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Semiotic Scaffolding of the Social Self in Reflexivity and Friendship

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Abstract

The individual and social formation of a human self, from its emergence in early childhood through adolescence to adult life, has been described within philosophy, psychology and sociology as a product of developmental and social processes mediating a linguistic and social world. Semiotic scaffolding is a multi-level phenomenon. Focusing upon levels of semiosis specific to humans, the formation of the personal self and the role of friendship and similar interpersonal relations in this process is explored through Aristotle’s classical idea of the friend as ‘another self’, and sociologist Margaret Archer’s empirical and theoretical work on the interplay between individual subjectivity, social structure and interpersonal relations in a dynamics of human agency. It is shown that although processes of reflexivity and friendship can indeed be seen as instances of semiotic scaffolding of the emerging self, such processes are heterogeneous and contingent upon different modes of reflexivity.

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Notes

  1. For dialogism and semiotics, see Petrilli and Ponzio (2005). Relational thinking in biosemiotics has often been inspired by notions specific to the human levels like Kierkegaard’s notion of the self that Hoffmeyer (1996: 50) quotes: “But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates to itself, or else it is within the relationship that the relation relates to itself; it is not the Self that is the relationship, but that the relation relates to itself.” Hoffmeyer comments that “a human being becomes a ‘self’ insofar as it can, in a given action or choice context, stand back from the situation and evaluate its own relationship to it. Thus, a “self” presupposes a three-factor relation in which the individual refers both to the situation in which he finds himself and to his own presence in that situation.” (ibid.). This capacity is what Archer (see below) terms reflexivity.

  2. “a man’s best friend is the one who not only wishes him well but wishes it for his own sake (even when nobody will ever know it)”, from Lynch (2005: 15-16) quoting Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics 1167a18-b64; the same idea is stressed in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics (cf. Stern-Gillet 1995: chapter 3). As to the gender issue, Aristotle saw virtue friendship as a (relatively rare) relation between good, wealthy, and virtuous men, and though he did not preclude that if husband and wife are decent, their friendship may be one of virtue, he was not very interested in and had few and inconsistent remarks on women, which should be seen against the backdrop of a socially unequal and patriarchal Greek city state (Baltzly and Eliopoulos 2009). This article assumes a different backdrop and do not use “he or she” all the time.

  3. “The decent person, then, has each of these features in relation to himself, and is related to his friend as he is to himself, since the friend is another himself” (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics,1166a29-32, here quoted from Stern-Gillett (1995: 28), other similar quotesibid. and chapter 2 passim). See also the penetrating analysis provided by Pangle (2003).

  4. Grayling (2013: 35) claims it to be overstated and a distortion in subsequent treatments of friendship, but most scholars, including Stern-Gillet, scrutinize its possible interpretation and implications.

  5. Interestingly, Donati uses the example of friendship in one of his attempts to explicate the emergent reality of social relations and the relational character of social reality Donati (2011: 65f).

  6. Archer conceives her theory in the tradition of critical realism. I consider her notion of reflexivity as internal conversation to be fully consistent with semiotics.

  7. p. 276 in The Principles of Psychology, here quoted from Archer (2003: 62).

  8. Also Petrilli-and-Ponzio (2005: 51, cf. p. 55-56) quote this expression from Colapietro, see next note.

  9. p. 115-16 in V. Colapietro, Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity(Albany, N.Y.: State University Press, 1989), here quoted from Archer (2003: 69).

  10. Though some may be tempted to explain severely fractured reflexivity by individual psychopathology, Archer abstains from direct psychological explanations. Affective disorders such as depression or anxiety are often the effects rather than the causes of the situations in which the fractured reflexives find themselves. Far from all are affliced by such disorders, and fractured reflexivity is a broader phenomenon Archer (2003: 303f).

  11. (Archer 2012: 167f) notes that for the generation of autonomous reflexives, it is often the absence of relational goods from their parents, rather than the presence of relational evils, that is influential: “autonomous subjects are parented by two individuals rather than by a couple”.Being a couple is seen as an emergent relational phenomenon orienting both partners to their relationship and its products. Her distinction, based upon a notion of ‘relational reflexivity’ (ibid., p. 96-99, 115-124; see also (Donati 2011), between a couple producing relational goods (such as love, reliance, caring and trust), and a mere partnership with no development of ‘we-ness’ or collaborative decision-making, could as well be applied to different kinds of long-term multifaceted friendship, a topic Archer did not investigate in depth.

  12. Further insights may be gained from the independent work of political psychologist Graham Little (2000), whose category of “communicating friendship” (of people coming from what he calls “special families”) has some affinity to Archer’s meta-reflexives, just as his category of “social friendship” (of individuals from “strong families”) are partly similar to the autonomous reflexives, and his “familiar friendship” (often of persons from “good families”) share similarities with Archer’s communicative reflexives. Though we are only talking about similarities – these notions are not completely parallel – the existence of some affinity is interesting. Little may give us a clue as to the scaffolding function of friendship for the meta-reflexives, especially those kinds of friendship which is “an attempt to link the social emphasis on achieving in society with the familiar emphasis on being content with yourself, hoping to avoid the narrowness and conformity of one and the sentimentality and dependence of the other” Little (2000: 180).

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Acknowledgments

The research was financed by the University of Copenhagen and the Danish Velux Foundation’s research programme Humanomics (grant no. 437810). Thanks to David Budtz Pedersen, Frederik Stjernfelt, Simo Køppe and members of the Humanomics research group for good suggestions. Thanks to Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzalez, Mariana C. Broens and Maria José Vicentini Jorente for inspiration and thoughts and for inviting me to the VIII International Conference of Information, Knowledge and Action (EIICA) and the VII International Coloquium of Philosophy of Mind (CIFM) in Marilia, São Paulo State, December 2013. Thanks are also due to Jon Nixon, Susan Haack, Henrik Zinkernagel, Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Theresa Schilhab, Wendy Wheeler, and Di Ponti for comments, help, critique and support, and the same goes for my old biosemiotic friends.

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Emmeche, C. Semiotic Scaffolding of the Social Self in Reflexivity and Friendship. Biosemiotics 8, 275–289 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-014-9221-0

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