From Cradle to Internet. The Social Nature of Personal Identity

Contrary to what Descartes argued many centuries ago, the self seems far from being a simple and indivisible entity, easily accessible to personal scrutiny. In this paper I will endorse an anti-Cartesian attitude, starting from two different perspectives. On the one hand, I will consider clinical and develop- mental studies showing how strongly interpersonal relations modulate the quality of introspective access. In this section, I will take into account Neisser's theory of self-knowledge and Gergely and Watson’s con- structivist approach. On the other hand, I will consider the extended mind paradigm, a recent philosophi- cal model that seems compatible with the idea that some important aspects of the self may extend to the physical world. This latter point acquires special importance when considering how widespread certain electronic tools such as second generation search engines will be in the future.