Towards a convergence of Dialogical Self Theory and Semiotic Self Theory through triadic phenomenology

Some basic elements of Dialogical Self Theory

The model of DST originally derives from James’s classic I/Me distinction from his The Principles of Psychology (1890) “reformulated in narrative terms by seeing the I as author and the Me as actor” (Hermans et al., 1992, p. 27), and Bakhtin’s (1986) dialogical analysis of the polyphony of voices in the novels of Dostoyevsky. The description of a novel in which there is not a single author leads to the proposal of one of the core concepts of DST, the dialogical self as “a dynamic multiplicity of I-positions” (Hermans & Gieser, 2012, p. 2). The boundaries between the private/internal realm and the social/external are porous: there is no insurmountable barrier between the collective and the individual; the self is construed as a “society of mind” (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 7), since “the I emerges from its intrinsic contact with the (social) environment and is bound to particular positions in time and space” (Hermans & Gieser, 2012, p. 2). In DST, each I-position is endowed with its own voice, thus a dialogical exchange can develop among positions (Hermans & Gieser, 2012, p. 2). To assuage the concern that this conception of the self may entail an excessive fragmentation or dissociation, and with it the impossibility of a person to live in society, DST argues that the adequate functioning of people involves the capacity “to move flexibly from one position to another” (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 304). There is a position that possesses an overarching status from which the person establishes connections between I-positions in a self-reflective way; this “meta-position” emerges not as a given or pre-ordained center of the multiplicity of voices, but as a horizon of evolving unity towards which positions gravitate (Hermans, 2004, pp. 23–24).

Regarding the relevance of meaning for identity matters, DST claims that: (a) meaning is never the product of an isolated individual but the upshot of a social negotiation and (b) meaning is never a fixed entity, but a dynamic and collective achievement (Salgado & Clegg, 2011).

At the core of Peirce’s definition of sign (see below), we find the notion of the dialogical as well as the processual dimension of meaning. Such a theory can contribute to the understanding of how sign-mediated dialogues involve a developmental functioning that is relevant to further elaborate on the temporal, evolving dimension of the self.

One of those elements has to do with the concept of teleology that Ellis and Stam (2010) bring in as a way to enrich the notion of “agency” in DST. They revisit Ricoeur’s hermeneutic analysis of the ethical dimension of human action, so as to go beyond the concept of “volitional capacity” (Hermans & Kempen, 1993, p. 45), which they find insufficient (Ellis & Stam, 2010, p. 433). Introducing moral values as a teleological explanation of the ethical accountability that pertains to any dialogical encounter not only enriches DST, but also brings in an interesting convergence with SST, as we will discuss below.

Some basic elements of Semiotic Self Theory and their kinship with Dialogical Self Theory

As a first approach to SST, we refer to Colapietro’s (1989) pioneering monograph, Peirce’s Approach to the Self: “For Peirce, the self is first and foremost a sign in the process of development” (p. 66). This is a corollary of Peirce’s critique of Cartesian intuitionism (Colapietro, 2006; Michaels, 1977). As there is no direct self-knowledge, an inferential, sign-mediated process must be carried out: we get to know the self just as we come to know anything else, through fallible inference by relying on signs. In Peircean logic, which for him is just another name for “semiotic” (CP 2.227), the working of signs takes place in an interpersonal and in an intrapersonal realm: “Logic is rooted in the social principle” (CP 2.654). On the evolving, developmental nature of signs, Colapietro (1989) claims that

the individual self apart from others as well as apart from its future (both its individual future and collective future) possesses a merely negative status. This characterization of the self, thus, makes reference to the future essential to its mode of being: To be a self is to be in process of becoming a self, a process that is never complete. (p. 78)

This description is not an attack or negation of the ontological status of the individual. We can compare it with Ellis and Stam’s (2010) incursion in hermeneutics, to posit the teleological and ethical nature of the self in DST: “The dialogical self is a dynamically unfolding entity, intimately connected to others and dependent on them for its very maintenance” (p. 421). It is easy to misconstrue the negative status of the self in Peirce’s bold claim. It echoes his description of the emergence of the self as the site of ignorance and error (“it is necessary to suppose a self in which this ignorance can inhere,” CP 5.233). ² Colapietro (1989) argues that Peirce does not deny human agency or self-control; he only states that “the self is distinguishable but not separable from others … it is always, in principle, possible for the self to become one with some other: this possibility belongs to the essence of selfhood” (p. 73).

