Person and Self

Abstract

Ascription of psychological predicates involves reference to the beliefs, values and purposes of the agent. Thus psychological knowledge is founded on the agent’s avowals, whereby he exercises a power, bestowed on him by his fellow agents who recognise his privileged authority to establish by declaration the significance, for him, of what is happening to him and what he is doing in response. In so avowing, to himself or to others, he declares his reasons in terms of which his actions can be understood and evaluated. He ‘explains himself’, to himself as well as to others. It follows that, to be a psychological subject, i.e. a rational agent, one must be capable of self-consciousness ; one must have a ‘self’ to explain. What kind of creature is capable of such agency, and what kind of entity is the ‘self’ he must have and be aware of? We call such an agent a person. What then is it to be a person, and what is it to have a self?

‘… only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’ — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations