▶︎ 0:01 In the last lecture, we talked about the narrative approach to personal identity and got a broad overview of how the narrative view sees the question of personal identity and responds to it. And I mentioned that there were also several objections that had been raised against the view, and indeed there are.
▶︎ 0:20 And the most fundamental probably, and the most widespread, is just the simple claim that thinking of our lives as narratives mistakes fiction for fact. There's a pithy internet meme that puts it this way: "The story of your life isn't your life, it's your story." And that's pretty much the objection that critics of the narrative view tend to make.
▶︎ 0:41 So those who make this objection point out that literary narratives are artifacts created by an author. Each element in a film or a novel or a play is there to serve some aesthetic purpose. And literary norms hold that elements that don't serve a narrative purpose should be revised or omitted. This is the so-called Chekhov's rule. So if an assassination or an illness or an inheritance or a meeting of soulmates doesn't make a narrative aesthetically better than its absence would, it can be undone with the stroke of a pen or the click of a mouse or whatever method you need to use to get it out of your narrative world.
▶︎ 1:19 But human lives, the critics point out, by contrast, are messy, natural affairs filled with contingency and accident. Sometimes things just happen in our lives without serving any particular purpose at all, let alone an aesthetic one. And when they do, we can't just strike them from our lives. Undesirable, uncomfortable, or derailing events become unchangeable facts about our histories.
▶︎ 1:45 We can live in denial, we can try to forget what happened, we can try to reinterpret it in a way that makes it fit better with the story we want to tell ourselves. But what we aren't able to do, or which the author of a fictional narrative can do, is simply make it the case that this thing didn't happen in the real world. We can omit it from our narrative, but we can't omit it from the world. And given that we can't omit it from the world, if we omit it from our narrative, our narratives are going to falsify or distort our histories.
▶︎ 2:19 And this is why, according to Peter Lamarque, who's one of the serious critics of the narrative view, taking novels as a model for understanding real life or taking novels as a model for understanding people,
▶︎ 2:32 real people, is a serious error. And he thinks that's exactly the error that the narrative theory is making. He says that when we do this, we fail to appreciate the very facts that make literary narratives aesthetic objects, and so we deeply misunderstand both life and literature by applying norms of literary fiction in a context where they do not and simply cannot apply.
▶︎ 2:56 And he has this really nice example of it. He talks about literary critic Dorothy Van Ghent's suggestion that the accident at the beginning of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is an instance of foreshadowing that represents the central themes of the novel. And he says, "Look, you may agree with Van Ghent or not agree with Van Ghent, but this is a perfectly appropriate explanation of why this accident happens at the beginning of the novel, because what it means to explain why the accident happened at the beginning of the novel is to explain why Hardy decided to include it."
▶︎ 3:28 Now, what he doesn't draw out, but he wants us to appreciate, is that it would be really absurd to try to account for an actual accident in the real world in this way. So if a traffic safety commissioner tried to offer such an explanation for a traffic accident, they'd either be making a tasteless joke or just revealing a serious lack of qualification for their job. That's not why accidents happen in real life, to foreshadow things. We may read them as omens, we may interpret them that way, but sometimes there are just accidents, or so Lamarque argues. And therefore, the logic of stories and the logic of lives are just very different, and it's a terrible mistake to think that our lives should follow the logic of a story.
▶︎ 4:12 More generally, critics of the narrative approach point to the fact that narrative is by its nature selective and interpretive. To tell a story, we select which events to include. We don't include everything that we possibly could, but only some things, and we have to decide which. And we put them together and arrange them in a way that suggests a particular interpretation of the meaning and significance of those events. So when we narrate our lives, we don't include everything that ever happened in our history. We choose what we're going to include, and what we do include, we interpret, and we give it a particular spin.
▶︎ 4:49 And critics think by doing this, we've already falsified our lives. We've already done something that doesn't tell the truth about who we are. And I think the recent rise of discussion about who controls the narrative and the idea of controlling the narrative really helps to express what they're worried about. Because talking about someone controlling the narrative and what the implications of who controls the narrative is suggests a picture of narration as really a way of enforcing one's preferred interpretation of contested events, taking those events and cementing an interpretation of them, and therefore using it as something like a propaganda tool. And this is the aspect of narrative that critics are worried is going to distort and falsify our lives if we think of them in narrative terms.
▶︎ 5:40 Moreover, when we self-narrate, they point out, we often go beyond just putting our spin on events. Knowingly or unknowingly, we often reconstruct them, and so we include in our narrative some events that didn't actually happen. So for instance, someone might say of their life partner, "Yeah, when I first set my eyes on this person, I knew at that moment that this was the person I would spend my life with." It may well be the case that there was no such thought at the moment. They just met at a party and gradually got to know each other and eventually became life partners. There was no momentary changing of life direction. It's only in retrospect that we see it that way.
▶︎ 6:22 And so critics say they're just making something up about what happened. The thing they say happened never did. Or in a more mundane way, I may remember that I paid for dinner the last five times we went out, and really you paid for three of them. I'm just misremembering it. Or I may remember that I made that witty remark at the party when really someone else made it, and I just remember it as my witty remark. Things like this do happen, and most of us have encountered people who have done this and recognized it, sometimes even in ourselves.
