L4.2: Lottie's tutorial on personal identity (MacIntyre, Schechtman and McDowell)
“An influential narrative theorist of this sort is Alisdair MacIntyre. One of his arguments stems from the iterative nature of reason explanation. Suppose I ask you what you were doing yesterday afternoon?”
“I was playing football.”
“And why were you playing football?”
“I was practicising.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to be a professional footballer.”
“I assume you also believe that by practising you at least raise the chances of becoming one? Equally, you might have answered my question by saying that you believe that by practising you might become a professional footballer and I could also have filled in the gap that this is something you want. Note the typical pairing of belief and desire that so often go to make an action explanation. Sometimes we cite beliefs and desires, sometimes just one or the other. Sometimes we cite a larger action (not a mental state) such as ‘I was practising to become a professional footballer.’ Indeed it has been argued that the most basic form of action explanation is: I was doing X because I was doing Y.)
“I was playing football.”
“And why were you playing football?”
“I was practicising.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to be a professional footballer.”
“I assume you also believe that by practising you at least raise the chances of becoming one? Equally, you might have answered my question by saying that you believe that by practising you might become a professional footballer and I could also have filled in the gap that this is something you want. Note the typical pairing of belief and desire that so often go to make an action explanation. Sometimes we cite beliefs and desires, sometimes just one or the other. Sometimes we cite a larger action (not a mental state) such as ‘I was practising to become a professional footballer.’ Indeed it has been argued that the most basic form of action explanation is: I was doing X because I was doing Y.)
“Anyway: and why do you want to be a footballer.”
“I don’t know. The money. The fame. But also, I just really like playing football.”
“See how a simple question about yesterday afternoon quickly sheds light on one major potential life project and, if I may add, your conception of what a worthwhile life for you might be, or at least include. Well, that is MacIntryre’s key idea. It is a feature of the self-conscious life of a rational subject that explanations for what they/we do escalate into, or perhaps presuppose, a broader narrative. Let me read some quotes.”
“I don’t know. The money. The fame. But also, I just really like playing football.”
“See how a simple question about yesterday afternoon quickly sheds light on one major potential life project and, if I may add, your conception of what a worthwhile life for you might be, or at least include. Well, that is MacIntryre’s key idea. It is a feature of the self-conscious life of a rational subject that explanations for what they/we do escalate into, or perhaps presuppose, a broader narrative. Let me read some quotes.”
It is a conceptual commonplace, both for philosophers and for ordinary agents, that one and the same segment of human behavior may be correctly characterized in a number of different ways. To the question ‘What is he doing?’ the answers may with equal truth and appropriateness be ‘Digging’, ‘Gardening’, ‘Taking exercise’, ‘Preparing for winter’ or ‘Pleasing hiswife’. Some of these answers will characterize the agent’s intentions, other unintended consequences of his actions, and of these unintended consequences some may be such that the agent is aware of them and others not. What is important to notice immediately is that any answer to the questions of how we are to understand or to explain a given segment of behavior will presuppose some prior answer to the question of how these different correct answers to the question ‘What is he doing?’ are related to each other. (MacIntryre 1981: 206)
What the narrative concept of selfhood requires is thus twofold. On the one hand, I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death; I am the subject of a history that is my own and no one else’s, that has its own peculiar meaning. I am not only accountable, I am one who can always ask others for an account, who can put others to the question. I am part of their story, as they are part of mine. The narrative of any onelife is part of an interlocking set of narratives… To be the subject of a narrative that runs from one’s birth to one’s death is, I remarked earlier, to be accountable for the actions and experiences which compose a narratable life. (MacIntryre 1981: 217)
“But this is also a modest account.
I am not arguing that the concepts of narrative or of intelligibility or of accountability are more fundamental than that of personal identity. Theconcepts of narrative, intelligibility and accountability presuppose the applicability of the concept of personal identity... (MacIntryre 1981: 218)
“So” suggests Lottie “he is not really playing the same ball game as Dennett, is he? It is as though, for him, the narrative bit is only part of the story. It gets added to some other story that you’ve not told me yet about what a self is. But if so, aren’t we back where we started. Hume’s useless bundle theory?”
An interlude on two different ways to question personal identity
“I will give you an answer to that question though I fear you will not like it. But first I want to mention a distinction drawn by Marya Schechtman, who is another narrative theorist. In fact, I don’t think that the distinction really affects her own account but it is worth having it in mind because, if you say that you are going to talk about identity, some people will expect identity politics. So let me make a connection.
“Schechtman says that her own narrative-based account of personal identity (which we are not going to discuss today) is an answer to the ‘characterization question’, which she contrasts with the more familiar ‘reidentification question’ about personal identity.
