Reflection

Abstract

The third articulating element of practical life is reflection, which is presented as the agents’ capacity to consider themselves from an external perspective, evaluate their own beliefs, desires and emotions, and confirm, reconfigure or reject them. This reflective exercise enables agents to evaluate their own positions and others’ through the interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships established in practical life, as well as their criticism, reformulation or confirmation. In this section, Korsgaard’s and Frankfurt’s positions are taken as starting points, and are reformulated and radicalized in intersubjectivist terms, from a perspective that is sensitive to vulnerability. In turn, reflection can be classified according to different exercise intensities, which also allows us to establish degrees of vulnerability to social pathologies. Finally, in this chapter I present the concept of normative friction as a trigger for reflective processes that can lead to the revision, transformation and criticism of beliefs, structures and social relationships, and of distinctive circumstances of social pathologies. Normative friction is a particular case of the concept of cognitive dissonance introduced by Festinger, and has its field of application in the questions of practical life, while cognitive dissonance is more comprehensive and can be experienced, for example, in the field of basic or experimental sciences.