Marya Schechtman

In developing a middle ground between narrativists and narrative sceptics Peter Goldie criticizes the view that personal identity is constituted through self-narrative. He also rejects the idea that empathic access to the past is required for personal survival. This chapter responds to Goldie’s objections. It acknowledges that Goldie identifies important complications and difficulties surrounding the notion of empathic access and uses the insights he offers to expand and improve this idea and to clarify the questions to which it applies. It is suggested that empathic access may be best conceived as a valuable heuristic, and provides an example of its value by showing how it helps to demonstrate the sense in which we are constituted by our narrative self-understanding. Goldie’s discussion of ironic distance as a feature of narrative thought is key to this demonstration.

The conclusion summarizes the overall argument of the manuscript and outlines some of the key moves made in developing and defending the Person Life View. These include a new way of framing the question of personal identity and an emphasis on the social aspects of personhood and personal identity, which calls for a rethinking of what is to be learned from the use of thought experiments. There is further argument that the Person Life View provides an account of our literal identity according to which facts about identity are inherently linked to practical considerations, and reiterates the reasons we have for desiring such an account, reasons that are further supported by details which have emerged over the course of the argument.

This chapter argues that the Person Life View is rightly understood as an account of our literal identity. To do this it responds to animalist charges that any view which sees persons and human animals as having distinct persistence conditions will encounter deep metaphysical difficulties. It is shown that the Person Life View can avoid these difficulties via either of two methods. One is to employ an adapted version of the constitution model of the relation between human persons and human animals developed by Lynne Baker. The other is to concede that persons are not metaphysical substances of the sort defined by animalists, but to argue that given the sparse ontology connected with animalism there are questions about the continuity of everyday objects that are legitimately understood as questions about literal identity despite the fact that they are not about the persistence of substances strictly speaking.

This chapter shows how the Person Life View delimits and tracks individual persons. By means of a discussion of biological life and death, which serves as an analogue, the chapter develops the idea that we should think of person lives in terms of homeostatic property clusters along the lines developed by Richard Boyd. This means that there will be no set of necessary and sufficient relations that must be in place for a person life to continue. To show more concretely how this model works within the context of the Person Life View the chapter revisits some of the standard puzzle cases from the philosophical literature on personal identity, and considers how the view evaluates them. It also describes how this newly developed conception of personal identity changes the way we can use the method of thought experiments in investigating questions of personal identity.

This chapter uses the insights and resources collected in the first four chapters to begin developing a positive account of personal identity-the Person Life View. According to this view persons are entities that live characteristic kinds of lives, “person lives.” To be a person is to live a person life; particular persons are individuated by individuating person lives; and sameness of person over time is defined in terms of the sameness of a person life. The basic features of a person life are introduced and developed. A key feature is the idea that the lives of persons are inherently social, and that living the life of a person involves occupying a space within a social or cultural infrastructure of the sort that beings like us naturally develop. The social aspect of the view raises a specter of conventionalism, which is addressed by considering a variety of particular cases.

This chapter addresses the question of which practical considerations we should include in our investigation of the conditions of personal identity. Using the work of Hilde Lindemann I argue for the need to expand our conception of the practical importance of personal identity beyond the forensic concerns we inherit from Locke. The notion of persons as forensic units is thus transformed into a conception of persons as individual loci of practical interaction to which the whole set of practical interests and concerns associated with personhood are appropriately directed, or “basic practical units.” Given the wide range of practical interests we have in persons, however, it is not immediately evident how to define a single locus that is an inherently appropriate target of all of these interests, at least if the designation “appropriate” is to have any bite. The chapter concludes by describing this challenge, which I call the “problem of multiplicity.”

This chapter offers resources for meeting the problem of multiplicity. Using Jeff McMahan’s theory of time-relative interests as a starting point it describes how a typical mature person can be defined in terms of a single relation that makes her a strongly unified target of the full range of practical questions and concerns that apply to persons. An analysis of my own Narrative Self-Constitution View, developed in _The Constitution of Selves_, offers the resources necessary to answer the challenge as it applies over time, explaining how infants and adults can be inherently appropriate loci of the same set of practical concerns despite possessing very different attributes. The key element taken from this view is a diachronic holism according to which personhood and personal identity are defined in terms of an unfolding developmental structure rather than in terms of relations between individual moments.

This chapter considers the possibility that literal questions about personal identity should be sharply distinguished from practical questions and that the two kinds of questions should be pursued entirely separately. Christine Korsgaard’s view of agential identity represents this point of view from the perspective of value theory, and Eric Olson’s Animalism from the perspective of metaphysics. It is shown that both views need to include the existence of a “forensic unit” which delimits a target of our person-related interests and judgments. Since the question of what constitutes the identity of the forensic unit has the logical structure of a question of numerical identity, reflection on this question represents a potential route to developing an inherently practical conception of personal identity.

