Self Reflexivity. The Ultimate End of Knowledge
Bogdan Popoveniuc2014, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences
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Abstract
In the history of modern knowledge one could notice the analogies that exist between the paths and the resolutions of any major forms of non-dogmatic enquiry which attempted to provide a comprehensive explanation and understanding of the Human Being and the Universe. The investigation in the Natural Sciences established the cornerstone of objectivity as its guiding principle. From the beginning, it has looked downward for the most solid foundation in objects and ended up finding the human consciousness reflected by the very core of quantum reality, the (self-)reflexivity of human consciousness in quantum reality. In the Social and Psychological Sciences, the (self-)reflexivity of a particular knowledge (theory/matter) over the knowledge that produced it (discipline itself/researcher) forms the main epistemological and methodological debate over the meaning and the condition of possibility for the scientific objectivity in the field. Modern Philosophy started with the methodical doubt from the Cartesian Meditations, advanced through a transcendental perspective and ended in the pure self-reflexivity of the phenomenological consciousness. Even if the unavoidable conclusion is that Self-reflexivity has proved to be the closing stage of any mature reflective mode of knowledge-whether it was natural, social or psychological science, philosophical or literary-the key question is 'Why?'
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From Socrates' admonition to know oneself and his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, the self has occupied a central place in philosophical and scientific inquiry. Debates about the self include metaphysical questions on the nature and reality of selfhood, empirical questions about the developmental and historical trajectory of the human selves, and ethical questions about agency, responsibility, and autonomy. The answers to these metaphysical, empirical, and ethical questions are intertwined, as the nature of selfhood both constrains and enables the range of moral and political actions the individual engages with in a social world. This entry focuses on the realist and antirealist positions on the metaphysical question of the reality of the self and its scientific investigation. Realism has two fundamental commitments about the world posited by scientific theories: existence and evaluation-independence. According to the existence claim, both the everyday world of objects and their properties-the subject of scientific theorizing-do exist. According to the evaluation-independence claim, the objects and properties posited by a scientific theory exist independent from what human beings think about them or how they are linguistically articulated. As a corollary, realists about the self argue that the self exists; its features are evaluation independent; and these features can be scientifically investigated. Antirealists on the other hand suggest that there is no such thing as the self, that it is merely a construct and what is identified as its features are contingent upon cultural and linguistic practices.
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Our principal thesis is that reflexivity is a fundamental and defining attribute of humanness itself. Here this thesis has it roots, most basically, in the philosophical anthropology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and his ontology of the betwixt and between. What we have in mind by "reflex-ivity", then, is not to be confused with or misconstrued for the relatively recent anthropological movement that also centered on a notion or notions of reflexivity, and had its beginnings in the 1970s. Granting its impact, provocation, and appeal over two to three decades, that movement was for the most part a matter of taking reflexivity as a methodology for rethinking anthropological research in light of postcolonialism and other ethical concerns of ethnographic practice. In contrast, we see reflexivity as significantly broader than a social scientific scholarly performance or a prescription to guard against our own cultural givens. Insofar as we see a connection, it is this: when considered as a defining feature of the being and becoming of the human, reflexivity emerges as a normally unseen, because natural, platform on the basis of which the word "reflexivity" was, in productive but cognitivistically circumscribed ways, understood by that previous anthropology.
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