-
4 Getting Our Stories Straight: Self-narrative and Personal Identity
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
chapter four Getting Our Stories Straight Self-narrative and Personal Identity Marya Schechtman, Ph.D. In everyday life we have relatively little trouble reidentifying people. Most questions of personal identity that we encounter can be settled by establishing relevant facts about human bodies. I may be uncertain that the person I am picking out of the police lineup is really the same person I witnessed running from the crime scene, but spying a distinctive tattoo may help settle the question for me. If I fear that the person claiming to be my long-lost brother is really a stranger trying to defraud me, I may ask him to take a DNA test; and if I have trouble distinguishing between the identical twins who work for me, it will be helpful to learn that one of them has a scar over her left eye. We may not always be able to obtain the information we need to resolve these sorts of identity question decisively, but we know what kind of information would enable us to do so. Sometimes, however, we encounter a di≠erent sort of question about personal identity. In these cases, we are confident that we are dealing with a single human being, but that human being shows psychological alterations so profound that we question whether what we are encountering is really a single person. This kind of identity question might arise, for instance, in dealing with someone with dissociative identity disorder (DID) who seems to exhibit several distinct personalities.1 It also arises in the four case studies we are asked to consider. Each of these cases describes a human being who changes in such fundamental ways that it is natural to ask whether we are dealing with the same person throughout his story. These identity questions cannot be answered by learning more facts about human bodies, because the sameness of the human being is not at issue. With these questions of identity, unlike the ones noted above, it is not immediately obvious how to go about resolving them. My primary goal in this chapter is to get clearer on how these kinds of question can be addressed. I begin by suggesting that the questions of personal identity that arise in cases such as DID and our case studies are concerned with what I call forensic personal identity. This is the notion of personal identity that underlies important practical issues concerning moral responsibility and entitlement. After defining the notions of forensic personal identity and forensic personhood, I briefly discuss the way in which the four case studies raise questions about these concepts. Next I sketch my account of forensic personal identity, which I call the narrative self-constitution view, and show how this view can be fruitfully applied to the specific questions raised by the case studies. Forensic Personhood and Personal Identity The first order of business is to see that cases such as DID and our four case histories raise questions of personal identity. It is in some ways tempting to conclude that the “questions” raised here are not genuine questions about personal identity but merely rhetorical devices used to express an anomalous degree of change in a single person. It seems clear that we sometimes use questions of personal identity in this way. I might say of someone, for instance, that she is “a di≠erent person” since taking a vacation or finishing a stressful longterm project. If someone is severe professionally and compassionate personally , we might say that she is “a di≠erent person” at the o∞ce and at home. In either case, these sentiments might be expressed in a question: “Are you really the same person who was biting everyone’s head o≠ while you were trying to finish that report?” or “Can this charming hostess really be the same person who reduces everyone in the o∞ce to tears on a regular basis?” In these cases the questions do not seem to signify any real puzzlement about identity, but instead are a registering of how multifaceted people can be. 66 Philosophers Hold Forth [3.238.114.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:07 GMT) One possibility, then, is to say that DID and Alzheimer disease, frontotemporal dementia, steroid psychosis, and the deep brain stimulation described in our case studies are continuous with these more common cases. On closer analysis, however, we can see that the questions raised in these more extreme cases are of a di≠erent...