Most simply put, this [characterization] question asks which actions, experiences, beliefs, values, desires, character traits, and so on… are to be attributed to a given person. Reidentification theorists ask [by contrast] what it means to say that a person at t2 is the same personas a person at t1; characterization theorists ask what it means to say that a particular characteristic is that of a given person. [Schechtman 1996: 73].
“It might thus seem that, by answering a distinct question, her account is incommensurable with answers to the latter question proposed by other philosophers, especially those responding to Locke. But although there is one relevant difference (to which I will return), I think that Schechtman takes her narrative constitution view to be an account of personal identity, however that is to be understood, and hence to be a competitor to neo-Lockean accounts.
“In a more recent book, Schechtman summarises her earlier approach thus:
I thus suggested that we instead think of the problem of personal identity as one of characterization—the question of which actions, experiences, and traits are rightly attributable to a person. The answer to a question of personal identity can then take the form of a relation between persons and psychological elements or actions rather than of a relation between time-slices. Such an account, I argued, will be non-reductive but still informative. In particular I urged that rather than thinking of identity-constituting psychological continuity in terms of overlapping chains of psychological connections properly caused, we should instead understand it in narrative terms, a revision made possible by framing the question as one of characterization. We constitute ourselves as persons, on this view, by developing and operating with a (mostly implicit) autobiographical narrative which acts as the lens through which we experience the world. [Schechtman 2014: 100]
“The characterization question, and her answer to it, is, however, ambiguous. In asking which actions, experiences, and traits are rightly attributable to a person, it might be asking which are authentic expressions of the person, their moral selves, aspects of their deeper character by contrast with momentary whims or temptations, or the distortions of alcoholic high spirits, for example. Or it might mean simply which of all the actions in human history were those of a particular person. More prosaically, the latter might be asked by a detective of an act of theft: who did it?
“Schechtman has conceded this point about her earlier 1996 work.
For many, the switch from the reidentification to the characterization question automatically signals a switch to questions about the moral self. There are some good reasons for thinking so—my first move in introducing the view is to draw a distinction between the “Who am I?” question raised by a confused adolescent (which I link to the characterization question) and the “Who am I?” question asked by an amnesia victim (which I link to the reidentification question). At the same time, however, I meant for the characterization question also to answer questions about attribution at the most fundamental level—not only which beliefs and desires are truly mine in the sense of the moral self, but which are mine in the most basic and literal sense. [Schechtman 2014: 102]
“As I said, we are not going to talk about her account because we have already thought about two of the people she cites as key influences: Dennett and MacIntyre. And we have already seen that they are trying to do different things with narratives to shed light on personal identity.
“But I wanted to point out that although Schechtman distinguishes between these two questions she then downplays the idea that the characterisation question concerns only those things that one values. In some contexts, however, that might be just what people mean by ‘identity’. For example, we could say that it is part of your identity that you are football-mad. That is part of who you are. That’s akin to identity politics. But that is different from saying that you are the creature who noisily stubbed their toe in the shower block and caused much fuss this morning. That is part of your identity too but in a much more Lockean ‘forensic’ sense. You are the axolotl who is to blame for the noise.That axoltl was you too. For Schechtman, narrative helps put the stubbed toe, too, in your life history.
“But, like Alisdair MacIntyre, I don’t think that that’s what we need narrative for at all.”
“Are you finally going to tell me about actual personal identity?”
A non-reductionist account of personal identity
“Although many philosophers assume it, as John McDowell points out, there is no need to assume that a reductionist account of the nature of personal identity especially the reidentification question, must work. He suggests instead that we should not take Locke to be trying to reduce personal identity to continuity of inner awareness (and failing at that because Locke says explicitly that a person ‘can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places’ which presupposes sameness).
“But, like Alisdair MacIntyre, I don’t think that that’s what we need narrative for at all.”
“Are you finally going to tell me about actual personal identity?”
A non-reductionist account of personal identity
“Although many philosophers assume it, as John McDowell points out, there is no need to assume that a reductionist account of the nature of personal identity especially the reidentification question, must work. He suggests instead that we should not take Locke to be trying to reduce personal identity to continuity of inner awareness (and failing at that because Locke says explicitly that a person ‘can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places’ which presupposes sameness).
“Rather, Locke is pointing out non-reductively that it is a feature of persons that they have an inner perspective on their lives which gathers together events as theirs without any criterion or test of identity and without even the exercise of a skill in picking themselves out (contrasting the way that one might keep track of one of the red balls in a game of snooker).
“One does not have to work to identify oneself to oneself, or one’s memories as one’s own rather than someone else’s. But that is not because one is a special locus of ‘mind-stuff’ or ego as Descartes assumed. No, it is because one is a body, with bodily criteria of identity, but one which happens to have – as the rational animals we are – an inner perspective too which goes hand in hand, effortlessly, and, in general, agrees with those bodily criteria.”
