Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 37, No.

3, 2005

2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Oxford, UK EPAT Educational Philosophy and Theory 0013-1857 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia July 2005 37 3Original Article Emergencies and Emergent Selves Felicity Haynes

Emergencies and Emergent Selves

F

cLici1v



H

avNcs

The University of Western Australia

Abstract

Marshalls (1999) article used Wittgenstein to argue that self functions as an explanation
for a name rather than a referent. This brief response tries to rescue Marshall from an
apparent reduction of self to material body without returning him to the mind/body dualism
that he, with Wittgenstein and Dennett, seeks to avoid. It treats I as an emergent
institutional fact, not inconsistent with a constructed explanation or narrative, but emerging
from shared social practices rather than an abstracted agent.

Keywords: self, identity, agency, emergent institutional facts
I see my hands holding this book. I have hands. How do I know theyre
MY hands? Silly question. Theyre fastened to my arms, my body. How
do I know this is my body? I control it. Do I own it? In a sense I do. Its
mine to do with as I like, so long as I dont harm others If I have this
body, then I guess Im something other than this body In any case,
I and my body seem intimately connected and yet distinct. I am the
controller; it is the controlled. Most of the time.
D. Dennett,

The Minds I

, p. 5
Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in comedy, farce or tragedy
by a

dramatis personae

, the self , and so it will be until the curtain drops.
C. S. Sherrington,

The Integrative Action of the Nervous System

Imagine that a re breaks out in an unsupervised classroom. Most of the students panic,
but one child seizes the water cooler, smashes it against the wall and douses the ames.
In such an emergency, there is no time to consider action, make rational choices. So
what makes this particular child react or act thus? This paper will not construct a theory
to explain functional action in an emergency, but rather examine Jim Marshalls
brief account of self and its implications for the way we think of the self as agent.

Is There an I? No.

When Wittgenstein says (NB, 80e) The thinking subject is surely mere illusion
The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious. The I is not an object. I objectively

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2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

confront every object. But not the I, he denies the usefulness of the ghost in the
machine, the homunculus in control. Despite Daniel Dennetts epigraph above,
Dennett argues that the idea of a separate self in control is an illusion and the often
chaotic army of sub-editors rushing around without a commanding general is
motivated by sets of physiological brainstates. Marshall (1999, pp. 113121) agrees
that I does not refer to a substantive self and that Descartes and Hume were
wrong in asking to what does self or I refer, but he does not seek the recourse
of reducing I to neuronal sequences or memes of habituated brainstates.
Marshall says that he is trying to uncover what Wittgenstein could have been
referring to when he spoke of himself as a person, self , identity, subject,
and subjectivity (1999, p. 9) but the what in that phrase should not give the
impression that these intertwining threads constitute the person named Ludwig
who refers to himself as I. I can no longer be examined as if it were being used
simply to express the collection of experiences that is LW, because that is still to
try to name the referent of I. The notion of an individuated self is a bump which
Marshall wishes to smooth out, a y which he wishes to release from the ybottle.

What is I Used For?

Marshalls contribution is to show how I functions, not as a referent, but as an
explanation for a name I

explains

a name, and

I am LW

has a different
function in language from contingent identity statements (Marshall, 1999, p. 115).
His methodology is the Foucauldian one of looking at practices. In this case, he
tries to explain a name by looking at the conditions under which I is learned
and how I is taught to children. In so doing, he looks at the

use

or function of
the word rather than its

meaning

in a conceptual scheme. To do that he examines
how concepts such as I and conscious and aware are

used

to mutually support
each other but this is a contingent matter rather than the naturalistic correspondence
of statements to states-of-affairs that underpins most representational views of
language. This marks a crucial shift in the philosophical activity. Marshall, following
both Wittgenstein and Foucault, has shifted the issue of I from a semantic one to an
epistemological one, or even, given the centrality of power/knowledge in any edu-
cational institution, to a political one, and one which makes philosophy crucially
relevant to educators.

The Grammar of Self

Marshall, as Wittgenstein did, examines the grammar of rst person psychological
statements, and concludes (p. 117) that Wittgenstein considers them as

expressions

of natural feelings rather than

descriptions

of inner mental states (

emphases in original

)
and these expressions of natural feelings, including pain, are learned (p. 118)

.

A
child learns the use of I and names such as Ludwig almost simultaneously. But
the child who learns how to use these terms must already be a language user and
understand even if tacitly that intention is a necessary component of language. I
then functions to remind people of certain things. I am LW expresses an intention

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2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

to associate, and have others associate, the name LW with criteria of identity such
as the Austrian philosopher, the relentless truth seeker. A centre of consciousness
that cannot be mistaken about I am LW is associated with those criteria and I
has a certain world view as an eye at the boundary of the world of representation.
Marshall concludes that the fact that a mouth is speaking saying that I am LW
identies a centre of language and intentional use for Wittgenstein. Wittgensteins
use of self or I requires a set of mutually supportive and as far as possible coherent
beliefs concerning intentionality, mind, autonomy, self-consciousness, and this
web of mutually supporting beliefs is built up from shared practices in a social
world.