▶︎ 6:57 In sum, the argument goes, narratives are by their nature inherently and necessarily selective and interpretive, and that's perfectly appropriate in the context of storytelling, but it's not appropriate in the context of a life. It's not appropriate in trying to present the truth of someone's identity. And this is particularly the case if the selecting and interpreting is done by the person whose life it is. We know that we're subject to all kinds of biases when we think about ourselves. We might reconstruct the events of our life to make better stories. We want to make it more story-like and more interesting when really there's just a lot of mundane routine there.
▶︎ 7:42 We might try to make it more thematically coherent or more like something with a recognizable and exciting plot. We may just wish to think well of ourselves, and so when we're selecting what events to include in our life narrative, we selectively include those that show us in a good light, conveniently omitting our failures or our bad deeds, or where something can be interpreted, we interpret it in the way that makes us look best. Or we might have taken on the narrative of victim and see everything through that lens and only include what makes us seem victimized and only interpret it that way. The general point is that there's reason to suspect some amount of self-deceptive falsification and self-narration, and that makes it distorting and incomplete and therefore not a good way of understanding who a person is, let alone constituting who a person is.
▶︎ 8:40 The narrative view, as I've described it before, says that our self-narratives make us who we are, not just that they show us who we are. And so in the last lecture, I raised some questions about the narrative view, and one of them which I deferred to this lecture is the question of, do we really want to say that any story a person tells about their life is true just because they tell it? And according to these critics, the answer to that is a resounding and emphatic no, we do not. We do not want to say that whatever story a person tells about their life is true.
▶︎ 9:13 So this is a pretty compelling objection because there is no doubt that people are sometimes self-deceived and that their stories don't always track historical truth. And I should say the critics don't have to say and don't usually say that people are doing this self-consciously or they're doing it with the purpose of defrauding. It's just that this is a very natural sort of tendency or bias for people thinking about their own lives. But if people are self-deceived sometimes, and the narrative theorist is going to concede that, that people can be wrong in their narratives, then they owe us an explanation of how that's possible.
▶︎ 9:49 Because if you say that someone's self-narrative constitutes who they are, that the very fact of who they are or what their identity is, is determined by their narrative, it's not clear logically how the narrative could be wrong. The fact is what the narrative says it is. So the narrative can't be wrong. So the narrative view is going to have to answer that question, and it's an important one.
▶︎ 10:13 And to see how the narrative view can help answer this question, it will be helpful to have an analogy that will show us that first of all, selection, interpretation, and even reconstruction, the things that the critics worry about, even if they occur, they don't only occur in storytelling. They don't only occur in the context of narrative. In general, selection, interpretation, reconstruction are important cognitive tools that we use all the time. They're how we abstract understanding of large amounts of information. Sometimes the amount of information we have is overwhelming, and we need to see patterns and trends, and the way we do that is by selectively interpreting.
▶︎ 10:59 And when this happens in other contexts, people do not generally take it to be distorting or falsifying, but rather illuminating and knowledge-giving. So here is an example that will perhaps serve as a useful analogy. Let's think of a scientist, we'll talk about scientific modeling, who collects a huge amount of data and plots it on a graph. So we've got an X-axis, which has some sort of scale there and a Y-axis. And the scientist has collected a lot of data about how Y varies with X. And that data is plotted here. There's going to be a lot of it, so it's going to be kind of messy.
▶︎ 11:54 If the scientist is trying to model a phenomenon, trying to model the relation between X and Y, what they will do to produce such a model and what you will see when the thing gets published in the paper showing you the connection between X and Y, between how much coffee you drink and how likely you are to have a cardiac event or anything like that, is they'll draw a smooth curve through the data points. They'll give you a curve, and you aren't going to see all their data because there's just too much data. It's too difficult to see. They're trying to show you what the real connection is. So what they'll do is draw a curve like this, and the curve will not include every data point, most likely.
▶︎ 12:46 There could be lots of reasons that data points fall off the curve. It could be that they're within the margin of error. It could be that there's reason to think that in this particular case, the experiment isn't as reliable as it is in others. So there can be lots of good scientific reasons. But the point is, a curve like this is going to show you a lot more than something that really tried to get all the data points and look like that. You don't know how to draw any pattern or inference from that.
▶︎ 13:21 It doesn't really model the thing for you. It just is another way of giving you this huge mass of data. So the idea here is that in the case where the scientist draws the smooth curve, omitting some data points, that's knowledge giving. That helps us understand the phenomenon better than we would if they just gave us all the data, because the data are too much to process, and we can't extract the relevant patterns and things from the data.
▶︎ 13:54 But there are a few points to emphasize here. The first is that only holds what I just said, that the drawing of the curve, which models the phenomenon, models the relationship, is only illuminating if proper principles of selection are involved. Leaving out data points whose distance from the curve is, as I said, within the margin of error, or leaving out data points where you're saying, "This is just so much of an outlier, something probably went wrong with that experiment, and I think I know what it was. That was the day the freezers weren't working," or whatever it is, those are perfectly good scientific principles that help you get rid of misleading or muddying data points to show a robust connection.
▶︎ 14:39 However, omitting data points, as we all know, simply to support your hypothesis, "I had a hypothesis. When I plot the data, it doesn't show it, so I'll just draw the curve that shows what I thought it would be, even though it only goes through two of the data points," this is not going to be illuminating. This is going to be falsifying and distorting. So it's not about selection and interpretation per se. It's rather about the principles of selection and interpretation.
▶︎ 15:10 A couple of other things to point out here is there are different kinds of cases of disagreement. Sometimes scientists don't agree on how the curve should be drawn through the data points. So maybe another scientist would say, "I don't think this is the best model of the phenomenon," trying to take the smooth curve. "I don't think that's the best one. I think you should do it this way." And so you'll get a slightly different curve that includes more or less the same number of data points, but it selects different ones and maybe for different reasons.
