Abstract
Rom Harré has held different views at different times on self and identity. He liked to keep these terms open and flexible, in line with his opinion that, “for the most part, selves are fictions”. These fictions take form (and change their form) in the ongoing flow of activities that people produce in interaction with one another—which is one reason why it is difficult, if not precarious, to use well-defined concepts to capture these “fictions.” Concepts tend to fix what they are meant to identify. In fact, this is the reason why we usually need and want well-defined concepts. But how then, drawing on Rom Harré, do we have to conceive of such unstable and unfixable phenomena as self and identity? How do we combine concepts and fictions?
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Rom Harré has dealt with these issues in numerous books, articles, and chapters. In what follows, I draw on the The Singular Self (1998); The Discursive Mind (1994, with Grant Gillet); Social Being (revised edition, 1993); Pronouns and People (1990, with Peter Mühlhäusler); Greenspeak : A Study of Environmental Discourse (with Jens Brockmeier and Peter Mühlhäusler).
References
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Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Brockmeier, J. (2019). What Is It to Be a Human Being? Rom Harré on Self and Identity. In: Christensen, B. (eds) The Second Cognitive Revolution. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26680-6_5
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