To assert the primacy of practice is a refusal to accord primacy to language, and this is what is maintained in relation to the emergence of self-consciousness. The effect of asserting it is to make the embodied practices of human beings in the world more important than their social relations for the emergence of selfhood, meaning a continuous sense of self, and for the development of its properties and powers, meaning reflexivity, which only exists in potentia for every neonate. The primacy of practice refers both to its logical and substantive priority in human development. This is not simply a matter of it coming before anything else, though temporally it does just that; it is also a question of viewing language itself as a practical activity, which means taking seriously that our words are quite literally deeds, and ones which do not enjoy hegemony over our other doings in the emergence of our sense of self.

Pointers to the primacy of practice

In Realist Social Theory I presented three arguments for maintaining that our sense of self, as part of our humanity, is prior and primitive to our sociality.

(1) The first, which it is particularly important to accentuate here, concerns our human embodiment. Harré's argument that, as embodied animals, we have to wait until fairly late upon society for the linguistic appropriation of a theory of the self, involves a completely radical break between homo sapiens and other animal species.