Uts – midterms IV.
Rene Descartes
Philosophical self
I. Socrates
- Know Thyself
- Question everything
- only the pursuit of goodness brings happiness
- Socratic method: question and answer, leads students thinking for themselves
- “an unexamined life is not worth living”
- “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think”
- “to know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge” (Art of Acceptance:
Ignorance → Knowledge)
II. Plato
- Greek philosopher who founded the academy in Athens; the academy is the first institution of learning
in the West
- “Never discourage anyone who countinually makes progress. No matter how slow”
- “Be kind, because all the people we met may have battle to surpass”
- “Scholars and wise men speak because they have to say; fools speak because they have to speak”
- Music is moral law. It gives soul to the world, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm to
life and to everything
- According to Plato,the sould is in the human body. The rational part is the head, the spirit is in the
upper part of the body, and the appetite is in the central part of the body to the heart
III. Saint Augustine of Hippo
- he takes a different philosophy before he became a Christian at the age of 35. (Mother – a Christian;
Father – remains a pagan)
- “pray where supposedly everything depends on God”; work ___
- you must lose what ever you have filled and you will be filled with things that you don’t have
- admission of wrong doing is the first step to a good cause
- a habit that, if not prevented, is becoming a necessity
 TEMPERANCE – is a love of giving up entirely himself to Him and that’s the only reason
 COURAGE – is a love that can go beyond everything with pleasure for the sake of Himself and that’s
the only reason
 JUSTICE – is love that is uniquely serve only Him and no other reason
 PRUDENCE – is love that can make the right decision on what prevents and what helps
“One of the single best problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place” (George Bernard
Shaw)
- the mind exists. Not far from the mid of man, so man exists. When in doubt someone has doubts for
him, The work itself will doubts the fact that he exists.
V. John Locke
- “no mans knowledge here can go beyond his experience”
- According to Locke, even if a man has the ability to think, it does not mean that he is using it.
- Others have chosen to live in ignorance, others think very weak, or others are slaves to their emotions
which they use their brains to understand the law of nature
- others chose to simply be bad because they are accustomed to it
VI. DAVID HUME
- “a wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence
 EMPIRICISM – is the theory that says all knowledge comes from the senses
└> the mind is not separated from perception
└> the entire contents of the mind are transmitted daily to the human condition
 BUNDLE THEORY – the man is a collective of different successive perception is always changing and
moving
└> the qualities that we feel is only part of something
 METACOGNITION – using thinking to understand another thinking
 METALANGUAGE – using language to understand another language
 METAPHYSICS -
VII. IMMANUEL KANT
- “morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make
ourselves worthy of happiness”
 METAPHYSICS OF SELF – branch of phulosophy that studies the nature, substance and identity
└> it also explains how we get knowledge
└> The path to true knowledge: RATIONALISM – reason; EMPIRICISM – by the senses
The conciousness is divided into:
1. INTERNAL SELF – composed of psychological states and informed decisions; remembering our own
state, how can we combine the new and old ideas with our mind
2. EXTERNAL SELF – made up of ourselves and the physical world where the representation of objects
VIII. SIGMUND FREUD SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
- “the child is the Father of a man”
I. The sociology of Self and Identity
- Psychoanalysis
- sociologists rarely study personality per se, bu the self, self-concept and identities
 ID – early stage of self-shaping; the center of all human wants and desires that you must satisfy
- the self is a process in which we construct a sense of who we are through interaction with others
− indifferent to the moral laws of society; collection of preferences that must be met
- the self process at a given point in time is the self-concept
 EGO – act according to reality; balances the desires of the people and how to present it
− to know what is right or wrong based on context
II. Dimensions of the self
 SUPEREGO – to achieve the superego, it can be cruel and punishable
- scholars examining the self-concept focus on self-identities, the kind of person we see ourselves as __
− looking at the perfection of things, we felt embarrasment and guilt when we have
and self-evaluations, the judgements we make of ourselves
fallen short of the high expectations
- Three self-evaluations often studied include: 1.) Self-Esteem, 2.) Mastery, 3.) Mattering

IX. GILBERT RYLE

III. the Self as a Process
- “in searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted”
- From the symbolic interactionist perspective, the self is a process, just like the construction of any
 Self and behavior: “I made it, and so I am”
social reality
└> Wrong bases and problems arise on how we give meaning and how we deliver or how we
- We give meaning to our self in many different ways during our interactions with others by asking
paraphrase the words
questions like
 GHOST IN THE MACHINE – the mysterious component called mind, controls the mechanistic body
 Are we good or bad people?
 How well do we do the tasks we set out to do?
X. PATRICIA CHURCHLAND
- “to understand the mind, we must understand the brain”
IV. The I and the Me
- modern philosopher who studied the brain (“The self as a brain”)
- We use symbols and language to communicate with other people, but we also use language to think
- the physical brain allows us to say we are so different
internally, a process Herbert Blumer calls SELF-INDICATION
- In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and
- According to George Herbert Mead, a large part of our internal dialogue occurse as interplay between
exactly at what level of description remains to be seen.
the Me, the organized set of attitued toward the self, and I our active self.

