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Narrative and Characterization

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Abstract

Many philosophers working on personal identity and ethics say that personal identity is constituted by stories: narratives people tell or would tell about their lives. Most of them also say that this is personal identity in the ‘characterization sense’, that it is the notion people in ordinary contexts are interested in, and that it raises the ‘characterization question’. I argue that these claims are inconsistent. Narrativists can avoid the incompatibility in one of two ways: They can concede that their view is not about the constitution but the epistemology of personal identity. Or they can say that it is not about personal identity at all.

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Notes

  1. Cf. e.g. MacIntyre (1981, chap. 15), Taylor (1989, chap. 2), Ricoeur (1992), Schechtman (1996, 2003, 2007), DeGrazia (2005), Merkel et al. (2007, chap. 5), Rudd (2007), Glannon (2009), and Lipsman and Glannon (2013).

  2. Most narrativists call it the ‘reidentification question’. I avoid this term because it suggests that the question is epistemic when in fact it is metaphysical.

  3. Cf. Nelson (2001, p. 72), Radden (2004, p. 142), Glannon (2009, p. 291), Shoemaker (2009, pp. 89–90, 2016, p. 325), Baylis (2013, p. 516), Galert (2015, p. 414) and Baker (2016, p. 8).

  4. In the remainder of the paper I leave out references to time where possible.

  5. DeGrazia uses the term ‘narrative identity’ instead of ‘characterization identity’ or ‘identity in the characterization sense’, suggesting that stories play a fundamental role in it. Since I am not convinced of this, I prefer the more neutral expressions.

  6. See also Schechtman (1996, p. 74), Shoemaker (2009, pp. 88−89), and Henning (2013, p. 159, n. 1).

  7. Cf. Radden (2004, p. 142), Shoemaker (2009, p. 90), Galert (2015, p. 414), Belohrad (2015, p. 286), and Baker (2016, p. 8).

  8. She no longer holds this view, cf. Schechtman (2007, pp. 170–171, 2014, p. 102). But I am unsure whether her retreat has had any effect on other narrativists.

  9. In fact, the picture is even more complicated: Schechtman thinks that attribution is a gradable notion, such that a ‘given characteristic can be attributed to a person to a greater or lesser extent’ (1996, p. 76). I will ignore this complexity and stick to the two senses of ‘attribution’ that I have explained.

  10. Narrativists might try to avoid the problem by assuming that our identities are composed of bundles of characteristics: a childhood bundle, an adulthood bundle, and a dotage bundle, say. Each bundle comprises all and only those characteristics that we have during the respective periods of our lives. An identity is not a bundle of characteristics but rather a bundle of bundles of characteristics, each being located at a certain time or period of time. Changes in identity might then be conceived as differences among these bundles. This seems to imply that changing objects have temporal parts, which is often taken to be inconsistent with narrativism, cf. Schechtman (1996) and Stokes (2012).

  11. I have been unable to find a clear example of a narrativist pursuing this strategy, although Schechtman comes close to it, cf. (2007, p. 171). Besides, several commentators think that this is what narrativists do; cf. Shoemaker (2009, pp. 90, 180) and Belohrad (2015, p. 283).

  12. Cf. Schechtman (1996, pp. 75–76, 2003, pp. 241–242, 246, 2007, p. 171), Shoemaker (2009, p. 180) and Belohrad (2015, p. 283).

  13. TA faces other problems. One is briefly touched upon in Sect. 6, another is discussed in Sect. 7.

  14. I thank Simone Dietz for making me aware of this alternative.

  15. DeGrazia speaks of ‘facts’ instead of ‘characteristics’, but the difference appears to be merely verbal. That he describes the characterization question as being ‘among other things’ about salient facts is not to say that it is also about non-salient facts. The qualification appears because he wants to make room for salient ‘interpretations of facts’ (2005, p. 84).

  16. Most but not all: If I read them correctly, some narrativists agree that our characterization identities do not include actions and experiences; cf. Merkel et al. (2007, pp. 250–251), and Henning (2013, p. 159, n.1). This is also the dominant view among non-narrativist philosophers; cf. Shoemaker (2006, p. 40), Nida-Rümelin (2006, pp. 18–20), Kleinig 2009, p. 96) and Olson 2016), Sect. 1. I have, however, never seen an argument for it.

  17. The possibility is disputed but never mind: The argument I am about to develop doesn’t depend on the possibility of ‘brain-state transfer’. Less fancy ways of transferring a person from one human animal to another would also do. I opt for the fancier variant mainly because it simplifies my argument.

  18. Couldn’t narrativists allow that someone else’s actions and experiences can be part of our identities if we ‘quasi-remember’ them? (You can quasi-remember things another person did, see Shoemaker 1970.) In that case there will presumably be no difference between the identities of Early Donor, Late Donor, and Recipient since Late Donor and Recipient will quasi-remember Early Donor’s life. The move, however, is not without problems. It is at odds with the common narrativist conviction that only my actions and experiences (those of all and only the subjects numerically identical with me) can be part of my characterization identity, cf. DeGrazia (2005, p. 114), Glannon (2009, p. 291), and Shoemaker (2009, p. 93). It also contradicts the related idea that only autobiographical narratives that comply with the ‘reality constraint’ can constitute identities, cf. Schechtman (1996, pp. 93, 119) and DeGrazia (2005, p. 85): If late Donor’s and Recipient’s reports included Early Donor’s actions and experiences, they would either not be autobiographical or not ‘fundamentally cohere with reality’ (ibid., p. 119) since nearly all experience memories figuring in them would be false.

  19. See also Radden (2004, p. 142), Schechtman (2007, p. 162) and Galert (2015, p. 415).

  20. This is the way Schechtman uses ‘constitutes’ in other places, for instance when writing about ‘the psychological continuity that constitutes the persistence of a person’ (Schechtman 2007, p. 165).

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Acknowledgements

I thank Oliver Hallich, Susanne Hiekel, Eric Olson, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful remarks on earlier drafts. I also thank the German Research Foundation for funding my research on narrative identity.

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Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (WI 4519/2-1).

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  1. Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften, Institut für Philosophie, Universität Duisburg-Essen, 45117, Essen, Germany

    Karsten Witt

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Witt, K. Narrative and Characterization. Erkenn 85, 45–63 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0017-5

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