Another aspect of the theoretical basis of SST that is convergent with DST comes from the dialogical relationship between Peirce and his lifelong friend, William James. The following passage points to the absence of an absolute dichotomy between the inner and external realm in identity matters:

In what does the identity of man consist and where is the seat of the soul? … But are we shut up in a box of flesh and blood? When I communicate my thought and my sentiments to a friend with whom I am in full sympathy, so that my feelings pass into him and I am conscious of what he feels, do I not live in his brain as well as in my own – most literally? (CP 7.591)

This is why Colapietro (1989) describes the body as a medium for the expression of the self “not as something in which the self is located” (p. 38). Now, to describe what is involved in defining the self as a developing (triadic) sign, we need to introduce some definitions of this key concept of triadic semiotic.

A Peircean scholar sums up the gist of this sign model thus: “the idea of one thing manifesting a second to a third – providing experiential access to it, revealing it, mediating the one to the other – is among the most helpful intuitive understandings of what semiotic is supposed to be about” (Ransdell, 1991, Chapter 2). The systemic purport of the object-sign relation in the triad is to generate a more developed sign (its interpretant) through the logical determination of the sign by its object. The entire process of sign action or “semiosis” (CP 5.484) consists in generating interpretants, and as these are also signs, they generate further interpretants. The utterance “it’s very nice outside” said in a certain way, for example, a friendly tone of voice and look (sign), has the power ³ to generate a meaning effect (interpretant) on the person being addressed, namely, an invitation to go out, while the object of the sign could well be the desire of the utterer to go out together. If the addressee gets ready quickly, which is an interpretant, that attitude is also a sign, and as such it creates a more developed meaning/interpretant that conveys that she really liked that invitation to the person who made the first utterance.

In his late writings, Peirce describes “semiosis simply (as) a conversation,” and the self as being both “speaker and listener …” in it (Colapietro, 1989, p. 38). But the social is also part of that conversation: “in any utterance the self makes there are echoes of the discourses of others” (p. 38). Still, human agency and autonomy based on self-control are preserved through the distinction between “the self as an interpreting subject and the self as an interpreted object” (p. 66). For this distinction to be kept, the self must be able to distance “itself from the stream of signs that at any moment of its existence uses the self as a medium” (p. 66). The self as sign process and the self as concretely manifested at a point in time and place are distinct but closely interrelated.

Instead of the sign-vehicle/meaning dualistic and static relation, the interpretant is a more developed sign whose generation entails temporality: it is a meaning effect of the object/sign relation. Any element can function as a sign, but it “is not actually a sign unless it is used as such; that is unless it is interpreted to thought and addresses itself to some mind” (CP 7.356; see Valsiner, 2007). Based on the interpretant, Peirce produces the entry “tuism” for the 1891 Century Dictionary: “The doctrine that all thought is addressed to a second person, or to one’s future self as to a second person” (as cited in Fisch, 1982, p. xxix). This notion is close to Bakhtin’s (1986) “addressivity,” to the fact that every utterance is “being directed to someone” (p. 95), so that it includes the other in its very origin. The interpretant sign can be compared with the built-in addressivity in DST, which corresponds to the inclusion of the external/alterity as belonging to the self: “Dialogic language is seen as informed by address and reply as the activity where mediation takes place. … Otherness describes the basic position of the individual as addressed and affected … by the other” (Bertau, 2014, p. 444).

Peircean “tuism” means that all thought is dialogical: “thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue – a dialogue between different phases of the ego – so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs” (CP 4.6).

The self as a semiotic process is aimed at the future as it addresses the You—which can refer to another person or to oneself in a future moment—as its interpretant sign:

A person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is “saying to himself,” that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. (CP 5.421)

Nevertheless, the “critical self” can never be fully achieved: as an interpretant, the You manifests the teleological functioning of semiosis, which Ransdell (1992) describes as a “tendency toward a unitary and unifying interpretant” (p. 43). This constitutes the teleological path of the self: the self as a developing sign is guided by ideals. But rather than acquiring those ideals, it is an affair of “surrendering” to them (Colapietro, 1989, p. 96). This is another way in which agency and self-control can be accounted for: “the self can only realize itself by exerting control over itself, and it can only exert control over itself by committing itself to ideals” (p. 95). The common aspects of the conception of “self-organization” and “goal-oriented” (see Valsiner, 2005, p. 202) developmental self process in DST and SST are beyond the scope of this paper.

