Making sense of ourselves: self-narratives and personal identity

Abstract

Some philosophers take personal identity to be a matter of self-narrative. I argue, to the contrary, that self-narrative views cannot stand alone as views of personal (or numerical) identity. First, I consider Dennett’s self-narrative view, according to which selves are fictional characters—abstractions, like centers of gravity—generated by brains. Neural activity is to be interpreted from the intentional stance as producing a story. I argue that this is implausible. The inadequacy is masked by Dennett’s ambiguous use of ‘us’: sometimes ‘us’ refers to real human beings, and sometimes ‘us’ refers to selves or fictional characters. Second, I consider Schechtmann’s view that self-narratives create persons (in the sense that she calls ‘characterization’ or personality. I argue that the sense in which a self-narrative creates a person cannot stand on its own: a person must already exist (in the sense of numerical identity) in order for there to be a self-narrative. Finally, I offer my own account of persons.