The Social construction of our inner selves

Abstract This paper contains an elaboration of a dialogic, relational paradigm for psychology. The dialogical view is based upon three major assumptions drawn from the works of Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, and others. The dialogical viewpoint focuses on (a) human activity as the product of joint action between individuals, (b) actual, lived utterances as the formative units of situations and joint action, and (c) the ways in which utterances are actualized within speech genres and other social organizations that frame joint action. From this relational view, it is argued that we create our sense of our inner lives through speakings that occur within joint activity and larger forms of social and spoken life. Thus, what psychologists often take to be existing cognitive entitites–intentions, memories, motives, perceptions, emotions, etc.–are not objective and finalized, but are in the process of construction as a function of one's sense of how one is placed in relation to others within varied discursive circumstances.