The principle that signs have the power to generate further signs is the basis of Wiley’s (1994) The Semiotic Self. Based on Colapietro’s (1989) definition of the self as a sign process, he proposes to use the term self for the “generic human structures” upon which singular identities depend and inhere. The self is the most general level of the theory, and identity, or rather, its plural form—particular identities (p. 2)—refers to the embodied or localized manifestations of the self. Each identity implies a set of social features that can be imposed from the outside through socialization, or through some “personalized psychological traits” (p. 36).

To avoid Wiley’s container/contained metaphor, we emphasize the notion of the self as a process, which points to the power of signs to generate further signs. Wiley defines “identities” as the multiple actualizations of the self in ever-changing social circumstances. We claim that they correspond to concrete interpretations, to Peircean dynamical interpretants (“the actual effect which the Sign, as a Sign, really determines,” CP 4.536). ⁴ In the context of the struggle of the American “politics of identity,” Wiley (1994) describes the risk involved in confusing these two levels: “(identities) have the potential to usurp the overall self that contains them” (p. 36). Such a reversal in the self/identities relation would entail turning the polyphonic self into a monological one. Thus, in the postmodern cultural battles, when political, ethnic, or gender identities prevail, or when personalized traits, such as self-concepts, end up absorbing the self and become “quasi cancerous identities that take over the self” (p. 38)—a problem that Wiley compares to Winnicott’s “false-self” (p. 38)—the excessive weight of a single identity can block the generation of further interpretants of the self, of semiotic power and growth.

Wiley’s (1994) model of “internal conversation” consists of a triadic relation that evolves through time. It combines Peirce’s I-You with Mead’s and James’s “I-Me” dialogical relations, and results in a reflexive trialogue that involves the three personal pronouns: “Me-I-You.” The I of the present as the sign stands for the Me of the past, as its object, which is a relation that brings about resistance/alterity, and it addresses a You of the future, its interpretant.

By defining the self as a triadic sign, we construe it as a continuous interpretive process that aims at integrating a multiplicity of different identities. Unity of the self is conceived only as a real tendency to an end (Ransdell, 1992): “this teleology is more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predeterminate end; it is a developmental teleology” (CP 6.156). Despite identities’ being multiple, every interpretive process tends naturally to consistency. When Peirce discusses “personality” as “a coordination of ideas,” he emphasizes its temporal nature: “like any general idea, (it) is not a thing to be apprehended in an instant. It has to be lived in time; nor can any finite time embrace it in all its fullness” (CP 6.155). Wiley’s reflections on the semiotic self were triggered by the need to answer the question of “how the self is a sign, how the definition of a sign could be mapped onto the self, or how the structure of the sign is homologous to the self” (N. Wiley, personal communication, April 22, 2003).

The development of the self aims at the unity of the person through time; it is the result of the interpretive process of thought through which the integrity of the self is pursued. The person as a thinking being “can distinguish in [him or herself] distinct parts that are, in essence, different roles in an ongoing dialogue” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 93). A consistent personal identity is not a given, but an always renewed, forever incomplete accomplishment, the result of an ongoing interpretative integration of the dramatic inner world.

Steps towards a categorial convergence of two theories of the self: DST and SST

Despite the overlapping assumptions in DST and SST, it is difficult not to notice a slight primacy of the spatial dimension in the former and a prevalence of the developmental/temporal dimension in the latter. This is compatible with the aim of DST to solve the dilemma between a centralized self and a disintegrated multiplicity by considering “selfhood as a developmental construct” (Lopes de Oliveira, 2012).

Although SST involves a dialogical conception of the self that includes a description of a dramatic inner domain, namely, “the theater of our inner world” (Colapietro, 1989), ⁵ emphasis is laid on the developmental dimension. Michel et al. (2008) propose the category of Secondness to analyze the notion of alterity in relation to the dialogical self. In what follows, we will discuss the relevance of all three Peircean categories as a theoretical framework to integrate the spatial and the temporal dimensions of the self.

The architectonic of triadic semiotic rests on three universal categories; they are a re-elaboration of the categorial systems of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Peirce posits the categories to analyze every possible experience: “Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness” (CP 1.347); each one underlies a component of the semiotic triad: sign, object, and interpretant, respectively.

