they can perceive where they are, how they are moving, what they are doing, and whether a given action is their own or not. Likewise, we do not experience hunger, pain, distress, fatigue, and anger as free-floating anonymous events, but as self-concerning experiences. When feeling nausea, I am not faced with a two-step process in which I first detect the presence of an unpleasant experience, and then wonder whose experience it might be. Rather, experiences are necessarily like something fora subject, they necessarily involve a point of view – they come with perspectivalownership. It might consequently be argued that a minimal form of selfhood is a built-in feature of experiential life, and that only, as Joseph Margolis has put it, “the utter elimination of experience could possibly vindicate the elimination of selves”.
If one really wishes to extirpate the so-called individualist bias, one should consequently go all the way and argue for the radical claim that experiences are socially constructed, not only when it concerns their specific content, but also their very being. Wolfgang Prinz, who defends such a view, has claimed that human beings who were denied all social interaction (like the famous case of Kasper Hauser) would be like zombies, “completely self-less and thus without consciousness”. But is such a view really plausible? The main difficulty with a view like this is that nobody so far hasbeen able to explain how social interaction is supposed to give rise to experience. Some psychoanalytically-influenced developmental psychologists have suggested that it is the caretakerthat teaches the infant to attend to its own initially non-conscious affective states, and that the latter only become experientially manifest as a result of being introspectively monitored by the infant. On this account, the caretaker’s social behaviour would thus be part of the causal process leading to experience. The problem, however, is that this model – like all other higher-order representational accounts of consciousness – fails to explain how a non-conscious mental state can be transformed into a subjective experience by being targeted by another (in this case, sociallyinduced) non-conscious higher-order mental state.
What about the we? Why does an attempt to derive the I from the we fail to understand the nature of the first-person plural? It is important here to realize that a we is a quite particular kind of social formation. Although by birth(right) one might belong to a certain social category (family, class, ethnicity, blood group, etc.) regardless of whether or not one knows or cares about it, and although outsiders might classify one as a member of a certain group quite independently of one’s own view of the matter, such externally enforced classifications are not of much relevance if we wish to understand what it means to be part of a we. In contrast to various kinds of aggregate groups, a we requires an experiential anchoring. To put it differently, you cannot be a member of a we without somehow affirming or endorsing that membership experientially. To be part of a we, you have to experience it from within. That is what makes the we a first-person plural. Saying this is by no means to say that the identification with and participation in a given group always happens deliberatively and voluntarily or that it cannot be based on shared objective features such as biological kinship. One might be born into and brought up within a certain family and community, and such memberships might be quite beyond the domain of personal will and decision. What is important, however, is that the membership in question involves rather than bypasses the self-understanding and first-person perspective of the involved parties. Even in such cases, for the membership in question to count as a we-membership, it requires that you do experience yourself as oneofus.
To conceive of the weas an undifferentiated fusional oneness is to misunderstand the very notion. The attempt to derive the individuality of minds from a pre-existing undifferentiated group will consequently not get us what we want, namely a proper account of the first-person plural. Rather, if we are to speak meaningfully of a we, plurality and differentiation must be preserved in order to make possible a genuine being-with-one-another. One might express this by saying that the interpersonal differences must be bridged rather than erased. Heterogeneity is an essential part ofcommunal life. But if this is so, the suggestion that the we precedes and enables individual differentiation – be it on the level of identity or on the level of experience – must be rejected as incoherent. When Martin Buber claimed that, “Only men who are capable of truly saying Thouto one another can truly say Wewith one another” he was onto something.
Perhaps some might object that abstract considerations like the preceding are all well and good, but we shouldn’t forget that in real life we are together with others from the start, that from the very beginning we are all embedded in sociality. So why not just acknowledge that the collective we is prior to the individual I, or that they at the very least arise together? But here again it is important not to move too fast. First, we need to distinguish factual co-occurrence (which nobody is denying) from constitutive interdependence (which is a much stronger – and theoretically interesting – claim). The former is no evidence for the latter. To put it differently, an infant’s first experiences typically occur in the company of others, but that does not show that its experiences are enabled or constituted by social interaction. Secondly, we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that one can prove the primacy of the communal we simply by pointing to the fundamental role of sociality. Whereas the different forms of we (the dyad of lovers, a group of friends, an editorial board, etc.) are all quite particular social formations, sociality is a much wider umbrella term that also covers relations of antagonism, indifference, instrumental interactions, etc. To put it differently, the number of people with whom we have social relations is much larger than the number of people together with whom we constitute a we. Even if infants are ultra-social from birth onwards, this hardly shows them to be part of a we from the outset.
Denying that our identity can be reduced to or exhaustively explained by our group membership(s) is not to deny that this membership in many ways shapes who we are. Even if it should turn out that a we requires some pre-existing (minimal) form of selfhood, it is far from obvious that genuine we-phenomena are compatible with just any account of self, including one that considers the essence of selfhood to reside in some kind of self-enclosed disembodied interiority. To put it differently, the fact that an individual can identify with a group and adopt a we-perspective does tell us something significant about the fluid nature of selfhood and self-identity. If it is acknowledged that we can come to share intentions, emotions, and even identities with others, this will consequently put pressure on various assumptions about the nature of selfhood and constrain the range of available options. Selfhood is not only what allows us to mark our difference to others, it is also something that permits us to share a perspective with them.
It is currently not difficult to find advocates of some form of no-self doctrine, i.e., sceptics who – often on the basis of neuroscience and/or Buddhism – deny the existence of selves. A critical rejoinder to this scepticism would lead too far afield, but it is worth noting that the claim that the self is an illusion has wider ramifications. To deny that the self is real is by the very same token to deny the reality of the community. If you eliminate the first-person singular, you also lose the first-person plural.
Arguing that a we requires a plurality of selves, arguing that it involves processes of group-identification, is, however, only part of the story. Even if I cannot be a member of a we unless I identify with the group in question, my identification is only necessary and not sufficient for membership. Why is that? Because a we by necessity involves more than one member. And whether I count as one also depends on whether the others recognize me as such. To understand the nature of a we, it is consequently not enough just to look at the relation between I and we. One also has to look at the relationship between the prospective members.
To put it differently, if we wish to understand what it means to share a belief, an intention, an emotional experience or, more generally, a perspective with others, we also need to look at how we come to understand and relate to others in the first place. Collective intentionality requires some capacity for social cognition, but are all forms of interpersonal understanding equal to the task? Is it enough simply to be able to single out and relate to others as special kinds of objects (“agents with intentions”)? Will two people who simultaneously adopt a third-person observer perspective on each other be able to enter into and maintain a joint we-perspective, or is something else needed? While recognizing that size matters – there are important differences between the kind of we whose members know each other in person and the kind of large-scale we whose members have never met, but who are nevertheless united via shared rituals, traditions and normative expectations – let me propose that second-personengagement is of crucial importance. To relate to and address another as a you (rather than as a he or she) is to relate to someone, an I, who in turn relates to me as a you.
Second-person engagement is a subject–subject (you-me) relation in which I am aware of and directed at the other and, at the same time, implicitly aware of myself in the accusative, as attended to or addressed by the other. Second-person engagement consequently involves not merely an awareness of the other, but also and at the same time, a form of interpersonal self-consciousness. The idea that the you is important for the we can not only be found in Buber, but also in classical phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz. Schutz, for instance, claims that a we-relationship is established when two individuals engage in a reciprocal thou-orientation (Du-Einstellung). To make this proposal compelling, more details have to be added, but I find it very plausible that a proper account of the we calls for a closer examination of topics such as reciprocity, recognition, and communication.
Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades, it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This book’s chapters address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states. The theories of the Big Four of collective intentionality (Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and Margaret Gilbert) and the Big Five of social ontology (which, in addition to the Big Four, includes Philip Pettit) play a central role in almost all contributions. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines, including dynamical systems theory, economics, and psychology, the chapter develops existing theories, criticize them, or provide alternatives to them. A number of chapters challenge the idea that there is a straightforward dichotomy between individual and collective level rationality and explore the interplay between these levels in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between them. These contributions make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is a discrepancy. Some go as far as arguing that on closer inspection, the alleged discontinuities dissolve.
Intentionality is the property of being about, directed at, or representing events, objects, properties and states of affairs. The mind is the original source of intentionality. The study of collective intentionality is the study of intentionality in the social context. What is distinctive about the study of collective intentionality within the broader study of social interactions and structures is its focus on the conceptual and psychological features of joint or shared actions and attitudes, that is, actions and attitudes of (or apparent attributions of such to) groups or collectives, their relations to individual actions and attitudes, and their implications for the nature of social groups and their functioning. It subsumes the study of collective action, responsibility, reasoning, thought, intention, emotion, phenomenology, decision-making, knowledge, trust, rationality, cooperation, competition, and related issues, as well as how these underpin social practices, organizations, conventions, institutions and social ontology. Collective intentionality is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of research that draws on philosophy, logic, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, computer science, psychology, economics, political science, legal theory, and cultural and evolutionary anthropology.
A Multi-Methodological Investigation of How Collective Intentionality Shapes Solidarity on Different Levels of Analysis
Zeynep Melis Kirgil
Academic dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology at Stockholm University to be publicly defended on Thursday 31 August 2023 at 13.00 in hörsal 6, hus 4, Albano, Albanovägen 12.
Collective intentionality concerns the intentionality of groups or collectives. Intentionality is the property of being about, directed at, oriented toward, or representing objects, events, properties, and states of affairs. Examples of intentional states (states with intentionality, not just intentions) are belief, desire, hope, intention, admiration, perception, guilt, love, grief, fear, and so on. Collective intentionality involves joint, shared, or group intentionality and the intentionality of members (qua members) of groups that have joint or shared attitudes. More broadly, the study of collective intentionality concerns forms of intentionality that underpin social reality. What is distinctive about the study of collective intentionality within the broader study of social interactions and structures is its focus on the conceptual, ontological, and psychological features of joint or shared actions and attitudes, that is, actions and attitudes of (or apparent attributions of such to) groups or collectives, their relations to individual actions and attitudes, and their implications for the nature of social groups and their functioning. It subsumes collective action, intention, thought, reasoning, emotion, phenomenology, decision-making, responsibility, knowledge, trust, rationality, cooperation, competition, and related issues, and how these underpin social practices, conventions, institutions, and social ontology. The two main theoretical questions in the study of collective intentionality concern the ontology and psychology of collective agency and collective attitudes. The main ontological question is whether we should admit into our ontology group subjects of intentional states or attribute intentionality only to their members. The main psychological questions are, if we admit group subjects of intentional states, first, how to understand what they come to, whether they are the same or different than the intentional states we attribute to individuals and if different exactly how, and, second, what is special about the attitudes of individuals who participate in group action or whose attitudes underpin attributions of intentionality to groups? More specifically, can we understand what is special about the attitudes of individuals who participate in group agency or sustain the potential for group agency in terms of concepts already available in our understanding of individual agency, or must we introduce new concepts either of the modes of intending, believing, etc., or in the contents of such attitudes? Both questions concern the debate between methodological individualists and holists about the social, the first with respect to its ontology, the second with respect to its ideology.
General Overviews
Jankovic and Ludwig 2016 provides a quick overview of the field and the major questions. Jankovic and Ludwig 2018 serves as the most in-depth introduction to the field through chapters on nearly all its major topics. Roth 2017 provides an excellent overview specifically of shared agency. Schweikard and Schmid 2013 provides a broader overview as well as historical background. Tollefsen 2019 is a good introduction to the summative/non-summative debate in collective intentionality.
Jankovic, Marija, and Kirk Ludwig, eds. The Handbook of Collective Intentionality. New York: Routledge, 2018. A comprehensive handbook on collective intentionality, with thirty-three chapters divided into eight parts, on collective action and intention, other shared and joint attitudes, epistemology and rationality, social ontology, collectives and responsibility, social institutions, the origins and development of collective intentionality, and the semantics of collectivity.
Jankovic, Marija, and Kirk Ludwig. “Collective Intentionality.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Social Science. Edited by McIntyre Lee and Alex Rosenberg, 214–227. New York: Routledge, 2016. DOI: 10.4324/9781315410098.ch19A short general survey of the field of collective intentionality that covers collective action and intention, the role of collective intentionality in our understanding of the social, including institutional groups, conventions, status functions and roles, proxy agency and social norms, and collective attitudes other than intention.
Roth, Abraham Sesshu. “Shared Agency.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2017. An excellent introduction to the topic of shared agency, with a focus on theories of participatory intentions, that is, the intentions that individuals have when participating in a group of agents doing something together intentionally. Discusses theories of the interrelatedness of participatory intentions as well as whether they give rise to mutual obligations and group minds.
Schweikard, David P., and Hans Bernhard Schmid. “Collective Intentionality.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2013. Focuses on shared attitudes, especially intention and belief, and is organized around the tension between the irreducibility thesis that collective attitudes are not reducible to individual attitudes and the individual ownership thesis that intentional states are states of individuals. Contains a helpful review of the history of discussion of collective attitudes, and reviews content, mode, and subject accounts of what is collective in collective attitudes. Includes a brief review of social and institutional facts, collective responsibility, and team reasoning.
Tollefsen, Deborah. “Collective Intentionality.” In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by James Fieser and Bradley Dowden. 2019. Short overview of collective intentionality, focusing on the contrast between summative and non-summative accounts of attitude attributions to groups, where summative accounts explain attributions to groups in terms of the individuals in the groups having the attitudes, whereas non-summative accounts deny this. Discusses Searle, Bratman, Gilbert, and Tuomela.
Pretence as Individual and Collective Intentionality
There are many ways to advance our understanding of the human mind by studying different kinds of sociality. Our aim in this introduction is to situate claims about extended cognition within a broader framework of research on human sociality. We briefly discuss the existing landscape, focusing on ways of defending socially extended cognition. We then draw on resources from the recent literature on the socially extended mind, as well as the literature on collective intentionality, to provide a framework for thinking about the social dimension of individual minds. We then turn to a brief overview of the individualistic approaches advanced by Ludwig and Spaulding in this volume. And we close with a discussion of the transformative role of the social mind in individual life presented by Kern and Moll, as well as the distributed approach to interacting systems defended by Goldstone and Theiner.
The multiple, interacting levels of cognitive systems (MILCS) perspective on group cognition,
The biological approach to culture focuses almost exclusively on processes ofsocial learning, to the neglect of processes of cultural coordination includingjoint action and shared intentionality. In this paper, we argue that the distinctive features of human culture derive from humans’unique skills andmotivations for coordinating with one another around different types ofaction and information. As different levels of these skills of ‘shared intentionality’emerged over the last several hundred thousand years, human culturebecame characterized first by such things as collaborative activities and pedagogy based on cooperative communication, and then by such things ascollaborative innovations and normatively structured pedagogy. As a kind of capstone of this trajectory, humans began to coordinate not just on jointactions and shared beliefs, but on the reasons for what we believe or howwe act. Coordinating on reasons powered the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution especially characteristic ofthe human species in the last several tens of thousands of years.
Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization,
Searle J. (2010).
Oxford University Press, New York.
Artefacts and Collective Intentionality
Seumas Miller
Seumas.Miller@anu.edu.au Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (An Australian Research Council Funded Special Research Centre) Charles Stuart University Australian National University University of Melbourne
Subjectivity and Identity is a philosophical and interdisciplinary study that critically evaluates critically the most important philosophical, sociological, psychological and literary debates on subjectivity and the subject. Starting from a history of the concept of the subject from modernity to postmodernity – from Descartes and Kant to Adorno and Lyotard – Peter V. Zima distinguishes between individual, collective, mythical and other subjects.
Most texts on subjectivity and the subject present the topic from the point of view of a single discipline: philosophy, sociology, psychology or theory of literature. In Subjectivity and Identity Zima links philosophical approaches to those of sociology, psychology and literary criticism. The link between philosophy and sociology is social philosophy (e.g. Althusser, Marcuse, Habermas), the link between philosophy and literary criticism is aesthetics (e.g. Adorno, Lyotard, Vattimo). Philosophy and psychology can be related thanks to the psychological implications of several philosophical concepts of subjectivity (Hobbes, Stirner, Sartre).
Table of Contents
Preface 1. Theories of the Subject: Terminology and Contemporary Debates 2. Subjectivity between Metaphysics and Modernism: The Subject as a Fundamental, Subjugated and Disintegrating Entity 3. Disintegration and Subjugation of the Individual Subject in Postmodernity: Philosophy and Psychology 4. The Dialectics of Individual Subjectivity in Sociology 5. Theory of the Subject: Towards a Dialogical Subjectivity Bibliography Index
Collective intentionality and the state theory of money
GEORGIOS PAPADOPOULOS
Aarhus University
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics,Volume 8, Issue 2,Autumn 2015, pp. 1-20.
I will shed light on the phenomenon of collective intentionality, which, in the philosophical, cognitive sciences and neurosciences debate, is often confused with similar yet diverse phenomena, i.e. with intersubjective intentionality, also called social cognition, and with social intentionality. In order to elucidate the phenomenon of collective intentionality, I shall present a taxonomy of collective, intersubjective and social intentionality, and consider a thesis about shared intentionality. The taxonomy intends to show that although collective, intersubjective and social intentionality are very close phenomena, nonetheless they are different types of intentionality, and that, like individual intentionality, collective and intersubjective intentionality involve different kinds of intentionality – practical, affective and cognitive – which have to be distinguished. The sharing thesis, I will argue for, maintains that collective intentionality is a shared intentionality in a very strong sense of the term “sharing”, a sense that implies some essential conditions, which are not required in the cases of intersubjective and social intentionality. Finally I shall point out that intersubjective intentionality is the basis and the necessary condition for collective and social intentionality.
Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality – An Interdisciplinary Workshop
Social Ontology as ontological inquiry of social reality – of collectives, practices, laws, material culture and other aspects of reality dependent on sociality including humans themselves and their minds – is a rapidly evolving international field of research. Collective intentionality is one of the key concepts in social ontology in terms of which the basic constitution of all things social is nowadays discussed. It is closely related to themes like mutual belief, joint action and shared emotion. Though many of the central authors in contemporary social ontology are philosophers (including Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, Philip Pettit, John Searle, Raimo Tuomela and others), social ontology also brings together research in many other disciplines, including theoretical sociology, law, economics, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology and political science. The common focus in all these theoretical endeavors is the basic constitution of entities and processes of the social world.
Interest in social ontology is globally shared, and prominently represented in the biannual Collective Intentionality Conferences (https://sites.google.com/site/collintviii/), meetings of the European Network for Social Ontology (http://cipp.unibas.ch/activities/network/) and other such events around the world. The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to bring together researchers in social ontology especially in the Australasian region, but contributions from all continents are heartily welcomed.
Collective Intentionality
Ludwig, Kirk and Jankovic, Marija,
(May 15, 2016).
“Collective Intentionality,” with Marija Jankovic, in The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Social Science, ed., Lee McIntyre and Alex Rosenberg, New York: Routledge, 2016., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3388724
Author(s): Michael E. Bratman Source: Ethics, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Oct., 1993), pp. 97-113 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2381695
University of Exeter Collective Intentionality, Social Ontology, Naturalism, Conceptual Reduction, Michael Tomasello, Joint Attention, Developmental Social Cognition Thesis or dissertation department Sociology and Philosophy PhD in Philosophy
In everyday discourse and in the context of social scientific research we often attribute intentional states to groups. Contemporary approaches to group intentionality have either dismissed these attributions as metaphorical or provided an analysis of our attributions in terms of the intentional states of individuals in the group. Insection1, the author argues that these approaches are problematic. In sections 2 and 3, the author defends the view that certain groups are literally intentional agents. In section 4, the author argues that there are significant reasons for social scientists and philosophers of social science to acknowledge the adequacy of macro-level explanations that involve the attribution of intentional states to groups. In section 5, the author considers and responds to some criticisms of the thesis she defends.
1. There are some who might object to my use of Durkheim here. Admittedly, Durkheim’s collective representations are somewhat different from intentional states. I appeal here only to his analogy between the irreducibility of individual mental states and the irreducibility of social facts. Although my project may be very different from Durkheim’s, the analogy is relevant.
2. Elster (1983) would, no doubt, argue that these ascriptions could be reduced to statements ascribing intentional states to individuals. My point here is simply that social scientists and philosophers of social science apply the intentional idiom at the level of groups.
3. I assume throughout the article that application of the intentional idiom to individuals is explanatorily powerful. My focus is on defending the view that collective intentional state ascriptions are explanatorily powerful, and this is something I attempt to do insection4. There is a great deal of debate about the explanatory power of belief-desire explanation at the individual level. I do not have time to enter into this debate here. I will say briefly, however, that the attack on the explanatory power of folk psychology seems to stem from a narrow conception of explanation. See Lynne Rudder Baker (1995) for a convincing attack on this narrow conception of explanation.
4. There are some immediate objections one might raise here. First, one might claim that we do not hold corporations morally responsible. Reflection on the way we talk about corporate acts seems to suggest otherwise, however. We certainly praise and blame corporations in our everyday moral discourse, and we do so without having any particular individuals in mind. One might argue that this practice is problematic and should be eliminated. But this claim is motivated by individualistic presuppositions. In more collectivist societies (China, for example), the practice of holding groups responsible is standard. That there are such practices does not, by itself, mean that groups are literally intentional agents. What it does suggest is that our ascriptions of responsibility and the ascriptions of intentionality presupposed by them are meant to be more than metaphorical. One might also object that corporations are not held legally responsible in the same way that persons are. Legal cases involving corporations are civil cases rather than criminal cases. In civil cases, there is no need to prove intent. Furthermore, the corporation itself is not held legally responsible. Particular individuals in the organization are held responsible. Both these claims are false. Organizations are now frequently brought up on criminal charges, and such charges need not be made against any individual in the organization. For an interesting discussion of the law and criminal charges against corporations, see http://www.usdoj.gov/04foia/readingrooms/6161999.htm. This is a memorandum from the deputy attorney general on bringing criminal charges against corporations.
5. This is the view espoused by Anthony Quinton in “Social Objects” (1975). He writes,
To ascribe mental predicates to a group is always an indirect way of ascribing such predicates to its members. With such mental states as belief and attitudes, the ascriptions are of what I have called a summative kind. To say that the industrial working class is determined to resist anti-trade union laws is to say that all or most industrial workers are so minded. (P. 242)
6. The summative accounts are also criticized on the grounds that they do not explain certain normative phenomenon that occur in group contexts. See Gilbert (1988, 288-312).