Lottie pauses to take this in. “So you mean that, despite what Locke seems to say, McDowell thinks that the thing that really matters is the body? What are those bodily criteria for the identity of persons over time, anyway? We’ve already agreed that bodies can change. This seems a typical cheat to me!”
“One does not have to work to identify oneself to oneself, or one’s memories as one’s own rather than someone else’s. But that is not because one is a special locus of ‘mind-stuff’ or ego as Descartes assumed. No, it is because one is a body, with bodily criteria of identity, but one which happens to have – as the rational animals we are – an inner perspective too which goes hand in hand, effortlessly, and, in general, agrees with those bodily criteria.”
Lottie pauses to take this in. “So you mean that, despite what Locke seems to say, McDowell thinks that the thing that really matters is the body? What are those bodily criteria for the identity of persons over time, anyway? We’ve already agreed that bodies can change. This seems a typical cheat to me!”
Her tutor looks rueful. “Here, McDowell rather breezily suggests ‘spatio-temporal continuity under a sortal’.” Before Lotti can scream, he continues.
“One way to make this clear is to imagine an alien with a very different kind of ‘bodily’ life – perhaps as a cloud of gas – studying plant and animal life on earth down as far as the cellular level but without our familiar ways of ‘chunking’ flora and fauna. As a rabbit, for example, lives, it eats grass and excretes dung. Thus vegetable matter gets merged with the rabbit and separated. Over time, there are complex chains of connection. But the spatio-temporal continuity of any particular rabbit does not have to take account of the grass and the dung with which it is causally continuous: but rather the career of the rabbit itself rather than its food or dung. In other words, an appeal to spatio-temporal continuity is not a reductionist explanation of rabbit identity over time. One already has to be familiar with what a rabbit is, what our concept ‘rabbit’ involves. The relevant mode of spatio-temporal continuity presupposes the sortal rabbit. The same applies to persons though with some complications.”
“Yes: what about the prince and the cobbler?!? This stupid account will give the wrong answer. It’s obvious that the prince is now somehow in the cobbler’s body. This happens all the time in Star Trek!”
“I did say that you wouldn’t like this account. Remember that when we discussed the philosophy of thought and the conceptual realm, you wanted to follow Ruth Millikan in reducing meaning to biological functions. That is obviously a part of your identity! Just like the accounts of Davidson and Dennett, interestingly, and McDowell and Travis of the conceptual realm, so McDowell’s sketch of an account of personal identity here is non-reductionist.”
“I did say that you wouldn’t like this account. Remember that when we discussed the philosophy of thought and the conceptual realm, you wanted to follow Ruth Millikan in reducing meaning to biological functions. That is obviously a part of your identity! Just like the accounts of Davidson and Dennett, interestingly, and McDowell and Travis of the conceptual realm, so McDowell’s sketch of an account of personal identity here is non-reductionist.”
“But what about the prince?!?” Lottie asks with exasperation.
“I agree with Locke and Star Trek that, in such a case, it seems that identity goes with the inner dimension rather than the outer body. Once we are familiar with the use of ‘self’ and ‘myself’ then the fact that the Cobbler’s mouth will use these words to speak of the prince’s past seems compelling.
“But that is not to say that, in general, we have an understanding of the inner dimension independently of, or more fundamentally than, the normal bodily criteria of identity. I am now going to try and say almost exactly what I said when discussing self knowledge last summer. It is Sir Peter Strawson’s account. I said something like:
“To earn the right to the idea that experiences are unified as the experiences of a particular subject (a person), there has to be some way to specify or identify that subject. Without some such criteria, the idea of a single subject is vacuous. But as Hume’s description of introspection reveals, conscious experience does not yield any criteria to identify a subject (or owner) for one’s experiences. It reveals only the experiences themselves. From this, Hume concludes that there is no substantial self.
“But there are criteria for the identification of a subject available elsewhere: third-person criteria for the ascription of experiences to fellow human beings on the basis of what they say and do. Strawson suggests that these can provide substance to the idea of a self even though they are not appealed to in self-ascriptions of experiences. This is because, while self-ascription of experiences is made without any appeal to these (or any other) criteria to identify a subject, it is still made in accord with them.
“As Strawson puts it, ‘The links between criterionless self-ascription and empirical criteria of subject-identity are not in practice severed’ (Strawson 1966: 165). Thus, it is because we are identifiable from a third person perspective as embodied subjects located within the world that we can also self-ascribe experiences without appeal to, but still in accord with, those criteria. The third-person criteria substantiate the idea of a subject.
Self-knowledge of thought is a matter of spontaneously being able to a self-ascribe in a way that will dovetail with third person ascription via radical interpretation. We learn to self-ascribe, without radical interpretation of our own actions, in a way that dovetails what others would need radical interpretation to ascribe to us.”
As so often at the end of these tutorials, Lottie is unconvinced. She wanted more. Again, it seems, she has been offered the thin gruel of 1950’s anti-reductionist linguistic philosophy.