THE SELF'S METAMORPHOSIS IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL EXPERIENCE: PRAGMATIC CONTRIBUTIONS

One of the most important changes in the field of human sciences is the transition from the psychological subject to the social subject. Man gets the selfexperience by confronting others, by interacting with his family, school, culture, the group he is part of, in other words through communication. In G.H. Mead ' s vision the self builds progressively, it appears and develops in social experience and activity. Man is aware not directly, but only indirectly, from the different points of view of the other members of the social group or the generalized group of the whole social group to which he belongs. At the moment, it is no longer possible to study man in isolation, but at the risk of depriving him of an essential dimension of his reality: at all levels, the human being is fundamentally communicating. In this context we can talk about the fact that the form of enunciation does not express the autonomous thinking of the subject, as it is an adaptation imposed by external circumstances. The mechanism of developing self-consciousness is based on assuming roles of the other, involving language and communication. It is not mental activity that organizes expression, but, on the contrary, the expression organizes mental activity, modelling it and determining its orientation. The genuine substance of the language is not constituted by an abstract system of linguistic forms, neither by the isolated monological enunciation nor by the psycho-physiological act of its production, but by the social phenomenon of verbal interaction, made by enunciation. Verbal interaction is thus the fundamental reality of the language.