7. Gilbert uses this example to show, among other things, that it is not necessary for all or even most of the members to believe p in order for the group to believe that p. I use it here to make the stronger claim that it is not even necessary that some of the members believe that p in order for the group to believe that p. One might argue that the ascription would surely be false unless at least one member believed that the last line of Larkin’s poem was moving. This intuition needs to be defended. Our attributions of intentional states to groups will be made on the basis of certain evidence including group statements and actions. If group members are not openly opposed to the interpretation and continue to act in ways that suggest they accept it as true, then there will be no evidence to counter the group attribution.
8. This is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition. Tuomela’s (1955) account is much more sophisticated than my gloss of it suggests, but I do not have the space here to give it full consideration. Since it is Tuomela’s methodology I object to rather than the details of his analysis, I think the oversimplification is justified.
9. At the very most, what we do is idealize and assume that the individuals are ideally rational. But there are considerable problems with trying to explain group actions in this manner. For one, even if all of the individuals were ideally rational, this would not guarantee that they would work together to rationally obtain their goals.
10. A similar point is made by David Velleman in “How to Share an Intention” (1997).
11. The reason I do not adopt this line of argument is that I am interested in saying something about our practice of ascribing intentional states to organizations. Since functionalism does not make much of the interpretative side of intentional ascription, I find interpretationism to be a more applicable framework.
12. Davidson develops his version of interpretationism in various places. See especially Davidson (1963, 1970, 1973, 1982, 1993). Dennett’s version of interpretationism can be found in Dennett (1971, 1979, 1987a, 1987b, 1991).
13. This line of argument is developed by Burge (1998). His aim, though, is not to establish the necessity of the first-person concept for reasoning but the necessity of the first-person concept for understanding reason and reasoning. I make the stronger claim here that such a concept is necessary for reasons to have the immediacy characteristic of reasons.
14. How does one determine what desires and beliefs an agent ought to have? Following Dennett, we can adopt the following guidelines: attribute as beliefs all of the truths relevant to the system’s interests that the system’s experience to date has revealed. An implication of the intentional stance is that believers believe mostly truths. If we are to attribute the beliefs that a system ought to have, then we will not attribute to the system lots of false beliefs. False beliefs will not promote a system’s interests, and so they are not beliefs a system ought to have. This is not to say that we cannot attribute false beliefs but that such attributions are made against the backdrop of mostly true beliefs. If attribution of falsehoods is required, there must be a story to tell that justifies such an attribution. Attribution of desires involves attribution of the most basic desires: survival, absences of pain, procreation, play, and so forth. And the attribution of absurd or harmful desires requires a special story just as the attribution of false beliefs requires a special story.
15. One may immediately object to an extension of interpretationism to groups on the following grounds. To interpret organizations, we will need to assume that organizations are rational. That is, we will have to assume that they have a network of beliefs similar to our own and a rational point of view from which cognitive activities originate. But this is the very thing for which I argue! Interpretationism appears to beg the question with respect to collective intentionality. I think there are several things we can say in response to this objection. First, when we descend to the level of individuals, one can raise the same objection to interpretationalism. Interpretationalism seems to presuppose that an agent is interpretable in order to interpret them. This is an accurate description of the process, but it need not be problematically circular. Because of the interdependence of meaning and thought, there is no way to approach intentionality from outside of the intentional realm. Furthermore, we can think of the interpretative process as a pseudoscientific method. Scientists often assume that a theory is true to see what predictions it will yield. If the theory yields successful predictions, adoption of the theory is justified. This simplifies the scientific method a bit, but we can see interpretationalism as engaging in the same sort of enterprise. See Dennett (1987a, 50) for a discussion of the unproblematic circularity involved in the intentional stance.
16. I am extremely grateful to Professor Pettit for allowing me to refer to his unpublished (at least at the time of my own writing) work.
17. Pettit appeals to the paradox in a paper he presented at the Erasmus Summer School on Social Ontology (2000) and in another paper (2001). He argues that the paradox (or as he calls it the “discursive dilemma”) supports the view that certain groups are persons. My own view is weaker. I think the paradox show us how groups can meet the criteria for being intentional agents. There is more, however, to personhood than intentionality. My account also differs from Pettit in that I start with an interpretationist understanding of intentionality and emphasize the role of the rational point of view.
18. This is a version of an example given by Pettit (2001, 2).
19. The paradox is not confined to cases where a court has to make a decision with reference to a conjunction of premises. It can also arise in disjunctive cases—cases where the support required for a positive conclusion is only that one or more of the premises be endorsed. Imagine that three judges have to make a decision on whether someone should be given a retrial. A retrial is admissible either in the event of inadmissible evidence having been used or in the event of a forced confession. The voting goes as follows (Kornhauser and Sager 1993, 40):
If majority voting is all that is required for a group to reject one of the premises, then the premise-driven approach will lead to giving the defendant a retrial, while the conclusion driven-approach will not.
20. The previous judgments may themselves be arrived at through the premise-driven approach or the conclusion approach, or they may have been made by some other committee or arrived at through some sort of consensus. There are many ways in which groups make judgments. The present point is that sometimes those judgments will influence other judgments in such a way that the premise-driven approach is the more rational approach.
21. I am simplifying the situation here. Inmost cases, if a student is weak in one area but very strong in another, he or she might gain acceptance, but this depends on the committee. I am stipulating that the candidate cannot be very weak in any area and gain admissions. How weak is “very” weak is something to be determined by the members of the committee. Surely, this is a plausible scenario.
22. Pettit points out that, strictly speaking, this is not a paradox. I prefer his use of the term “dilemma” but do not adopt it in this article.
23. Thanks to Alison Wylie for bringing this objection to my attention.
24. I am working with a notion of explanation that is prevalent in discussions of folk psychology in the philosophy of mind. Folk psychological explanations are both causal and rationalizing explanations. Interpretationism as I develop it, then, it is not synonymous with the view, advocated by some philosophers of social science, that interpretation is merely a form of understanding and not a form of explanation. For Davidson and other interpretationists, there is no distinction between interpretation and explanation. How, then, can explanations in terms of the intentional states of groups be causal as well as rationalizing explanations? See Jackson and Pettit (1992).
25. Methodological individualism has been defined in various different ways in the literature. I follow Watkins’s (1992) definition: “The principle (of MI) states that social processes and events should be explained by being deduced from (a) principles governing the behavior of participating individuals and (b) descriptions of their situations” (p. 149).
26. Davidson holds that there are token identities between mental states and physical states.
27. This provides us with an additional reason for thinking that the current accounts of group intentionality are inadequate. We are left with the same question that plagues token-token identity theories in the philosophy of mind. The token identity thesis is that for every token instance of a mental state, there will be some token neurophysiological event with which that token instance is identical. But what is it about these token mental states that makes them all tokens of the same type? If Sue and Eric both believe that Columbus is the capitol of Ohio, then what is it that we have in common that makes our different neurophysiological states the same belief? We can formulate the same question with respect to group intentional states. If GM and the Federal Reserve are both ascribed the belief that interest rates should be cut, what do these two groups have in common that makes it appropriate to ascribe to them the same belief? Indeed, what is it about these particular configurations of intentional states that makes it appropriate to call them beliefs at all? Answering these questions requires that we reflect on the nature of intentionality in general and the ways in which group agency is similar to individual agency. Although we find some discussion of this in the work of Margaret Gilbert, most writers on collective intentionality continue to emphasize the differences between individual and group intentionality.
28. I use the word might because I actually think that explanation of certain token social events will also require appeal to the intentional states of groups rather than simply to those of individuals. I develop this line of argument in my dissertation. If one wants to explain a particular merger of two companies, we must appeal to the companies’ goals, aims, beliefs, and so forth. Although managers may share these aims and have these beliefs, they are parasitic on the intentional states of the group.
29. This point is made more elegantly by Elliot Sober, Andrew Levine, and Erik Olin Wright in “Marxism and Methodological Individualism” (1992).
30. See Goldstein (1992) and Watkins (1992) for this portrayal of ontological holism.
31. For a discussion of how monism and supervenience are consistent with interpretationism, see Davidson (1970, 1993).
32. See, for instance, Fodor (1985) and Searle (1992).
33. It will be helpful here to extend one of Dennett’s thought experiments. Imagine that two people are engaging in a prediction contest. Their task is to predict what Ford Motor Company will do in response to the enormous increase in gas prices. One of the participants is an individualist. He is certain that social phenomena can be explained and predicted by appealing to individual intentional states. The other is a collectivist, and she believes that predicting the behavior of an organization involves viewing the organization as a rational agent. To predict what Ford will do, the individualist will have to find out who the operative members of the organization are, how each member voted and why they voted that way, and whether they are telling the truth about their intentional states. The collectivist, on the other hand, knowing that individuals are likely to stop buying large vehicles during a time at which gas prices are high and knowing that Ford sells a great deal of these vehicles and wants to continue to maximize its profits, will predict that Ford will discount these vehicles in the near future. The prediction is a bit risky perhaps but a pretty good one nonetheless. Compared to the individualist, the collectivist performance will look like magic. How did she know Ford would lower its prices on large vehicles without even talking to the president of the company?
34. Clark (1994) considers this argument as well. His response to it differs from my own.
35. I think this is what Gilbert really has in mind when she talks of plural subjects.
36. In Gilbert’s words, they are plural subjects!
References
Baker, L. R. 1995. Explaining attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brennan, G. 1999. Collective irrationality and belief. Unpublished manuscript, Canberra Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University.
Burge, T. 1998. Reason and the first person. In Knowing our own minds, edited by B.S.C. Wright and C. MacDonald, 243-270. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. 1979. True believers: The intentional strategy and why it works. In Scientific explanation, edited by A. Heath, 53-75. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldstein, L. J. 1992. Two theses of methodological individualism. In Modes of individualism and collectivism, edited by J. O’Neill, 277-286. Hampshire, UK: Gregg Revivals.
Jackson, F., and P. Pettit. 1992. Structural explanation and social theory. In Reductionism and anti-reductionism, edited by David Charles and Kathleen Lennon, 97-131. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taschek, W. 1988. Making sense of others: Donald Davidson on interpretation. Paper prepared for the Fellows Seminar Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan.
Watkins, J.W.N. 1992. Ideal types and historical explanation. In Modes of individualism and collectivism, edited by J. O’Neill, 143-165. Hampshire, UK: Gregg Revivals.
Lifeworld, System, and Intersubjectivity: Jurgen Habermas’ Communication Theory of Society
Key Terms
John Dewey
George Herbert Mead
Theory of communicative Action
Social Interaction
Symbolic Interactionism
Action theory
Lifeworld phenomenology
Hermeneutic analysis
Conversational analysis
Ethnomethodology
Social constructivism
Dialogism
Discourse theory
Recognition theory
Objects relations theory
Communication
Language
Dialogical Intersubjectivity
Lifeworld vs System
Jürgen Habermas
Social theory
System
Lifeworld
Communication theory of society
Niklas Luhmann
Political power
Civil society
Dialogs
Dialectics
Self Culture Nature
Self Ritual Reality
Culture, Society, and Personality
First Person, Second Person, Third Person
AQAL Model of Ken wilber’s Integral Theory
Source: Intersubjectivity/ encyclopedia.com
Intersubjectivity
In its most general sense of that which occurs between or exists among conscious human actors, intersubjectivity is little more than a synonym for “the social.” As used by social scientists, however, intersubjectivity usually denotes some set of relations, meanings, structures, practices, experiences, or phenomena evident in human life that cannot be reduced to or comprehended entirely in terms of either subjectivity (concerning psychological states of individual actors) or objectivity (concerning brute empirical facts about the objective world). In this sense, the concept is usually intended to overcome an unproductive oscillation between methodological subjectivism and objectivism. The concept is especially predominant in social theories and theories of the self.
Although German idealist philosophers Johann Fichte (1762–1814) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) stressed the importance of intersubjectivity, the concept became influential in the twentieth century through the work of American social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). Mead claimed that the development of cognitive, moral, and emotional capacities in human individuals is only possible to the extent that they take part in symbolically mediated interactions with other persons. For Mead, then, ontogenesis is essentially and irreducibly intersubjective. He also put forward a social theory explaining how social norms, shared meanings, and systems of morality arise from and concretize the general structures of reciprocal perspective-taking required for symbolic interaction. In short, he argued that intersubjectivity—understood specifically in terms of linguistically mediated, reflexively grasped social action—furnishes the key to understanding mind, self, and society.
Although the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein(1889–1951) was often more directly inspirational, Mead’s bold claim that self and society are irreducibly intersubjective has been rearticulated and supported by many distinct subsequent inter-subjectivist approaches. Action theory, symbolic interactionism, lifeworld phenomenology, hermeneutic analysis, conversational analysis, ethnomethodology, social constructivism, dialogism, discourse theory, recognition theory, and objects relations theory all take inter-subjectivity as central and irreducible. For example, Erving Goffman(1922–1982) insisted that we need a microanalysis of face-to-face interactions in order to properly understand the interpersonal interpretation, negotiation, and improvisation that constitute a society’s interaction order. While macro-and mesostructural phenomena may be important in setting the basic terms of interaction, social order according to Goffman is inexplicable without central reference to agents’ interpretations and strategies in actively developing their own action performances in everyday, interpersonal contexts. Harold Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists likewise insist that social order is only possible because of the strongly normative character of a society’s particular everyday interaction patterns and norms.
Widely diverse social theorists influenced by phenomenology also center their analyses in intersubjective phenomena and structures. Most prominently, Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) sought to show how the lifeworld of persons—the mostly taken-for-granted knowledge, knowhow, competences, norms, and behavioral patterns that are shared throughout a society—delimits and makes possible individual action and interaction. In particular, he sought to analyze the way in which the constitutive structures of any lifeworld shape social meanings and personal experiences, by attending to the lifeworld’s spatiotemporal, intentional, semantic, and role typifying and systematizing dimensions. Other theories analyze different aspects of the lifeworld: how experience and knowledge is embodied (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), the intersubjective construction of both social and natural reality (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann), the social construction of mind and mental concepts (Jeff Coulter), and the social power and inequalities involved in symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu). Finally, Jürgen Habermas emphasizes the linguistic basis of the lifeworld, constructing a theory of society in terms of the variety of types of communicative interaction, the pragmatic presuppositions of using language in order to achieve shared understandings and action coordinations with others, and the role of communicative interaction for integrating society. While acknowledging that some types of social integration function independently of communicative action—paradig-matically economic and bureaucratic systems—Habermas claims that intersubjective communication is fundamental in, and irreplaceable for, human social life.
Diverse prominent theories of the self are united in supporting Mead’s claim that the self is developed and structured intersubjectively. Martin Buber’s (1878–1965) distinction between the different interpersonal attitudes involved in the I-Thou stance and the I-It stance leads to the insight that the development and maintenance of an integral sense of personal identity is fundamentally bound up with the capacity to interact with others from a performative attitude, rather than an objectivating one. Mead’s claim is also developed in diverse theories of the self: Habermas’s account of interactive competence and rational accountability, Axel Honneth’s and Charles Taylor’s theories of interpersonal recognition and identity development, Daniel Stern’s elucidation of the interpersonal world of infants, and psychoanalytic object-relations theories stressing the dependence of the ego on affective interpersonal bonds between self and significant others.
SEE ALSOBourdieu, Pierre; Goffman, Erving; Habermas, Jürgen; Mead, George Herbert; Other, The
Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination.New York: Pantheon.
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Buber, Martin. 1958. I and Thou. 2nd ed. Trans. Ronald G. Smith. New York: Scribner.
Coulter, Jeff. 1989. Mind in Action. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1983. The Interaction Order. American Sociological Review48 (1): 1–17.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Vol. 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity. In Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Trans. William Mark Hohengarten, 149-204. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: Polity.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Child’s Relations with Others. In The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie, 96-155. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Schutz, Alfred. 1962. The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson. Vol. 1 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. I. Schutz. Vol. 3 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen. Vol. 2 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Stern, Daniel N. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Winnicott, Donald Woods. 1964. The Child, the Family, and the Outside World.Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
Christopher F. Zurn
Source: JÜRGEN HABERMAS / SEP
Habermas distinguishes the “system” as those predefined situations, or modes of coordination, in which the demands of communicative action are relaxed in this way, within legally specified limits. The prime examples of systemic coordination are markets and bureaucracies. In these systemically structured contexts, nonlinguistic media take up the slack in coordinating actions, which proceeds on the basis of money and institutional power—these media do the talking, as it were, thus relieving actors of the demands of strongly communicative action. The term “lifeworld,” by contrast, refers to domains of action in which consensual modes of action coordination predominate. In fact, the distinction between lifeworld and system is better understood as an analytic one that identifies different aspects of social interaction and cooperation (1991b). “Lifeworld” then refers to the background resources, contexts, and dimensions of social action that enable actors to cooperate on the basis of mutual understanding: shared cultural systems of meaning, institutional orders that stabilize patterns of action, and personality structures acquired in family, church, neighborhood, and school (TCA 1: chap. 6; 1998b, chap. 4).
Habermas’s system-lifeworld distinction has been criticized from a number of perspectives. Some have argued that the distinction oversimplifies the interpenetrating dynamics of social institutions (e.g., McCarthy 1991, 152–80). Others attacked the distinction as covertly ideological, concealing forms of patriarchal and economic domination (e.g., Fraser 1985). Habermas’s attempt to clarify the analytic character of the distinction only goes partway toward answering these criticisms (1991b).
Source: COMMUNICATIVE ACTION THEORY. A SYSTEM – LIFEWORLD COMPATIBILITY OR INCOMPATIBILITY?
3.5. System and Lifeworld
An important subtitle of Habermas’s theory is the concept of “lifeworld”. He used this concept inspired by Husserl (Brand, 1973, p. 143), who first used it in his work “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”, and then by Schütz, who brought a new interpretation to the concept. For Husserl, the world of life is a space that exists before theory / science (Schutz, 1962, p.120), includes all entities, arranged in space-time dimensions, and and is the “soil” for all socail human experience (Husserl, 1970; Schutz, 1970, s. 116).
Habermas, on the other hand, thinks that the interactions between people in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) do not take place in the consciousness of individuals (Husserl 1969: 12), but in a common space. The lifeworld (Habermas, 1971). According to him, one of the places where the negative effects of rationalization underlying modernity, such as cultural transformation, are seen most intensely is the lifeworld, which is an area of interpersonal interaction. Habermas, who attaches great importance to this sphere as the area where social rationalization takes place through language, argues that this area is occupied by the system and its subsystems such as power and money (Habermas, 1984d, Vol II: 318) and shows that this space is not rationalized sufficiently in a communicative sense (Habermas, 1984e Vol. II: 119, 173).
Husserl explains the reason behind his development of the concept of the “lifeworld” as an effort to find a solution to the separation of the objective- scientific field from the subjective lifeworld as the cause of an increasing crisis of meaning in the field of European science.
Habermas, on the other hand, states that he developed the concept of the “lifeworld” against the possible invasion of the private sphere, where agreement- oriented communicative action is carried out, from the system and its subsystems such as power and economy, which operate with reason for success. Because the system and its subsystems has the possibility to occupy private space in conflict situations that prevent his success (Habermas, 1984f II,: 318-331).
This means that, with the concepts of System and Life world, Habermas tries to explain how a two-level social structure can coexist. This effort is in fact the duality such as individual-society, subject-object, theory-practice, nomothetic-idiographic, natural sciences, social sciences and structure-subject, which both philosophy and sociology have worked on and tried to overcome. These oppositions appear, for example, as the opposition of science and social sciences in the Enlightenment, as the opposition of the nation-state, individual- society in the French revolution, and as the product of human development in the technological field in the industrial revolution, the opposition of the acting and transforming subject and the object connected to it.
The opposition Habermas tries to overcome or balance is the opposition of the system, which is the field of material production, and the life world, which is opposed to it and consists of the private and public sphere* where symbolic production is realized. Taking these two concepts together and explaining their contrasts will make the meaning of these concepts for communicative action theory more visible.
Habermas, in his two-strucrured social theory, explains the duality of symbolic and material reproduction of society through the “lifeworld” and “system” concepts.
“System and lifeworld are each evolutionarily and structurally differentiated social spheres, subsystems or even sovereign territories that are either systemically or socially integrated” (Habermas, 1981: 140).
For the structure of modern, differentiated societies, this means that the system and lifeworld exist in them as concretely separated systems of action and can be set in relation to one another (in the sense of: boundaries, primacy, superiority / subordination, mutual penetration interpenetration, mediatization, colonization.
The economy and the state administration are systemically integrated, formally organized sub-systems of purposeful rational action, which are driven by money and power as media of action release. They serve the material reproduction, disturbances of the same are to be understood as system crises or control crises. These systems are subject to the imperatives of increasing complexity. People have official roles and must seek certain goals, even if sometimes with ethical restraints.
The lifeworld on the other hand is the daily world that we share with others. This includes all facets of life, apart from organised or institution-driven ones. For example, family life, culture and informal social exchange. It is the sphere within which we lead much of our social and individual life (Habermas, 1984g, Vol. II: 126). It’s based on a implicit foundation of shared values and understandings. that give us the ability to perform actions that we know others will understand. Thus daily actions that we produce in the lifeworld are generally communicative in nature (Cooke, 1998).
If one follows the thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld, reifying effects only arise when systemically established obligations impose oneself into the lifeworld.
“It is not the uncoupling of media-steered subsystems and of their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetration of forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas of action that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action” (Habermas, 1984h, Vol. II: 330).
Habermas’s goal with the rationalization of the lifeworld and the system is the rationalization of both in their own unique way. On the one hand, the structures of the system should become more complex by differentiating, on the other hand, the lifeworld should provide an environment for free and independent communication and ensure that the best arguments are accepted as a result of consensus. According to Habermas, this is a formulation that will ensure that the life-world and the system balance each other and will have a positive effect on their development.
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
My Related posts
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Intersubjectivity in Buddhism
Meditations on Emptiness and Fullness
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Semiotics and Systems
Semiotic Self and Dialogic Self
Phenomenological Sociology
Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism
Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self
Individual, Relational, and Collective Reflexivity
Boundaries and Relational Sociology
Semiotic Sociology
Kenneth Burke and Dramatism
Drama Theory: Choices, Conflicts, and Dilemmas
Drama Theory: Acting Strategically
Drama Therapy: Self in Performance
Dialog and Dialectics
Erving Goffman: Dramaturgy of Social Life
Victor Turner’s Postmodern Theory of Social Drama
Understanding Metatheater
Society as Communication: Social Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann
Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, and Social Systems Theory
Frames in Interaction
Key Sources of Research
On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action.
