ABSTRACT
In this chapter we turn again to the place of the self in commonsense psychology. When last we discussed the self in chapter 7, we documented the fact that by the end of the second year, young children have acquired an ability to reflect on the self from a third-person point of view. Among other phenomena, they show mirror self-recognition and self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment, which indicate an appreciation of an objective sense of self. This objective sense of self accompanies their first-person experience and allows them to understand self and others in the same terms as agents of psychological activity. However, as seen in chapter 2, understanding self–other equivalence represents only one step along the way to a mature notion of agents. Adult commonsense psychology recognizes agents as having a temporally continuous identity—an identity that spans the past, present, and future. Thus, the person who performed certain activities and had certain experiences at particular moments in the past is understood to be, in an essential way, identical with the person who is now acting or experiencing. Furthermore, this person will continue to be essentially identical to a person who will act and experience things in the future.