▶︎ 15:50 Reasonable scientists can disagree about how to model the data they got. Reasonable scientists can disagree about the underlying phenomenon that they're trying to describe and exactly how it should be modeled. And when this happens, they have reasons, reasons internal to science, internal to the science of whatever it is they're trying to describe for choosing one rather than the other. And they're just putting different emphasis on which are the most salient data points.
▶︎ 16:21 It could be even that some models are better for some purposes and some models are better for others. In that case, it's not like one of them is distorting and falsifying and the other one is true. Probably neither of them is completely and entirely accurate, but both are illuminating, but illuminating in different ways of different parts of the phenomenon. And so either of them can be seen as a knowledge-giving curve.
▶︎ 16:50 On the other hand, the person who just wants to confirm their hypothesis and draws a curve that basically doesn't have anything to do with the data points at all, but only has to do with what they were expecting, is not going to be illuminating. So there's a disagreement that can go on within science where neither party actually has to be wrong in a relevant sense. They're both close enough to right, but in different ways. And then there's other kinds of disagreements where you're just saying you're not even doing science anymore, so we can't even talk about which of these might be better or when it might be better to use one than the others. Yours is just not usable.
▶︎ 17:32 I go into these details because they will come back when we talk about the narrative of personal identity. And there's one more point that I want to make about this, which is to say not only does a smooth curve through data points that constitutes a model in science, not only does that omit some data points that were actually collected, but it will also include, in some sense, data points that were never collected. And what I mean by that is only this. There are points along the x-axis where no data was collected, but the curve goes through those points.
▶︎ 18:14 So what the curve is doing here, where there's no data point, no experiment was done in this condition, is predicting what would happen if you did an experiment there. It's saying, it's not just making stuff up. It's saying, given what we have seen, this is what we would predict. And so that's why a model is useful. It's one of the main reasons it's useful. It not only helps you understand what the data do show, but it allows you to predict what would happen in cases where you haven't gathered any data.
▶︎ 18:51 So this is a form of reconstruction in the sense of including something that never happened. So it's like reconstruction in a narrative, but it's a form of reconstruction that can be useful. And so I want to ultimately say that there's something like that in self-narrative as well. So enough about the scientists and their experiments, whatever it is that they're experimenting on.
▶︎ 19:16 How does this analogy apply to the narrative view? Well, the objection to the narrative view that I have laid out so far suggests that the way in which we narrate our lives uses illegitimate principles of selection and interpretation rather than ones that yield illumination. And they say necessarily when we form a self-narrative, we're going to be like the scientist who draws a line to confirm their hypothesis or please a granting agency or make a pretty curve rather than the scientist who draws their curve, makes their model according to sound and respectable scientific principles of interpreting and selecting data.
▶︎ 20:02 So the unsound principles in the case of self-narrative are just the ones that we discussed before. We might be trying to tell a good story or meet the aesthetic aims of literary fiction, or we might be trying to think well of ourselves or think of ourselves as successful, or we might be trying to confirm our hypothesis that we're always being victimized. And so what they say is since we are using the wrong principles to self-narrate, we're always going to be deceiving ourselves. Our narratives will always be falsifying, and they shouldn't be taken to show who we really are.
▶︎ 20:38 Now, I want to note, first of all, that we do have plenty of anecdotal evidence. I think most of us that people do sometimes narrate in ways that make them appear more glamorous than we think they really are or better than we think they really are and so on. But we're never given any quantification by the critics of the narrative view of identity about how widespread this misnarration is. Does everybody do it or just a lot of people? How many people? What percentage of people? And also how frequently it occurs in the average life.
▶︎ 21:20 Maybe people do this in some domains, but not others. Maybe they do it occasionally, but most of their self-narrative is basically sort of accurate in the ways that we think about. So we don't yet really know how big a problem this is. But even more important, even if we concede it is a problem and that it might be a fairly big one, that people narrate badly in this way, that they use bad principles to think about and understand and narrate their lives, what this analogy is supposed to reveal is that it's not the mere fact that what they do is selective and interpretive and even has some forms of reconstruction, because we can see that that's not inherently distorting or falsifying.
▶︎ 22:12 Just as a model through data points can help you see a phenomenon that you couldn't otherwise see in a bunch of data at a higher, more abstract level, so might a life narrative tell you something about who someone is that would be hard to see if you followed each and everything they did because there's so many things that happen. And this is what a good biographer is supposed to do, not just tell a good story, tell the truth of someone's life, capture the truth of someone's life by putting the incidents together and selecting among them the most representative or salient to give you this higher order picture. So it's not clear that the problem is that we're narrating. If there's a problem, it's that we're narrating badly.
▶︎ 23:05 So you might say, the narrative theorist might say in response to this falsification worry, well, maybe self-narratives done badly are falsifying, but self-narratives done well can be very illuminating. Just because self-narratives sometimes distort or misrepresent, it doesn't mean they always must. Now, if we want to really use this analogy and this idea to develop a narrative account of personal identity, we're gonna have to answer some questions about how the analogy between the scientific case and the self-narrative case work.
▶︎ 23:47 And we're going to have to do four things, and the four are really interrelated. They're only artificially four. But these are the kinds of questions we'll have to answer. One is if we think that self-narratives done according to proper principles can be illuminating, we're going to have to say what those principles are. The critics have shown us what the bad principles are. If we think there are good principles of selection and interpretation that will yield an illuminating self-narrative, and one that's ultimately going to be self-constituting, we're going to have to say which these principles are and why those are the right principles. Where do these principles come from? How do we know they're the right ones? So that's one thing we're going to have to do.
▶︎ 24:34 Another thing we're going to have to do is answer the question raised before about how we can be mistaken in our self-narratives if they actually constitute our identities. Suppose there are good principles of self-narration, and they do make us who we are. We know that some people make mistakes. Do they always make mistakes just because they narrated according to the wrong principles? Or can you make a mistake if you narrate according to the right principles? And if so, how can that be the case? How does that all work? How do mistakes work in this picture? Because we know mistakes happen. We know people have misleading narratives. We know they're self-deceived sometimes.
▶︎ 25:15 So another thing that we're going to have to do if we want to turn this into a theory of narrative identity is say something about what corresponds to the data set in the science analogy. The scientist has some set of data that they've collected, and they have to model that data. What are we modeling, or what are we weaving into a narrative? In the last lecture, I talked about how a child learns to turn the events in their life into a narrative, how to narrate the events in their life. You don't just take any old actions and experiences and make them part of your life story. It's taking the events in your life and turning them into a story. But if that's how we're thinking about it, there's some set of actions and events that are part of your life and are yours to narrate, and that sounds like there's already some form of personal identity in place. Why isn't personal identity constituted by what delimits the set of actions and experiences that are properly part of your narrative, and then the narrative is just something on top of that? How can it actually constitute your identity in that case?
▶︎ 26:27 And relatedly, and last, some explanation is going to need to be given of what it means to say overall that a narrative constitutes a person. To see the bite of this requirement, I think possibly some of you have already thought about the fact that there's a real disanalogy between the science case that I gave, where you model data, and the narrative view insofar as the narrative says that you constitute with yourself a narrative. Because the drawing of the curve doesn't create the phenomenon that's being modeled, it models it. So there's some preexisting natural phenomenon that the scientist is trying to capture. So there's a real disanalogy there because in the case of the narrative view, the narrative is actually supposed to constitute the relevant phenomenon. The narrative is what constitutes your identity. It's what determines it. So we have to understand how that works too.
▶︎ 27:33 So all of these issues are interconnected, and all of them are really difficult, but I think it's very helpful to separate them, at least initially, before we see how they interact with one another, just because it makes it more manageable to try to address them.
▶︎ 27:51 I'm going to take them point by point, at least for a while, in trying to describe how the narrative approach can answer these challenges or speak to these questions, or at least to give the strategy for doing so. The first question was, what are these constraints on proper narrations? I wanted to make a distinction between narrating badly and narrating well. If you narrate according to the proper narrative principles and you select and interpret that way, then it can constitute your identity without being misleading or false or distorting. What are these principles, and where do they come from?
▶︎ 28:34 I think that once again, in answering this question, it's going to be very helpful to go to narrative views in developmental psychology because they give us some really good resources for thinking about how this works. And you'll see that it involves some rethinking of fundamental ways of approaching the question of personal identity overall as we go along with it. So in the last lecture, we discussed the way in which children are taught to be self-narrators through social reminiscing, and their induction into self-narration teaches them not just to form a narrative, but to form a narrative of a person's life that is their life. That is, they're taught to understand themselves as living a person's life, and they're taught what a person's life looks like in their sociocultural context, and they're taught how to take the events that they're remembering and put them together into a life narrative and not just a narrative. And this is just analogous to the way that a student of science would be taught how to model, use data, and model a data set, and which are the good principles of doing it and which are the bad principles of doing it.
▶︎ 29:51 So as a child learns to self-narrate, what the child learns is the broad logic and typical trajectory of a person's life in their social world, to internalize the recognition that they themselves are a person living such a life among others, and therefore to begin to organize their life, to understand it, but also to structure it in a way that demonstrates the constraints of a life, of a person in their social context. So as we saw, the child starts with some disjointed recollections of experiences. They were at the park, they were on a swing, they were eating a snack. The caregiver teaches the child how to connect them in a way that will be intelligible to others as an extended event in the life of the child. They learn that we go to the park, and that when we go to the park, we play there, and that when we play there, it's only for a limited amount of time. And so that's an episode, going to the park, and here are the kinds of things that happen when you go to the park, and so on.
▶︎ 31:00 But they also learn that they're little now and that they're going to be bigger, and one day they'll be as big as big brother, and one day they'll be a grown-up like mommy, and one day they'll even be old like grandma. And that various things will happen as they go along. As they get bigger, they'll go to school. They'll go have a job someday. When children are little, they ask them very quickly. Very young children ask, "What do you want to be when you grow up? Are you going to be an engineer? Are you going to be a ballerina? Are you going to be an astronaut?" Maybe things get more realistic as they go along. So it's not always engineer, ballerina, or astronaut, and it becomes more like, "Well, I think I might be an accountant."
▶︎ 31:45 But in any event, children are taught how a life goes, and they also learn certain sociocultural schemas for connecting experiences, emotions, motivations, actions, and consequences. They talk about, "Well, why do you think that he did that? Why did you do that? And what would you do if you were doing it differently next time? And would you be happier if you had done it this way?" So they're learning all kinds of ways to put together experience, action, moral judgment, emotions, human motivations, and to understand the events in their world and to organize their events in the world so that they unfold according to the very broad logic of a human life, of the life of a human person in their sociocultural context.
▶︎ 32:44 Now, I keep talking about the sociocultural context because some of what the children will learn will be culturally specific. They'll learn certain norms and customs as they learn how a life unfolds. You'll be confirmed when you get bigger. You'll have a bar mitzvah when you get bigger. You'll have a naming ceremony, or you'll retire when you're sixty-five, whatever it is. These are going to differ from culture to culture, and there's very clear and robust evidence that by a very early age, people know what the big milestones of their culture are. Whether it's finding a mate, whether it's moving out of the house, whether it's having some sort of ritual, they know what they are, and they'll learn the culturally specific ones.
▶︎ 33:33 But there's also a lot that's universal, and the reason there's a lot that's universal is because a lot of what we do and how we live and how we engage with one another has to do with the way a biological life unfolds. Universally for humans, at least for human persons, we start as helpless infants who need a lot of care and education and induction into the social world, and then we develop over time, typically into mature adults with the full range of capacities of mature adults. Then after that, we age if all goes well. In the good case, we age. But as we age, we may gain some new capacities, but we also lose capacities that we had as mature adults or children. We change in various ways. The activities we undertake change in various ways.
▶︎ 34:31 There is already a story of a biological human life because a human life is a developmental process in which capacities are gained and lost in roughly predictable ways. Now, of course, lots of biological lives don't follow that trajectory. Some end early. Some have atypical developmental trajectories. It's not the case that every life is like that, but that's the typical life.
▶︎ 35:00 And for that reason, the sort of cultural milestones and the culturally specific elements of a narrative of the life of a person are going to overlap among cultures in various ways. You're just not going to find a culture where the prescribed period for being educated and starting a family is going to be extreme old age or infancy, nor are you going to find one where the point at which you're expected to contribute as a functional and full member of the culture is when you're four. There are just certain constraints, and so that's where these principles of narration come from.
▶︎ 35:48 Now, none of this is to say that you're only narrating if you assume that you will do everything that the cultural template shows. Part of, they're not that specific, and they're not that rigid. So we should not think of these principles of narration that the children learn by learning the form of the life of a person or the typical life of a human person in their culture as a script that they have to follow to be narrating correctly or to live the life of a person.
▶︎ 36:24 But it's the starting point. It's a shared reference point so that if you're going to deviate, you know that there are expectations that you're going to deviate from. I don't want to get married. I don't want to have a job. I don't want to have this ceremony. So you're still having a narrative that recognizes what the narrative in your culture is, but it leaves room to respond for it in different ways.
▶︎ 36:50 A narrative is an active, dynamic thing. It's not a script that you follow rigidly. It's something you use as a reference point. So this provides something of an initial answer to the question of where the principles of respectable self-narration come from. They come from the sociocultural templates, the broad and flexible sociocultural templates for the logic of a human life or the life of a person that we learn through social reminiscing and other forms of reinforcement as we go through our lives and which are shared with others in our social context and more broadly.
▶︎ 37:28 And just to reiterate, these are not scripts. These are not step-by-step instructions for leading the life of a person that one must follow to the letter. It's a broad expected trajectory that gets us all virtually on the same page, so that we can interact with one another.
▶︎ 37:47 Now, if those are the correct or respectable principles for narrating a life, we might ask why. What makes these the appropriate principles of self-narration? Maybe our culture agreed on them. Maybe they're connected to our biology in some way. But why does that make them the appropriate principles to actually illuminate or shed light on or display the truth of or constitute the life of a person? How does that make sense?
▶︎ 38:19 And here the answer gets tricky. As I pointed out before, there's a disanalogy with the case of the scientist drawing a curve to model data points, because in the case of the scientist modeling data points, there's some phenomenon in the world that exists to be rightly or wrongly captured. But if our narrative is supposed to constitute us, why is it that these are the right principles? We're looking for the things that correspond to the proper scientific principles for modeling a data set with a graph. But in the scientific case, as we already noted, there's an independent phenomenon that you're trying to get right or wrong. But in the case of narrating a life, the narrative is supposed to constitute the self. It's supposed to constitute the person's identity. So there's nothing independent to get right or wrong. So in what way do we justify these as the appropriate criteria or principles of selection and interpretation to use as opposed to any others?
▶︎ 39:30 And this is a very difficult question, and it's a place where the narrative view really starts deviating from other accounts of personal identity, because both the psychological and the biological account fundamentally assume there is some metaphysical fact about personal identity that exists that we're trying to capture. We're trying to say what actually constitutes identity. And here the narrative view takes a different turn, and in doing it, they follow developmental psychologists once again.
▶︎ 40:00 So in order to answer the question, what makes these the right or appropriate or respectable or proper principles for selection and interpretation in self-narrative, we need to answer questions about what we think a person is. I haven't really answered that question yet, and I've been talking as much about humans as about persons, and I will come back to talk about that in a moment as well. So what is a person, and what is the truth of their identity? What is the truth that we're trying to capture?
▶︎ 40:30 And to try to answer this question in this context, I think what we have to think about is what self-narratives are for. Why are we self-narrators? What do we get out of self-narrating? So when we model a big data set, we're trying to capture some pattern for some purpose. We want to predict. We want to explain some natural phenomenon. What are we doing when we self-narrate?