In his Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas proposes a theory of “communicative action” and sets it within a concept of society he calls “lifeworld.” In both his Theory of Communicative Action and later in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas describes the “lifeworld” as the basic conception of society, to be amended or supplemented only for cause. In addition, Habermas argues that in the course of social evolution, systems of economic and political action arise whereby action is coordinated by the consequences of self-interested action, rather than consensual understanding. This chapter explores Habermas’s idea of such “systems” based on his reading of Talcott Parsons. It also examines how Habermas integrates the lifeworld and system concepts into his model of system/lifeworld interchange. It argues that the critical model developed by Habermas in Theory of Communicative Action is more functionalist than straightforwardly normative.
‘System, Lifeworld, and Habermas’s “Communication Theory of Society”’,
In his Theory of Communication Action, Jürgen Habermas talks about a “reconstructive social theory which employs a dual perspective”—the perspective of “system” and “lifeworld.” Habermas’s proposed theory “should explain how the reconstructed normative self-understanding of modern legal orders connects with the social reality of highly complex societies.” In developing the “communication theory of society” in which his “discourse theory of law” is to be situated, Habermas departs from his earlier understanding of the relation between system and lifeworld. This chapter explores Habermas’s concepts of system and lifeworld as well as his communication theory of society. It considers his “model of the circulation of political power”, which presents the idea of “civil society” as an elaboration of the lifeworld’s “private sphere.” It also discusses Habermas’s reference to the three “structural components” (culture, society, and personality) and argues that his notion of “system” and “lifeworld” is similar to the post-Parsons “autopoietic” systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Finally, the chapter rejects the concept of lifeworld as separate social sphere.
Intersubjectivity and critical consciousness: Remarks on Habermas’s theory of communicative action.
Wagner, Gerhard & Zipprian, Heinz (1991).
Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (1):49 – 62.
This chapter describes Jürgen Habermas’ approach to intersubjectivism, presenting his theories of communicative action and discourse ethics as a response to his own earlier call for a form of rationality that is suited to critical social theory. Some implications that Habermas’ ideas hold for leadership are considered. A number of practical and conceptual challenges to Habermas’ conclusions, which have been offered by writers who broadly share his intersubjectivist commitment, are outlined. These challenges are used to augment the understanding of intersubjectivist leadership already presented. The chapter ends with some general reflections concerning moral philosophy and leadership, which have been garnered from the three chapters of Part II.
A Habermasian perspective on joint meaning making online : what does it offer and what are the difficulties?
Hammond, Michael. (2015)
International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 10 (3). pp. 223-237.
The basic categories of Habermas’s theory are, then, those of a broadly conceived sociological theory of action, which, however, also incorporates social historical and system-theoretical, as well as structuralist elements. Although he borrows some concepts from Talcott Parsons (Holmwood, 2009) and often mentions Niklas Luhmann, his conception is closer to those of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens (Outhwaite, 2015).
What Habermas (1987b: 553) stresses is that system theories and theories of action ‘isolate and overgeneralize’ aspects of modernity (system and lifeworld, respectively). When, here and elsewhere, he emphasizes the role of language, he does not intend to reduce “social action to the interpretive accomplishments of participants in communication … assimilating action to speech, interaction to conversation” (Habermas, 1987a: 143). This is rather the way in which action is ‘coordinated.’
Intersubjectivity and interculturality: a conceptual link
Author: Xiaodong Dai Date: Jan. 2010 From: China Media Research(Vol. 6, Issue 1) Publisher: Edmondson Intercultural Enterprises
Intersubjectivity reflects the condition of all human existence and constitutes the basis of social communication. Interculturality opens up new social space and constitutes the largest and most productive platform for intercultural dialogue. This paper attempts to define intersubjectivity and interculturality, interpret their implications and analyze how they interact with each other. Intersubjectivity refers to the interpersonal connection between individuals who are attuned to one another and construct social relations. The polysemic nature of intersubjectivity suggests that it not only embodies mutuality and consensuses but also disagreements and tensions. In like manner, interculturality refers to the complex connection between cultures whose members negotiate to reach agreements and achieve reciprocal interactions. It implies commonalities and similarities as well as differences, contrasts and conflicts. Intersubjectivity and interculturality share a similar structure, but have different operational mechanisms. The key difference lies in their frames of reference. With more exposure to other culture/cultures, communicators can broaden their horizons, reduce cultural distance and further transform intersubjectivity into interculturality. In establishing interculturality, they need to be open to other cultures and transcend monocultural ways of thinking. Key words: intersubjectivity, transformation, interculturality
Communication as analytical unit in Luhmann and Habermas
Sergio Pignuoli-Ocampo1
1Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas y Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. (CONICET-UBA-IIGG). spignuoli@conicet.gov.ar
Reconstructive Social Theory: Habermas, Bhaskar, and Caillé
16th November 2016
This is a guest blog post by Professor Frederic Vandenberghe of Sociology in the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Frederic is a leading expert in the field of Critical Realism. He has been working on CR and the social sciences since 1994 when he completed his doctorate in Sociology from Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. His work operates at the intersection of philosophy and sociology with a special interest in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and critical realism. He recently published a series of essays in a book titled, “What’s Critical about Critical Realism? Essays in Reconstructive Social Theory”.
Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity: A response to the linguistic-pragmatic critique
Zahavi, D. (2001a).
(E. A. Behnke, Trans.). Athens, OH: Ohio UP.
Phenomenology and the problems of intersubjectivity.
Zahavi, D. (2001b).
In S. Crowell, L. Embree, & S. J. Julian (Eds.), The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century. Purchased and downloaded at: http://www.electronpress.com
Individuation through socialization: George Herbert Mead‟s theory of subjectivity.
Habermas, J. (1995).
In J. Habermas (ed.), Postmetapysical Thinking. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 149-204.
Some further clarifications of the concept of communicative rationality.
Habermas, J. (1996).
In J. Habermas (ed.), On the Pragmatics of Communication. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. pp. 307-342.
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy.
Habermas, J. (1997).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn.
Habermas, J. (2003).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2008), Truth and Justification. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. pp. 1-51.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Goffman, E. (1971).
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Reflections on the linguistic foundation of sociology: The Christian Gauss lecture.
Habermas, J. (1971).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2001), On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 3-103.
Wahrheitstheorien.
Habermas, J. (1972).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1984), Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 27-183.
Reflections on communicative pathology.
Habermas, J. (1974a).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2001), On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 131-170.
Können komplexe Gesellschaften eine vernünftige Identität ausbilden?,
Habermas, J.(1974b).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1976), Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 92-126.
Introduction: Some difficulties in the attempt to link theory and praxis.
Habermas, J. (1974c).
In J. Habermas (ed.), Theory and Practice. London: Heinemann. pp. 1-40. Forchtner Page |36
Towards a reconstruction of historical materialism.
Habermas, J. (1975).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1979), Communication and the Evolution of Society. Heinemann: London. pp. 130- 177.
Habermas, J. (1976a). Überlegungen zum evolutionären Stellenwert des Rechts. In J. Habermas (ed.), Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 260-267.
What is Universal Pragmatics?
Habermas, J. (1976b).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1979), Communication and the Evolution of Society. London: Heinemann. pp. 1-68.
A reply to my critics.
Habermas, J. (1982).
In J.B. Thompson and D. Held (eds.), Habermas: Critical Debates.
London/Basingstoke: MacMillan Press. pp. 219-283.
The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society.
Habermas, J. (1984).
London: Heinemann.
The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System.
Habermas, J. (1987).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures.
Habermas, J. (1990).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
The Gulf War: Catalyst for a new German normalcy.
Habermas, J. (1993).
In M. Pensky (ed.), The Past as Future. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 5-31.
Kollektive Lernprozesse: Studien zur Grundlegung einer Soziologischen Lerntheorie.
Adequate accounts of intersubjectivity must recognise that it is a social, cognitive, and affective phenomenon. I draw on Jürgen Habermas’ formal-pragmatic theory of meaning and of the lifeworld as an alternative to phenomenological approaches. However, his conception of the lifeworld reflects a cognitivist bias. Intersubjectivity cannot be adequately conceptualised merely in terms of our mutual accountability and exchange or reasons; the affective dimension of our social interactions must also be recognised. I propose to redress this shortcoming by taking account of empirical research on intersubjectivity, joint attention, and attachment. This leads me to suggest supplementing the three Habermasian validity claims to truth, normative rightness, and sincerity with a fourth, a claim to attachment, which fits with understanding the earliest infant interactions in terms of altercentric participation. Since an adequate account of the social nature of linguistic communication must do justice not only to the lifeworld as a shared background of intelligibility, but also as a background against which differences in point of view are articulated, I conclude with a brief look at the ontogeny of perspective. Keywords: lifeworld; intersubjectivity; validity claims; attachment; cognition; affect; perspective; J. Habermas; M. Merleau-Ponty
The close relationship between motion (bodily movement) and emotion (feelings) is not an etymological coincidence. While moving ourselves, we move others; in observing others move – we are moved ourselves. The fundamentally interpersonal nature of mind and language has recently received due attention, but the key role of (e)motion in this context has remained something of a blind spot. The present book rectifies this gap by gathering contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists and linguists working in the area. Framed by an introducing prologue and a summarizing epilogue (written by Colwyn Trevarthen, who brought the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity to a wider audience some 30 years ago) the volume elaborates a dynamical, active view of emotion, along with an affect-laden view of motion – and explores their significance for consciousness, intersubjectivity, and language. As such, it contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of mind science, transcending hitherto dominant computationalist and cognitivist approaches.
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION THEORY.
A SYSTEM – LIFEWORLD COMPATIBILITY OR INCOMPATIBILITY?
Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity
Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity
Transpersonal Psychology
Consciousness
Key Researchers
Jessica Benjamin
Judith Blackstone
Dan Zahavi
Roy Tzohar
B. Alan Wallace
Bill Waldron
Jeannine A. Davies
Brook Ziporyn
Gerald Dōkō Virtbauer
de Balbian, Ulrich
Loy, David
Joel Krueger
Joshua May
Evan Thompson
Brincat, S
Linda A. Chernus
G. E. Atwood
R. D. Stolorow
Lewis A. Kirshner
Christian de Quincey
Shaun Gallagher
Orange, D.M.
Alex Gillespie
Flora Cornish
Peter Buirski
Hanne De Jaegher
Vygotsky, Lev S.
Toma Strle
Merleau-Ponty M.
Buber, Martin
Mackenzie, Matthew
Source: The Buddhist Philosophical Conception of Intersubjectivity: an Introduction.
This paper serves as a retrospective introduction to a series of four tightly connected articlesFootnote 1published over the course of several issues in SOPHIA, all of which arose from a panel on the Buddhist Philosophical Notion of Intersubjectivity at the Yogācāra Studies Unit of the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR, Atlanta, 2015). The growing online access to academic journals seems increasingly to obviate the need to group thematically related articles in a special issue, but nonetheless, readers may wish for some guidance regarding the editorial reasons for grouping them in a series, the common concerns they address, and the ways in which they relate to each other. This brief introduction therefore outlines a possible framework for approaching these papers, and suggests a particular order in which they can be most profitably read.
The philosophical engagement with the issue of intersubjectivity—i.e., the shared nature of our experiences, in particular of the external world—has evident significance for an array of Buddhist concerns. Intersubjective experience is of interest not just for its role in bridging the self and others, but also because it allows (and for the philosophical realist, indeed reaffirms) an emergent notion of objectivity. Viewed on the one hand against the background of the Buddhist metaphysics of momentariness and causality, the critique of the self, and nominalism, and on the other hand in light of the Buddhist emphasis on the practical and social role of the Sangha and of meaningful salvific discourse, intersubjectivity poses a particularly tenacious explanatory challenge for Buddhist schools of thought. It is a curious fact, then, that despite the significance of this topic and its relevance to the Buddhist understanding of personal identity, otherness, and the nature of the life-world, it has received relatively little explicit attention in either Buddhist philosophical writing (see Garfield’s response paper on this point) or contemporary scholarship. As a corrective, the AAR panel and the set of articles that ensued from it—by Kachru, Prueitt, and Tzohar, and a response paper by Garfield—addressed this theme from various angles. The overarching question at the background of the discussion was whether there is a uniquely Buddhist conception of intersubjectivity, and if so what it entails and what are its expressions in the Buddhist philosophical conception of experience, language, and the life-world.
Aiming to situate these questions within a concrete and continuous intellectual and historical context, the papers focus on the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition as a case study. Taken together, they provide a diachronic account of the development of this particular Buddhist approach to the topic, by tracing continuity, disruption, and innovation as the outcomes of shifting intellectual agendas in the works of Vasubandhu and his commentators (Tzohar), Dharmakīrti’s thought (Prueitt), and Ratnakīrti’s response (Kachru).
While they are attuned to differences between the respective accounts of these thinkers, the papers all seem to suggest certain overlapping concerns. These concerns, and the ways in which they were addressed by the Buddhist thinkers, are spelled out and assessed in Jay Garfield’s response paper, “I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru.” The most common concern, pointed out by Garfield, has to do with the need to account for and justify the possibility of intersubjective experiences under a view of phenomena as mind-dependent, and it is framed—not unlike the way it appears in the Western philosophical tradition—in terms of the perennial debate between the realist and the idealist. Another major if more subtle concern has to do with the question of meaning—in both the perceptual and the linguistic communicative realm—and how it can be construed intersubjectively so as to allow for shared perceptual content and efficacious actions, to account for successful and meaningful language use (in the constitution of norms), and to avoid the pitfalls of solipsism on the one hand or incommensurability on the other.
Dealing broadly with these concerns within the context of each thinker, the papers before us reveal the way in which intersubjectivity branches off into a range of fundamental questions in Buddhist metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language, all of which are deeply grounded in particular Buddhist conceptions—of, for instance, cosmology, the category of species, the concept of mind and the operation of language. In this respect, the emergent collective account of Buddhist intersubjectivity serves as a step toward much needed conceptual groundwork regarding this notion in its original context, that is, groundwork that takes into account the meaning of specific specialized terms and categories involved in this notion, and the way in which it conveys a complex set of cultural preferences and doctrinal premises.
My own paper in the series, “Imagine being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” deals with the early Yogācāra strategies for explaining intersubjective agreement under a “mere representations” view. Thus, this paper presents the foundational tradition to which the other Buddhist thinkers react, and in this respect sets down the terms of the discussion taken up in the other three papers. Examining Vasubandhu’s, Asaṅga’s, and Sthiramati’s uses of the example of intersubjective agreement among the hungry ghosts (pretas)—an agreement explained by appeal to a shared karma—I demonstrate that the Yogācāra arguments should be understood as an ironic inversion of the realist premise; in other words, as showing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of external mind-independent objects, but in fact is incompatible with their existence. Under this account, I argue, intersubjectivity is not only possible under a “mere-representation” view but necessary for the coherence of the Yogācāra view. As Garfield observes about this Yogācāra reasoning, “it is the fact that external objects are imagined not by a single mind, but by many… that gives the argument its force, for that enables genuinely alternative realities to be compared to one another to demonstrate that reality, not hallucination, is mind-dependent” (Garfield, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7).
My paper goes on to explicate the emergent Yogācāra understanding of the life-world—as the outcome of the shared karma of all its beings—as a realm that is understood in terms of the self and others’ shared engagement in a common world. This has some affinity with the way the contemporary phenomenological tradition conceives of intersubjectivity, but unlike the phenomenological account, the Yogācāra takes the first-person perspective to be a product rather than the enabling condition of this engagement. Among the ramifications of this reluctance to privilege the first-person perspective, I argued, is a radical revision of the “shared” and “private” distinction as it is used with respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically.
Exploring the later development of these themes from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy of language is the focus of Catherine Prueitt’s paper “Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought.” The early Yogācāra attempt to uphold and justify intersubjectivity by appeal to shared karmic imprints (vāsanā) is the starting point for Prueitt’s paper, which explicates the way in which this strategy is used by Dharmakīrti (fl. c. 550–650 C.E.) to explain the absence of universals under his theory of apoha. While she traces the continuity between these two accounts, Prueitt points out important points in which Dharmakīrti departs from the early Yogācāra reasoning. For Dharmakīrti, she suggests, intersubjectivity was important not so much for defending a view of phenomena as mind-dependent but insofar as it was involved in the more fundamental question of how shared meaning—in its most fundamental function as concept formation—may be construed and normatively applied.
Prueitt’s paper demonstrates how, with the premise of the non-existence of universals, Dharmakīrti explains concept formation by tracing concepts ultimately to the mechanism of karmic imprints (which in turn are understood to be developed over countless lifetimes and continuously and recursively reshaped by ongoing actions). Couched in terms similar to those of the early Yogācāra account, according to Dharmakīrti, the extent to which individuals experience themselves as acting within a shared world (or not) depends on these imprints. Whatever is shared—manifested in terms of similar sensory capacities, habits, and aims—allows in turn for the judgment of sameness, that is, forms the basis for selectively collecting certain particulars (taking them as if having the same effects) under a single concept.
Prueitt’s argument goes on to show that Dharmakīrti’s appeal to karmic imprints also allows him to meet the critique (both traditional and modern) that his denial of the reality of the subject/object duality is incompatible with his theory of apoha. She concludes that Dharmakīrti’s reliance on karmic imprints on two distinct levels—one within the conventional world (i.e., concept formation), and one that constitutes the conventional world (i.e., the subject/object duality)—provides a round and complete account of intersubjectivity without relying on universals.
Proceeding to examine the changing conception of intersubjectivity within changing theories of mind in the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition, Sonam Kachru’s paper “Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism” traces the outlines of what may be described as a paradigm shift in the tradition with respect to the conceptual foundations of intersubjectivity.
The paper achieves this by focusing on the response by Ratnakīrti (990–1050 C.E.) to Dharmakīrti’s attempt to defuse the threat of epistemological solipsism, with particular attention to the former’s sensitivity to the conceptual preconditions of this problem, and to the ways in which his conclusions differ from Dharmakīrti’s.
According to Kachru’s analysis, Ratnakīrti’s critique, in essence, is that Dharmakīrti overlooks the fact that in framing the problem he is helping himself to an equivocation between two distinct concepts of mind (which, however, remain inactive in forming his solution to the problem). The first is a notion of mind that emerges out of our ordinary linguistic practices, and the second, a phenomenological concept of mind as phenomenal presence. Given the latter conception of mind, so goes Ratnakīrti’s argument—which, as Garfield notes, has interesting affinities with similar treatments of the problem of other minds in contemporary philosophy of mind and language, beginning with Wittgenstein—there is indeed no justification for applying the concept of “other minds,” but neither are there any grounds to speak of “one’s own mind” (because insofar as the phenomenological concept of mind is experienced as such, we have no room to meaningfully ask whether there is only one mind or many). Kachru’s essay concludes by considering which of the different ways we find in the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition to assuage epistemological solipsism we have reason to prefer, thereby exploring the impact these various theories of mind have had on the changing place of intersubjectivity within that tradition.
Notes
Guest edited by Roy Tzohar and Jake Davis, and include: Roy Tzohar, “Imagine Being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity” Sophia 56 (2017): 337–354; Catherine Prueitt, “Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought,” Sophia 57 (2018): 313–335; Sonam Kachru, “Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism,” Sophia 58 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0707-8; Jay L. Garfield, “I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy, Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru,” Sophia 58 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7.
A Buddhist Philosophical Approach to Intersubjectivity
CFS Lecture by Roy Tzohar, Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel
In this talk I propose that there is a uniquely Buddhist philosophical conception of intersubjectivity, and explore some of its expressions in the Buddhist conception of experience, language, and the social realm. For the Buddhist philosophical schools of thought, intersubjective experiences were of interest not just for their role in bridging the self and others, but also because they allegedly involve an emergent notion of objectivity. Given the Buddhist metaphysics of momentariness and causality and the critique of the first-person perspective, intersubjectivity posed a particularly tenacious explanatory challenge for Buddhist thought. In discussing how this challenge was met, I focus in particular on the strategies devised by one Buddhist school, the Indian Yogācāra, to explain intersubjective agreement under a view of phenomena as mind-dependent. This explanation, I show, involved an ironic inversion of the realist premise, since it proceeds by arguing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of mind-independent objects but is in fact incompatible with their existence. By delineating the phenomenological complexity underlying this account, I unpack the emergent Yogācāra account of intersubjectivity along with its implications for the understanding of being, the life-world, and alterity, and argue that it proposes a radical revision of the way in which we conceive of the “shared” and “private” distinction with respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically.
Roy Tzohar specializes in the history of philosophy with a focus on Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophical traditions in India. He is currently an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies Department at Tel Aviv University. He holds a PhD from the Religion Department at Columbia University (New York, 2011), and an M.A. in philosophy from Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students (Tel Aviv, 2004). His research, under the Marie Curie IRG fellowship, concerns intersubjectivity and language in the Indian Buddhist Yogācāra thought. His monograph “Meaning in the World and in Texts: A Buddhist Theory of Metaphor” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
My Related Posts
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Meditations on Emptiness and Fullness
Indira’s Net: On Interconnectedness
Third and Higher Order Cybernetics
The Great Chain of Being
Law of Dependent Origination
Key Sources of Research
The Buddhist Philosophical Conception of Intersubjectivity: an Introduction.
Buddhism has become one of the main dialogue partners for different psychotherapeutic approaches. As a psychological ethical system, it offers structural elements that are compatible with psychotherapeutic theory and practice. A main concept in Mahāyāna-Buddhism and postmodern psychoanalysis is intersubjectivity. In relational psychoanalysis the individual is analysed within a matrix of relationships that turn out to be the central power in her/his psychological development. By realising why one has become the present individual and how personal development is connected with relationships, the freedom to choose and create a life that is independent from inner restrictions should be strengthened. In Mahāyāna-Buddhism, intersubjectivity is the result of an understanding of all phenomena as being in interdependent connection. Human beings are a collection of different phenomena and in constant interchange with everything else. Personal happiness and freedom from suffering depends on how this interchange can be realised in experience. The article focuses on the philosophical psychological fundaments in both approaches and emphasises clarification of to what the term ‘intersubjectivity’ exactly refers. This clarification is essential for the current dialogues, as well as further perspectives in this interdisciplinary field.
Intersubjectivity in Mahāyāna-Buddhism and Relational Psychoanalysis.