The phenomenological analysis of any experience yields only three constitutive elements: qualities (Firstness), existents (Secondness), and mediation (Thirdness). Multiplicity in its sheer variety corresponds to the category of Firstness: feelings considered in their purely qualitative aspect, not yet embodied. Firstness refers to the monadic unrelated aspect of any experience, to sheer possibilities. It is “the mode of being which consists in the subject’s being what it is regardless of aught else” (CP 1.21). Secondness refers to all that consists in an embodied dyadic relation: an element in reaction against another. Peirce describes its impact on interpretation thus: “in the idea of reality, Secondness is predominant; for the real is that which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s creation” (CP 1.325). Alterity can be defined as the experience of resistance whether external or internal. ⁶ The relation of a first element with a second one in sign action refers to that of the ego with the non-ego, which implies “a two-sided consciousness” (CP 8.330). Genuine mediation only comes into being with Thirdness: two elements work together in order to produce a third one as in the generation of the interpretant. Understanding, thought, reason itself, all involve Thirdness, which is defined as the regular working out of general results: “This mode of being which consists, mind my word if you please, which consists in the fact that future facts of Secondness will take on a general character, I call a Thirdness” (CP 1.26). Interestingly, the notion of the interpretant insofar as it is a process of interpretation, it pertains to Thirdness, but as it is an actual understanding of somebody, therefore located in space and time, it also involves Secondness: “The Dynamical Interpretant is whatever interpretation any mind actually makes of a sign. This Interpretant derives its character from the Dyadic category, the category of Action” (CP 8.315, 1909, in a letter to William James).

The mind works with concepts, which are regularities/generalities (Thirdness); it is constrained by existents, which manifest the dyadic resistance of alterity (Secondness), but it is open to possibilism and spontaneity, manifested in an unlimited variety of absolute qualities/ feelings (Firstness). The more complex categories presuppose the simpler ones: so Firstness is presupposed by the other two categories (Ransdell, 1986). Every utterance has an indefinite number of qualities, it occurs at a specific time/space context, and it carries meaning.

A convergent model that incorporates Peircean triadic phenomenology to DST is Raggatt’s (2010a, 2010b, 2014). ⁷ His proposal is based on the fact that both theories share a conception that combines a manifold of representations of identity with an integrated self as an ongoing achievement, the upshot of a process, not a preexistent, static entity:

There is synergy here with dialogical self theory because multiplicity is a fundamental premise in dialogical conceptions of a self. At the same time, however, a dialogical approach should be able to account for experiences of integration or for “centralizing tendencies” in the experience of self. (Raggatt, 2010a, p. 401)

Raggatt (2010a) posits “dialogical triads” (p. 408) to study the internal dialogue. He combines “the dialogical self as multi-positioned or ‘multi-voiced’ with the role of ‘mediating objects’ as symbols for self-representation” (p. 400).

In a discussion of a clinical case study, Raggatt (2010b) proposes the notion of “ambiguous mediating objects,” which are “simultaneously appropriated as part of the self and rejected as ‘not part of me’” (p. 456). The following is an example of this concept: “the same aspect of body image signifies different I-positions. Charles’ ‘strong face’ and his ‘craggy face,’ like the figure of Quentin Crisp, are one and the same object, but this object embodies both his humiliation and his activism” (2010a, p. 412). We think this description evinces the teleological action of Thirdness: a tendency towards a synthesis and a unity that entails growing complexity as the self develops and tries to come to terms with opposite identities.

Another convergent proposal of semiotic and dialogism is that of Uslucan (2004), who discusses the shared assumptions of Bakhtin’s “multivoicedness,” “dialogicality,” and “addressivity” as being inseparable from the triadic sign functioning: “And insofar as we cannot think without signs, Peirce would agree with Bakhtin that we cannot think without being in dialogue with our social world” (2004, p. 102). This is how Thirdness accounts for addressivity in the self as a sign. Now we would like to bring out more explicitly the interrelatedness of the three categories.

The three categories of experience as a possible common framework of DST and SST

In order to highlight the interrelation of the three phenomenological categories and to further elaborate their functioning in the internal dialogical realm, we will use Wiley’s (1994) I-Me-You “internal conversation” model (p. 13), in order to compare it with DST.

The I pronoun in the present corresponds to the category of Firstness, a fleeting, subjective feeling/quality. The second pronoun comes from the I-Me dialogue of James and Mead. The Me or the “empirical” (James) self of the past is a stubborn existential external and internal limit—alterity as Secondness. This is a dyadic Ego/Non-Ego interactive-oppositional aspect, or as Valsiner (2005) describes it, “I and not-I (me)” (p. 201). Otherness is a constraint in self-interpretation: “something that forces its way to recognition as being something other than the mind’s creation” (CP 1.325). The Me as an instance of Secondness limits the potentially omnipotent activity of thought upon the world. This category comprises both the Other within and without; alterity is characterized by opposition regardless of whether we may agree or disagree with this Other. The experience of ego vs. non-ego is the outcome of a direct consciousness that reacts to the sensation of a constraint, and it can only be grasped or understood when it becomes (self) knowledge. For this to take place, there must be the mediation of a third element (CP 7.630).

