Dialogical self
Inspired by the original ideas of William James and Mikhail Bakhtin, Hubert Hermans, Harry Kempen and Rens van Loon wrote the first psychological publication on the "dialogical self" in which they conceptualized the self in terms of a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous "I"-positions in the (extended) landscape of the mind. In this conception, the "I" has the possibility to move 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. The voices function like interacting characters in a story, involved in processes of question and answer, agreement and disagreement. Each of them have a story to tell about their own experiences from their own stance. As different voices, these characters exchange information about their respective Me's and mines, resulting in a complex, narratively structured self.
Dorit Bar-On
In "Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge", published by Oxford University Press, Bar-On investigates the problem of self-knowledge (how, if at all, we are each in a privileged position to know own mental states) in relation to questions of expression and expressive behavior. She draws on historical figures including Wittgenstein and Darwin to develop a neo-expressivist view of first-personal expressive utterances (such as, "I am in pain") which explains how these utterances differ epistemically from non-expressive utterances while sharing the same semantic structure. "Speaking My Mind" has been praised as "a rich book; rich in topics, in argumentation, and in philosophical imagination and insight. It deserves the attention of all who work in mind and language." In subsequent work, Bar-On has applied this neo-expressivist framework to additional problems in the philosophy of language, metaethics, and epistemology. More recently, Bar-On has sought to illuminate the nature of human communication by situating it in relation to animal expressive communication more broadly, and thereby to show how human linguistic meaning can be understood consistently with a naturalistic theory of the world.