▶︎ 40:58 And narrative theorists in developmental psychology argue, using principles of evolutionary psychology but also cross-cultural studies of narrative, that the practice of self-narration almost certainly developed in humans to allow them to live together in large groups, large social groups where they need to coordinate, cooperate, plan, and manage disagreements. Humans live together in very large groups, and in order for a culture, or a society, to survive with this large group of people, the people need to be able to coordinate, plan, cooperate, and in order to do that, they need to be intelligible to one another and also largely predictable. So we don't always know what other people are going to do. We can't always predict it, but as we walk through our day-to-day life, we better be able to have a pretty good idea of how people will react to various kinds of circumstances. When we'll get agreement, when we'll get disagreement, when they're going to get angry at us, when they're going to help us. When we can count on them to deliver the food we ordered.
▶︎ 42:07 We just need to know these things, and in order to know these things, we have to share certain common assumptions about how humans work. We have to know them, we have to share them, and we also have to make them so. We have to organize our lives so that they're so. And so the idea is that that's what self-narrative is for, that we self-narrate so that we can be intelligible to one another, so that we can cooperate, disagree, argue, coordinate, and do all of the things that we need to do for a social world to thrive and for all of us to survive.
▶︎ 42:46 One way to think about it is this. We can go back to the very beginning of these lectures, the introduction, and in the introduction, I distinguished between two identity questions. One of them was the question of an identity crisis, what makes me the person I am in terms of what beliefs, values, desires, goals, and so on do I have? And the other was this very prosaic day-to-day re-identification question. I pointed out, in order to do almost anything we do, we need to be able to re-identify other people. When I pick up my child at daycare, I need to be able to identify my child. When I want to pay back a loan, I need to pay it back to the person I borrowed it from, and so I need to identify them. If I want to ask the boss for a day off, I have to be able to identify the boss, the person who's in charge, and so on. We do this all the time, and that was the first point I made.
▶︎ 43:46 A second point I made is that we do this by re-identifying human animals, that this is how we, in fact, re-identify people most of the time, not always, but we do it by looking at them, by hearing their voice. If we are in doubt, we might do it through a DNA test or fingerprints or something like that. But we do it by re-identifying human bodies. Then when I introduced the psychological approach, I said that psychological theorists say, yeah, we do re-identify people in this way, but that's just an epistemic criterion. That's just the way we tell whether we have the same person. What we're really after is psychological sameness.
▶︎ 44:29 I gave the example in defending that view, showing how the psychological theorists defend that view. If I'm supposed to meet my friend in a coffee shop, I walk in, I look to see what human animal looks like my friend, and that's the table I go to. But I said the psychological theorist will tell us, when I go there, I have certain expectations. When I say hello, I expect her to say, "Hello, you're late," and not to say, "Who are you and what are you doing here? And leave me alone, this is my table." That would be strange. We have an appointment. I expect her to know what our social relationship is and honor that and act accordingly. I expect her to tell me about her day in a way that coheres with what I know to be the circumstances of her life, and so on.
▶︎ 45:22 I do expect something different when I walk up to my friend's table than I would expect if I walked up to the table of a stranger and just sat down. I would expect them to behave in some other way. This is used by psychological theorists to say, what we're trying to ascertain is whether the person that we go up to, the person who's associated with this body, has the same psychological life as the person we knew, is psychologically continuous. But in the context of the narrative approach, and especially the narrative approach in conjunction with the way it's developed in developmental psychology, we can put this a somewhat different way.
▶︎ 46:06 We do re-identify people by re-identifying human bodies in the way described, but what we're after is not just the question of, is the internal life of this person sufficiently similar to the life of the person who used to be associated with this body? What I want is to be able to predict how that person will react roughly when I go up to her and talk to her and sit down with her. I want to know what to expect. I want to be able to understand what she says to me easily. And with a friend or an intimate, we're usually pretty good at this. With strangers, it might be a little bit harder, but there's some fundamental level at which other humans and their behaviors and their motivations and their actions are intelligible to us, and that's what allows us to move through the day and do all the things we have to do.
▶︎ 46:57 We know who to ask for what, we know how to ask, we know how to approach people when they're responding to us in a way that we do or don't like. We can guess what their motivations are, and so on, most of the time. And what the narrative theory says, or at least the one that I'm trying to develop, which is different from many other versions of it, is that what we really want, not unlike the scientist who wants a model that will explain and predict some phenomenon so that we know how to practically deal with it in the world, instead of just having this huge dataset, what we want is to be able to explain and predict the others with whom we interact so that we can coordinate, cooperate, explain ourselves to them. If somebody challenges me and I need to give an explanation, I need to know how to explain what I was doing and why I was doing it and who I am and why I have a right to do it in a way that will be intelligible to that person, that will make sense. And in order for us to do this, given how complicated human lives are, and given how complicated the social
▶︎ 48:15 We have to be basically on the same page about how humans operate, what kinds of things they do, what features of their lives are the most salient, what are the things that you have to explain to somebody when they say, "Why do you get to pick up this child?" Or, "Why should I hire you?" Or any other kind of question. "Who do you think you are?" We have to know what kind of question they're asking and what kind of answer they're looking for, and this is achieved, according to this view, by us all having in common this basic template of how a human life evolves. We know what to expect from someone later in life that's different from what we expect from a child, both in terms of how they act, but also what their cognitive capacities are, what's gonna make them happy, how we can comfort them. We have all of this in common because we have a fundamental story. We know how to narrate a life.
▶︎ 49:23 And it's not just that we know how to do it. It's not just that lives go on independently, and we can add a narrative gloss to them. We are actively arranging our lives this way. We're following the narrative structure in the way we live, not by following a script, not by following a template, but by using it as the fundamental guide so that we can organize our behavior in a way that will be comprehensible, intelligible, and effective in interacting with others.