From the perspective of DST, Wiley’s internal conversation has been criticized by Lysaker (2006, pp. 42–44), who warns about the risks of reducing the self to thought and to self-conscious reflection. His objection assumes that there is only one dimension to thought, but according to triadic semiotic theory, self-consciousness only encompasses one aspect of thought, its symbolic element. It is true that the claim that “all thought whatsoever is a sign” (CP 5.421) refers to the prevalence of the symbolic dimension (Thirdness), but it is also true that all symbols involve for their functioning the other two categories, which include non-cognitive aspects of thought (Firstness and Secondness). ⁸

Another critique of Lysaker’s (2006) is that “aligning our creativity and spontaneity with a single term (the present I) elides the multiplicity that we are” (p. 43). To claim that spontaneity characterizes the present I does not suppress multiplicity, because the I in the present has as its distinctive categorial feature its variety, its many possible manifestations. The three components of the internal conversation—the I-Me-You triad—are not three separate entities that relate to each other in a linear, mechanical way. They are connected through logical determination (CP 5.484). As the three categories are intertwined, multiplicity as a manifestation of possibilism—the experience of the I in the present instant—is inseparable from the identities that emerge from concrete interpretations. To the critique of Wiley’s “reflexive trialogue” as being linear, a possible answer is to refer the reader to Peirce’s account of the teleological mechanism of signs: “the future does not influence the present in the direct, dualistic, way in which the past influences the present” (CP 2.86).

In the pursuit of a theoretical convergence of DST and SST, it is relevant to point out the kinship of the manifold of situated I-positions (DST) with the range of actual particular identities (Wiley, 1994) of SST, with the many concrete interpretations of the self as an evolving sign or dynamical interpretants. Hermans (2003) gives a clinical example in which a patient selects six positions to describe himself: “will-less; perfectionist; dreamer, etc.” (p. 117). DST claims that the I is continuous, while the self is discontinuous: “Even if positions are radically different and may at times be experienced as fragmented or pastiche-like, they are diachronically and synchronically united by a continuous I” (p. 101). This is a difference with SST, for which the unifying element is the continuity of the developing self as an open-ended, teleological process, and not the I as the flexible, possible, spontaneous variety. Therefore the continuous nature of the self as a process of sign action (Thirdness) is distinguished from and coexists with still unthought of, possible movements of the I (Firstness), and with actual (dynamical) interpretations or embodied signs (Secondness). ⁹

How does the categorial framework contribute to the convergence of DST and SST? In a classic paper, Hermans (2003) defines the dialogical self

in terms of a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I-positions. In this conception, the I has the capability of moving from one spatial position to another in accordance with changes in situation and time. The I fluctuates among different and even opposed positions, and has the capacity to imaginatively endow each position with a voice so that dialogical relations between positions can be established. (p. 101)

There are three features of the self of DST that made us choose this quote: multiplicity, difference/opposition, and dialogical relations. If we conceive the I abstracted from any actual position, as an I that “fluctuates” among multiple positions, this could be construed semiotically as an instance of Firstness (CP 3.422): the fluctuation of the I has “an element of indeterminacy” (CP 6.13). If viewed as detached from space and time, the fluctuating I can be analytically described in its “freshness, life, freedom” (CP 1.302). In the present instant, there is no Ego/Non-Ego distinction; it is pure spontaneity since “freedom can only manifest itself in unlimited and uncontrolled variety and multiplicity” (CP 1.302).

When Hermans (2003) refers to the I situated in a certain position, this can be construed as pertaining to the realm of Secondness, to the concrete, socio-historical aspect of an interpretation: “But when (someone) asks what is the content of the present instant, his question always comes too late. The present has gone by, and what remains of it is greatly metamorphosed” (CP 1.310). This evokes James’s account (1890) of the stream of thought:

As a snow-flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing … The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. (p. 243)

A situated or positioned I is an existent, as it occupies a determined space and therefore creates resistance. Peirce describes this as a dyadic relation of an Ego to a Non-Ego (CP 1.37). Such opposition implies “a two-sided consciousness of effort and resistance” (CP 1.24), one which “does not involve the sense of time (i.e., not of a continuum), but it does involve the sense of action and reaction, resistance, externality, otherness, pair-edness” (CP 8.41).

