Harre, Rum

Harre was born in New Zealand , in Apiti, northern Manawatu, but currently has British citizenship. ^[four]

In 1948 he graduated from the undergraduate degree in natural sciences at the University of Auckland , New Zealand, and then at the same university he defended his master's work in philosophy (1952).

After graduation, Rom Harre taught mathematics at King's College of Auckland (1948-1953), and then at Punjab University in Pakistan (1953-1954). After that, he returned to study at the university, this time at the University College of Oxford , where he completed his undergraduate studies in philosophy (1956) under the supervision of John Langshaw Austin , a British language philosopher. From 1957 to 1959 he lectured at the University of Leicester .

At the age of 34, he returned to Oxford in order to become a student of Friedrich Weismann, a famous physicist and mathematician, one of the representatives of the Vienna Circle . There, Rum Harre was carried away by social psychology and made a significant contribution to the accomplishment of the so-called "discursive turn".

Currently, Rum Harre is a professor at Georgetown University and director of the Center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences of the London School of Economics .

The range of scientific interests of Roma Harre is extremely extensive. He wrote a large number of publications related to the following fields of knowledge: philosophy of mathematics , philosophy of science , ontology , psychology, social psychology, sociology and philosophy. He had a rather strong influence on the philosophical movement of critical realism by publishing the Forces of Causality in 1975, and in the same year, the book The Realist Theory of Science, co-authored with Roy Bhaskar, a British sociologist and representative of the realist trend. Harre was the scientific coordinator of Roy Bhaskar's doctoral dissertation, which influenced his close passion for critical realism.

Rum Harre was closely involved in the philosophy and methodology of science, challenging the classical understanding of scientific progress. So, in his opinion, progress does not occur in the process of changing paradigms , as Kuhn proved, but in the process of deep knowledge of the world. He especially emphasizes the importance of creating such scientific tools that can empirically confirm scientific theories, therefore it is more likely to rely on the creation of new material things than abstract ideas and knowledge that are too often revised and modified.

In addition, he is engaged in the history and epistemology of psychiatry, social psychology.

Harre believes that the “inner self” is determined by the cultural and social context - in some cultures (for example, non-Western) it is absent altogether. This Self is a product of communication within the framework of social interaction, and therefore is limited by historical chronological frames: so, in his opinion, the “inner self” is characteristic of the Western culture of recent centuries, where the inner world of the personality and the desire for reflection are cultivated. ^[5] Based on such a system of views, Harre made a significant contribution to the so-called "discursive turn" and discursive psychology, being considered one of its first theorists.

So, Harre postulates the importance of studying an everyday language or similar sign systems (including non-verbal ones), since it is in him that psychic phenomena are represented and constructed. In addition, relying on language, he breeds "social" and "non-social" objects. Social objects require a certain social context for understanding their meaning (for example, “wine for communion”), while non-social objects are understood in isolation from it (water). In the first case, the phrase is embedded in the Christian narrative , which reveals its sociality. So, the object becomes social due to rooting in the narrative, such signs automatically send the listener to a particular social system. Such an approach allows us to approach a deep understanding of the contribution of society to the development of a person’s personality, to determine personality attitudes based on such forms of discourse as cliche and the metaphors used.

Positioning Theory

In addition to his contribution to the theory of discursive psychology, Rom Harre is also known as the author of the theory of positioning in a narrative socio-psychological approach. Positioning theory can be considered as an alternative to the role-based approach , which describes behavior as a set of actions regulated by the role-based representations of the subject.

Positioning theory studies how local rights and obligations in society are formed and changed, how they affect small-scale interactions .

The theory of positioning became the development of the concept of Vygotsky’s personality in the framework of cultural-historical theory. According to her, a person manifests itself in interaction with people in a stream of public and social thinking. Positioning theory offers a conceptual system that makes it possible to look at the events of everyday life on the other hand, offering three interconnected situational conditions for the meaningfulness of symbolic interactions. The basis of these interactions consists of both verbal manifestations and other symbolic systems (for example: icons, road signs, gestures).

Conditions of meaningfulness: ^[6]

1. Illocutionary force - the social meaning of what has been done and said at the moment in a given situation (that is, in the so-called local repertoire). The same speech utterance, signal or gesture can have many different meanings and assumptions depending on the situational context.

2. Positions - the use of certain indisputable behavioral patterns in the local repertoire. For example, a mother can blame a little girl for misconduct, while a passerby on the street is actually deprived of this right.

3. Stories - certain life scenarios that form one or another episode of human relationships. For example, in one plot, a dispute can be interpreted as a conflict, and in another as a fascinating search for truth.

Three situational conditions mutually determine each other, forming a “positioning triangle”. An episode can develop based on any of these conditions. For example, negative positioning of patients can affect the construction of a destructive plot, which will constantly stigmatize them in the local repertoire.

• Honorary Doctor , University of Massee, 2012 ^[7]
• Honorary Doctor, Aarhus University , Denmark (1998) ^[8]
• American Psychological Association Award, Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (2010) ^[9]

• Harré, H. Rom with FM Moghaddam. Psychology for the Third Millenium. London and Los Angeles: Sage , 2012.
• Harré, H. Rom with PQ Pfordresser and SL Tan. Introduction to the Psychology of Music. London: Psychology Press , 2010.
• Harré, H. Rom, Ed. L. van Langenhove. People and Societies. London: Routledge , 2010.
• Harré, H. Rom. Social being: a theory for social psychology. : Blackwell, Oxford (Spanish translation), 1979.
• Harré R. & Moghaddam FM The Self and Others. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
• Harré, H. Rom, & Madden, EH. Causal powers. Oxford, GB: Blackwell, 1975.
• Harré, H. Rom, & Secord, PF. The explanation of social behavior. Oxford, GB: Blackwell, 1973.
• Harre R. Positioning Theory // Bulletin of Udmurt University . Series “Philosophy. Psychology. Pedagogy". 2007. No. 9.

• Busygina N. P. “Discursive turn” in psychological studies of consciousness // Advisory Psychology and Psychotherapy, 2010, 1, p. 55-82
• Romanova L.A. Theory of social construction and composite performatives // Bulletin of VolSU. Series 2: Linguistics. 2009. No 2.
• Turusheva Yu. B. Features of the narrative approach as a method of studying identity // Psychological research. 2014.V. 7, No. 33.P. 6.

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