▶︎ 49:54 And if this is how we understand what a self-narrative is for, it also helps us understand various things like why is this the appropriate narrative? Well, it's the appropriate narrative because it's the one that allows us to effectively engage with one another. It's the appropriate one because it's the one that structures the social and natural world I live in, because it's built on biology as well as on cultural overlay. This is structuring the world I'm gonna encounter on a day-to-day. And so having this as my principle of self-narration is what allows me to explain myself to others, to be predictable enough to others that they will do things like engage with me as a friend or a colleague or an employee or whatever.
▶︎ 50:47 So what makes it right is that it's close enough to the general template to be effective, and it also helps us understand ways it can be wrong. And so one way of thinking about what the truth of my identity is and what it is to get it wrong, and how even though my narrative is going to be constitutive of who I am, and I'll say more about that in just a minute, nevertheless, I can be wrong about it, and that's because it has to do this practical work. The way you find out that your model isn't good is that the predictions don't work very well, and it isn't effective for doing what you wanna do in the world. You wanna come up with prescriptions to decrease cardiac events, and the model doesn't work. You get feedback from the world, and you change the model.
▶︎ 51:36 Similarly, we walk around with something like a model of who we are. We have our self-narrative, and we use it when we engage with other people, and if we're doing something that deviates too far from the cultural norms, we'll get some pushback on it. Now, when we get pushback, depending on the exact interpretation, it's important for us to consider it, to realize what feedback we're getting, but what we're gonna do about it can depend a lot on the circumstances. So just like in the scientific case, there are various ways in which I can be wrong about my self-narrative, various things that are gonna get me feedback or pushback from my social world that should make me think about whether I need to rethink, reinterpret, revise my narrative.
▶︎ 52:29 So there might be just small matters of disagreement, things that are like the disagreements between respectable scientists. I think I'm confident. You think I'm arrogant. I think I'm generous. You don't think so much that I am. I think I'm very diplomatic. You don't. If I hear this from enough people, I need to consider it because it's gonna affect the way they engage with me. But I don't need to accept that they're right. I may decide that they're wrong. I may decide that I'm right. And these are kinds of interpretive disagreements that we actually know people do have. We have lots of interpretive disagreements on a lot of things and that we can still live and work with. It will affect socializing with various people. It will have some social impact, but it's not gonna undermine my ability to interact with or predict what people do or to make myself predictable to them. It doesn't make me unintelligible. It doesn't make them unintelligible. We just disagree.
▶︎ 53:31 Then there can be factual mistakes, the sort of reconstructions that we talked about before, where I say I paid for all the dinners, and you say, "No, you only paid for one of them." Well, if you can bring me the receipts, and I see it, I need to revise my narrative. Now, maybe I revise that point of my narrative, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm gonna rethink my whole life. I just realize I have to make some accommodations. So I'm doing something wrong if I just say, "I don't care if you have receipts. I still stick by my narrative." But if I respond to it, I'm narrating in a perfectly proper way.
▶︎ 54:13 And then there can be profoundly disordered narratives, and this would be in something like a case of extreme psychosis or something or real delusion, where it's very difficult to engage with the person because their narrative is so deviant from the cultural norms. And in such a case, we will be able to see that this is a deviant narrative, that it's wrong, and that it's really failing to completely constitute a good personal identity. By a good personal identity, I don't mean one that pleases us, but one that allows you to engage with the world and with other people effectively, that it doesn't give you a coherent enough identity to do that or a comprehensible one. It will be evident in those cases. So this is the answer to the question of how we go wrong.
▶︎ 55:08 And then there's one more question that I originally put as two different questions, and that's a question of what corresponds to the dataset in the science analogy? Some set of events and experiences our mind narrate. I can't just take any ones of them. How do we delimit that class? And it's pretty clear, from what I've been saying so far and the way I've developed the view, that it's the things that happen in my human history. A child is taught to weave the events and experiences that happen in their human history into a narrative.
▶︎ 55:49 Somehow, they're going to have to answer to other people for those events, actions. They're going to have to explain themselves to other people in terms of the things that happened in their human history. So the narrative is built out of the actions and experiences and events in a human history, and this is not accidental at all. Human lives are relatively easily re-identifiable. That was the point that I started with. That's why we use human animals as our epistemic or criterion of personal identity, as minimally our epistemic criterion.
▶︎ 56:28 And we're mammals, so other conspecific organisms like us are really salient to us. That's built into us biologically. And so we do treat other humans as salient units of interaction. What we're interacting with are other human people, and what's relevant about them is how their human life has unfolded, and there are natural features that are related to this as well.
▶︎ 56:57 So if we're talking about something like prudence and prudential concern, if I'm imprudent about a vaccine or my medical screenings or whether I smoke or not, that imprudence is going to affect this human organism. And so even these things that we associate with personal identity and that the psychological continuity theorists use to test their accounts of identity are going to be connected in many cases, but not all, to the human body in ways that I don't think the psychological approach appreciates enough.
▶︎ 57:34 So I take all of this to be relatively uncontroversial, and that leaves us with one last big question, to which I will give the best answer that I can and then leave things, I think, more or less unresolved probably for many people. And that question is, why isn't what I've just described Olson's animalism? Why haven't I just shifted the discussion from the metaphysical question of personal identity to the identity crisis conception of personal identity? Because now I'm saying that the absolute limit is a human life, that that's where the beginning and endpoint of the experiences that get woven into the narrative are. The narrative starts when you're born, more or less, and ends when you die, more or less, as a human being.
