Self, Philosophical Considerations

Abstract

Abstract The debate between the proponents of realism and antirealism about the self has played an important role in philosophy, and, though less directly, in clinical psychology. Realism has two fundamental commitments about the world posited by scientific theories: existence and evaluation‐independence. According to the existence claim, both the everyday world of objects and their properties—the subject of scientific theorizing—do exist. According to the evaluation‐ independence claim, the objects and properties posited by a scientific theory exist independent from what human beings think about them or how they are linguistically articulated. Realists argue that the self exists as an evaluation‐independent phenomenon. Antirealists, on the other hand, argue that there is no such thing as the self. What is conventionally conceived of as the self is contingent on our evaluations; that is, it is a mere artifact of cultural, social, and linguistic conventions.