The 2007 Couch-Stone distinguished lecture: The pragmatists' theory of the self

Abstract

This will be an attempt to construct a pragmatist theory of the self, drawing on the four major classical pragmatists. From John Dewey, I will take the self as actor or agent; from George Herbert Mead the social self; from Charles Sanders Peirce the semiotic or significative self; and from William James the emotion of self feeling. The four fit together reasonably well, and the result is a highly egalitarian, democratic and humanistic idea of what it means to be a human being.

Citation

Wiley, N. (2008), "The 2007 Couch-Stone distinguished lecture: The pragmatists' theory of the self", Denzin, N.K., Salvo, J. and Washington, M. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 31), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 7-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31002-3