This chapter uses a discussion of John Locke and of present-day psychological continuity theories to introduce a new way of understanding the relation between personal identity and practical concerns. Locke offers one of the most famous and influential accounts of personhood and personal identity, defining “person” as a “forensic term.” He is usually taken to hold the view that judgments of identity should directly coincide with forensic judgments. This chapter argues that he can be read as employing a more complicated understanding of the connection between these two types of judgments. The significance of this feature of Locke’s account is demonstrated by looking at present-day psychological continuity theories which lose sight of his sophisticated picture of the relation between personal identity and the practical, making them vulnerable to a serious objection, “the argument from the extreme claim.”

The introduction identifies the problem that will be addressed and describes how it will be tackled. Judgments of personal identity are ubiquitous, but it turns out that we operate with many different conceptions of _person_, leading to irresolvable disputes about what these judgments signify. Given our multiplicitous understanding of personhood we seem forced either to give up on providing a unified account of personal identity or to deny that there is any necessary connection between questions about the literal identity of beings like us and practical considerations. Neither alternative is attractive. A description is offered of a new account, the “Person Life View,” which will be developed and shown to provide a unified account of our literal identity according to which facts about identity are inherently linked to practical considerations.

An amnesia victim asking "Who am I?" means something different from a confused adolescent asking the same question. Marya Schechtman takes issue with analytic philosophy's emphasis on the first sort of question to the exclusion of the second. The problem of personal identity, she suggests, is usually understood to be a question about historical life. What she calls the "reidentification question" is taken to be the real metaphysical question of personal identity, whereas questions about beliefs or values and the actions they prompt, the "characterization question," are often presented as merely metaphorical. Failure to recognize the philosophical importance of both these questions, Schechtman argues, has undermined analytic philosophy's attempts at offering a satisfying account of personal identity. Considerations related to the characterization question creep unrecognized into discussions of reidentification, with the result that neither question is adequately addressed. Schechtman shows how separating the two questions allows for a more fruitful approach to the reidentification question, and she develops her own narrative account of characterization. She suggests that persons constitute their identities by developing autobiographical narratives that bear the right relation to facts about the environment, the general concept of a person, and other people's concepts of who they are.

The idea that technology can change not only our lives but also our sense of identity and even our nature does not arise first in the internet age. The rapid pace of technological development and its centrality to our current way of life does, however, make questions about whether and how it does so particularly urgent now. This paper considers a recent application in which artist-scientist Michelle Huang fed selections from her youthful journals to GPT-3 and had an extended conversation with a bot representing her younger self. It looks at two specific goals Huang had for the conversation – discovering what her younger self would think of her current life and furthering her inner child work – and argues that these presuppose different conceptions of diachronic personal identity. Both are goals that have been more traditionally pursued with imaginary internal dialogues. I explain how introducing a chatbot and using it for both goals conflates different conceptions of personal identity and speculates about how widespread use of this application and others like it might potentially affect our sense of self and personal identity.

This paper examines the role of episodic memory, and the broader notion of “mental time travel” (MTT), in constituting personal identity. After arguing that the construal of memory’s role in personal identity found in traditional psychological continuity theories of personal identity is both unrealistic and unsatisfying, the paper endeavors to provide a better account. This begins with recent work in the science and philosophy of memory that sees episodic memory as part of a broader faculty for MTT (which also involves imagination and counterfactual thought). Some of the basic ideas expressed in this work are developed into an account of the connection between MTT with “strong identification” and personal identity. According to this alternative approach, we regularly “borrow affect” from our pasts and futures through forms of remembering, imagining, and counterfactual thinking that involve a particular form of identification with our past and future selves. This activity generates a strong diachronic experience of self, which contributes in important ways to diachronic personal identity. The sense of self generated through MTT is, however, only one piece of a more comprehensive account of personal identity. The paper concludes by describing its place in the larger picture.

In the innovative and engaging _Philosophy, Literature and Understanding_, Jukka Mikkonen investigates a range of developments in multiple disciplines that have complicated traditional debates between cognitivists and non-cognitivists about literature. To avoid the extremes this debate has fallen into, Mikkonen develops a middle course that grounds the cognitive value of literature in its contributions to cultural and self-understanding. As part of this argument, Mikkonen offers an account of how literature can contribute to self-understanding via its narrative form despite what he sees as deep differences between real-life and literary narratives. He concludes that literature can (obliquely) aid our understanding of emotions like grief due to their shared processual nature, and self-understanding generally through its artificiality, the awareness of which allows us to recognize and correct fictionalizing narrative tendencies in our life-narratives. While I agree with Mikkonen’s conclusions, I believe they are too modest and that he provides the resources to claim even greater cognitive benefits from literature. Focusing on what it means to ‘have a self-narrative’ and describing narrative work as it occurs both unreflectively and through self-conscious reflection, this paper argues that that the selectivity, interpretation, and revision said to fictionalize life-narratives are in fact critical to self-understanding, which requires imaginative engagement of the sort Mikkonen sees as characteristic of the practice of literature. This suggests additional and more direct potential cognitive benefits of literature for self-understanding than Mikkonen describes, strengthening and supporting his broader position.

