Extending and distributing the self

Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, 2013

Personal indexicals are often taken to refer to the agent of an expression’s context, but deviant uses (e.g. ‘I’m parked out back’) complicate matters. I argue that personal indexicals refer to the extended self of the agent, where the extended self is a mereological chimera incorporating whatever determines our behavioral capacities. To ascertain the persistence conditions of personal identity, I propose a method for selecting a level of description and a set of functional properties at that level that remain constant over a lifetime. I argue for functional constancy, and against continuity, as the central determinant of diachronic identity.

臨床教育人間学, 2007

This book is in part the translation of Beyond the Self: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Limits of Language, the main substance of which was written in the 1980s. The text published here constitutes a revision of parts of the earlier book, together with additional essays prepared with a Japanese audience in mind. In this

The Self the Other and Language Dialogue Between Philosophy Psychology and Comparative Education, 2009

This is an introduction to Paul Standish's book, Beyond the Self: Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Limits of Language (1992) (hereafter abbreviated as BTS'.) Naoko Saito, in collaboration with five graduate students from Kyoto University, is in the final stage of translating the book (to be published from Hosei University Press). The value of the book has been rediscovered centring on the theme of self, other and language, and how their inseparable relation presented in the book can serve today in envisioning an alternative route to education: 'education for otherwise' (Standish 2002) and 'ethics before equality' (Standish 2001). The purpose of our dialogical presentation is to explore the possibilities and limits of BTS; and to show how the preliminary declaration of the author's stance in going `be yond the self' has been developed since then in venturing into the territory of `bey ond Beyond the Self, especially in his critique of Heidegger through Levinas and Cavell.

2011

Philosophical Studies, 2017

Synthese, 2025

This paper explores the mediational and constitutional role of technical images (both analogue and digital) for the definition and continuity of the sense of self, proposing a new framework within the extended mind theory grounded in recent approaches to memory. Traditional cognitive science often views the mind as confined within the brain, but we argue that cognition is not merely extended but fundamentally constituted through ongoing material engagements with technical images within specific sociocultural contexts. Our interdisciplinary approach integrates cognitive archaeology, media theory, and cognitive sciences, emphasising the dynamic, embodied, and situated nature of cognition. This perspective shifts the understanding of the mind from a static, internal entity to a dynamic, distributed process continually mediated through organismic transactions in the environment. Building on this tradition of studies in the extended mind, we introduce the Mediational-Constitutional Principle, arguing that technical images not only trigger cognitive processes but actively constitute them. In the paper, we illustrate how technical images mediate and constitute the sense of self because they are central in how memory is continually re-enacted in specific sociomaterial environments made of people, things, and practices. These images function as automatic ecological records, blending past and present, influencing personal narratives and memory.

Many philosophers and at least some psychologists think of themselves implicitly as physicalists: they believe that everything there is is physical (and that minds are somehow manifestations of brains). To avoid contradicting themselves, these physicalists must be able to state all their theories in strictly physical language. If any of their explanations rely on the existence of entities that cannot be described using only physical vocabulary, they cannot maintain their physicalism unless and until they can demonstrate that such entities can be explained away in wholly physical terms. A closer look at the methods used by contemporary psychology shows that psychological explanation cannot meet the demand of using only strictly physical language which the philosophy of science places on physicalist theories. Analytic philosophers have developed a rigorous strategy for determining the entities posited by a theory---its ontological commitments. There are sound reasons belonging to the philosophy of psychology, a subcategory of philosophy of science, to think that the methods of psychology, and the questions it seeks to answer, are of a radically different kind from those of physics. We will argue that the best interpretation of contemporary psychology views it not as a branch of applied physics, but as a discipline which investigates physical as well as inalienably mental, combined mental-and-physical, and social properties, ascribed to persons or selves which outstrip the conventional physical framework. Persons or selves are described by current psychological methods as irreducibly non-physical posits. Psychologists now almost universally reject the behaviourist paradigm that all methodology must be impersonal. Since some psychological studies have begun to use introspective and irreducibly first-personal methods, the question arises whether ontological commitments can be first-personal as well as third- personal. The first-personal perspective is associated with mental properties such as privileged access which cannot be reconciled with physicalism.

Marketing theory, 2024

This essay gives closer historical consideration to the unprecedented disciplinary impact of Belk's (1988) conceptualization of the extended self. This canonical article initially appeared to be another flashpoint in the paradigmatic conflict between positivist and interpretivist consumer researchers. However, Belk's portrayal of consumers as agentic actors who produce their own identities through a network of possessions and symbolic artefacts proved to be highly compatible with interdisciplinary trends toward a more holistic and socio-culturally situated understanding of consumer behavior. Accordingly, Belk's "extended self" created an ontological bridge between interpretivist studies of consumers' co-constituting relations to the socio-material world and consumer psychologists' quest to expand their research interests beyond the study of rational decision making processes. While some marketing historians have suggested that the extended self's seminal influence derives from its generative "vagueness," I propose that its transformational effects on the broader field of consumer research trace to a genius of mythopoesis and a genius of timing. I then discuss how the logic of ontological reconfiguration, manifest in Belk's conceptualization, can foster more synergistic and innovative inter-paradigmatic dialogues between consumer culture theory (CCT) and consumer psychology.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2011