2 - What Selves Are

Summary

Personality, Character, and Self

What is this thing called ‘self’, and is it different from or the same as self-concept? Are we simply who we think we are – at least when we are being reasonably coherent – or are the stories we believe and tell about our lives and who we are essentially defeasible?

In this chapter I subject to critical analysis the tangled debate between realists and anti-realists about the status of the so-called self. The debate traverses various academic disciplines and discursive fields. What interests me here is the issue between self-realists and anti-self-realists, not between (scientific) realists and anti-realists, per se. To clarify, all self-realists are scientific realists. Standard scientific realism is the view that we ought to believe in the objective existence of the unobservable entities posited by our most successful scientific theories. The most common argument in favour of scientific realism is the ‘no-miracles argument’, according to which the success of science would be miraculous – straining credulity beyond its breaking point – if scientific theories were not at least approximately true descriptions of the world. There are, however, various forms of general scientific realism that make do without any notion of independent selfhood, simply because they do not consider the notion of ‘self’ to belong to any of our most successful scientific – here psychological – theories. Hence, not all scientific realists are self-realists, and it is only the latter type of realism that concerns me in this chapter.