Intersubjectivity as an antidote to stress: Using dyadic active inference model of intersubjectivity to predict the efficacy of parenting interventions in reducing stress—through the lens of dependent origination in Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy
Ho S. Shaun, Nakamura Yoshio, Gopang Meroona, Swain James E.
“CHAPTER 11 What Is the Buddha Looking At? The Importance of Intersubjectivity in the T’ien-t’ai Tradition as Understood by Chih-li”
Ziporyn, Brook.
In Buddhism in the Sung edited by Daniel A. Getz and Peter N. Gregory, 442-476. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824843649-013
In this volume, volume 6, I will deal with insight and understanding, meaning and communication and intersubjectivity. (In an appendix I will include a number of -isms, cognitive biases and fallacies that might interfere in, with and distort these things.)
The latter is pre-supposed by, present, necessary and operating in all four of these notions when they are employed as verbs. I hope and intend to employ these words and explore them without the need for ghost-in-the-machine like mysterious, mystical and mythical ‘mental’ processes and organs such as ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ but by means of different meanings, dimensions, levels of t notions of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity enfolds (like a pregnant mother her foetus) insight, understanding, meaning and communication. Intersubjectivity is the beginning, the ground and reason for and the end of all meanings or sense that human beings could have. I am not interested in all the details of insight, experience, understanding, meaning, concepts and ideas, dialogue, discourse, interaction, communication (for example as speculated about by Habermas and his followers, Brandom et al). etc but merely the fact that these things require, assume, presuppose (different aspects, features, functions, processes, etc of) intersubjectivity. For those who are so inclined they could execute experiments (for example in the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences, anthropology, etc) to establish that what I state here is a fact and not merely speculate. I will leave speculation - about the activities and nature of the first, second and third person (the public, etc) participants in the activities and process of communication, the question of second and third contingencies, or Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity and/or Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity, the insufficiency of the former’s coordination and the need for synthesis, modes of structuration and the temporal dimensions of communication, threefold semiotic or twofold semiological structuralist theories of signs, theories of individualist or collective learning, action-directing models cultural models, pre-supposed structural features of the social relationships that are involved in communication, the structure parameters of for example the process of communication embedded in an intersubjective context (I would say all the following themselves are intersubjective), as discursive practice, including discourse, argumentation, communication, communication exchange, linguistic communication, everyday communication, interaction, etc - those, especially Continentals and those influenced by them, who suffer from the need for metaphysical speculation and to ontologize in complex terms about the most simple and obvious notions.
The reason for these attitudes of mine towards mental things, processes, organs, etc is that I do not believe they exist, apart from being umbrella-notions that refer to a number of undefined and not yet conceptualized meanings. They have their origins in uneducated, uninformed redundant myths and folk psychology. Their usage date back to almost pre-historic times in the evolution of human thinking and psychology and are conceptual remainders and linguistic left overs of primitive flat earth socio-cultural attitudes and beliefs.
I further need to make four points concerning my approach in this volume and my approach to or understanding of philosophy, they manner or style in which I write, especially in this volume and how I employ and interpret the nature and one function of intersubjectivity, both in this volume and in general. The latter I present as a kind of hypothesis and conclusion.
Institutionalized and internalized, competence intersubjectivity contain many user-illusions and an imaginary or manifest image of reality, including of themselves (Dennett and Sellars),. This can be contrasted we a comprehension or comprehensive, understanding intersubjectivity. It is possible and perhaps even necessary to transform or replace the competence intersubjectivity to a comprehension or understanding (scientific, Dennett and Sellars) image of reality and themselves.Ethics and morality and studies of ethics and morality deal with the reality of competence intersubjectivity (by means of socio-cultural practices that are derived from, based on an created by means of this restrictive, misleading, unreal, illusory, unrealistic intersubjectivity and the life-worlds associated with it) and human life-worlds constituted on the basis of and in terms of this intersubjectivity. This is why I am a nihilist, a libertarian, at least a minarchist or rather an anarchist and epistemologically a sceptic.
Kant’s things in themselves are similar to Dennett and Searle’s notions of manifest and scientific image. With my addition that we are socialized and internalize the competent, know how to do it, institutionalized manifest, everyday intersubjectivity, instead of the comprehension, insights and understanding knowing that, scientific intersubjectivity of all scientific disciplines.
Buddhist practices can be understood as inquiries into individual experience within a community, whereas analytic psychotherapy is an inquiry into mutual discovery through a dyadic relationship. While Buddhism invites us to investigate the subjective and objective worlds, psychotherapy especially invites us to investigate the intersubjective. In this program, we will explore both the resonances and divergences between psychotherapy and Buddhist practice in these regards, focusing on selected strands in depth psychology and psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and Zen, Pure Land Buddhism, and Vipassana Mindfulness, on the other. Themes of subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity will be especially helpful in thinking through Buddhism in a Western context, where the majority of practitioners are living in couple and family relationships. The program emphasizes both embodied practice and reflective inquiry.
Buddhist Notion of Intersubjectivity.
Bandyopadhyay, P. S. (Guest ed.), Tzohar, R. (Guest ed.), & Davis, J. (Guest ed.) (2019).
This paper disputes the claim that the so-called soul-body dualism finds its solution in the analysis of the intersubjectivity from the viewpoint of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and in the concept of selflessness in the philosophy of Mahayana-Buddhism. The intentionality of instinctual drive as the passive synthesis provides the reason for Husserl’s intersubjectivity and the possibility of Buber’s I-Thou relation. The selflessness in this relation is the concept of Buber’s thou and in Husserl’s intersubjectivity lies in the interesting connection with the non-egological dimension of Buddhism.
“‘I’ Without ‘I am’: On the Presence of Subjectivity in Early Buddhism, in the Light of Transcendental Phenomenology”.
Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy (Book Review)
Title: Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy Author: Magid, Barry Publisher: Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002 Reviewed By: Susan B. Parlow, Winter 2004, pp. 34-36
LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Empathy and Consciousness
Evan Thompson
First a consulting report prepared for the Fetzer Institute (Kalamazoo, MI) that also served as the discussion paper for the meeting I convened at Fetzer on ‘The Intersubjectivity of Human Consciousness: Integrating Phenomenology and Cognitive Science’ (Sep- tember 24–27, 1999), and the second my opening address to this meeting.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 5–7, 2001, pp. 1–32
Intersubjectivity Theory Revisited: A 30-Year Retrospective,
Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism, edited by G. E. Atwood, & R. D. Stolorow (2014). New York, NY: Routledge,
The author views the analytic enterprise as centrally involving an effort on the part of the analyst to track the dialectical movement of individual subjectivity (of analyst and analysand) and intersubjectivity (the jointly created unconscious life of the analytic pair—the analytic third). In Part I of this paper, the author discusses clinical material in which he relies heavily on his reverie experiences to recognize and verbally symbolize what is occurring in the analytic relationship at an unconscious level. In Part II, the author conceives of projective identification as a form of the analytic third in which the individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand are subjugated to a co-created third subject of analysis. Successful analytic work involves a superseding of the subjugating third by means of mutual recognition of analyst and analysand as separate subjects and a reap-propriation of their (transformed) individual subjectivities.
The relational unconscious is the fundamental structuring property of each interpersonal relation; it permits, as well as constrains, modes of engagement specific to that dyad and influences individual subjective experience within the dyad. Three usages of the concept of thirdness are delineated and contrasted with the concept of the relational unconscious, which, it is suggested, has the advantage of being both consistent with existing views of unconscious processes and more directly applicable to therapeutic concerns. Enactments and intersubjective resistances are viewed as clinical manifestations of the relational unconscious, and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis results, in part, from altering the structure of the relational unconscious that binds analysand and analyst.
In this book, Lewis Kirshner explains and illustrates the concept of intersubjectivity and its application to psychoanalysis. By drawing on findings from neuroscience, infant research, cognitive psychology, Lacanian theory, and philosophy, Kirshner argues that the analytic relationship is best understood as a dialogic exchange of signs between two subjects—a semiotic process. Both subjects bring to the interaction a history and a set of unconscious desires, which inflect their responses. In order to work most effectively with patients, analysts must attend closely to the actual content of the exchange, rather than focusing on imagined contents of the patient’s mind. The current situation revives a history that is shaped by the analyst’s participation.
Intersubjective Systems Theory in Psychoanalysis – An Overview
George E. Atwood, Robert D. Stolorow, and Donna M. Orange are the core theorists of intersubjective systems theory, a form of psychoanalytic practice that focuses on the relational origins of mental distress and does so through the interpersonal and intersubjective relationship of the analyst and analysand.
These theorists, all of whom are practicing psychoanalysts, have rejected the Cartesian version of self as a unitary, isolated entity, and have likewise rejected mental illness as an intrapsychic dysfunction. In their model, which relies heavily on phenomenological philosophy as its explanatory foundation, the patient’s troubles (excluding organic disease or physical trauma) exist only within the experiential and relational contexts in which they developed.
There are two powerful and often implicit beliefs that underlie most current psychotherapeutic models: (1) the Myth of Modeling, “a way of thinking which over-emphasizes the conscious, cognitive, rational and technique based aspects of the psychoanalytic encounter” (Mikko Martela and Esa Saarinen, 2008), and (2) the Myth of the Isolated Mind (Stolorow and Atwood 2002), a remnant of the Cartesian dualism that has infected Western philosophy until the middle of the 20th Century and still is embedded in modern psychology.
Intersubjective systems theory (IST, or intersubjectivity theory) proposes that minds are not isolated, unitary things that exist as individual entities, as though in a vacuum. Rather, minds exist within interpersonal and intersubjective relationships, beginning at birth (and even before) with the attachment bond to the mother, and they develop within interpersonal, intersubjective, relational contexts.
Here is a wide-angle definition of intersubjectivity from Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish (2009):
Gillespie, A. & Cornish, F. (2009). Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40:1; 20-46.
Intersubjectivity is central to the social life of humans. Thus, unsurprisingly, research pertaining, either directly or indirectly, to intersubjectivity spans many research areas of psychology. In developmental psychology it lies just below the surface of widely used concepts such as decentration (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), theory of mind (Doherty, 2008) and perspective taking (Martin, Sokol and Elfers, 2008). In neuroscience, intersubjectivity has recently become a popular topic with the discovery of “mirror neurons” which are thought to provide a neurological basis for imitation, theory of mind, language, and social emotions (Hurley & Chater, 2005). In the field of comparative psychology, there has been a surge of interest in intersubjectivity, in the form of investigations of possible perspective-taking amongst, for example, monkeys (Tomasello, Call and Hare, 2003) and scrub jays (Emery & Clayton, 2001). Intersubjectivity, going by various names, is also central to research on communication. Phenomena such as addressivity, double voiced discourse, and dialogue are deeply intersubjective (Linell, 2009). Intersubjectivity has also been identified as important in small group research because it has been found that mutual understanding within small groups creates increased efficiency, reliability and flexibility (Weick & Roberts, 1993). Research on self and identity has long emphasised the importance of Self’s perceptions of Other’s perceptions of Self (James, 1890; Howarth, 2002). In the field of counselling, much therapeutic effort is directed at resolving misunderstandings and feelings of being misunderstood both of which indicate dysfunctional intersubjective relations (Cooper, 2009). (p. 20)
Unfortunately, intersubjective theory falls into an area of overlap between psychology and sociology, and the insularity of each has precluded any serious cooperation in terms of research. Most of the research has been done in the realm of psychology and philosophy (especially by Stolorow and Orange).
Mind, as understood by current developmental research, is a relational construction. As we have discussed previously, there is no subjectivity without intersubjectivity and there can be no intersubjectivity without subjectivity (Buirski and Haglund, 2001). That is, subjective worlds of personal experience are inextricably embedded in intersubjective systems. When viewed from a systems or contextual perspective, distinctions, like those between one-person and two-person psychologies, are revealed as too limited because worlds of personal experience encompass more than just the two people involved. (p. 4)
Kenneth Gergen (Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community, 2009) offers another way of looking at this, specifically at the therapeutic relationship within a relational context.
We now turn to the therapeutic relationship itself. From the present standpoint, how are we to understand the relationship between therapist and client, its potentials, and its efficacy? In responding to this question, we are invited to think beyond the tradition of bounded being in which the aim of therapy is to “cure” the mind of the individual client. The metaphors of the therapist as one who “plumbs the depths,” or serves as a mechanic of the cognitive machinery must be bracketed. We also set aside the causal model in which the therapist acts upon the client to produce change. Rather, we are invited to view the therapist and client as engaged in a subtle and complex dance of co-action, a dance in which meaning is continuously in motion, and the outcomes of which may transform the relational life of the client.
Consider the situation: Both therapist and client enter the therapeutic relationship as multi-beings. Both carry with them the residues of multiple relationships. Therapists bring not only a repertoire of actions garnered from their history of therapeutic relations; they also carry potentials from myriad relations stretching from childhood to the present. Likewise, clients enter carrying a repertoire of actions, some deemed problematic, but alongside a trove of less obvious alternatives. The primary question, then, is whether the process of client/therapist coordination can contribute to a transformation in relationships of extended consequence. Can their dance together reverberate across the client’s relational plane in such a way that more viable coordination results? This is no small challenge, for the client’s plane of relationships is complex and fluid. (p. 282, Kindle Edition)
Much of IST is based in philosophy. Stolorow and his collaborators believe that in order to make sense of the therapeutic relationship, we need make objects of our subjective beliefs about the mind. If we believe in a unitary, isolated mind, we are going to relate to our clients as objects to be fixed, to see their pain as faulty scripts that we have the expertise to reprogram.
But if we believe in the social construction of mind within its physical, intrapsychic, intersubjective, and environmental contexts, then we are more likely to approach the client with a relational and co-constructive perspective on the therapeutic process, where healing comes from relationship and process (for example, the co-transference process).
This is how they explain the need for self-analysis:
Atwood, G.E., Stolorow, R.D. & Orange, D.M. (2011, Jun). The Madness and Genius of Post-Cartesian Philosophy: A Distant Mirror. Psychoanalytic Review, 98(3), 263-285.
In studying the psychological sources of philosophical ideas, we go against a pervasive opinion in contemporary intellectual circles that is rooted in Cartesianism. This opinion, perhaps surprising in its prevalence so long after the life and death of Descartes, arises from a continuing belief—one could almost say a mystical faith—in the autonomy of the life of the mind. The products of the mind are in this view to be treated as independent, self-sufficient creations, verified, falsified, or otherwise evaluated according to criteria that exist apart from the personal contexts out of which they arise. Any attempt to bring considerations of origin to bear on the understanding and development of intellectual works is seen to exemplify the unforgivable fallacy of ad hominem reasoning. It is therefore said that the study of the individual details of a thinker’s life, although perhaps of some limited interest as simple biography, can in principle have no relevance to the broader enterprise of the development or evaluation of that thinker’s work in its own terms. Intellectual constructions are claimed to have a life of their own, freely subsisting in the realm of public discourse, above and beyond the historical particularities of specific contributors’ personal life circumstances. (p. 264)
Our thesis here is that the task of self-analysis must be extended to the philosophical premises underlying psychoanalytic inquiry which, like all specific theoretical ideas in the field, also necessarily embody the analyst’s personal forms of being. Our approach to this great task is to study the individual worlds of selected post-Cartesian philosophers, with the aim of comprehending the psychological sources of each thinker’s specific repudiation of Cartesian doctrines. We hope to use the insights gained in this study as a distant mirror to which we may turn for a clarifying glimpse of how our own departures from the Cartesian view also reflect the patterns of our specific personal worlds. It is our additional faith that such an undertaking of self-reflection carries with it the possibility of the opening up of new pathways of inquiry for our discipline and the enrichment of psychoanalytic practice. (p. 266-267)
The following quotes are from Stolorow (in an interview) on the practice of IST in a clinical setting, which is it becomes useful for me as a clinician. It is important to note that there is no uniform body of technique to which all proponents of ITS adhere, nor is there any standardized or manualized series of interventions. If there is one thing upon which they all agree it’s that every treatment is unique and must be created anew by its participants. So even Stolorow is only speaking for himself here, not for all the other advocates for ITS.
Stolorow, R., & Sassenfeld, A. (2010, Summer). A Phenomenological-Contextual Psychoanalyst: Intersubjective-Systems Theory and Clinical Practice. Psychologist-Psychoanalyst: APA Division 39, Psychoanalysis; 6-10.
I describe intersubjective-systems theory as a “phenomenological contextualism.” It is phenomenological in that it investigates organizations or worlds of emotional experience. It is contextual in that it claims that such organizations of emotional experience take form, both developmentally and in the therapeutic situation, in constitutive intersubjective contexts.
Developmentally, recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system give rise to principles that unconsciously organize subsequent emotional and relational experiences. Such unconscious organizing principles are the basic building blocks of the personality. They show up in the therapeutic situation in the form of transference, which intersubjective systems theory conceptualizes as unconscious organizing activity. The patient’s transference experience is co-constituted by the patient’s unconscious organizing principles and whatever is coming from the analyst that is lending itself to being organized by them. A parallel statement can be made about the analyst’s transference. The interplay of the patient’s transference and the analyst’s transference is an example of what we call an intersubjective field or system.
From an intersubjective-systems perspective, all of the clinical phenomena with which psychoanalysis has been traditionally concerned: manifest psychopathology, transference, resistance, therapeutic impasses, therapeutic action, emotional conflict, indeed, the unconscious itself are seen as taking form within systems constituted by the interplay between differently organized, mutually influencing subjective worlds. (p. 6)
And more from the 2010 interview with Sassenfeld:
One’s philosophical presuppositions, and one’s awareness or unawareness of them, can have a monumental clinical impact. For example, the Cartesian objectivist analyst who sees himself/herself as treating deranged isolated minds and correcting “distortions” of what he/she “knows” to be true can unwittingly retraumatize his/her patients by repeating devastating early experiences of massive invalidation. On the other hand, the phenomenological-contextualist analyst, in seeking to understand and make sense out his/her patients’ experiences in terms of the contexts of meaning in which they occur, no matter how bizarre these experiences may seem to be, helps to create a therapeutic bond in which genuine psychological transformation can gradually take place. (p. 6-7)
But this does not lead inevitably to some form of navel-gazing relativism.
A phenomenological, contextualist, perspectivalist stance, although embracing a fallibilistic attitude of epistemological humility and a level epistemological playing field in the therapeutic situation (no one has privileged access to truth and reality), should not be confused with postmodern nihilism or relativism. Relativity to context and to perspective is not the same thing as a relativism that considers every framework to be as good as the next. Pragmatically, some ideas are better than others in facilitating psychoanalytic inquiry and the psychoanalytic process. Moreover, we do not abandon the search for truth, that is, for lived experience.
Intersubjectivity theory holds that closer and closer approximations of such truth are gradually achieved through a psychoanalytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective awareness is enlarged for both participants. Truth, in other words, is dialogic, crystallizing from the inescapable interplay of observer and observed.
My own phenomenological orientation did not, by the way, originate in Kohut’s self psychology. Its origins go back to a series of studies that George Atwood and I conducted in the early and mid-1970s investigating the personal subjective origins of four psychoanalytic theories. These studies were collected together in our first book, Faces in a Cloud, which was completed in 1976 (although not published until 1979), one year prior to the birth of Kohut’s self psychology. In the concluding chapter of our book, we reasoned that, since psychoanalytic theories can be shown to a significant degree to be shaped by the personal subjectivity of their creators, what psychoanalysis needs to be is a theory of subjectivity itself–a depth psychology of personal experience broad enough to encompass, not only the phenomena that other theories address, but also these theories themselves. We christened pur proposed framework “Psychoanalytic Phenomenology,” but that appellation never caught on. It was that framework that gradually evolved into intersubjective-systems theory.
A phenomenological emphasis does not in anyway entail abandonment of the exploration of unconsciousness. Going back to the father of philosophical phenomenology; Edmund Husserl, phenomenological inquiry has never been restricted to mere description of conscious experiences. Phenomenological investigation has always been centrally concerned with the structures that unconsciously organize conscious experience. Whereas philosophical phenomenologists are concerned with those structures that operate universally, a psychoanalytic phenomenologist seeks to illuminate those principles that unconsciously organize individual worlds of experience. Such principles include, importantly, those that dictate the experiences that must be prevented from coming into full being, that is, repressed, because they are prohibited or too dangerous. Intersubjective-systems theory emphasizes that all such forms of unconsciousness are constituted in relational contexts. The very boundary between conscious and unconscious (the repression barrier) is seen, not as a fixed intrapsychic structure within an isolated mind, but as a property of ongoing dynamic intersubjective systems. Phenomenology leads us inexorably to contextualism. (p. 7)
According to Orange (1995, p. 8), “Intersubjectivity theory sees human beings as organizers of experience, as subjects. Therefore it views psychoanalytic treatment as a dialogic attempt of two people to understand one person’s organization of emotional experience by ‘making sense together’ of their shared experience” (p. 26)
Another note of clarification is needed here. Although ITS makes a point of the co-transference and the co-creation on the intersubjective space, there is not full equality in the relationship. I, as the therapist, am talking less than my client and offering questions, clarifications, or interpretations when I do speak, while the client is telling me the story of who s/he is and how it feels to be in that subjective space.
In practice, what a ITS psychotherapist says in a session may look no different than what any experienced psychotherapist might say in a session. Buirski (2005) notes:
I try to articulate my grasp of the other’s subjective world of experience, which is what I believe most good therapists, regardless of theory, do most of the time. Perhaps the difference lies in the inverse: what distinguishes the therapist working from the intersubjective systems perspective from the therapists working from other orientations is to be found more in what they do not do or say than in what they actually do or say. For example, we try to avoid taking an objectivist stance, assuming that we are privy to some greater authority or knowledge than the other. And we avoid pathologizing, which is revealed by a focus on the person’s maladaptive behaviors or motives, like his masochism. Instead we wonder about how the person’s striving for health might be obscured by behaviors or motives that appear self-defeating. (xvi-xvii).
Finally, the following comments from Stolorow come from a 1998 article/response to another author (George Frank) who had raised objections to the ITS model. This piece is an attempt to explain the foundational ideas of intersubjective systems theory more clearly (and to discredit the critic). Stolorow and his collaborators were getting a lot of push-back from more traditional psychoanalytic therapists who thought they were staging a coup (they were, really, bringing a whole new perspective into the psychoanalytic and therapeutic equation). There are many similar articles from the 1990s, including some from Donna Orange, as well.