It is a common thought that our experience of self in time plays a crucial role in living a good human life. This idea is seen both in views that say we must think of our lives as temporally extended wholes to live well and those that say living well requires living in the moment. These opposing views share the assumption that a person’s interests must be identified with either a temporally extended or temporally local perspective. David Velleman has argued that both perspectives are necessary parts of human experience, and each has its own independent interests. I agree with Velleman that our experience is inherently multi-perspectival but argue that there are more than two relevant perspectives and reject the claim that these perspectives have independent interests. Expanding his metaphor of narrative, I describe the way in which these perspectives continuously influence and affect one another, and suggest that living well can be understood in terms of skillful management of the perspectives that make up this complex form of temporal self-experience.

In ‘Narrative and Personal Identity’, Mark Schroeder defends an important and exciting account of personal identity. This account starts from insights he finds in Locke and Frankfurt, but moves beyond them in ways that complicate and improve their respective notions of personhood and agency. I argue that he nonetheless retains too much from the views he rejects, especially an undue emphasis on the role of agency in personal identity and an impoverished picture of our embodiment. This paper explains the ways I think Schroeder does not go far enough, and offers an account that takes his insights a step further.

The burgeoning use of experimental methods to consider questions of human nature and personal identity has been a fruitful and exciting development, yielding significant and provocative results. This essay argues for the value of including reflection on the treatment of these topics in fictional narratives to complement and deepen results in experimental philosophy. Experimental vignettes are by necessity brief and schematic. This is part of what makes them so effective in the experimental context. The space afforded for detail, complexity, and ambiguity by the format of fiction allows it to highlight and explore issues that cannot easily be incorporated into experimental method. By juxtaposing a fictional narrative in which we are led to view a character as fundamentally bad with a structurally similar experimental vignette in which participants judge the protagonist to be fundamentally good, I demonstrate how reflection on fiction can contribute to debates in experimental philosophy and reveal distinctions between different dimensions of questions about identity and morality.

The idea that a sense of oneself as continuing over time is necessary for the ethical and experiential depth characteristic of a human life has been expressed frequently in philosophical work on the self and other venues. The opposing view, that preoccupation with one's diachronic extension is misleading and self-damaging, has also had forceful proponents. This paper explores this conflict via reflection on Galen Strawson's defence of the value of 'Episodic' selfexperience and an objection to Strawson raised by Kathleen Wilkes. I argue that, while there are legitimate worries about superficiality with respect to the Episodic self, Strawson also offers powerful reasons to think that standard understandings of the kind of diachronic selfexperience required for an ethically and experientially full human life are too strong. Employing some structural features of narrative thought, the paper develops an account of the kind of experience of self-in-time that characterizes human self-experience that is stronger than Strawson's Episodic self but accommodates his legitimate complaints against stronger forms of Diachronic self-experience.

This is a commentary on Hilde Lindemann’s, “Counter the Counterstory.” Lindemann notes that even when counterstories to oppressive master narratives emerge, it is remarkably difficult for them to get uptake. She offers a forceful analysis of why this is so and reflections on what can be done to change it. She uses #MeToo as an example of a counterstory that has met with some success and can therefore offer clues as to how counterstories might be able to generate greater uptake. My commentary agrees with the core of Lindemann’s analysis and points to new questions it raises, especially the question of what it means for a counterstory to get uptake. This turns out to be less obvious and more diffuse than it might first appear. Uptake involves multiple audiences who must be approached (and will respond) in different ways. Recognizing this raises further questions about what it means for a counterstory to be true. Neither question challenges Lindemann’s claims. Instead, they show how fruitful it is.

Mary Walker and Catriona Mackenzie's "Neurotechnologies, Relational Autonomy, and Authenticity" provides much needed reflection on the lens through which ethical concerns about the use of neurotechnologies are usually viewed. There is a general worry about the sometimes rapid and radical effects that such technologies can have on personalities and values. These concerns are often described as worries about how such technologies might alter our identities or compromise our authenticity. Clear theorizing of the notoriously slippery notions of "identity" and "authenticity" is, however, surprisingly rare in these discussions. Walker and Mackenzie's paper undertakes that theoretical work, arguing that the major...

Abstract   A small but significant number of residents of Second Life (SL) insist that SL is as real to them as Real Life (RL) and that their SL avatars are as much themselves as their offscreen selves. This paper investigates whether this claim can be literally true in any philosophically interesting way. Using a narrative account of personal identity I argue that there is a way of understanding these identity claims according to which the actions and experiences of the offscreen user and the online avatar are indeed actions and experiences of a single person. In the course of describing how this is so, the paper also uncovers new insights into how a narrative approach to personal identity should be structured and developed. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-15 DOI 10.1007/s13347-012-0062-y Authors Marya Schechtman, Department of Philosophy M/C 267, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1423 University Hall, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433