Abstract
Historians of ideas and students of comparative cultures debate the extent to which all people share e.e. cummings’s ideal of being “nobody-but-myself”. However, within the modern Western European tradition, most of our political philosophies, theologies, and common sense belief systems emphasize the uniqueness and autonomy of individuals.
To be nobody-but-myself — in a world which is doing its best night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings
Earlier versions of this material were presented to philosophers at Colby College and to psychologists at the University of Maine. I would like to thank the students and faculty for their feed-back on both of those occasions.
I would also like to acknowledge the influence of John Watkins’ philosophical work on the general perspective taken in this paper, especially his excellent article, ‘Imperfect Rationality’, which combines a normative analysis with the pragmatic aspects of human decision making, as well as his spirited defense of methodological individualism.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Koertge, N. (1989). Stereotypes, Statistics, and Schemata. In: D’Agostino, F., Jarvie, I.C. (eds) Freedom and Rationality. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 117. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2380-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2380-5_7
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