Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Conclusion

• There is a confusing diversity of conceptions of ‘the self’ in philosophical, psychological, psychiatric, and neuroscientific discourse. To remedy this, I propose and defend a naturalistic view of the self: the system view. The self is here conceived of as the complex and dynamic system of our higher-level self-monitoring functions, including our capacities for self-representation over time. These are grounded in more basic self-representational capacities that are widespread among different species.
• On the system view, the self is not to be confounded with the attributes of personhood, as it often has been in philosophical discourse. Nor is the self over time a product of memory, as philosophers in Locke’s tradition, and some popular intuitions, seem to take it to be.
• I discuss the complex nature of autobiographical memory and argue that, given that much of our autobiographical remembering is already a reconstructive process, the self is not produced by our memories, but is the system that produces them.
• The system view is also opposed to currently fashionable views of the self as ‘narrative’. Narrative constructionism about the self has an authorship problem: it does not account for the processes that enable and subserve narration about oneself in the first place. I argue that it is in these processes, rather than in their productions, that we should conceptually locate the self.
• Neither should we take narrative capacities to be essential for a self. To illustrate the advantages of the system view, I discuss autism spectrum conditions and other defects and disorders such as dementia, dissociative disorders, and schizophrenia. In these conditions, particular self-representational capacities are differently configured, impaired, or absent, but this does not entail a wholesale loss or lack of self. Instead, such conditions are better characterized as specific system malfunctions.
• I conclude by suggesting directions for future research.