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TERM-075: attributed self, and which sense: held, imagined, imagined audience or appropriated

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Properties7
StatusActive
Version2
Tagsself, social-science
Linedistributed-agency
Used byCLAIM-425 — A perspective governs itself with respect to social judgement to the extent that it keeps access to others' judgements of it while making their authority over its conduct depend on their grounds, not on their visibility, repetition or attributed plurality; neither absorbing every judgement nor resisting every one meets this, since both let the judgements set the terms of response, CLAIM-426 — Where a judgement's circulation helps bring about what it says, its visibility, repetition and attributed plurality are evidence about what it will bring about, so the rule that a judgement's authority should come from its grounds and not its visibility holds for judgements of what already is, and not without qualification for judgements of what someone or something will become
ComplementsTERM-045 — self, and which sense
Cited as “uses” byCLAIM-415 — A person can be organized by a judgement they attribute to a collective that does not hold it: the audience in a self-model can be a false unity, and a judgement can shape a person who rejects it, because resisting it makes it consequential

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Definition

An attributed self is a characterization of a person that originates with others, or the person’s model of such a characterization and of who holds it. A claim using it should say which of these it means.

  1. Held attribution. What others actually take the person to be, and act on. A39 called it “socially operative identity”, which “can therefore diverge from their private self-understanding”. It acts through others’ treatment of the person whether or not the person knows of it or agrees: “The person need not agree with the description for it to affect their life” (A39). CASE-141 is a held attribution confirming itself through a school’s treatment of a pupil.
  2. Imagined attribution. What the person takes others to take them to be. This is Cooley’s looking-glass self (LIT-1379), “the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance”. It can diverge from sense 1 in content.
  3. Imagined audience. Who the person takes “them” to be: one critic, a group, “nearly everyone important to them” (A39), or a collective that holds no single view. It can diverge from the actual holders of sense 1 in number, in unity and in standing. This is CLAIM-415’s false unity, and CASE-140 varies it alone.
  4. Appropriated attribution. The attribution taken up by the person into how they characterize themselves, whether endorsed or flaunted. Senses 2 and 3 are already the person’s models, of how they are seen and by whom, and are what CLAIM-415 calls the audience in a self-model; sense 4 is an attribution that has become part of the self the person takes themselves to be. The couplet of LIT-1394 shows it: after “I am whatever you say I am”, “If I wasn’t then why would I say I am” claims the label as the speaker’s own. Only in this sense does an attributed self become content of TERM-045’s narrative and presented selves (senses 4 and 7). Senses 2 and 3 can shape conduct, presentation included, without it: that is “rejection does not free” (CASE-142).

Senses 2 and 3 together are what A39 proposed to call “recursive social self-modeling”: “The person is modeling themselves as an object of other people’s judgments, while simultaneously modeling the supposed distribution of those judgments.” The term keeps the two apart because they fail separately: a person can imagine a judgement correctly and its breadth wrongly, or the reverse.

Why the senses must be kept apart

Each step of CLAIM-415 and its cases runs between two senses.

  • 1 without 2: a held attribution acts on someone unaware of it (CASE-141).
  • 2 against 1: a person misjudges what others think. That is pluralistic ignorance, a misjudgement of what others hold (LIT-1370, not reached).
  • 3 against 1: the content is right and the audience wrong, as in the majority illusion’s skewed sample seen accurately (LIT-1390) or a loud minority taken for everyone.
  • 2 and 3 shaping conduct without 4: “rejection does not free” (CLAIM-415, CASE-142). The judgement is never appropriated, and still organizes what the person does.

What it is not

  • Not the presented self. TERM-045’s sense 7 is the self a person gives to others. An attributed self originates with others, though a presentation is one of the things they attribute from.
  • Not a represented owner. CLAIM-355 and TERM-072’s sense 2 concern a self-model’s attribution of the person’s own activity to a single owner. The attributed self concerns others’ characterizations, and the person’s models of them. Sense 3’s false audience is the social analogue of CLAIM-355’s false owner, not a case of it.
  • Not a new mechanism. A39 offered its phrase “as a way of integrating established mechanisms, not as a new discovery”: Cooley’s reflected appraisal, Hacking’s looping effects (held through CLAIM-402), Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy (LIT-1398) and pluralistic ignorance. The term names the objects those mechanisms run between. It does not add a mechanism.

What would settle it

Adopted on 2026-10-29. The term would be shown idle, under CLAIM-278’s objection to a vocabulary that describes everything and explains nothing, if no case needed two of its senses to come apart. It would be shown wanting if a case needed a fifth. The candidate is a judgement the person makes of how they are seen by an audience they know to be imaginary, such as posterity, which may belong under sense 3 or may not. CASE-140, if run, would show whether sense 3 does work of its own.

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