Stolorow, R.D. (1998). Clarifying the intersubjective perspective: A reply to George Frank. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(3), 424-427. doi: 10.1037/0736-9735.15.3.424
In response to Frank, G. (1998). The intersubjective school of psychoanalysis: Concerns and questions. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(3), 420-423. doi:10.1037/0736-9735.15.3.420
I have quoted almost all of the article since it was short and the material is less coherent without the full context.
First, the collaborators of intersubjectivity theory have not sought to create yet another “school of psychoanalysis,” if what is meant by that phrase is a fixed metapsychological doctrine with accompanying rules of technique. Rather, the intersubjective perspective offers a unifying framework for conceptualizing psychoanalytic work of all theoretical schools. The hallmark of our viewpoint is a clinical sensibility emphasizing “the inescapable interplay of observer and observed” (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, p. 9). It is not our aim to have our theory replace Freud’s “as the theory that can explain the psychological life of humans” (Frank, 1998, p. 420). On the contrary, intersubjectivity theory exists at a different level of abstraction and generality than does Freud’s and other psychoanalytic theories, in that it does not posit particular psychological contents that are presumed to be universally salient in personality development and in pathogenesis. It is a process theory offering broad methodological and epistemological principles for investigating and comprehending the intersubjective contexts in which psychological phenomena, including psychoanalytic theories (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993), arise. It also provides a framework for integrating different psychoanalytic theories by contextualizing them. From an intersubjective perspective, the content themes of various metapsychological doctrines can be de-absolutized, de-universalized, and recognized as powerful metaphors and imagery that can become salient in the subjective worlds of some people under particular intersubjective circumstances (Orange et al., 1997).
Second, we have never made the absurd claim, which Frank attributed to us, that “there is no objective reality” (Frank, 1998, p. 421). We have instead consistently maintained that objective reality is unknowable by the psychoanalytic method, which investigates only subjective reality as it crystallizes within the intersubjective field of an analysis. Frank was correct when he concluded that from our point of view the analyst has no privileged access to “what is really going on between patient and analyst.” All psychoanalytic understanding is interpretive. This means that there are no neutral or objective analysts, no immaculate perceptions, no God’s-eye views of anything. Intersubjectivity theory holds that closer and closer approximations of “what is really going on” are gradually achieved through an analytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective selfawareness is enlarged for both participants. There is no danger of solipsism or of relativism here, only a contextual, perspectival, and fallibilistic epistemology (Orange, 1995) that consistently “opens our horizons to expanded possibilities of meaning” (Orange et al., 1997, p. 89).
Third, Frank was incorrect when he inferred that our intersubjective contextualism means that we “have moved away from” (Frank, 1998, p. 422) our focus on the invariant principles that unconsciously organize experience:
Some may see a contradiction between the concept of developmentally preestablished principles that organize subsequent experiences and our repeated contention that experience is always embedded in a constitutive intersubjective context. This contradiction is more apparent than real. A person enters any situation with an established set of ordering principles (the subject’s contribution to the intersubjective system), but it is the context that determines which among the array of these principles will be called on to organize the experience. Experience becomes organized by a particular invariant principle only when there is a situation that lends itself to being so organized. The organization of experience can therefore be seen as codetermined both by preexisting principles and by an ongoing context that favors one or another of them over the others. (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 24)
Fourth, Frank confused the aim of analysis with the method of analysis when he mistakenly concluded that we advocate “analyzing] the interaction between patient and analyst to understand the nature of that interaction” (Frank, 1998, p. 422). From our perspective, the aim of an analysis has always been the illumination of the patient’s world of personal experience, but the method of investigation must continually take into account its own exquisite context sensitivity:
The development of psychoanalytic understanding may be conceptualized as an intersubjective process involving a dialogue between two personal universes. The goal of this dialogue is the illumination of the inner pattern of a life, that distinctive structure of meanings that connects the different parts of an individual’s world into an intelligible whole. The actual conduct of a psychoanalysis . . . comprises a series of empathic inferences into the structure of an individual’s subjective life, alternating and interacting with the analyst’s acts of reflection upon the involvement of his own personal reality in the ongoing investigation. (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 5)
[Intersubjectivity theory] views psychoanalysis as the dialogic attempt of two people together to understand one person’s organization of emotional experience by making sense together of their intersubjectively configured experience. (Orange et al., 1997, p. 5)
Fifth, contrary to Frank’s misperception, there is nothing in our view of psychoanalytic investigation that could result in “ignoring the patient’s history” (Frank, 1998, p. 423):
Clinically, we find ourselves, our patients, and our psychoanalytic work always embedded in constitutive process. Process means temporality and history. To work contextually is to work developmentally. To work developmentally is to maintain a continuing sensibility to past, present, and future experience…. [It] affirms the emotional life of persons who have come from somewhere and are going somewhere. (Orange et al., 1997, p. 77)
Sixth, it is clear, I hope, that Frank (1998) seriously mischaracterized our views when he claimed that we “abandon” the intrapsychic world or adopt “an extreme position contra Freud’s intrapsychic orientation” (p. 423). I close with an explicit statement of our position on this matter:
We must emphasize, because we are often misunderstood on this point [!], that the intersubjective viewpoint does not eliminate psychoanalysis’s traditional focus on the intrapsychic. Rather, it contextualizes the intrapsychic. The problem with classical theory was not its focus on the intrapsychic, but its inability to recognize that the intrapsychic world, as it forms and evolves within a nexus of living systems, is profoundly context-dependent. (Orange et al., 1997, pp. 67-68)
Martela, M. & Saarinen, E. (2008). Overcoming the objectifying bias implicit in therapeutic practice – Intersubjective Systems Theory complemented with Systems Intelligence. Unpublished manuscript.
“Intersubjectivity and Physical Laws in Post-Kantian Theory of Knowledge Natorp and Cassirer”
Edgar, Scott.
In The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Novel Assessment edited by J Tyler Friedman and Sebastian Luft, 141-162. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110421811-007
Based on the work of Alfred Schutz, this article develops a theory of intersubjectivity—one of the basic building blocks of social experience—and shows how such a theory can be empirically leveraged in sociological work. Complementing the interactionist and ethnomethodological emphasis on the situated production of intersubjectivity, this paper revisits the basic theoretical assumptions undergirding this theory. Schutz tied intersubjectivity to the way people experience the world of everyday life: a world that he held as distinct from other provinces of meaning, such as religious experience, humor, or scientific reasoning. However, as this article shows, such neat distinctions are problematic for both empirical and theoretical reasons: The cognitive styles that define different provinces of meaning often bleed into one another; people often inhabit multiple provinces of meaning simultaneously. Intersubjectivity may thus be simultaneously anchored in multiple worlds, opening a host of empirical research questions: not only about how intersubjectivity is done in interaction, but about how different kinds of intersubjective experiences are constructed, how multi-layered they are, as well as opening up questions about possible asymmetries in the experiences of intersubjectivity.
Intersubjectivity Theory Revisited: A 30-Year Retrospective:
Chernus, Linda. (2017).
Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism, edited by G. E. Atwood, & R. D. Stolorow (2014). New York, NY: Routledge, 157 pp.,
Psychoanalytic Social Work. 24. 1-8. 10.1080/15228878.2017.1346516.
Correspondence: Thomas J. Csordas, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Social Sciences Building 210, La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, USA E-mail: tcsordas@ucsd.edu
Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. and George E. Atwood, Ph.D.
In our early psychobiographical studies of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979), we found that psychoanalytic metapsychologies derive profoundly from the personal, subjective worlds of their creators. This finding, which has a powerfully relativizing impact on one’s view of psychological theories, led us inexorably to the conclusion that what psychoanalysis needs is a theory of subjectivity itself‐a unifying framework that can account not only for the phenomena that other theories address but also for the theories themselves.
Our own proposals for such a framework (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992), have undergone a significant process of development during the past two decades, culminating in what we have come to call the theory of intersubjectivity. The central metaphor of our intersubjective perspective is the larger relational system or field in which psychological phenomena crystallize and in which experience is continually and mutually shaped. Our vocabulary is one of interacting subjectivities, reciprocal mutual influence, colliding organizing principles, conjunctions and disjunctions, attunements and malattunements‐a lexicon attempting to capture the endlessly shifting, constitutive intersubjective context of intrapsychic experience, both in the psychoanalytic situation and in the course of psychological development. From this perspective, the observer and his or her language are grasped as intrinsic to the observed, and the impact of the analyst and his or her organizing activity on the unfolding of the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a focus of analytic investigation and reflection.
Intersubjectivity theory is a field theory or systems theory in that it seeks to comprehend psychological phenomena not as products
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of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms, but as forming at the interface of reciprocally interacting worlds of experience. Psychological phenomena, we have repeatedly emphasized, “cannot be understood apart from the intersubjective contexts in which they take form” (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984, p. 64). Intrapsychic determinism thus gives way to an unremitting intersubjective contextualism. It is not the isolated individual mind, we have argued, but the larger system created by the mutual interplay
between the subjective worlds of patient and analyst, or of child and caregiver, that constitutes the proper domain of psychoanalytic inquiry. Indeed, as we have shown, the concept of an individual mind or psyche is itself a psychological product crystallizing from within a nexus of intersubjective relatedness and serving specific psychological purposes (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
Psychological Development and Pathogenesis
Intersubjectivity theory is both experience‐near and relational; its central constructs seek to conceptualize the organization of personal experience and its vicissitudes within an ongoing intersubjective system. It differs from other psychoanalytic theories in that it does not posit particular psychological contents (the Oedipus complex, the paranoid and depressive positions, separation‐ individuation conflicts, idealizing and mirroring longings, and so on) that are presumed to be universally salient in personality development and in pathogenesis. Instead, it is a process theory offering broad methodological and epistemological principles for investigating and comprehending the intersubjective contexts in which psychological phenomena arise. With regard to psychological development, for example, we have proposed that the “organization of the child’s experience must be seen as a property of the child‐caregiver system of mutual regulation” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, p. 23) and that it is the “recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system [that] result in the establishment of invariant principles that unconsciously organize the child’s subsequent experiences” (p. 24). The concept of intersubjectively derived unconscious organizing principles‐what we term the realm of “the prereflective unconscious” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992)‐is our alternative to the notion of unconscious instinctual fantasy. It is these unconscious
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ordering principles, forged within the crucible of the child‐caregiver system, that form the basic building blocks of personality development and that constitute the quintessential focus of psychoanalytic investigation and interpretation. The essence of psychoanalytic cure lies in the establishment of new, alternative principles for organizing experience, so that the patient’s experiential repertoire becomes enlarged, enriched, more flexible, and more complex (Stolorow, 1994).
Increasingly, we have found that those principles that unconsciously organize patients’ experience of affect are of the greatest import clinically. From early recurring experiences of malattunement, patients have acquired the unconscious conviction that their unmet developmental yearnings and reactive feeling states are manifestations of a loathsome defect or of an inherent inner badness. Qualities or activities of the analyst that lend themselves to being interpreted according to such automatic meanings of affect, confirm the patient’s fears and expectations in the transference that emerging feelings will be met with disgust, disdain, disinterest, alarm, hostility, withdrawal, exploitation, and so on, or will damage the analyst and destroy the therapeutic bond. The investigation and illumination of these invariant meanings as they take form within the intersubjective dialogue between patient and analyst can produce powerful therapeutic reactions in liberating the patient’s affectivity and in strengthening the patient’s capacities for affect tolerance, integration, and articulation. We regard such expansion and enrichment of the patient’s affective life as central aims of an analytic process.
Any pathological constellation can be understood, from our perspective, only in terms of the unique intersubjective contexts in which it originated and is continuing to be maintained. “The intersubjective context,” we have contended, “has a constitutive role in all forms of psychopathology” (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987, p. 3), and “the exploration of the particular patterns of intersubjective transaction involved in developing and maintaining each of the various forms of psychopathology is…one of the most important areas for continuing clinical psychoanalytic research” (p. 4). The proposition that psychopathology always takes form within a constitutive intersubjective context calls into question the very concept of psychodiagnosis (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993). What is diagnosed, from an intersubjective perspective, is not the patient’s
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psychological organization seen in isolation but the functioning of the entire therapeutic system. Similar considerations apply to the question of analyzability, which cannot be assessed on the basis of the patient’s psychological structures alone but must be recognized as a property of the patient‐analyst system‐the goodness of fit between what a particular patient most needs to have understood and what a particular analyst is capable of understanding.
Conflict Formation and the Dynamic Unconscious
The foregoing conceptualizations of development and pathogenesis are well illustrated by our formulation of the intersubjective origins of intrapsychic conflict:
The specific intersubjective contexts in which conflict takes form are those in which central affect states of the child cannot be integrated because they fail to evoke the requisite attuned responsiveness from the caregiving surround. Such unintegrated affect states become the source of lifelong inner conflict, because they are experienced as threats both to the person’s established psychological organization and to the maintenance of vitally needed ties. Thus affect‐dissociating defensive operations are called into play, which reappear in the analytic situation in the form of resistance….It is in the defensive walling off of central affect states, rooted in early derailments of affect integration, that the origins of what has traditionally been called the dynamic unconscious can be found.
(Stolorow et al., 1987, pp. 91‐92)
From this perspective, the dynamic unconscious is seen to consist not of repressed instinctual drive derivatives, but of affect states that have been defensively walled off because they evoked massive malattunement from the early surround. This defensive sequestering of central affective states, which attempts to protect against retraumatization, is a principal source of resistance in psychoanalytic treatment. We wish to emphasize that the shift from drives to affectivity as forming the basis for the dynamic unconscious is not merely a change in terminology. The regulation of affective experience is not a product of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms; it is a property of the child‐caregiver system of reciprocal mutual influence (Beebe, Jaffe, and Lachmann, 1992; Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). If we understand the dynamic unconscious as taking form within such a system, then it becomes apparent that the
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conscious and unconscious is always the product of a specific intersubjective context.1 This idea of a fluid boundary forming within an intersubjective system continues to apply beyond the period of childhood and is readily demonstrated in the psychoanalytic situation as well, wherein the patient’s resistance can be seen to fluctuate in concert with perceptions of the analyst’s varying receptivity and attunement to the patient’s emotional experience.
Transference and Countertransference
Our intersubjective view of conflict formation has been incorporated into our conceptualization of two basic dimensions of transference (or two broad classes of unconscious organizing principles) (Stolorow et al., 1987). In one, which we term the development, or following Kohut (1984), the selfobject dimension, the patient longs for the analyst to provide development enhancing experiences that were missing or insufficient during the formative years. In the other, called the repetitive dimension, which object relations theorists have attempted to capture metaphorically with such terms as “internal objects” and “internalized object relations,” and which is a source of conflict and resistance, the patient expects and fears a repetition with the analyst of early experiences of developmental failure.
These two dimensions continually oscillate between the experiential foreground and background of the transference in concert with perceptions of the analyst’s varying attunement to the patient’s emotional states and needs (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). For example, when the analyst is experienced as malattuned, foreshadowing a traumatic repetition of early developmental failure, the conflictual and resistive dimension is frequently brought into the foreground, while the patient’s developmental yearnings are driven into hiding. On the other hand, when the analyst is able to analyze accurately the patient’s experience of rupture of the therapeutic bond, demonstrating an understanding of the patient’s reactive affect states and the principles that organize them, the developmental dimension becomes restored and strengthened, and the conflictual/resistive/repetitive dimension tends to recede, for the time being, into the background. Alternatively, at other times, the patient’s experience of the analyst’s understanding may heighten the conflictual and resistive aspect of the transference because it stirs the patient’s walled‐off
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longings and archaic hopes, along with dread of the retraumatization that the patient fears will follow from the exposure of these longings and hopes to the analyst. In still other circumstances, it is the repetitive dimension of the transference that is resisted because the patient fears that its articulation will jeopardize a precariously established and urgently needed selfobject tie to the analyst. For us, the essence of transference analysis lies in the investigative and interpretive tracking of these and other shifting figure‐ground relationships among the various dimensions of the transference as they take form within the ongoing intersubjective system constituted by the patient’s and analyst’s interacting worlds
of experience.
The foregoing description of the shifting figure‐ground relationships among dimensions of the transference applies not only to the patient’s transference but also to the analyst’s transference, usually termed countertransference. The larger system formed by the interplay between transference and countertransference is a prime example of what we call an intersubjective field or context. Transference and countertransference together form an intersubjective system of reciprocal mutual influence.
From the continual interplay between the patient’s and analyst’s psychological worlds two basic situations repeatedly arise: intersubjective conjunction and intersubjective disjunction (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). The first of these is illustrated by instances in which the principles organizing the patient’s experiences give rise to expressions that are assimilated into closely similar central configurations in the psychological life of the analyst. Disjunction, by contrast, occurs when the analyst assimilates the material expressed by the patient into configurations that significantly alter its meaning for the patient. Repetitive occurrences of intersubjective conjunction and disjunction are inevitable accompaniments of the therapeutic process and reflect the interactions of differently organized subjective worlds.
When the analyst is able to become reflectively aware of the principles organizing his or her experience of the therapeutic relationship, then the correspondence or disparity between the subjective worlds of patient and analyst can be used to promote empathic understanding and insight. In the absence of reflective self‐awareness on the part of the analyst, such conjunctions and disjunctions can seriously impede the progress of an analysis. When the principles
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unconsciously organizing the experiences of patient and analyst in an impasse are successfully investigated and illuminated, however, we have found that such analysis can transform a therapeutic stalemate into a royal road to new analytic understandings for both patient and analyst (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
The therapeutic action of psychoanalytic interpretation is something that takes form within a specific intersubjective interaction, to which the psychological organizations of both analyst and patient make distinctive contributions. The analyst, with an awareness of his or her own personal organizing principles and their codetermining impact on the course of the therapeutic relationship, contructs, through sustained empathic inquiry, an interpretation of the meaning of the patient’s experience that enables the patient to feel deeply understood. The patient, from within the depths of his or her own subjective world, weaves that experience of being understood into the tapestry of unique mobilized developmental yearnings, permitting a thwarted developmental process to become reinstated and new organizing principles to take root. Psychoanalytic interpretations thus derive their mutative power from the intersubjective matrix in which they crystallize (Stolorow, 1994).
Some Technical Implications
Psychoanalytic theories that postulate universal psychodynamic contents also tend to prescribe rigid rules of therapeutic technique or style that follow from the theoretical presuppositions. Freudian drive theory, for example, prescribes for the analyst a “rule of abstinence.” The more general and encompassing nature of intersubjectivity theory, by contrast, allows for much greater flexibility, so long as the analyst consistently investigates the impact of his or her own techniques, style, and theoretical assumptions on the patient’s experience and on the course of the therapeutic process. This greater flexibility frees analysts to explore new modes of intervention and to discover hitherto unarticulated dimensions of personal experience.
The doctrine of intrapsychic determinism and corresponding focus on the isolated mind in psychoanalysis has historically been associated with an objectivist epistemology. Such a position envisions the mind in isolation, radically estranged from an external reality that it either accurately apprehends or distorts. Analysts embracing
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an objectivist epistemology presume to have privileged access to the essence of the patient’s psychic reality and to the objective truths that the patient’s psychic reality obscures. In contrast, the intersubjective viewpoint, emphasizing the constitutive interplay between worlds of experience, leads inevitably to an epistemological stance that is best characterized as “perspectivalist” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992; Orange, 1994). Such a stance does not presume either that the analyst’s subjective reality is more true than the patient’s, or that the analyst can directly know the subjective reality of the patient; the analyst can only approximate the patient’s psychic reality from within the particularized scope of the analyst’s own perspective. A perspectivalist stance has a profound impact on the ambiance of the analytic situation, in that it is grounded in respect for the personal realities of both participants. Liberated from the need to justify and defend their experiences, both patient and analyst are freed to understand themselves, each other, and their ongoing relationship with increasing depth and richness.
Some Common Misunderstandings
In order to bring the assumptions underlying our theoretical framework more sharply into view, we close with a discussion of four common misunderstandings of the intersubjective perspective that we have encountered in dialogues with students and colleagues (Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandchaft, 1994).
1. The misunderstanding based on the fear of structureless chaos. The first misunderstanding involves a reading of our work as containing a claim that there is no psychic structure, pattern, or organization of personality that does not derive entirely from immediate, ongoing interactions with other people. Our vision of the individual person is thus seen as a portrait of an essentially formless void, radically vulnerable to and dependent on the shaping influence of events occurring in the interpersonal milieu. This misreading, exemplified by one critic’s characterization of our book Contexts of Being (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992) as promoting a “myth of the structureless mind,” fails to take into account the organizing activity that the individual contributes to every intersubjective field in which he or she participates. Here intersubjectivity theory is being interpreted as destroying the basis for concepts of
character, psychic continuity, the ‐ 188 ‐
achievement of regulatory capacities, and the development of complex psychological organizations. This misreading and criticism arise, we believe, because of a commitment on the part of such critics to what we have called the myth of the isolated mind (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). Within the thinking of theorists of the isolated mind, the stability of character and of self‐experience becomes reified as a property of a mind or psyche having internal structures that exist separately from the embeddedness of experience in constitutive intersubjective fields. It is as if the isolated‐mind theorist cannot imagine a stable character or psychological organization unless it is pictured inside a spatialized mental apparatus or perhaps even inside the physical boundaries of the cranium. Intersubjectivity theory, which specifically dispenses with all such ideas, thus raises the specter for these theorists of falling into structureless chaos.
This misunderstanding involves an interpretation of what we call a constitutive intersubjective field as an all‐determining interpersonal milieu in which the individual is totally the product of interactions with others. Again, this interpretation ignores the contribution of that individual to each intersubjective transaction that occurs. Intersubjective fields are, by definition, codetermined and thus cocreated.
Let us consider in this connection the analytic dyad. According to the older, classical traditions in psychoanalysis, psychological structure and the processes and mechanisms of psychopathology are located inside the patient’s mind. This isolating focus of the classical perspective fails to do justice to every individual’s irreducible engagement with others and blinds psychoanalytic clinicians to the specific ways they are implicated in the phenomena they observe and seek to treat. The intersubjectively oriented analyst, by contrast, while committed to illuminating the unconscious organizing principles the patient brings to the analytic encounter, also understands that the psychopathological phenomena that are seen to unfold do so within an intersubjective field that includes the analyst as a codetermining influence.
