Whose Right is it to Define the Self?

Abstract

Descartes founded the psychology of the individual with a mind! body distinction that calls for internal dialogue and interactive exchange. Individuals struggle with their nature through an intracommunicative system, emanating not from social exchanges, but, instead, from autonomous rules and constraints inherent in the machine of the body. The attacks on these ideas by social constructionists, such as Gergen, Harré and Shotter, impel me to write this paper. My purpose is to show how rejection of Descartes's Cogito; ergo sum, and of his idea that the human being struggles with feelings directed by the body and beliefs formed in the soul, eliminates criteria necessary for concepts of the self and the person. I argue that social constructionist reductions of mind and body to social process disallow a causal basis for self and its autonomously generated origins. The same reductions substitute contextual determination for cause and effect logic, clouding accounts of an individual's choices and decisions and making the attribution of personal moral responsibility impossible. I demonstrate that the bases for maintaining the criteria of self and person flow from the Cartesian tradition, have a wide support among many trenchant thinkers in psychology and remain logically necessary.