The Agency of Adaptation

Yet for Marshall, Wittgenstein has a curiously deterministic notion of the construc-
tion of this grammar is. Because there is no

dramatis personae

or homunculus, there
can be no actor or agent. He concludes that Wittgenstein was deeply pessimistic
about the ability of the self to do anything but adapt to a decadent world, so that
it becomes a passive acceptor of the shared conventions and practices that contrib-
uted to its very formation. In Wittgenstein, the world as I found it is essentially
the world as I will leave it (Marshall, 1999, p. 120). By some irony, this traps him
in the same sort of reductionism practiced by Dennett, that we construct the idea
of being the controller, or the self empowered to act, but that the separation of the
I from its expression of the body is fanciful. I argue that the emergence of a
constructed self will protect him from this determinism.

I as Emergent Institutional Fact

The constructed or emergent self is not inconsistent with Marshalls focus on the
conditions under which I is learned and how I is taught to children. We may have
to look more closely at the evolutionary epistemologies offered by Piaget, Vygotsky,
Toulmin, Popper, or, more recently, Searle. Realist that Searle (1998) is, he can
retain the notion of a mind, consciousness and intentionality as biological, and
explain an epistemologically objective social reality such as self as being partly
constituted by an ontologically subjective set of attitudes, because he believes that
collective intentionality is a primitive, demonstrated whenever people cooperate.
Collective intentionality is the foundation of all social activities and occurs when-
ever you have people sharing their thoughts, feelings and so on (Searle, 1998,
p. 120). To construct institutional reality Searle does something that Wittgenstein
does not do directly, that is he assigns functionality to human action. The student
who uses the water cooler to extinguish the re is an agent assigning a function to,
or imposing a function on some object even where it is not done consciously. An
agent exploits some natural feature of the object to achieve a purpose. To relate the
notion of a brute reality to an institutional reality, Searle appeals to constitutive
rules which seem to have much in common with Wittgensteins shared conventions
or knowing how to go on. habituated through use and functional.

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2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

This crucial difference of intentional functionality makes a difference to how we
learn the conventions of self and identity. Searle proposes that our institutional
structures evolved out of actions. He tells the story of primitives individually
assigning functions to individual objects, such as using a stump as a seat and then
perhaps together building a wall around their shelters to keep intruders out. The
wall has an assigned function in virtue of its physical features and it has collective
intentionality because a function has been assigned to it. Even if the wall were to
gradually decay, we can imagine that the inhabitants would continue to treat the
line of stones as if it still served the function for which it was built, that they treated
the line of stones as if it was not to be crossed. The wall now serves its function
not in virtue of its physical structure but in virtue of the collective acceptance or
recognition by the individuals acting collectively. Similarly the mechanism of col-
lective intentionality whereby X counts as Y in C can be iterated over time so that
in complex societies, the C term (context) is typically a Y term from an earlier
stage. Searles favourite example is paper money which serves a status function, but
he shows how institutions such as marriage (implying heteronormativity) can be
built up out of iterative contextualization of specic speech acts and collective
intentionality for procreation. Such institutional facts are emergent events, similar
to the emergence of human language (Popper) and of the human brain.
The consequence is that we do not have separate and mutually exclusive classes
of brute and institutional facts. The whole point of having institutional facts such
as money, marriage, theories (or selves) is to gain social control of the brute facts.
While we are embedded in practices of inclusion and exclusion, such practices
direct us in our self-awareness of ourselves, sometimes presenting agonizing stress
for homosexuals like Wittgenstein and Foucault.

Education of the I

Is Foucault as deterministic as Wittgenstein appeared to be? Marshall contrasts
Wittgensteins pessimism with the philosophy of hope carried in Foucaults care
of the self but does not elaborate. Foucaults ongoing concern with the three
modes of objectication which transform human beings into subjects indicates that
as individuals we have very little power to change either the world or ourselves. Yet
Foucaults notion of power/knowledge allows resistance to institutional hegemo-
nies, even where unconsciously expressed by dgeting in class. Resistance is not
inconsistent with the institutional fact of self as agent being presented with other
possibilities, perhaps through education in the arts, or presentation of different
cultural practices, or even global culture on mass media*. It may be that in learning
institutional facts through shared conventions practices, individuals do adopt a
trial-and-error testing of hypotheses, and consider more than one hypothesis at a
time. Our ability to jointly construct institutional facts gives us equal ability to
change or resist them through imagination or philosophical hypothesis, once we
have built a self sophisticated enough for knowledge systems. The process need not
be as rational as Popper suggested in his three worlds or as solipsistic as Piaget
believed. If we interpret Foucaults injunction to take care of the self in a way which

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2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

uses taking care in its widest sense of paying heed to unanticipated possibilities,
we can choose to join, adapt or resist prevailing hegemonies through reection.
Foucaults concern with institutional power and subjectivities still leaves the way
open for teachers to consider in what way they help constitute the identity of
students qua students, or citizens, or commodities or autonomous beings. If it does
not, then there is no point in philosophising.

Acknowledgment

* My thanks to Bruce Haynes for this point.

References

Dennett, D. C. (1978)

Brainstorms

( Vermont: Bradford Books).
Hofstadter, D. R. & Dennett, D. C. (1981)

The Minds I

(Sussex: Harvester Press).
Marshall, J. (1999) Wittgenstein on the Self,

Educational Philosophy and Theory

, 31:2, pp. 113
121.
Popper, K. R. & Eccles, J. C. (1981)

The Self and its Brain

(Berlin, Springer International).
Searle, J. (1998)

Mind, Language and Society

(New York, Basic Books).
Sherrington, C. S. (1947)

The Integrative Action of the Nervous System

, 2nd edn (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press).