XI. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

V. IDENTITY AND IDENTITY THEORY
- French Phenomenological Philosopher
 IDENTITY – refers to our internalized, stable senses of who we are, including role identities, social
- Philosophical movement called Existentialism
categories, and personal characteristics
- Rejects Edmund Husserl’s philosophical movement
 IDENTITY THEORY – examines the ways society shapes how we view ourselves, and how those
- analysed experiences, perceptions and difficulties of human existances
views, or identites, affect our behavior
- “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything
PRINCIPLES OF IDENTITY THEORY (identity theory is rooted on five basic principles)
without its acquiring a name in history”
1. Behavior is based on an already classified world
- “the body is our general medium for having a world”
2. Positions in society are among the things classified
3. People develop their identities based on their positions in society
4. We incorporate our social positions into our sense of identity
5. Social behavior is derived from the shaping and modifying of the expectations of our
positions
VI. EMOTIONS AND IDENTITIES
- David Heise’s affect-control theory – incorporates elements of identity theory; it states that emotions
serve as signals about how well we are producing our identites
- Congruence between our self-perceived identity and the information we receive about ourselves
generally produces positive emotions
VII. Dramaturgical Sociology
- From an interactionalist perspective, individuals have the ability to choose how to act, above-and-
beyond their inclinations
 DRAMATURGICAL SOCIOLOGY - The study of how we present ourselves, playing roles and
managing impressions during interactions with other people
└> is most closely associated with Erving Goffman (1922-1982)
VIII. GOFFMAN AND IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
- Erving Goffman believed that we use information from others’ presentations to help establish
expectatiions of our behavior and that of the people around us
- IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT – refers to the ways individuals seek to control the impressions they
convey to other people, however, there are impressions given and impressions given off – the
imperssion you believe that you are giving and the impression the other person has of you
IX. Motivations behind impression management
- Goffman argued that we are driven to maintain positive impressions, probably because outcomes of
interactions serve as a source of self-esteem
- supporting others’ impressions is important because we may need support in our own impression
management efforts later in the interaction
X. REGIONS OF IMPRESSION FORMATION (affect how we interacts with people)
1. FRONT STAGE – the place where we present ourselves to others
2. BACKSTAGE – the region where we relac our impression management efforts and we may practive
our performances
[People regularly move in and out of these regions]
XI. THE SITUATED SELF
- in the interactionist framework, the self changes as quickly as our social environments
- social forces like globalization and technological advances lead to rapid changes in our social worlds
- scholars to argue that we have a much more situated self, a temporally based sense of who we are,
associated with a lack of clear sense of identity
X. The self and social structure
- scholars from the social structure and personality perspective focus on how our social positions and
relationships affect our self-evaluations
- researchers from this tradition often study the relationship between social positions and the selfl-
concept in the form of self-esteem, mastery and mattering
XI. Evaluative Dimensions of the Self
- Three of the most studies forms of the self-concept include self-esteem, mastery, and mattering
 SELF ESTEEM – is the positive or negative evaluation of our self as an object
 MASTERY – refers to our perceptions of our ability to control our environments
 MATTERING – refers to our sense that we are important to other people in the world
XII. SELF ESTEEM
- is considered a foundatuional aspect of the self
- it answers the question: “How good am I?”
- There are four sources of the self-concept, including self-esteem: 1.) Social comparisons, 2.) Reflected
Appraisals, 3.) Psychological centrality, 4.) Self-perceptions
- Research generally shows that reflected appraisal are most central to our self-esteem
XIII. Mastery
- Addresses the question: “How powerful am I to do the things I would like to do?”
- Personal accomplishments are the most important source of efficacy in adulthood
- Several studies show that higher levels of mastery is associated with fewer mental and physical health
problems
XIV. Mattering
- it answers the question: “How much do I matter to others”
- Morris Rosenberg argued that we have an intrinsic need to feel that we are needed by the people
around us
- Research show that mattering is positively related to self-esteem and negatively related to depression
and anxiety
XV. Measuring the Self-Concept
- scholars rely on a number of common methods to asses the self-concept
- Manford Kuhn’s Twenty-Statements Test (TST) is a popular way to measure the self
- Morris Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale is popular method of assessing self-esteem
XVI. Class and Self-Esteem
- Rosenberg and Pearlin (1978) used data from surveys of children, adolescents, and adults from
Baltimore and Chicago to compare levels of self-esteem at different class levels
- The researchers found that social class position begins to affect self-esteem as children enter
adolescence, when occupation, income and education become more important to one’s identity
XVII. Ethnicity and Self-Identities
- Ethnicity not only affects self-evaluations, it is an integral to self-identities a) Mind as the Product of Social Interaction

XVIII. Identity and Group Processes

 GROUPS − serve as a way to establish and maintain our sense of self
− can also serve to give you an identity that is a collective one

XIX. social identity theory

 SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY – argues that we carry self-definitions that match all the categories to
which we belong. In theory these self-definitions are called “social identities”
- Originally developed in psychology, social identity theory proposes that our social identities describe to
us who we are, provide us with information about how to behave, and tell us how we should evaluate
other people

XX. Social identity theory and interactions

- Social identity theory says that we will perceive ourselves according to that identity and behave in ways
that are stereotypical of that identity
- We also engage in a process of categorization, the process through which we draw sharp dividiving
lines between group membership categories and assign people to relevant categories
- Once categorized, we engage in self-enhancement, the process through which we make comparisons
that favor our group

XXI. Bringing it all together

 INTERACTIONISTS – emphasize how our sense of self is actively constructed
 Social structure and personality scholars – focus on the ways that our social positions impact the
self concept
 GROUP PROCESSES – work emphasize the important role of group memberships in our sense of
identity

XXII. symbolic interactionism

- a theoretical perspective in which society is viewed as composed of symbols that people use to
establish meaning, develop their views of the world, and communicate with one another
- the idea of symbolic interactionism was formed as a result of three perspectives:
1. The Person
a) Introduction
b) Mead at Chicago
2. A summary of ideas
a) Introduction
b) The self in society
c) The Genesis of the Self
d) Mead as a Pathsetter
3. The Original Work