Skepticism about Character Traits

Sartre (1956) describes ways in which one may present oneself to others as being a certain sort of person. In one of his examples, a waiter presents himself as a waiter by as it were acting the part of a waiter. More generally, Sartre argues that, wanting to be, or at least to appear to others to be, a person of a certain sort or character, one often acts the part of a person of that sort of character. Sartre denies that people have fixed characters in the sense that they actually are in themselves any of the sorts of people they present themselves as being. People merely pretend, sometimes even to themselves, to be one sort of person rather than another.