Toward a Dialogical Self

Abstract

This article outlines four broad notions of the self or human agency. They are a traditional understanding of the self as defined by a meaningful cosmic order, a modern notion of the self as highly individualized and autonomous, often termed self-contained individualism, a decentered conception of the self as developed recently by postmodern and social constructionist thought, and a dialogical understanding of self and agency elaborated by hermeneutic thinkers and Bakhtin. Much modern social science presupposes self-contained individualism as the unquestioned nature of things and thereby tends to prepetuate views and ideals that are a source of modern dilemmas in living that social science itself tries to address. It is argued that postmodern, constructionist notions of human action restore a sense of its embeddedness in culture and history but still are colored by individualistic and scientistic elements of the modern view they seek to displace. A dialogical, partly decentered, view of human agency may offer a way to do justice to how selves are woven into the fabric of culture and history without thereby undermining our best conceptions of freedom and responsibility.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 95 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.