▶︎ 58:31 So why isn't Olson just right that our criterion of numerical identity should be biological, but that we would really care about being persons? Person is a phase sortal for him, remember. It's an attribute we can have, and we're only persons when we self-narrate, and we care about being a person, so that's really important to us. But it has nothing to do with our numerical identity. It just has to do with, put dismissively, whether we can get along with people or not, whether people like us or not, whether people believe what we say about ourselves or not.
▶︎ 59:09 And this is a really tricky thing for the narrative view to answer because it involves just taking a really different perspective on the question we're asking. As a narrative theorist, I don't want to deny that we are human organisms, but I do want to deny that we're just human organisms or even that we are most fundamentally human organisms. I think if you think not of the term human organism, but of the term human being, where a human being is a richer conception that captures all our dimensions, that we're subjects of experience in a certain way, and that we can have extended experience in our complex social world and the complex sorts of relationships that gives rise to, maybe we could say we're fundamentally human beings. I'm not even sure that I would say that.
▶︎ 1:00:05 But the fact that we have this kind of phenomenal consciousness that can extend over time, that we can become full-blown agents that allow us to engage in so complex social practices, undertake long-term projects and plans, all of this is connected to our ability to have culture, which makes us very, very different from other kinds of animals, that don't tend to build buildings and write novels and those sorts of things. They can be very complex too in their own way. I'm not ordering things in that way, but it's very fundamental to what we are, that we have this social organization and that we have this psychology. And this is not unique to us either. There are other kinds of animals whose social organization is very fundamental to their being the kinds of things they are. Ants, bees, for instance.
▶︎ 1:01:00 And so what I want to say is if, as the biological approach usually says, what you're talking about is a human organism, meaning just the biochemical stuff going on under the skin, that's not enough to capture what we are, and that's not a good way to talk about our identity. So what I would propose instead is a biopsychosocial account of personal identity. I think what we are are beings that are inherently embodied, embedded in a social world, and subjects of experience. We're subjects, we're agents, and we're animals, and we're all of these things.
▶︎ 1:01:40 And in the actual lives of most humans on Earth, as we encounter them, these three things are not only co-present, they're in dynamic interaction all the time. This self-narration I talk about that teaches the child, that the child learns from the mother, that changes the architecture of the brain. Learning language, learning to self-narrate literally makes biological changes. Our biology affects our psychology and our sociality in all kinds of ways that we know about, and our social world affects us biologically and psychologically all the time. These three things are dynamically interacting.
▶︎ 1:02:24 Sometimes they do come apart. When someone is in a vegetative state, they're biologically continuous, but not psychologically. If someone could survive the death of the body, in terms of their consciousness continuing after that, and especially if it's as sometimes imagined that they get together with loved ones who died before them and are able to reunite with those individuals in some other realm, that's not material, then that would be a way of continuing, too.
▶︎ 1:02:59 So my thought is, the idea here is to say human persons as we know them are these biopsychosocial beings. The usual way of asking the question of personal identity is to say, "Well, which one of these is really the most fundamental? Which one is the one we have to have for me to continue?" And I think that's the wrong way to ask the question. I think it's analogous to taking a rope that's made out of interwoven bits of twine and string and saying, "Okay, the rope can do all these things. It can work as a pulley and stuff, and there's all these different strands in it. Which is the one that really makes it the rope?" As if, if you cut strand by strand, you'd get to the one that's really necessary and sufficient for the rope to continue.
▶︎ 1:03:54 But depending what order you cut the strands in, they're all equally fundamental. Any one strand could be the last one, such that we would still say we had a rope. And similarly, I think for humans, we know them as these complex biopsychosocial beings, and if they lose some aspect or another, it would alter their nature in a very fundamental way. We might still say that they were continuing, but in a different way.
▶︎ 1:04:19 In order to make this narrative view work as an answer to the question of personal identity, we sort of have to change the question that we're asking and think about it in a very different way. And one of the ways of characterizing how we change it is that since it's all built on our ability to interact with one another and to do the things that make up a human life, that's what's justifying the narrative approach in the end. It really puts practical questions before metaphysical questions.
▶︎ 1:04:55 The usual way of asking the question of personal identity says, "There's some metaphysical thing that makes me numerically identical over time, and that thing should explain why I can do what I do and why I care about what I care about and why we make the judgments of morality and so on that we do." I would put it the other way around. I would say what we fundamentally are are beings who can do these kinds of things and live this kind of life, and that it's actually having those practical capacities and abilities that makes us metaphysically, to the extent that it's a metaphysical question, what we are. So it reverses the order of the metaphysical and the practical.
▶︎ 1:05:40 Many people see this as just simply changing the subject or as inappropriate because metaphysics can't be like that. This is really a much more foundational disagreement that can't be resolved here, probably can't be resolved anywhere. But I think it brings us full circle to the very beginning where I said the question of personal identity is really tricky, and it's tricky because we have different aspects of personal identity that are really important to us.
▶︎ 1:06:17 So there's the identity crisis sense of identity. What am I like? What matters to me? And there's this metaphysical sense of identity, this re-identification sense of identity. And what the narrative view is saying is you really have to answer the identity crisis sense at some level. You have to have enough coherence and understanding of yourself over time to be able to engage with one another to have identity in the more metaphysical sense. So this I know will not be convincing to everybody, and it's certainly not straightforward, but at a minimum, it offers a new way of thinking about this very old question.