Abstract
Self-studies are important to psychology, understood as the study of human action and experience in the world. For, unlike other animals, humans are uniquely capable of a kind of personhood that, while evolved in a broad Darwinian sense, has proven adept at tethering itself historically to increasingly complex cultures (Donald, 2001). A necessary aspect of such an evolved, culturally sustained personhood has seemed to many to be the psychological self, understood both as a self-conscious first-person perspective (a psychological “I”) and as a conceptual self-understanding (a psychological “me”), through which we humans perceive, understand, and act in the world. Since first theorized by William James (1890), some version of this dual-aspect psychological self has been a mainstay of much self-theory and research in the discipline of psychology (e.g., Harré, 1998; McAdams, 1997; Mead, 1934). If both first-person experiences and self-understandings are not to count as real in a way that matters to human life on this planet, psychology dissolves into either physics or sociology, or assumes the status of folk beliefs and practices of interest to historians and cultural anthropologists. Given the current prevalence of antirealist sentiments concerning the self, it is surprising that so few contemporary psychologists appear willing to defend its reality.
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A concern about compatibilist proposals such as the current one (i.e., proposals that attempt to reconcile agency with some form of determinism, including the kind of underdetermination theorized herein—see Chapter 2) that is shared by many analytic philosophers of science (e.g., Kapitan, 1999) rests on what might be referred to as the transitivity argument. Such scholars claim that if what occurs at time B is determined by what has occurred at time A, and what occurs at time C is determined by what has occurred at time B, then what occurs at time C is determined by what occurred at time A. Our counter claim is that agency issues from a kind of self-determination active at time B that, while determined by all that is in place at time A, nonetheless goes very modestly beyond all that is in place at time A, with the consequence that what determines what occurs at time C must include all that is at play at time A plus the self-determination that enters at time B. If this is so, then the transitivity condition does not hold, in that what occurs at time C is determined by all that is in place at time B (including the exercise of an agent’s self-determination), but is not determined by all that is in place at time A because conditions at time A do not include the self-determination that enters at time B. In our approach to agency, such an intransitive state of affairs rests on the kind of perspectival emergence theorized by pragmatists like Mead and the kind of self-interpretation theorized by hermeneuts like Heidegger and Gadamer. Perspectival emergence refers to an agent’s unpredictable reactivity to his/her location in two or more spatial-temporal perspectives (e.g., being simultaneously oriented to a determining past and to the particulars of an unfolding present, in anticipation of an immediate and more distant future—more of this in Chapter 8). Hermeneutic self-interpretation refers to an agent’s interpretive reactivity to self-selected features of his/her situation in terms of both the background understandings and current life projects that provide both intelligibility and animation to his/her present undertakings (see Chapters 1–4). Both the perspectival emergence and hermeneutic self-interpretation constitutive of self-determination require the biophysical embodiment and sociocultural situatedness of self-interpreting beings, but are not reducible to these determinants. Self-determination, understood in these ways, is ultimately underdetermined by relevant biophysical and sociocultural constituents and determinants in the sense that, when and if actively deployed, such self-determination enters into the determination of an agent’s actions and experiences in ways that depend on, but are not exhausted by, these other conditions. (For elaborations of our arguments concerning the roles of perspectival emergence and hermeneutic self-interpretation in agentive self-determination, see Martin (2007a) and Martin et al. (2003b), respectively.)
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Martin, J., Sugarman, J.H., Hickinbottom, S. (2010). Real Perspectival Selves. In: Persons: Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1065-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1065-3_7
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