While Hermans introduces time together with space as part of the positioning of the I, the inclusion of temporality in SST refers to the category of Thirdness, of generality/regularity. Every rule or regularity allows us to envisage future outcomes. We claim that the process of taking a “general character” has as a counterpart in DST the notion of voices which “behave like interacting characters in a story or movie” (Hermans & Gieser, 2012, p. 2). Insofar as the voice in DST manifests regularity and can set up some type of relationality, it is equivalent to the regularity associated with Thirdness in SST.

To sum up, the category of Firstness accounts for the plasticity of the fluctuating I, for its “flexibility” (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 304), that of Secondness for the encounter of situated, embodied I-positions which, for example, can be counted, as when Hermans (2003) tells about “six positions,” and not five or three, and that of Thirdness, for the continuity and teleological functioning of the self as a process: the tendency towards a meta-position conceived as a horizon of evolving, not a predeterminate (Peirce) unity of the dialogical process.

The diagram attempts to explain the points of convergence between DST and SST (Figure 1). Each node of the triad is labelled with concepts from both theories. The triad is made up of three intertwined nodes: that of the object/Secondness on the left; that of the sign/Firstness above; and that of the interpretant/Thirdness on the right. In the center of the triad there is the self as a semiotic evolving process, a triadic generative relation represented with a Greek sigma. As this process is driven by the tendency to an end (Ransdell, 1992), time is of the essence.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A triadic diagram of the convergence of the Semiotic Self and the Dialogical Self.

The sign node in the triad is the plastic, changing element of Firstness, a fluctuating I of the present, which has limitless possibilities of occupying a manifold of positions, even some not yet imagined. These possibilities are, however, constrained by the embodied encounter with Otherness, which occupies the dyadic pole of the triad, the Me in the diagram. Michel et al. (2008) argue that the self-interpretive process is triggered when the encounter with alterity produces an internal opposition (dialogical opponent). This relation is constitutive of the self, in fact, it is what makes it dynamic, in a way that is not different from how all thought evolves: “The idea of other, of not, becomes a very pivot of thought. To this element I give the name of Secondness” (CP 1.324). This notion is akin to Valsiner’s (2005) Vygotskyan account of DST: “thinking in dualities (involves) systemic units of two opposites that are mutually related by functional dynamic relations” (p. 197). There is a similar account in Abbey (2007): “the counter-voice speaks as an oppositional complement to the focal voice, becoming any and all of the meanings that the voice is not but could become” (p. 79).

The third node of the triad is occupied by the generation of voices, by relationality, mediation: it is the way in which the self develops through the generation of interpretants. The notation Σ designates the entire semiotic process whereof the self is an overarching identity; it is equivalent to a meta-position.

Methodological considerations

Researchers have pointed out the difficulty that dialogical theories have to find methods to observe the self “as it develops interactionally” (Salgado, 2004). Historically, the psychodramatic method has been applied to observe the “self in dialogical action” (Verhofstadt-Denève, 2012). It can be used to study the internal dialogical realm because

a chair or an auxiliary can be brought in to represent the body, a part of the body, or an inner self or personality … the protagonist (of the dramatization) becomes identified with the people and the parts of himself that he invokes, and when externalized on the stage, these parts can engage in dialogue. (Farmer, 1995, p. 19)

To illustrate the proposed theoretical convergence, we draw from a qualitative study (Michel, 2006). Nineteen voluntary university students of both sexes were asked to think about an actual doubt concerning their lives that they were willing to stage through a psychodramatic method based on “the empty chair technique” (Moreno, 1946). The elicited discourse including aspects of the spatial configuration and movements of the participant is used as an input to apply a triadic phenomenological analysis. This research design was also based on Peirce’s idea that thought is naturally triggered by doubts (CP 5.374). We delimited the stage with chairs that represented the arguments in favor or against the ideas that participants had to evaluate. The dramatization started by asking them to verbalize their thoughts (soliloquy), and to bring chairs to visualize different perspectives regarding their doubt. Then, they were asked to sit on one of the chairs so as to express their reflections. As incompatible arguments emerged, they moved from one chair to another to make the development of the inner dialogue visible. After some time, they were asked to describe the position embodied by each chair that they had brought and to give it a name that synthesized the distinctive features of each position. Finally, we asked them whether the resulting positions represented permanent aspects of their self. What we were able to observe was the externalization of an “identity dialogue” (Märtsin, 2010).

