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Am I Who I Say I Am? Social Identities and Identification 647
On this view, then, we avow S when we would give S as a response to
the question “Who...
Pomodliłem się do każdego boga jaki istniał bym był w wstanie wkurzyć tę kobietę do granic możliwości. |
Let us call these responses “self-avowals.”
And just to be clear let us define self-avowals as follows: self-avowals
are self-referring descriptions that a person avows or would avow in re-
sponse to the question “Who am I?”5
This account makes an assumption that needs to be made explicit.6 To
see it, consider the case of Maria described earlier. When she answers the
question “Who am I?” in a certain context she would say “Hispanic.”
However, as we noted earlier, her psychological relationship to this so-
cial status does not amount to identification. So in this case it would
seem that a self-avowal, by itself, does not get us to identification. What SA assumes is that people will understand that the question “Who am I?”
is asking for a list of features that, in some respect, have a special importance to the person being questioned. That is, according to the self-avowal account, identification does not amount to simply saying that one is a thus and such. It is saying it and taking some kind of importance-making psychological stance toward the self-avowal. So the self-avowal account needs a story to tell about just what this stance is. Below I will
look at some options that have been offered by philosophers that might
help fill the lacuna in the account, starting with K. Anthony Appiah’s
work on this issue.
3. Making the Self-Avowal Account Work
One finds Appiah’s most developed approach to the issue of identifica-
tion in his recent article “Does Truth Matter to Identity?”7 On his view,
we identify with a self-avowal when we take it as reason to act in a par-
ticular way.8 To see what Appiah means by this, we first need to have a
basic understanding of what taking something as a reason to act amounts
to. As always, an example will help clarify things. Suppose George raises
his hand. When he performs this activity we typically assume that he has
5This is made explicit by Weigert et al. in Society and Identity, pp. 30-35.
6David Copp calls attention to this problem in “Social Unity and the Identity of Persons,” Journal of Political Philosophy 10 (2002): 365-91, p. 367. Copp does not reject the questionnaire account in general; in fact, he utilizes its basic structure. However, he does try to offer a way to single out the self-avowals one might give in response to such a questionnaire that are relevant for a person’s identities.
7Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Does Truth Matter to Identity?” in Jorge J.E. Gracia (ed.), Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 19-44.
8Ibid., p. 27.
648 Nathan
Placencia
a reason for doing so. He has a question to ask, he needs to get some-
one’s attention, or, perhaps, he wants to say hello. All of these considerations count in favor of acting in this particular way, that is, raising one’s hand. When a consideration counts in favor of acting in a particular way,
I will call it a reason for action. Turning back to the example, for sim-
plicity’s sake, let’s just say that George’s reason for raising his hand is to say hello.9 For a social status to be reason-producing, it must fill the role that George’s desire to say hello plays in the story above, that is, it must give a person a reason to act. To see how a social status could play this
role, consider a variation of one of Appiah’s examples.10
Don avows being an Angelino. While on a trip to New York, he be-
comes stuck in a crowd in which people are being shoved and pushed.
Among the mob he sees two other Angelinos, whom he recognizes be-
cause they are wearing shirts that identify them as residents of Los An-
geles. He is a big strong guy, so he has no trouble maneuvering through
the crowd. He wants to help some of the other people having a hard time
and he reasons that since he is an Angelino, he’ll help the other Angeli-
nos. One might think that this is a morally questionable decision. But
that’s not the issue we need to focus on. What is important about this
example is that he is taking this self-avowal as a consideration that
counts in favor of acting in a particular way, namely, helping the other
Angelinos. Likewise, suppose José thinks to himself “I am a father now;
I need to learn to balance my bank account,” or Maria takes being Gua-
temalan as a reason to protest the policy of referring to Guatemalans as
simply Central-Americans. On Appiah’s model, Don, José, and Maria
can be said to identify with their social statuses because they take them
to be reasons for acting. Thus we might put Appiah’s view as follows:
SAA: A person identifies with some social status S, if and only if she
avows S and she treats her avowal of S as a reason to act in certain ways.
It seems to me that Appiah is right insofar as he analyzes our identifica-
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