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Descartes founded the psychology of the individual with a mind! body distinction that calls for internal dialogue and interactive exchange. Individuals struggle with their nature through an intracommunicative system, emanating not from social exchanges, but, instead, from autonomous rules and constraints inherent in the machine of the body. The attacks on these ideas by social constructionists, such as Gergen, Harré and Shotter, impel me to write this paper. My purpose is to show how rejection of Descartes's Cogito; ergo sum, and of his idea that the human being struggles with feelings directed by the body and beliefs formed in the soul, eliminates criteria necessary for concepts of the self and the person. I argue that social constructionist reductions of mind and body to social process disallow a causal basis for self and its autonomously generated origins. The same reductions substitute contextual determination for cause and effect logic, clouding accounts of an individual's choices and decisions and making the attribution of personal moral responsibility impossible. I demonstrate that the bases for maintaining the criteria of self and person flow from the Cartesian tradition, have a wide support among many trenchant thinkers in psychology and remain logically necessary.

Which comes first -meaning or logic? To make this query I focus on semantic 'domains' and on what appear as paralogical and protological forms. The forms I identify in this article are metonymy, metaphor, and analogy. I view them as 'groupings' that progress in the direction of logical categories. The thesis I present supports logical form as origin. The argument is that the self is the source of values, and that since the self is categorial, its unfolding forms play a causal role in the construction of meaning. Within the thesis that logical form originates meanings, the specific purpose of this article is to picture metaphors and their relation to analogy structures by placing meaning within the unfolding categories and operations of the logical space of self. In the process of originating categories, metaphor is a pre-categorial grouping, and metonymy a step logically prior to the metaphor. Analogy as a complex categorizing is a step logically later than metaphoric grouping. By way of its paralogical limitations and the incomplete strategic value of its immature form, metonymy 'motivates' further categorial denouement and schema articulation, leading to metaphor and analogy. In all, logical form set in motion by subjective values creates meanings in ecological adaptations. Form into meaning or from meanings to connections?In creating metaphors and constructing analogies, which comes firstmeaning or logic? The chicken-egg problem is not only one of origin; it's one of essence. I ask not only, 'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?', but also, 'Which is the chicken and which the egg?'. Do the meanings of a person's experience give rise to the forms and figures of speech, which give birth to new categories of understanding? Or do a priori rules of logical necessity underlie our grasp of life experiences and generate the