A triadic analysis of the internal conversation

We will now illustrate the triadic analysis of an internal conversation of a 23-year-old participant we will call “Luc,” who was concerned with his “relationships.” ¹¹

Luc began his soliloquy by expressing a doubt that he summed up as “love or sex.” He brought a chair that stood for “my belief that both things (love and sex) can walk together.” As he was sitting on it and speaking, suddenly Luc decided to bring a second chair, as an argument against this belief occurred to him: “… I think that it doesn’t … that it doesn’t exist … that kind of romanticism, I think that sex is sex, and that to like someone is to like someone.” Thus a dialogue developed between two positions that he called “my romantic side and my realist side.”

The discordance between the positions became evident in his speech and movements. The staging of an internal dramatic structure as he went back and forth between the two chairs enabled us to observe a pattern of recurrent gestures, words, and tones. This regularity resulted in two opposed tendencies, which Luc described as his “two sides,” as two internal aspects of the self. Thus Luc experienced a temporal phenomenon (regularity) as a spatial (internal) one. He named the distinctive aspects of the self “the pure-romantic” and “the pure-carnal.” From the theoretical viewpoint, they can be analyzed as two inner voices/characters and as dynamical interpretants. These are some of the remarks he made from each voiced position:

Position/Chair 1 (pure-romantic): I believe that it’s possible … that two people may like each other, stay together and feel desire … that they may become partners in their romantic life … in their sexual life, etc…. I believe that.

Position/Chair 2 (pure-carnal): I don’t believe that, because I think that things are separate, because I think that when it comes to sex … one has that need of … of… there is an element of variety … of new things… of … even because new things awaken mmm … maybe … there’s … a wild thing in sex that for me is strong.

The terms pure-romantic and pure-carnal are concrete interpretations, particular identities that arise from the understanding of himself that Luc had at a certain point in time. They are akin to the voiced I-positions of DST, so we can claim that this is a partial self-understanding, since we assume that there are still more positions that Luc did not think of at that time. Such dynamical interpretants are the upshot of actual interactions with specific persons in his past. Although Luc did not give details about the persons with whom he had had romantic relationships, probably due to their intimate nature, he hinted at the fact that what he said and did during the dramatization derived from the actual, concrete interaction with these women in his life. In fact, the entire inner dialogue was related to the end of a romantic relationship. For instance, when he referred to the “the two things (= love and sex) can walk together,” he then said that he did not believe in that “ideal” any longer, because that relationship no longer existed.

Later, Luc delimited another space by standing next to Chair 2, from where he claimed something that modified slightly the meaning of the pure-carnal voiced I-position: “to say that there is also something relational about sex.” And he named it carnal-sensitive. We call this combined position “2a,” since it represents a development of Chair 2 (pure-carnal), which now is not so clearly opposed to Chair 1. It exhibits a tendency towards integration. However, it was not completely achieved during the dramatization, which ended up with the two opposed positions that represented carnal-sensitive and pure-romantic.

At a certain point of this dialogue, Luc stood up, to watch the two opposite chairs from a third, upright position, facing the other two. He remarked impatiently: “Oh! No! … this thing! … From here (Chair 1) it’s possible, from there it isn’t” (Chair 2). This third reflexive position—“it’s possible”—refers to Luc’s ideal, and to his desire to integrate the two opposing positions. The third position is “an overarching identity” (Colapietro, 1990), similar to Herman’s (2004, p. 23) “meta-position,” however it is not a center for the self process but only “a horizon.”

The internal division made it necessary for Luc to search for a more encompassing position from which to take a perspective on what he was expressing: “I want to see both sides arguing!” ¹² Luc describes the standing position as a third one: “I am three in fact, because I here I’m the one who understands the reason why each one thinks what he thinks” and he added: “In fact, I am this one, I am the mixture of those other two. I am the one who understands why he believes in that, and why the other one in something else.” In that position, and with that voice, Luc spoke in his own name. The semiotic power of the critical self in that meta-position (Thirdness) was manifiested in the following comment: “So I, Luc, think: maybe I don’t allow that side of me to appear (= the carnal-sensitive) to defend myself, because I think that I may not live that again, that’s the truth.”