A variant of the misunderstanding based on the fear of structureless chaos appears in a similarly mistaken conception of our view of the process of psychological development. Here our standpoint becomes confused with a naive environmentalism according to
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which the child’s psychological growth is interpreted as entirely the product of the shaping influence of external interpersonal events. The intersubjective view of psychological development embraces what Wallace (1985) terms “intersectional causation.” At any stage the child’s formative experiences are understood to emerge from the intersection of, and to be codetermined by, his or her psychological organization as it has evolved to that point and specific features of the caregiving surround. In this model, the development of the child’s psychological organization is always seen as an aspect of an evolving and maturing child‐caregiver system.
2. The misunderstanding based on the fear of surrendering one’s personal reality. The second misunderstanding concerns the epistemological stance of intersubjectivity theory and the problem of truth and reality. As we have said, a defining feature of our thinking lies in our not assigning any greater intrinsic validity to the analyst’s world of reality than to the patient’s. This is in contrast to an objectivist epistemology that posits an objective external world, a true world to which the analyst is presumed to have access. Corresponding to this latter stance, a goal of treatment inevitably materializes involving the bringing of the patient’s experiences into alignment with that objective reality. Such a goal appears in the notion of correcting transference distortions.
The misreading we are discussing here is the interpretation of our refraining from granting absolute validity to the analyst’s reality and not to the patient’s as somehow containing an injunction to analysts not to have a theoretical framework to order clinical data. It appears that our critics on this point cannot envision holding to their theoretical ideas without conferring upon those ideas an absolute validity, or at least a greater measure of truth than is ascribed to the patient’s ideas. The specter here is of losing a grip on any assumptions at all, of the dissolution of the analyst’s personal reality, leaving the analyst adrift in a sea of uncertainty, perhaps in danger of being swept into the vortex of the patient’s psychological world. A key distinction lost in this misunderstanding is that between holding an assumption or belief and elevating that assumption to the status of an ultimate, objective truth. Once such an elevation has taken place, the belief necessarily escapes the perimeter of what can be analytically reflected upon. Intersubjectivity theory contains a commitment to examining and analytically reflecting upon the impact of
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the analyst and his or her theories, as well as that of the patient’s organizing principles, on the analytic process. This means that there can be no belief or idea that in principle escapes the field of potential analytic investigation, even including the ideas of intersubjectivity theory itself (see Atwood and Stolorow, 1993).
3. The misunderstanding based on the fear of an annihilating ad hominem attack. The third misunderstanding pertains to our tendency to explore the formative psychological background of various ideas we discuss and criticize. An objection is sometimes raised on our analysis of the myth of the isolated mind, because of our focus of this doctrine as a symbol of alienated self‐experience (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). We argued that the image of the isolated mind is a genuine myth in the sense of being a symbol of pervasive cultural experiences involving an alienation of the person from the physical world, from social life and engagement with others, and from the nature of subjectivity itself. We suggested further that this alienation exists for the purpose of disavowing a set of specific vulnerabilities that are in our time otherwise felt as unbearable. This discussion of alienation and the need to disavow vulnerability is not intended as an attack on theoretical viewpoints that embody the myth of the isolated mind; it is rather an attempt to explain why it is that an idea that has so manifestly hindered the development of psychoanalysis could nevertheless have maintained such a tenacious hold on thinkers in our field.
An ad hominem argument is one that seeks to dispose of a proposition or idea by pointing at the individual who espouses it. It would be an example of such a fallacious argument if we were maintaining that doctrines incorporating the idea of the isolated mind ought to be rejected simply because of the personal alienation and evasions of anguish shown by those who promulgate them. Clearly the value of a psychological or philosophical system needs to be assessed in relation to issues and traditions larger than the personal characteristics and events in a thinker’s life. The separation of the life out of which an idea originates and that idea itself is, however, not as clean as one might think in a discipline concerned with illuminating subjectivity; in fact, we view the total isolation of the personal context of origin from assessments of value and validity as still another manifestation of the alienation afflicting our field. We (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979) have addressed this issue as follows:
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It would be incorrect to view an explication of the personal realities embedded in psychological theories as giving no more than an account of the conditions of their genesis. Every [such] analysis delimits, in content as well as origin, the view being studied. It seeks not only to establish a relationship between the theorist and his works, but also to determine the particularization of scope of the theory, and hence to delimit its generality and validity. (pp. 22‐23).
Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory (1993) discusses the ways in which theories of personality symbolically crystallize central dimensions of the personal subjective world of the theorist, and the critical importance of the study of such relationships to the further development of personality theory. The concept of intersubjectivity was clearly implicit in the studies described in this work in that they pictured various theories as, on the one hand, reflecting the empirical domain of human experience to which they were addressed (more or less adequately) and, on the other hand, as also reflecting the psychological organization of the theorist. This is a prime example of what is meant by the idea of intersubjectivity.
4. The misunderstanding based on the fear of anarchy in the analytic relationship. The fourth misunderstanding pertains to the implications of intersubjectivity theory for the conduct of psychoanalytic treatment. A cardinal feature of the intersubjective perspective is the view of the analytic relationship in terms of an interaction between the subjective worlds of analyst and patient. The parity we ascribe to the worlds of patient and analyst at the level of abstract conceptualization of the therapeutic dyad becomes, however, misinterpreted as implying symmetry in that relationship at the level of concrete clinical practice. Here the authority ordinarily assumed by the analyst collapses, as the patient is thought to acquire a voice equal to that of the analyst in setting the conditions of the treatment. The theoretical vision of interacting subjective worlds thus becomes transposed into a picture of the decisions affecting the patient’s treatment being made on an egalitarian, democratic basis. The ultimate extreme of this overly concrete misinterpretation of intersubjectivity theory is the loss of the very distinction between patient and analyst. If the worlds of both participants are fully engaged in the analytic process, it is said, then what is left to tell us which of the two is the patient? If the life themes structuring the analyst’s world need to be constantly borne in mind as they impact on
the therapeutic process, ‐ 192 ‐
it is asked, whose analysis is it anyway? The disciplined practice of psychoanalytic treatment thereby threatens to dissolve into confusion and anarchy.
It seems to us that these misunderstandings arise because of an insufficiently abstract interpretation of the principles of intersubjectivity theory. The intersubjective perspective contains few concrete recommendations as to technique or style in the practice of psychoanalytic therapy; indeed, it is a perspective intended to be broad enough to accommodate a wide range of therapeutic styles and techniques, so long as the meanings and impact on the treatment process of these various approaches are made a focus of analytic investigation and reflection. The authority of the analyst is not comprised in any way by the adopting of an intersubjective standpoint, nor does this perspective necessarily introduce any confusion into the analytic dyad as to which participant is the patient. The asymmetry between analyst and patient seems to us to inhere in the very definition of a professional therapeutic relationship. The interacting meanings of this inherent asymmetry for the patient and the analyst may, of course, represent an important focus of analytic inquiry in the therapeutic dialogue.
Note
1 In addition to the prereflective and the dynamic unconscious, we have described a third intersubjectively derived form of unconsciousness‐the unvalidated unconscious: experiences that could not be consciously articulated because they never evoked validating responsiveness from the surround (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
Acknowledgment
This article contains material previously published in Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life, by R. Stolorow and G. Atwood (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1992), and in The Intersubjective Perspective, edited by R. Stolorow, G. Atwood, and B. Brandchaft (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994). We thank the publishers for giving us permission to reuse this material.
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RUNNING HEAD: DIALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
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READING BETWEEN THE MINDS: INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERNISM FROM ROBERT BROWNING TO HENRY JAMES
by Jennie Hann A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland May 2017
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RUNNING HEAD: DIALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis
Alex Gillespie1 Department of Psychology University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA UK Tel: + 44 (0) 1786 466841 alex.gillespie@stir.ac.uk Flora Cornish School of Health Glasgow Caledonian University Glasgow G4 0BA UK
The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity
Author(s): James Giles
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Awakening to Wholeness: Aikido as an Embodied Praxis of Intersubjectivity
2019
As a lifelong practitioner of Aikido, known as the ‘Art of Peace,’ the author reflects on how cultivating one’s ‘mind and body coordination’ through this defensive art develops embodied non-dissention. This principle is expressed and observed through calmer, more harmonious interaction with others and one’s entire life sphere. A non-competitive art that emerged in modern Japan from the deep spiritual values of its founder, Morihei Ueshiba (O Sensei) Aikido teaches one to blend with an attacker’s movements and ki (‘life force’ or ‘energy’). In the context of moving from ‘first person’ to ‘second-person’ contemplative education practices, this chapter explores through the lens of Aikido the implications of intersubjectivity as a double-bind paradox: How can dualistic consciousness of subject-object dichotomy apply itself to resolving human conflicts while inherently operating from a position of dualism that creates such conflict in the first place? Put yet another way, if one inhabits a dualistic consciousness regarding ‘other’ subject-objects then by the logic of such consciousness, one cannot be intersubjective, and hence, one cannot practice non-dissention. Reflections from Aikido pedagogy and training offer a transformative approach to relationality, one that offers contemplative education a model by which to transcend the habitual conditioning of subject-subject consciousness toward peaceful dialogic interconnectedness. The contention is that contemplative education practices in this way approach more engaged—and not split—intersubjectivity. Through a series of vignettes and explication, the author presents Aikido as a contemplative way of being and living that demands an intersubjective, second-person model of engagement. Thus, this model is based on the view of cosmos as interdependent relationality.
SELF-TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH SHARED SUFFERING : AN INTERSUBJECTIVE THEORY OF COMPASSION
2016
The value of compassion has often been appraised in terms of its benefits to the recipient, or its contribution to civil society. Less attention has been paid to the positive effect it may have upon the protagonists themselves, partly because compassion ostensibly appears to involve mainly dysphoric emotions (i.e., sharing another’s suffering). However, driven by the question of why traditions such as Buddhism and Christianity esteem compassion so highly, in this article, a theory of compassion is proposed that focuses on its transformative potential. In particular, I argue that compassion inherently involves a process of self-transcendence, enabling people to enter into an intersubjective state of selfhood. Drawing on Buddhist and Christian ideas, I then suggest that this intersubjective state is not only an antidote to the protagonists’ own suffering, but can accelerate their psychospiritual development. Thus, the article offers a new perspective on compassion that allows us to fully appreciate its transpersonal and transformative potential.
Intersubjectivity as an antidote to stress: Using dyadic active inference model of intersubjectivity to predict the efficacy of parenting interventions in reducing stress—through the lens of dependent origination in Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy
2022
Intersubjectivity refers to one person’s awareness in relation to another person’s awareness. It is key to well-being and human development. From infancy to adulthood, human interactions ceaselessly contribute to the flourishing or impairment of intersubjectivity. In this work, we first describe intersubjectivity as a hallmark of quality dyadic processes. Then, using parent-child relationship as an example, we propose a dyadic active inference model to elucidate an inverse relation between stress and intersubjectivity. We postulate that impaired intersubjectivity is a manifestation of underlying problems of deficient relational benevolence, misattributing another person’s intentions (over-mentalizing), and neglecting the effects of one’s own actions on the other person (under-coupling). These problems can exacerbate stress due to excessive variational free energy in a person’s active inference engine when that person feels threatened and holds on to his/her invalid (mis)beliefs. In support of this dyadic model, we briefly describe relevant neuroimaging literature to elucidate brain networks underlying the effects of an intersubjectivity-oriented parenting intervention on parenting stress. Using the active inference dyadic model, we identified critical interventional strategies necessary to rectify these problems and hereby developed a coding system in reference to these strategies. In a theory-guided quantitative review, we used this coding system to code 35 clinical trials of parenting interventions published between 2016 and 2020, based on PubMed database, to predict their efficacy for reducing parenting stress. The results of this theory-guided analysis corroborated our hypothesis that parenting intervention can effectively reduce parenting stress if the intervention is designed to mitigate the problems of deficient relational benevolence, under-coupling, and over-mentalizing. We integrated our work with several dyadic concepts identified in the literature. Finally, inspired by Arya Nagarjuna’s Buddhist Madhyamaka Philosophy, we described abstract expressions of Dependent Origination as a relational worldview to reflect on the normality, impairment, and rehabilitation of intersubjectivity.
Meditation Effects in the Social Domain: Self-Other Connectedness as a General Mechanism?
2014
Recent theories and findings in psychology and neuroscience suggest that self and other are interconnected, both on a conceptual and on a more basic bodily-affective representational level. Such self-other connectedness is supposed to be fundamental to empathy, social bonding and compassion. Meditation techniques – in particular mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation – have been found to foster these social capacities. Therefore, this contribution brings together both fields of research. In a first step, we examine self and other from the perspective of psychology and neuroscience, integrating findings from these fields into a dimension of mental functioning anchored to self-centeredness and self-other-connectedness, respectively. In a second step, we explore how mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation may act differentially upon this dimension. Finally, by referring to a recent experiment from our lab, it is illustrated how research hypotheses can be derived from this framework. Such investigations could help to comprehend meditation effects in the social domain, and more generally, further the scientific understanding of self and other.
Decentering the Self? Reduced Bias in Self- vs. Other-Related Processing in Long-Term Practitioners of Loving-Kindness Meditation
2016
TLDR
Preliminary evidence is provided that prolonged meditation practice may modulate self- vs. other-related processing, accompanied by an increase in compassion, which is needed to show if this is a direct outcome of loving-kindness meditation.
Abstract
Research in social neuroscience provides increasing evidence that self and other are interconnected, both on a conceptual and on an affective representational level. Moreover, the ability to recognize the other as “like the self” is thought to be essential for social phenomena like empathy and compassion. Meditation practices such as loving-kindness meditation (LKM) have been found to enhance these capacities. Therefore, we investigated whether LKM is associated to an increased integration of self–other-representations. As an indicator, we assessed the P300 event-related potential elicited by oddball stimuli of the self-face and a close other’s face in 12 long-term practitioners of LKM and 12 matched controls. In line with previous studies, the self elicited larger P300 amplitudes than close other. This effect was reduced in the meditation sample at parietal but not frontal midline sites. Within this group, smaller differences between self- and other-related P300 were associated with increasing meditation practice. Across groups, smaller P300 differences correlated with self-reported compassion. In meditators, we also investigated the effect of a short LKM compared to a control priming procedure in order to test whether the state induction would additionally modulate self- vs. other-related P300. However, no effect of the priming conditions was observed. Overall, our findings provide preliminary evidence that prolonged meditation practice may modulate self- vs. other-related processing, accompanied by an increase in compassion. Further evidence is needed, however, to show if this is a direct outcome of loving-kindness meditation.
Decentering the Self? Reduced Bias in Self- vs. Other-Related Processing in Long-Term Practitioners of Loving-Kindness Meditation.
In this paper, we start exploring the affective and ethical dimension of what De Jaegher and Di Paolo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6:485–507, 2007) have called ‘participatory sense-making’. In the first part, we distinguish various ways in which we are, and feel, affectively inter-connected in interpersonal encounters. In the second part, we discuss the ethical character of this affective inter-connectedness, as well as the implications that taking an ‘inter-(en)active approach’ has for ethical theory itself.
This paper is part of a paper series on the Buddhist Notion of Intersubjectivity, published in this journal from 2017 to 2019, guest-edited by Roy Tzohar and Jake Davis. Readers are recommended to view these papers in the following order:
Tzohar, R. 2017. ‘Imagine Being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity.’ Sophia, 56, 337–354;
Prueitt, C. 2018. ‘Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought.’ Sophia, 57, 313–335;
Kachru, S. 2019. ‘Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism.’ Sophia, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0707-8;
Garfield, J. L. ‘I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru.’ Sophia, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7.
“The Self-Effacing Buddhist: No(t)-Self in Early Buddhism and Contemplative Neuroscience.”
Verhaeghen, Paul.
Contemporary Buddhism 18 (2017): 21 – 36.
Essential Others on the Path to Enlightenment: The Importance of Intersubjectivity in the Visuddhimagga’s Presentation of Progress along the Path
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Key Terms
Self
No Self
Self and Other
Primacy of the We
Intentionality
Individual Intentionality
Collective Intentionality
Subjectivity
Phenomenology
Transcendental Subjectivity
Transcendental Phenomenology
Being of Dasein
Being in the World
Life World
Mundane Phenomenology
Phenomenological Sociology
Intersubjectivity
Transcendental Intersubjectivity
Selfhood
First-person perspective
Empathy
Second-person perspective
We-identity
Social Cognition
Social Ontology
Shame
Self Culture Nature
Self Mind Society
I We It Its
AQAL Model of Ken Wilber
Community
Samaj
Solipsism
We Intentionality
Phenomenology of the We
Social Phenomenology
Self Consciousness
Consciousness
Self Reference
Knots
Mobius Strip
Triadic Phenomenology
Charles Sanders Peirce
Niklas Luhmann
Subjectivity Intersubjectivity World
Key Scholars
Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938)
Max Scheler (1874 – 1928)
Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976)
Emmanuel Levinas (1906 – 1980)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1906 – 1980)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961)
Alfred Schutz (1899 – 1959)
Edith Stein
Dan Zahavi
Shaun Gallagher
Evan Thompson
Books by Dan Zahavi
Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity 1996
Husserl’s Phenomenology 1997
Alterity and Facticity: New Perspectives on Husserl 1998
Self-Awareness, Temporality, and Alterity: Central Topics in Phenomenology 1998
Self-awareness and alterity: a phenomenological investigation. 1999
Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-Experience 2000
One Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Revisited 2002
Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries 2003
Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First Person Perspective 2005
Self, No Self?: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions 2011
The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science 2008/2012
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology 2013
Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame 2014
Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy. 2017
Phenomenology: The Basics 2018
Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology 2018
Source: Intersubjectivity
Has phenomenology anything of interest to say on the topic of intersubjectivity? As one frequently stated criticism has it, due to its preoccupation with subjectivity, phenomenology has not only failed to realize the true significance of inter-subjectivity, but it has also been fundamentally incapable of addressing the issue in a satisfactory manner (see Habermas 1994). As a closer scrutiny of the writings of such figures as Scheler, Stein, Husserl, Heidegger, Gurwitsch, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas is bound to reveal, however, this criticism is astonishingly misguided. The truth of the matter is that intersubjectivity, be it in the form of a concrete self–other relation, a socially structured lifeworld, or a transcendental principle of justification, is ascribed an absolutely central role by phenomenologists. It is no coincidence that the first philosopher ever to engage in a systematic and extensive use of the very term intersubjectivity (Intersubjektivität) was Husserl. Ultimately, it is difficult to point to a philosophical tradition that has been more concerned with doing justice to the different aspects of intersubjectivity than phenomenology.
Source: Varieties of Phenomenology
Phenomenology counts as one of the most influential philosophical movements in twentieth-century philosophy. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was its founder, but other influential proponents were Max Scheler (1874–1928), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995). Over the years, phenomenology has made major contributions to many areas of philosophy, including transcendental philosophy, philosophy of mind, social philosophy, philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of science, epistemology, theory of meaning, and formal ontology. It has offered important analyses of topics such as intentionality, embodiment, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, temporality, historicity, truth, evidence, perception, and value theory. It has delivered a targeted criticism of reductionism, objectivism, and scientism, and argued at length for a rehabilitation of the lifeworld.
Source: Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First Person Perspective
What is a self? Does it exist in reality or is it a mere social construct—or is it perhaps a neurologically induced illusion? The legitimacy of the concept of the self has been questioned by both neuroscientists and philosophers in recent years. Countering this, in Subjectivity and Selfhood, Dan Zahavi argues that the notion of self is crucial for a proper understanding of consciousness. He investigates the interrelationships of experience, self-awareness, and selfhood, proposing that none of these three notions can be understood in isolation. Any investigation of the self, Zahavi argues, must take the first-person perspective seriously and focus on the experiential givenness of the self. Subjectivity and Selfhood explores a number of phenomenological analyses pertaining to the nature of consciousness, self, and self-experience in light of contemporary discussions in consciousness research.
Philosophical phenomenology—as developed by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others—not only addresses crucial issues often absent from current debates over consciousness but also provides a conceptual framework for understanding subjectivity. Zahavi fills the need—given the recent upsurge in theoretical and empirical interest in subjectivity—for an account of the subjective or phenomenal dimension of consciousness that is accessible to researchers and students from a variety of disciplines. His aim is to use phenomenological analyses to clarify issues of central importance to philosophy of mind, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and psychiatry. By engaging in a dialogue with other philosophical and empirical positions, says Zahavi, phenomenology can demonstrate its vitality and contemporary relevance.
Source: Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame
Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? How do we at all come to understand others? Does empathy amount to and allow for a distinct experiential acquaintance with others, and if so, what does that tell us about the nature of selfhood and social cognition? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter?
Engaging with debates and findings in classical phenomenology, in philosophy of mind and in various empirical disciplines, Dan Zahavi’s new book Self and Other offers answers to these questions. Discussing such diverse topics as self-consciousness, phenomenal externalism, mindless coping, mirror self-recognition, autism, theory of mind, embodied simulation, joint attention, shame, time-consciousness, embodiment, narrativity, self-disorders, expressivity and Buddhist no-self accounts, Zahavi argues that any theory of consciousness that wishes to take the subjective dimension of our experiential life serious must endorse a minimalist notion of self. At the same time, however, he also contends that an adequate account of the self has to recognize its multifaceted character, and that various complementary accounts must be integrated, if we are to do justice to its complexity. Thus, while arguing that the most fundamental level of selfhood is not socially constructed and not constitutively dependent upon others, Zahavi also acknowledges that there are dimensions of the self and types of self-experience that are other-mediated. The final part of the book exemplifies this claim through a close analysis of shame.
Source: Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity: a response to the linguistic-pragmatic critique.
__Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity __analyzes the transcendental relevance of intersubjectivity and argues that an intersubjective transformation of transcendental philosophy can already be found in phenomenology, especially in Husserl. Husserl eventually came to believe that an analysis of transcendental intersubjectivity was a _conditio sine qua non_ for a phenomenological philosophy. Drawing on both published and unpublished manuscripts, Dan Zahavi examines Husserl’s reasons for this conviction and delivers a detailed analysis of his radical and complex concept of intersubjectivity, showing that precisely his reflections on transcendental intersubjectivity are capable of clarifying the core-concepts of phenomenology, thus making possible a new understanding of Husserl’s philosophy. Against this background the book compares his view with the approaches to intersubjectivity found in Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, and it then attempts to establish to what extent the phenomenological approach can contribute to the current discussion of intersubjectivity. This is achieved through a systematic confrontation with the language-pragmatical positions of Apel and Habermas.
