SARSAW PROJECT

SARSAW project aims to create a webtool to facilitate interdisciplinary research on the topic of the Self, designed to help researchers from different scientific fields and nationalities at overcoming the conceptual and methodological fragmentation regarding scientific studies on the Self. For Olson (2007), no concept could be so problematic that no one could agree about anything to do with it as the concept of Self. The problem is aggravated by the existence of an overabundance of proposals focused on distinct aspects of the Self, that is accompanied by a proliferation of terms to designate the Self, such as: "cognitive", "conceptual", "ecological", "embodied", "existential", "fictional", "extended", "narrative", "private", "representational", "core" or "minimal" Self (Strawson, 1999). A review of the literature reveals that some of these different terms are applied to exactly the same phenomena, which means that the lack of integration of literature from several scientific areas, is undermining the study of the Self, which is mainly an interdisciplinary topic.

 

The webtool is supposed to be, in the final stages of the project, an online analytical database of multidisciplinary research literature on the Self. Its main purpose consists in allowing for the manipulation and crossing of relevant statistical data in such a way as to provide its users with a synoptic and organized view on the literature from a variety of different research interests and angles.

 

SARSAW webtool will operate on the basis of organized quantified data extracted from articles on the topic of the Self. This data is divided into four axes, which in turn are divided in a number of different subcategories. The first axis pertains to the scientific field in which each article is contextualized in terms of the theoretical approach followed by the author(s) (for example: Psychology, Philosophy); the second is concerned with the specific scientific methodology or methodologies used to study the Self in each article (for example: experimental method, clinical studies, qualitative method); the third concerns the ontological status attributed to the Self in the article in question (for example: eliminativism about the self, Self as emergent), and the fourth is related with the type of Self is at issue in each article (for example: minimal-self, core-self, extended-self). Once an article is exhaustively categorized along all fourth axes, it is stored in the SARSAW database in the form of a numerical profile, which then allows it to be used for statistical purposes.

 

Since the quantitative classification of each article depends on the ability to correctly and unambiguously classify it along the 4 axes, the project includes a preliminary qualitative analysis phase before the construction of the quantitative database. 

 

The SARSAW project is linked to another project being developed at the IFL, the "Cognitive Foundations of the Self" project.