The above utterance results from the functioning of the self-interpretive process, which insofar as it is a process, it pertains to Thirdness. The self does not have complete control of the internal world, because identities are the consequence of the encounter with the external, social world, with others, with oneself as other. As dynamical interpretants they are actual meaning effects, and therefore they are constrained by certain circumstances (Secondness), they are not arbitrary. That is why Luc said: “I may not live that [romantic relationship] again.” His self-reflexive comments provide evidence that he pursues a goal, and to do so is an upshot of Luc’s capacity of self-control. It is not a deliberate decision but a certain directionality of the development of the self. In a similar way to Raggatt’s (2010a) “ambiguous mediating objects,” this carnal-sensitive position combines aspects from two opposite identities. It results from the present interpretation of the concrete past encounters with actual people in Luc’s previous social interactions.

If we apply a triadic analysis to this process of self-interpretation, we distinguish three basic components in it. As belonging to Firstness, we classify the qualities that can be abstracted from Luc’s bodily behavior (tones of voice, bodily rhythms, etc.), which are associated with romanticism, carnality, etc. When the I fluctuates from pure-carnal to a carnal-sensitive position, this entails a qualitative variety—an unlimited range of qualities that one can imagine to express oneself. It corresponds to the manifestation of new “qualities of feeling” (CP 1.304).

As part of Secondness, we classify the actual, concrete signs with which Luc delimits positions as distinct aspects of his self. He did so by uttering some verbal expressions denoting resistance and opposition to his own will, such as “no.” The perception of a constraint forced him to occupy another chair, which embodied the dialogical opponent. Insofar as they are existents, the concrete identities—carnal-Luc vs. romantic-Luc—emerged from his actual relations with others (= the women who had been his partners), who are the objects of the sign, as much as Luc himself in those relationships is its object (Me), the way he reacted to the constraints of life. The following utterance manifests the resistance exerted by alterity on his own self: “a more realistic side [the pure-carnal] which says: no, I’ll never be able to get married ….” In those interactions, there are other elements of the self that resist his will: “… because, I’ll never be able to be with just one person.” This is the I-Me relation that becomes visible in any action that causes resistance not only from others, but, based on his own past experience, also from himself (Me), the alterity in the intrapsychological realm.

As pertaining to Thirdness, we classify voices as interpretants insofar as they were regularities in Luc’s inner dialogue, recurrent patterns that he interpreted as identitites in his quest for self-knowledge. These interpretants are described as dialogical voices or internal characters: “pure-carnal, pure-romantic, carnal-sensitive,” but they should not be confused with fixed or static labels. Insofar as they are signs, they are guided by ideals as their horizon, namely, the self “that is just coming into life in the flow of time” (CP 5.421). Being an ideal, it can never be fully predicted or wholly accomplished. As an evolving interpretant, the critical self arises from a position that is not materialized in any chair: it is Luc speaking from a standing (overarching) position. This moment of reflexivity makes self-control possible: “I am three in fact, because I here I’m the one who understands the reason why each one thinks what he thinks.”

Conclusion

The outcome of our observation of the internal conversation is that the I-positions function dialogically as pairs of opposites (two opposite chairs) that are in triadic relation to an overarching (standing) meta-position. This result could be biased by the research design, by our request to reflect upon a doubt. Still, our interpretation is that the dyadic configuration—the pairs of opposite I-positions—and the meta-position are due to the relational nature of the self as a semiotic process and to its tendency to unity. The self-interpretive process seamlessly blends creative human agency with the objective constraints that our existence comes across all the time, and with its steady pursuit of ideals.

At the end of this article, we need to ask again, what is to be gained by the application of the three phenomenological categories of experience to a possible convergence of the theories of the dialogical and semiotic perspectives? The categories enable us to integrate the multiplicity (Firstness); the spatial, concrete aspect of human identity (Secondness); as well as the unitary, temporal development of self-interpretation (Thirdness). In their open-ended multiplicity, identities can be considered as an opportunity to imagine ourselves as different from what we are here and now. In their concrete dyadic-relational dimension, identities are the embodiment of socially rooted I-positions. These actual, manifested I-positions are the partial, never complete or definitive dynamical interpretants of a general, ongoing dialogical interpretive process of the self. One of those identities should never replace or usurp the self, since it is a tendency towards unity that guides the process of becoming a self. The future directionality of the continuous flow in which our self develops is relational, circumstantial, and ideal as an evolving meaning in a lifelong, multi-voiced conversation of signs and people.

We hope that the phenomenological approach may contribute to the convergence of Dialogical Self Theory and Semiotic Self Theory, and thus help to solve the age-old dilemma of the many which is one, of the multiplicity which life so clearly manifests through a changing social environment, and the ensuing changes that we human beings undergo as long as we exist, but which we stubbornly refuse to consider equivalent to the suppression of the sameness and continuity that are also part of our being.