Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Philosophy

Committee Chair

Deborah Tollefsen

Committee Chair

Remy Debes

Committee Member

Ásta Ásta

Committee Member

David Gray

Abstract

This dissertation explores the nature of social identity by examining both the collective identity of groups and the social selves of individuals. I start by offering a Humean model of collective identity. On this model, the metaphysical nature of group persistence depends on our psychological dispositions and our explanatory goals. On this view, collective identity is a fiction—something that humans ascribe to a group—rather than something that exists independently. I argue that this Humean model has advantages over structural and intentional theories of group persistence. I then move onto the topic of social construction and its incompatibility with methodological individualism. Here, I focus on the conferralist framework of social construction, and I argue that the conferralist framework cannot explain how social statuses become anchored in a context with individualistic tools alone. To remedy this, I offer what I call the shared perspective model to explain why group attitudes are needed in order to fully explain the kind of social phenomena at which conferralism aims to describe. Finally, I develop a notion of the social self. I argue that one’s social self is a bundle of conferred statuses that do not diachronically persist from context to context. I turn towards George Herbert Mead’s notion of the generalized other to describe how one’s social self achieves synchronic unity. On this view, for there to be normative priority between the statuses that compose a social self requires that individuals adopt a shared perspective that is directed towards some goal.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest.

Notes

Open Access

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