Language and the Languages of Personality

Abstract

Although inquiry in philosophy and some social sciences has attended closely to the question of how investigators use language to describe and explain phenomena of interest, less attention has been devoted to questions of language use in psychological science. This essay explores language use in a major subfield of psychology, the psychology of personality. We identify three descriptive and explanatory languages in the field and critique them from the perspective of scholarship outside of psychology that has explored language use. We conclude with a call for greater exchange between investigators who embrace discursive accounts of persons and social action, and those who posit social-cognitive accounts of the knowledge that individuals use when they create discourse in their efforts to understand the world and to direct their experiences and actions.