Source: Ontology, Otherness, and Self-Alterity: Intersubjectivity in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Source: Ontology, Otherness, and Self-Alterity: Intersubjectivity in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Source: Ontology, Otherness, and Self-Alterity: Intersubjectivity in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Source: Ontology, Otherness, and Self-Alterity: Intersubjectivity in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Source: Ontology, Otherness, and Self-Alterity: Intersubjectivity in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Source: Ontology, Otherness, and Self-Alterity: Intersubjectivity in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Source: BEYOND EMPATHY: PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Drawing on the work of Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Sartre, this article presents an overview of some of the diverse approaches to intersubjectivity that can be found in the phenomenological tradition. Starting with a brief description of Scheler’s criticism of the argument from analogy, the article continues by showing that the phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity involve much more than a ‘solution’ to the ‘traditional’ problem of other minds. Intersubjectivity doesn’t merely concern concrete face-to-face encounters between individuals. It is also something that is at play in simple perception, in tool-use, in emotions, drives and different types of self-awareness. Ultimately, the phenomenologists would argue that a treatment of intersubjectivity requires a simultaneous analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and world. It is not possible simply to insert intersubjectivity somewhere within an already established ontology; rather, the three regions ‘self’, ‘others’, and ‘world’ belong together; they reciprocally illuminate one another, and can only be under- stood in their interconnection.
Source: Transcendental Co-originariness of Subjectivity, Intersubjectivity, and the World: Another Way of Reading Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology
‘Thin, Thinner, Thinnest: Defining the Minimal Self’,
Zahavi, Dan,
in Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, and Christian Tewes (eds), Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World (Cambridge, MA, 2017; online edn, MIT Press Scholarship Online, 18 Jan. 2018), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262035552.003.0010, accessed 5 June 2023.
We as Self: Ouri, Intersubjectivity, and Presubjectivity
By Hye Young Kim
The Experiential Self: Objections and Clarifications.
Zahavi, D. (2011).
In M. Siderits, E. Thompson, & D. Zahavi (Eds.), Self, No Self?: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions (pp. 56-78). Oxford University Press.
Music and social bonding: “self-other” merging and neurohormonal mechanisms
Bronwyn Tarr*, Jacques Launay and Robin I. M. Dunbar Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
In P. Gordon & W. Breckman (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, pp. 102-127). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316160879.005
“We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution
Ronald McIntyre / California State University, Northridge
From Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, ed. by Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2012, pp. 61-92.
A motivational hierarchy within: Primacy of the individual self, relational self, or collective self?☆
Lowell Gaertner a,⁎, Constantine Sedikides b, Michelle Luke b, Erin M. O’Mara c, Jonathan Iuzzini a, Lydia Eckstein Jackson a, Huajian Cai d, Quiping Wu e a University of Tennessee, USA b University of Southampton, UK c University of Dayton, USA d Chinese Academy of Sciences, China e The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012) 997–1013
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Paley J. (2013). 5 questions. In Forss A., Ceci C., Drummond J. S. (Eds.), Philosophy of nursing: 5 questions (pp. 143–155). Copenhagen, Denmark: Automatic Press.
Petitmengin C. (2006). Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5, 229–269.
Scheler M. (1973). Formalism in ethics and non-formal ethics of values: A new attempt toward a foundation of an ethical personalism (Frings M. S., Funk R. L., Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1913/1916)
Smith J. A. (2018). “Yes it is phenomenological”: A reply to Max Van Manen’s critique of interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 28, 1955–1958.
Varela F. J. (1997). The naturalization of phenomenology as the transcendence of nature: Searching for generative mutual constraints. Alter, 5, 355–381.
Axiology is the philosophical study of value, which originally meant the worth of something. It includes the studies of moral values, aesthetic values, as well as political and social values. Logic, on the other hand, is a philosophical study of arguments and the methods and principles of right reasoning.
Is Logic part of Aesthetics?
Key Terms
Axiology
Philosophy
Ethics
Aesthetics
Moral Values
Virtues
Virtue Ethics
Values
Culture
Normative Culture
Goodness
Three types of Goodness
Charles Sanders Peirce
A N Whitehead
Pragmatism
Process Philosophy
Robert C. Neville
Axiology of Thinking
Beauty in Experience
Aesthetics of Experience
Emotions
Positive Emotions
Negative Emotions
Wellness
Society
Big Tent
Mahayana Buddhism
Hinduism
Big Boat
Evolution of Culture
Design Thinking
Justice and Injustice
Laws
Human Development
Human Capabilities
Limits and Boundaries
Acceptable and Unacceptable
Rules and Norms
Pratha
Sanskriti
Bhav and Ras
Harmony and Dissonance
Monks and Brahmins
Guru and Pandit
Priests
Monks and Society
Communication
Access to Ideas
Access to Knowledge
Monks who are busy in meditation and contemplation on reality depend on alms and charity provided by the society. Monks would not survive in a society which is not charitable, just, and respectful towards Monks and their role in the society.
Culture matters as much as Monks’ philosophy.
Source: Reconstruction of Thinking
Source: Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature
Source: Normative Cultures
Source: Normative Cultures
Source: Axiology and Logic
Lesson Overview We have said earlier that philosophy deals with the most basic issues faced by human beings. Axiology is the philosophical study of value, which originally meant the worth of something. It includes the studies of moral values, aesthetic values, as well as political and social values. Logic, on the other hand, is a philosophical study of arguments and the methods and principles of right reasoning. In this lesson, we will discuss Axiology and Logic as the other two major fields of philosophy.
4.1 Axiology
Activity # 1: – Dear learners, what do you think is Axiology? List any question that you might think is an axiological question. Show your question to student(s) beside you, and discuss about your questions together.
Axiology is the study or theory of value. The term Axiology stems from two Greek words – “Axios”, meaning “value, worth”, and “logos”, meaning “reason/ theory/ symbol / science/study of”. Hence, Axiology is the philosophical study of value, which originally meant the worth of something. Axiology asks the philosophical questions of values that deal with notions of what a person or a society regards as good or preferable, such as:
What is a value?
Where do values come from?
How do we justify our values?
How do we know what is valuable?
What is the relationship between values and knowledge?
What kinds of values exist?
Can it be demonstrated that one value is better than another?
Who benefits from values?
Etc.
Axiology deals with the above and related issues of value in three areas, namely Ethics, Aesthetics, and Social/Political Philosophy.
I. Ethics
Activity # 2: – Dear learners, how do you define ethics? What ethical rules, principles, and standards do you know and follow, and why? Discuss about it with the student(s) beside you.
Ethics, which is also known as Moral Philosophy, is a science that deals with the philosophical study of moral principles, values, codes, and rules, which may be used as standards for determining what kind of human conduct/action is said to be good or bad, right or wrong. Ethics has three main branches: meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Ethics raises various questions including:
What is good/bad?
What is right/wrong?
Is it the Right Principle or the Good End that makes human action/conduct moral?
Is an action right because of its good end, or it is good because of its right principle?
Are moral principles universal, objective, and unconditional, or relative, subjective and conditional?
What is the ultimate foundation of moral principles? The supernatural God? Human reason? Mutual social contract? Social custom?
Does God exist? If so, is He Benevolent and Omnipotent?
If God is Benevolent, why He creates evil things? If God does not create evil things, then, there must be another creator who is responsible to creation of the evil things? But, if it is so, how can God be an Omnipotent creator?
Why we honor and obey moral rules? For the sake of our own individual benefits?, or for the sake of others?, or just for the sake of fulfilling our infallible duty?
Ethics, or ethical studies, can be grouped into three broad categories: Normative ethics, Meta-ethics, and Applied Ethics.
Normative Ethics refers to the ethical studies that attempt to study and determine precisely the moral rules, principles, standards and goals by which human beings might evaluate and judge the moral values of their conducts, actions and decisions. It is the reasoned search for principles of human conduct, including a critical study of the major theories about which things are good, which acts are right, and which acts are blameworthy. Consequentialism or Teleological Ethics, Deontological Ethics, and Virtue Ethics are the major examples of normative ethical studies.
Meta-ethics is the highly technical philosophical discipline that deals with investigation of the meaning of ethical terms, including a critical study of how ethical statements can be verified. It is more concerned with the meanings of such ethical terms as good or bad and right or wrong than with what we think is good or bad and right or wrong. Moral Intuitionism, Moral Emotivism, Moral Prescriptivism, Moral Nihilism, and Ethical Relativism are the main examples of meta-ethical studies.
Applied Ethics is a normative ethics that attempts to explain, justify, apply moral rules, principles, standards, and positions to specific moral problems, such as capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion, adultery, animal right, and so on. This area of normative ethics is termed applied because the ethicist applies or uses general ethical princes in an attempt to resolve specific moral problems.
II. Aesthetics
Activity # 3: – Dear learners, how do you define and understand aesthetics? What Discuss about it with the student(s) beside you.
Aesthetics is the theory of beauty. It studies about the particular value of our artistic and aesthetic experiences. It deals with beauty, art, enjoyment, sensory/emotional values, perception, and matters of taste and sentiment. The following are typical Aesthetic questions:
What is art?
What is beauty?
What is the relation between art and beauty?
What is the connection between art, beauty, and truth?
Can there be any objective standard by which we may judge the beauty of artistic works, or beauty is subjective?
What is artistic creativity and how does it differ from scientific creativity?
Why works of art are valuable?
Can artistic works communicate? If so, what do they communicate?
Does art have any moral value, and obligations or constraints?
Are there standards of quality in Art?
III. Social/Political Philosophy
Activity # 4: – Dear learners, how do you define politics and society? What political and social rules, principles, and standards do you know and follow, and why? Discuss about it with the student(s) beside you.
Social/Political Philosophy studies about of the value judgments operating in a civil society, be it social or political. The following questions are some of the major Social/Political Philosophy primarily deal with:
What form of government is best?
What economic system is best?
What is justice/injustice?
What makes an action/judgment just/unjust?
What is society?
Does society exist? If it does, how does it come to existence?
How are civil society and government come to exist?
Are we obligated to obey all laws of the State?
What is the purpose of government?
4.2 Logic
Activity # 5: – Dear learners, how do you define and understand logic? Discuss about it with student(s) beside you.
Logic is the study or theory of principles of right reasoning. It deals with formulating the right principles of reasoning; and developing scientific methods of evaluating the validity and soundness of arguments. The following are among the various questions raised by Logic:
What is an argument; What does it mean to argue?
What makes an argument valid or invalid
What is a sound argument?
What relation do premise and conclusion have in argument?
How can we formulate and evaluate an argument?
What is a fallacy?; What makes an argument fallacious?
Unabridged. Edition by Robert Cummings Neville (Author)
The Renaissance development of science fulfilled the ancient ideal of integrating quantitative and qualitative thinking, but failed to recognize valuational thinking and thus deprived moral, aesthetic, and political thought of cognitive status. The task of this book is to reconstruct the concept of thinking in order to exhibit valuation, not reason, as the foundation for thinking and to integrate valuational with quantitative and qualitative modes. Part I explains the broad thesis, interpreting the problem of the foundations for thinking and providing a general theory of value. Part II explains the role of valuation at the imaginative level of thinking with discussions of synthesis, perception, form, and art. The method of reconstruction requires a cosmology that is generated in successive waves.
Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature
(Axiology of Thinking, Vol. 2) (Axiology of Thinking; 2)
Paperback – August 15, 1989 by Robert Cummings Neville (Author)
“The world is as we interpret it.” Arguing that this assumption is a major and pervasive error, Neville demonstrates that the world is the measure of our interpretations. Distinguishing two traditions of hermeneutics, the continental tradition focusing on the interpretation of texts and the American tradition on the interpretation of nature; Neville argues that, since interpretation itself is part of the natural world, a philosophical vision of nature must be restored to currency in order to provide an interpretive theory of the world that can be a measure of interpretation. The natural world must be construed richly enough to be inclusive of human intention and purpose. By taking the discussion of hermeneutics from the context of textuality and placing it within that of nature, Recovery of the Measure provides a non-modernist and non-postmodernist theory of interpretation.
The first four chapters and the last four constitute a hermeneutical theory addressing contemporary problems of interpretation situated in the context of the philosophy of nature. The middle chapters provide a compact philosophy of nature dealing with being, identity, value, space, time, motion, and causation.
“Neville’s systematic, self-conscious employment of Peirce’s theory of the sign as a means of locating the project of a philosophy of nature within the context of contemporary hermeneutical thinking is extremely fortunate. By so doing Neville has opened his thought to a ready assessment by continental thinkers and has placed himself near the center of contemporary philosophic debate. Because of its timeliness, the brilliance of its arguments, and the profundity of its conclusions, there is good reason to believe that this work will shortly become the focus of genuine and widespread discussion. With the publication of this latest installment of his Axiology of Thinking, Neville emerges as one of the strongest voices in American philosophy.” — David L. Hall
Normative Cultures
(Axiology of Thinking Series) (Axiology of Thinking, Vol 3)
Paperback – August 17, 1995 by Robert Cummings Neville (Author)
Robert Cummings Neville is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University where he is also Dean of the School of Theology. He is past president of the American Academy of Religion, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the International Society for Chinese Philosophy. Neville has also written Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology; New Essays in Metaphysics; The Puritan Smile: A Look Toward Moral Reflection; and The Tao and the Daimon, all published by SUNY Press.
“The subject of Neville’s Normative Cultures is the rebirth of philosophy as a ‘worldly’ enterprise. There is no topic more significant than this one for the philosopher truly responsive to the present demands of his discipline.” ― David L. Hall, The University of Texas
The Tao and the Daimon: Segments of a Religious Inquiry
Hardcover – June 30, 1983 by Robert Cummings Neville (Author)
The Tao and the Daimon examines a central theme in religious studies: the question of the authority and authenticity of traditional religious faith and practice (tao) in light of the challenge from the spirit of critical reason (Socrates’ daimon). From a non-judgmental, historical standpoint, it develops the dialectical relation between religion and rational inquiry. Neville employs a philosophical system to set a task for reflection, making it possible to see how Eastern and Western religious traditions differ, overlap, contradict, and reinforce one another. The central chapters are detailed studies of theologically interesting elements in Christianity, Buddhism, taoism, and Neoconfucianism.
How can one judge of the higher truths of another religion without having practiced it? Can the tao and the daimon, after all, be reconciled purely in the conceptual realm of speculative philosophy? Neville recognizes the very real differences between conceptualizing and practicing and the very real differences in understanding that can result. At the same time, he transcends the problem by identifying (and exemplifying in his own work) speculative philosophy as a tao in itself, “a new locus of religious significance, our own scholarly interpretation, new creations of the holy out of practiced scholarly piety toward the old.”
Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Suny Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture)
Paperback – September 22, 2000 by Robert Cummings Neville (Author), Tu Weiming (Foreword)
Ultimates: Philosophical Theology, Volume One
Paperback – July 2, 2014 by Robert Cummings Neville (Author)
God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God
‘The Status of Time in Robert C. Neville’s Axiology of Thinking’,
Slater, Gary,
C. S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs (Oxford, 2015; online edn, Oxford Academic, 17 Dec. 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198753230.003.0006,
‘Introduction: What is the Nested Continua Model?’,
Slater, Gary,
C. S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation, Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs (Oxford, 2015; online edn, Oxford Academic, 17 Dec. 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198753230.003.0001, accessed 19 May 2023.
Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self
Key Terms
Gross Body, Subtle Body, Causal Body
Three Bodies Doctrine
Five Sheaths (Kosha)
Identity orientations
Aspects of Identity Questionnaire
Tetrapartite self
Tripartite self
Self-concept
Self-affirmation theory
Individual Self
Relational Self
Collective Self
Public Self
Independent Self
Interdependent Self
Hierarchical Model of Self
Source: Aspects of identity: From the inner-outer metaphor to a tetrapartite model of the self
Source: Aspects of identity: From the inner-outer metaphor to a tetrapartite model of the self
Source: Who Is This “We”? Levels of Collective Identity and Self Representations
Source: Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self: Hierarchical Ordering of the Tripartite Self.
The individual self comprise unique attributes, the relational self comprises partner-shared attributes, and the collective self comprises ingroup-shared attributes. All selves are fundamental components of the self-concept, with each being important and meaningful to human experience and with each being associated with health benefits. Are the selves, however, equally important and meaningful? We review a program of research that tested four competing theoretical views suggesting that the motivational hub of human experience is (a) the individual self, (b) the relational self, (b) the collective self, or (c) determined by contextual or cultural factors. The research furnished support to the view that the individual self is the primary form of self-definition. We discuss alternative explanations and implications. We end with the introduction of a theoretical model, the boomerang model, that has the potential to integrate the diverse literature on the topic.
Source: Chapter Five – A Three-Tier Hierarchy of Self-Potency: Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self
The self-system consists of three fundamental components: the individual self, the relational self, and the collective self. All selves are important and meaningful and all are associated with psychological and physical health benefits. However, the selves are not equally important and meaningful. We propose a three-tier hierarchy of the motivational potency of the self-system, with the individual self on top, followed somewhat closely by the relational self, and followed distantly by the collective self. Engaging in competitive testing, we conducted a variety of experiments in which we implemented diverse methods for controlling the accessibility of the selves, introduced different forms of threat or enhancement, sampled several relational and collective selves, measured the independent reaction of each self, and assessed an array of responses to threat or enhancement (e.g., mood, anger, distancing, impact of feedback, derogation of feedback, impact on life, sentiments of “real you,” goals, monetary allocations). The findings were consistent with the three-tier hierarchy of motivational self-potency.
Source: Introduction: The Relational Self: Basic Forms of Self-Awareness
Self-awareness, the feeling that our experiences are bound to the self—as a unitary entity distinct from others and the rest of the world—is a key aspect of the human mind. But how do we become aware of ourselves in a constantly changing and complex physical and social environment? How do we relate to others while keeping in touch with one’s self, with the fundamental feeling that there is an ‘I’ at the core of all our experiences and exchanges with the world and others? How is it possible to navigate such a dynamic environment without losing track of one’s self? What are the mechanisms underlying typical and atypical self-awareness and how can we spell them out within a coherent conceptual and empirical framework? What are the most basic or minimal forms of self-awareness? Is the minimal self relational or is it preferable to conceptualise it in an individualistic manner, as a fundamentally subjective sense of mineness? Is there is a ‘sense of we’, and if yes, what is its relationship with the minimal ‘individualistic’ self?
This special issue tackles these key questions by bringing together papers from philosophy, developmental and clinical psychology and theoretical neuroscience. The aim is to provide a multifaceted, interdisciplinary and rich perspective on the perennial and fundamental questions i) “what is a (minimal) self?” and ii) “how the self relates to the world and others?”
The papers in this special issue can be divided into three main groups. The first consists of four papers discussing the question whether (i) the minimal self is best understood and defined relationally, that is in terms of social interactions; or rather (ii) the minimal self is a tacit, non-socially grounded, experiential self-awareness. The second group contains three papers and combines resources from theoretical neuroscience (the Predictive Processing framework), experimental work (developmental studies), and philosophy in order to emphasise the fundamentally dynamic aspect of self-awareness. Finally, the last group consists in three papers bringing insights into these questions by focusing on atypical forms of self-awareness and social interactions, in particular schizophrenia and Autism Spectrum Condition. In what follows I provide a brief synopsis each of these contributions.
Source: Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self: Hierarchical Ordering of the Tripartite Self
Source: Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self: Hierarchical Ordering of the Tripartite Self
Source: Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self: Partners, Opponents, or Strangers?
Source: Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self: Partners, Opponents, or Strangers?
Source: Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self: Partners, Opponents, or Strangers?
Source: Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self: Partners, Opponents, or Strangers?
The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences: Models and Theories
Book Editor(s):Bernardo J. Carducci, Christopher S. Nave, Jeffrey S. Mio, Ronald E. Riggio First published: 18 September 2020 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119547143.ch43
The Relational Versus Collective “We” and Intergroup Allocation: The Role of Nested Group Categorization
Sujin Lee Department of Management Science Graduate School of Innovation and Technology Management KAIST Daejeon, Korea Phone: 82-42-350-4339 Fax: 82-42-350-4340 sujinlee@kaist.ac.kr
Wendi L. Adair
Department of Psychology University of Waterloo
Elizabeth A. Mannix Johnson Graduate School of Management Cornell University
Junha Kim Department of Management Science KAIST
Forthcoming in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
The Differential Effects of Relational and Group Collectivism on Social Motivation: Evidence from Two Cultures
Min Li
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Business Administration in the Graduate School of Duke University
The Neural Representation of Relational- and Collective-Self: Two Forms of Collectivism
Yingcan Zheng1,2†, Zilun Xiao1†, Luqing Wei3 and Hong Chen1
1Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China 2Department of Psychology, Army Medical University, Chongqing, China 3School of Psychology, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, China
NEGOTIATING RELATIONALLY: THE DYNAMICS OF THE RELATIONAL SELF IN NEGOTIATIONS
MICHELE J. GELFAND University of Maryland VIRGINIA SMITH MAJOR Miller Consultants, Inc. and Corporate Balance Concepts, Inc. JANA L. RAVER Queen’s University LISA H. NISHII Cornell University KAREN O’BRIEN University of Maryland
Academy of Management Review 2006, Vol. 31, No. 2, 427–451.
Self-Hierarchy in Perceptual Matching: Variations in Different Processing Stages
Yingcan Zheng1, Zilun Xiao2, Yong Liu2 and Xin Zhou2
1Developmental Psychology for Armyman, Department of Medical Psychology, Army Medical University, Chongqing, China 2School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China
Source: “Culture: The Missing Concept in Organization Studies.”
Source: Organizational Culture and Leadership
Culture as a concept is thus an abstraction. If an abstract concept is to be useful to our thinking, it should be observable yet increase our understanding of a set of events that are otherwise mysterious or not well understood. From this point of view, I will argue that we must avoid the superficial models of culture and build on the deeper, more complex anthropological models. Those models refer to a wide range of observable events and underlying forces, as shown in the following list.
Observed behavioral regularities when people interact: The language they use, the customs and traditions that evolve, and the rituals they employ in a wide variety of situations (for example, Goffman, 1959, 1967; Jones and others, 1988; Trice and Beyer, 1993; Van Maanen, 1979b).
Group norms: The implicit standards and values that evolve in working groups, such as the particular norm of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” that evolved among workers in the Bank Wiring Room in the Hawthorne studies (for example, Homans, 1950; Kilmann and Saxton, 1983).
Espoused values: The articulated publicly announced principles and values that the group claims to be trying to achieve, such as “product quality” or “price leadership” (for example, Deal and Kennedy, 1982, 1999).
Formal philosophy: The broad policies and ideological principles that guide a group’s actions toward stockholders, employees, customers, and other stakeholders such as the highly publicized “HP Way” of the Hewlett-Packard Co. (for example, Ouchi, 1981; Pascale and Athos, 1981; Packard, 1995).
Rules of the game: The implicit, unwritten rules for getting along in the organization, “the ropes” that a newcomer must learn to become an accepted member, “the way we do things around here” (for example, Schein, 1968, 1978; Van Maanen, 1976, 1979b; Ritti and Funkhouser, 1987).
Climate: The feeling that is conveyed in a group by the physical layout and the way in which members of the organization interact with each other, with customers, or with other outsiders (for example, Ashkanasy, and others 2000; Schneider, 1990; Tagiuri and Litwin, 1968).
Embedded skills: The special competencies displayed by group members in accomplishing certain tasks, the ability to make certain things that get passed on from generation to generation without necessarily being articulated in writing (for example, Argyris and Schon, 1978; Cook and Yanow, 1993; Henderson and Clark, 1990; Peters and Waterman, 1982; Ang and Van Dyne, 2008).
Habits of thinking, mental models, and/or linguistic paradigms: The shared cognitive frames that guide the perceptions, thought, and language used by the members of a group and are taught to new members in the early socialization process (for example, Douglas, 1986; Hofstede, 1991, 2001; Van Maanen, 1979b; Senge, Roberts, Ross, Smith, and Kleiner, 1994).
Shared meanings: The emergent understandings that are created by group members as they interact with each other (for example, Geertz, 1973; Smircich, 1983; Van Maanen and Barley, 1984; Weick, 1995, Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001; Hatch and Schultz, 2004).
“Root metaphors” or integrating symbols: The ways that groups evolve to characterize themselves, which may or may not be appreciated consciously, but that get embodied in buildings, office layouts, and other material artifacts of the group. This level of the culture reflects the emotional and aesthetic response of members as contrasted with the cognitive or evaluative response (for example, Gagliardi, 1990; Hatch, 1990; Pondy, Frost, Morgan, and Dandridge, 1983; Schultz, 1995).
Formal rituals and celebrations: The ways in which a group celebrates key events that reflect important values or important “passages” by members such as promotion, completion of important projects, and milestones (Trice and Beyer, 1993, Deal and Kennedy, 1982, 1999).
All of these concepts and phenomena relate to culture and/or reflect culture in that they deal with things that group members share or hold in common, but none of them can usefully be thought of as the culture of a country, organization, occupation, or group. You might wonder why we need the word culture at all when we have so many other concepts such as norms, values, behavior patterns, rituals, traditions, and so on. However, the word culture adds several other critical elements to the concept of sharing. The concept of culture implies structural stability, depth, breadth, and patterning or integration.
Source: Relations between organizational culture, identity and image
As stated above, when we express organizational identity we use our cultural artefacts symbolically to present an image that will be interpreted by others. However, while our projected image is contextualized by our cultural heritage, the interpretations that others give to that projection are contextualized by their culture(s). If most of those involved are members of the same organization, then the culture-image-identity system is fairly self-contained. If, on the other hand, an environment or public is involved (as is the case when internal-external boundaries collapse), organizational culture is opened to external influence. As organizational cultures open to more and greater external influences, organizational image and identity become more obviously interdependent.
We argue that the relationships between culture, image and identity form circular processes involving mutual interdependence, as is illustrated by Figure 1. In this view, organizational identity is a self-reflexive product of the dynamic processes of organizational culture (Hatch, 1993). Culturally embedded organizational identity provides the symbolic material from which organizational images are constructed and with which they can be communicated. Organizational images are then projected outwards and absorbed back into the cultural system of meaning by being taken as cultural artefacts and used symbolically to infer identity: who we are is reflected in what we are doing and how others interpret who we are and what we are doing. For example, a negative reading of organizational image by the press can affect organizational identity when news reports are perceived as genuine reflections of organizational activity or intent. The news message becomes a symbol to be interpreted or rejected; if interpreted, it can affect the organization’s definition’s of itself. In this way, organizational identity is opened to the influence of opinions and reputations forged beyond the organization’s direct sphere of influence, as happened, for instance, when Body Shop’s image as a green retailer was attacked by” allegations made in the business press. Anita Roddick’s defence of Body Shop, we argue, was as much an attempt to protect organizational identity internally as it was an effort to avoid negative external images.
Figure 1 illustrates both the internal and the external influences of and on organizational identity. The internal influences on identity are illustrated by the left side of the figure, which depicts organizational identity as the nexus of influences from top management vision and leadership efforts (e.g. Anita Roddick’s use of corporate value statements as an integral part of internal communications at the Body Shop or her distribution of transcripts of her public lectures to all employees), and opinions and beliefs formed about the organization by its internal constituencies as they go about their daily work activities (e.g. how do Body Shop employees interpret and enact what the Body Shop “is” through informal as well as formal channels of communication and European sense-making?). Both sets of influence are interpreted within and contextualized by the organizational culture.
Organizational identity in turn has a number of external influences. First, organizational identity is communicated to the various constituencies of the external environment who form organizational images, at least partly in response to identity-based communications. The forms and means of such communication may differ, ranging from unplanned appearances by top management in public media, to a conscious strategy for external corporate communication involving design management, corporate advertising and public relations. However, direct experience and interaction with the organization are also strong forces in the image-formation processes of external constituencies (e.g. the conversations between employees and customers when Body Shop launches a new ideological campaign or a new product). Direct contacts between insiders and outsiders are contextualized by the organizational culture, as everyday organizational behaviour is assumed to be influenced by local sense-making and interpretation. Thus, insofar as organizational members interact with “outsiders”, there will be an influence of both organizational culture and identity on image beyond that carried by top management and other corporate spokespersons.
Organizational image involves externally produced meaning-making about the organization but, as noted above, this has an influence on internal processes of identity formation. First, insofar as organizational members are also members of external groups (e.g. consumers of the organization’s goods or services, environmentalists, media watchers), it is likely that image and identity will be compared and these comparisons communicated within the internal symbolic context of the organization, leading to possibilities for synergy but also for cynicism. Second, the way in which organizational members are perceived by customers, competitors and the like, can influence organizational identity as members mirror themselves in the comments (and complaints) about the organization made to them by their external contacts (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991). Thus, insofar as organizational members encounter organizational images as part of their lives both inside and outside the organization, it is likely there will be feedback from image to identity. Third, top management vision and leadership is opened to external influence via its concern to manage organizational image. Whenever this influence occurs, the statements, decisions and actions top management directs to its internal audiences are influenced by these external concerns with subsequent effects on organizational identity. In Figure 1, the arrows from organizational image to organizational identity, and from organizational image through top management vision and leadership to organizational identity, indicate these sources of external influence on organizational identity.
Source: Relations between organizational culture, identity and image
Source: Theories of Organizational Culture
Source: Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizational culture
Source: Metapsychology of borders: Structures, operations and semiotic dynamics
Borders are present in each form of human activity. Probably the most common representation of border is the separation, yet borders are implied in many operations enabling development, action, thinking, sense-making and relation-making. In this work, borders are considered as dynamic semiotic devices enabling many functions relevant for each living organism and psychic systems as well. Taking into account several border-focused models from psychoanalysis, psychology and semiotics, the author identifies and discusses eight operations carried out by borders: Distinction, Differentiation, Separation, Containment, Protection, Mediation, Transformation and Regulation. Each function is not mutually exclusive but it is recursive in time and works respect to intra/inter-subjective contextual conditions. The meta-model offers relevant developments for the study of psychological processes in dynamic, topological and systemic terms.
Source: Psychological and Social Borders: Regulating Relationships
Psychological phenomena take place at the border between person and environment. Indeed, psychology as a whole may be seen as a science of human liminal constructions, a science concerned with the dynamic relationships that exist between people and what surrounds them and with the constant border crossing that defines the arena within which all human development takes place. From this perspective, the central question becomes: how do humans deal with such transitions throughout the course of their lives? Cultural psychology offers a way of addressing, theoretically and empirically, the epistemological and social dimensions of this question. In addition, we argue that mereotopology—the theory of the relations of part to whole and of part to part within a whole—provides a conceptual framework of enormous potential for appreciating its unexplored ontological underpinnings, thus contributing to the foundations of psychology as a developmental science of the inherent uncertainty that accompanies all individual and social becoming.
Source: Models of semiotic borders in psychology and their implications: From rigidity of separation to topological dynamics of connectivity
In this article, I discuss some implications deriving from different models of the notion of border, starting from interdisciplinary contributions and in particular from semiotics, psychoanalysis, cultural psychology, and topology. The starting point is a reflection on the notion of sign, as a device used to realize at the same time both a first form of discretization and to instantiate a system of relations with the environment. The article goes on to describe the importance of borders for the construction of human experience and for the processes of psychic and relational development. Lastly, the differences between three different forms of conceptualizing borders are discussed: rigid boundaries, permeable boundaries, and topological boundaries of the Möbius strip type. For each of the three models, the different implications will be presented and discussed.
Source: On the semiosphere
This article, first published in Russian in 1984 in Sign Systems Studies, introduces the concept of semiosphere and describes its principal attributes. Semiosphere is the semiotic space, outside of which semiosis cannot exist. The ensemble of semiotic formations functionally precedes the singular isolated language and becomes a condition for the existence of the latter. Without the semiosphere, language not only does not function, it does not exist. The division between the core and the periphery is a law of the internal organisation of the semiosphere. There exists boundary between the semiosphere and the non-or extra-semiotic space that surrounds it. The semiotic border is represented by the sum of bilingual translatable “filters”, passing through which the text is translated into another language (or languages), situated outside the given semiosphere. The levels of the semiosphere comprise an inter-connected group of semiospheres, each of them being simultaneously both participant in the dialogue (as part of the semiosphere) and the space of dialogue (the semiosphere as a whole).
Source: Signs as borders and borders as signs
This article focuses on bordering as a fundamental semiotic process of human psychological functioning. First, we discuss similarities between semiosis and bordering and explore their relationships. In the perspective of cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics, psychic life is a process of purposeful production and interpretation of signs, carried out through cycles of culturally guided, selective internalization and externalization. Signs and borders are not only entities “out there”: they emerge in the purposeful movement of the organism in the course of future-oriented action in everyday life. Second, we discuss borders in mind and society as particular types of signs, through which humans regulate their own and others’ conduct. Finally, we propose a general genetic law of bordering development: borders are first conceived as tools created and established by humans as interpsychic activities. Later, the sign is internalized and begins to regulate psychological functioning. It also becomes a psychological tool for dealing with other humans and with the environment.
Source: THE HUMAN PSYCHE ON THE BORDER OF IRREVERSIBLE TIME:FORWARD-ORIENTED SEMIOSIS
Psychology of human being is the science of goals-oriented actions that transcend the border of the present, and incorporate the past and the future in the process of development (“The Yokohama Manifesto” —Valsiner, Marsico, Chaudhary, Sato and Dazzani, 2016). Semiotic mediating devices—signs of various forms that operate in dynamic configurations catalyze the processes of human acting, feeling, and thinking. The border of past and future forms a triple Gegenstand. The triplicate (goal-oriented action, resistance to the action, and reflection upon action) sets up the human condition within which higher psychological functions relate with their lower counterparts through forward- oriented semiosis—making signs, creating sign configurations, and setting up catalytic conditions for the future. The basic structural forms of these relations set up a new theoretical agenda for the science of psychology, maintaining the focus on human subjective self-reflection (the psyche) in its social contexts as the arena for investigation. Focusing on this arena makes it possible for psychology to avoid reduction of its phenomena either to neuroscientific or sociological empirical practices, while benefitting from the theoretical innovations in these adjacent sciences.
Source: Psychological Functions of Semiotic Borders in Sense-Making: Liminality of Narrative Processes
In this paper we discuss the semiotic functions of the psychological borders that structure the flow of narrative processes. Each narration is always a contextual, situated and contingent process of sensemaking, made possible by the creation of borders, such as dynamic semiotic devices that are capable of connecting the past and the future, the inside and the outside, and the me with the non-me. Borders enable us to narratively construct one’s own experiences using three inherent processes: contextualization, intersubjective positioning and setting of pertinence. The narrative process – as a subjective articulation of signs in a contingent social context – involves several functions of semiotic borders: separation, differentiation, distinction-making, connection, articulation and relation-enabling. The relevant psychological aspect highlighted here is that a border is a semiotic device which is required for both maintaining stability and inducing transformation at the same time. The peculiar dynamics and the semiotic structure of borders generate a liminal space, which is characterized by instability, by a blurred space-time distinction and by ambiguities in the semantic and syntactic processes of sensemaking. The psychological processes that occur in liminal space are strongly affectively loaded, yet it is exactly the setting and activation of liminality processes that lead to novelty and creativity and enable the creation of new narrative forms.
Psychological and Social Borders: Regulating Relationships
Giuseppina Marsico (University of Salerno, Italy) Achille Varzi (Columbia University, USA)
[Final version published in J. Valsiner, G. Marsico, N. Chaudhary, T. Sato, and V. Dazzani (eds.), Psychology as a Science of Human Being, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 2015, pp. 327–336]
Interobjectivity as a border: The fluid dynamics of Betweenness.
Marsico, G., Cabell, K. R., Valsiner, J., & Kharlamov, N. A. (2013).
In G. Sammut, P. Daanen, & F. Moghaddam (Eds.), Understanding the self and others: Explorations in intersubjectivity and interobjectivity. London, United Kingdom: Routledge.
Process and boundaries of the mind.
Neuman, Y. (2003).
New York, NY, USA: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
THE HUMAN PSYCHE ON THE BORDER OF IRREVERSIBLE TIME:FORWARD-ORIENTED SEMIOSIS
Invited address at the 31st International Congress of Psychology Yokohama, July 27, 2016
Jaan Valsiner Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark (jvalsiner@gmail.com)
Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, NY
(Published in Noûs, 31 (1997), 26–58; reprinted in Patrick Grim, Gary Mar, and Kenneth Baynes (eds.), The Philosopher’s Annual, Volume 20, Atascadero (CA): Ridgeview, 1999)
Source: Charles Sanders Peirce and the Semiotic Foundation of Self and Reason
The philosophy of the classical American pragmatism represents one of the basic challenges to the conception of self and reason in the history of philosophical and psychological thinking. As the founder of pragmatism, Peirce is well known for his attempt to overcome the Cartesian tradition of philosophy, which was founded on the paradigm of monologic self-consciousness and self-awareness. The dialogical principle is a core piece of the Peircean semiotics, which has deep implications to subjectivity, meaning-construction, reasoning on the “self,” and communication. The reinterpretation of the classic tradition of thinking on signs leads Peirce to a triadic and dynamic-dialogical conception of signs. For Peirce, a sign is as such because it stands for something to somebody. It creates in the mind of the person an equivalent or a more developed sign. This radical conception of semiotics terminated in the idea of “man as a sign” and the claim that “men and words reciprocally educate each other.” The self is an interpreting subject and an interpreted object. In its innermost being, the self is a communicative agent. The epistemological consequence of this conception is as follows: Truth is closely related to intersubjectivity and the private is synonymous with erroneous.
Source: Narrative Identity and the Semiotic Self in Dialogical Semiosis of Narrative
The self is known as a term notorious for grasping its meaning. There are many different approaches to the notion of the self. Among these are the phenomenological, hermeneutical, semiotic, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and narrative. It can also be understood through an interdisciplinary approach. The distinction between different or competing notions of the self lies in whether the self is constructive or transcendental and fictional or real. Peirce’s semiotic approach to the self is concerned not with what the self is but with how the concept of self is acquired in relation to other within linguistic community in that self-awareness is derived from errors and ignorance evident from other people’s testimony. This presupposes that the concept of the self is associated with intersubjectivity, implying experiential and social dimensions from the first-person perspective. Traditionally, the first-person access to the self has been widely recognized by philosophers. But a competing idea arises, challenging the first-person givenness, from those who argue that self-interpretation and self-knowledge are acquired through the third-person perspective. I argue that these two dichotomous perspectives of the self can be mediated by the second-person perspective through dialogical semiosis of narrative. This means that self-narrative will be achieved by dialogical processes of self and other in a biographical form of narrative with an autobiographical tone by which narrative form as medium and genre becomes operative for symbolic mediation of the self. From the context of discussion on the concept of the self in terms of semiotics, it is clear that the self is not accessible directly; the self is mediated by sign, which means that it is expressed by sign, so as to be interpreted by another sign, leading to the evolutionary self. Thus, Peirce’s semiotic perspective on the self emphasizes the role of a semiotic subject that participates in sign processes as an interpreting agent. In this sense, the concept of self is acquired through semiosis of narrative and at the same time it is interpreted in narrative world, taking the role of character. It is character which makes a person identifiable as a person, since character is not substance but quality as a recognized pattern or type through time, which becomes a habit of act and thought, thus forming personal identity. Within this context, I argue that from the first-person perspective a deliberate subject of self as “subjective I” and from the third-person perspective a dynamic object of self as “objective I” are mediated by the relationship between self and other as an imaginary relation in narrative world, just like an imaginary line of identity, connecting word with thing. From the second-person perspective, oneself as another forms teridentity(co-identity) in textual world. I shall illustrate the interlock point of the semiotic self and narrative identity through Peirce’s semiotic approach to the self and Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity expressed in “oneself as another”.
Source: The Semiotic Self
This work offers a novel and challenging interpretation of the nature of the self. In opposition to currently fashionable theories, Wiley argues that the self is an integral and autonomous entity. The self is interpreted as a semiotic structure and on this basis the author presents an original analysis of the origins of self-identity. The book draws particularly upon two philosophical sources: the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead. The result is a “trialogical” model in which the present self (“I”) talks to the future self (“you”) about the past self (“me”). A distinctive feature of Wiley’s view is that there is a mutually-supportive relation between the self and democracy, a view which he traces through American history.
Providing as it does a means of interpreting the politics of identity in relation to such issues as class, gender, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation, this book will stimulate wide interest.
Source: Inner Speech and the Dialogical Self
Inner speech, also known as self-talk, is distinct from ordinary language. It has several functions and structures, from everyday thinking and self-regulation to stream of consciousness and daydreaming. Inner Speech and the Dialogical Self provides a comprehensive analysis of this internal conversation that people have with themselves to think about problems, clarify goals, and guide their way through life.
Norbert Wiley shrewdly emphasizes the semiotic and dialogical features of the inner speech, rather than the biological and neurological issues. He also examines people who lack control of their inner speech—such as some autistics and many emotionally disturbed people who use trial and error rather than self-control—to show the power and effectiveness of inner speech.
Inner Speech and the Dialogical Self takes a humanistic social theorist approach to its topic. Wiley acknowledges the contributions of inner speech theorists, Lev Vygotsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, and addresses the classical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, William James, and George Herbert Mead to show the range and depth of this largely unexplored field.
Source: Towards a convergence of Dialogical Self Theory and Semiotic Self Theory through triadic phenomenology
We propose a theoretical convergence between Dialogical Self Theory and Semiotic Self Theory by using C. S. Peirce’s phenomenology as a metatheoretical framework. Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness account for all kinds of experience; they are distinct but intertwined. Our hypothesis is that this theoretical umbrella can combine complementary aspects of both theories, such as space and time, and the multivoicedness and integrative tendencies of the self. We apply the categories to analyze the externalization of the internal conversation of a participant in a qualitative study. The dialogue was elicited through a psychodramatic instrument that is based on J. L. Moreno’s empty-chair technique. In the resulting discourse, we observed aspects of Firstness: the fluctuating multiplicity of the I; of Secondness: the dyadic relation between pairs of I-positions; and of Thirdness: the self construed as a developing sign process that generates interpretants/voiced positions, and tends towards unity.
Source: Steps to a convergence of two dialogical theories of the self theories
In this paper, we aim to describe the elements that would enable researchers to bring together two different but complementary theories of the self in the dialogical psychology field: the theory of the semiotic self, based on C. S. Peirce’s triadic model of meaning generation, and the theory of the dialogical self, based on the work of H. Hermans, which derives from M. Bakhtin’s and W. James’s reflections on dialogism. The benefit of this theoretical convergence is argued through a discussion of the structural elements of triadic semiotic, including its phenomenological basis and its kinship with key concepts of the Dialogical Self Theory. We also present a case in which the internal dialogue of a person who has an important doubt regarding his life is observed through a psychodramatic method, and the posited theoretical convergence of dialogical theories is illustrated through the manifestation of opposite I-positions. Throughout the dialogue an attempt of synthesis through the emergence of a meta-position was observed.
Author(s): Arthur Asa Berger Source: The American Sociologist, Vol. 42, No. 2/3, Semiotics and Sociology (September 2011), pp. 232-237 Published by: Springer
EXPOSING THE DIALOGICAL NATURE OF THE LINGUISTIC SELF IN INTERPERSONAL AND INTERSUBJECTIVE RELATIONSHIPS FOR THE PURPOSES OF LANGUAGE-AND-CONSCIOUSNESS-RELATED COMMUNICATION STUDIES
Psychological Functions of Semiotic Borders in Sense-Making: Liminality of Narrative Processes
Raffaele De Luca Picione*a, Jaan Valsinerb
[a] Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Naples “Federico II”, Naples, Italy. [b] Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark.
Europe’s Journal of Psychology 2017, Vol. 13(3), 532–547 doi:10.5964/ejop.v13i3.1136
AnnA BAtory*, WAcłAW Bąk*, Piotr k. oleś**, MAłgorzAtA PuchAlskA-WAsyl* * John Paul ii catholic university of lublin ** Warsaw school of social sciences and humanities
Psychology of Language and Communication 2010, Vol. 14, No. 1
THE RELEVANCE OF SECONDNESS TO THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE DIALOGICAL SELF
Mariela Michel Fernando Andacht
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sol, Brazil
University of Ottawa, Canada
William B. Gomes
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sol, Brazil
International Journal for Dialogical Science
Fall, 2008. Vol. 3, No. 1, 301-334
A Semiotic Reflection on Self Interpretation and Identity
Fernando Andacht
Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS)
Mariela Michel
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
The Dialogical Self: Converging East-West Constructions
Commentary
David Yau-fai Ho and Shui-fun Fiona Chan National Institute of Education, Singapore Si-qing Peng Peking University, China Aik Kwang Ng National Institute of Education, Singapore
Viewpoints which Matter 