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Since English is not my first language, I decided to create this blog in order to get my friends' comments and views on my academic essays, because this will, I believe, help me improve both my writing style and my argumentative skills. You do not have to write a long comment or feedback. You can refer to a weak point in my essay, and I will try to figure it out. I know your time is precious but nothing more joyful than intellectual interaction because it enables us to discover the unknown in ourselves and in the world accordingly. Remember that this world was only an idea in someone's mind which indicates the power that ideas could have! So, help my ideas be good in order for them to survive!

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Dennett and the "True Story" of the Self




April18th, 2010


Dennett and the "True Story" of the Self

Because of its interrelation with the issue of survival and human responsibility, the concept of personal identity or the self has always concerned philosophers throughout history. Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of mind, introduced a narrative theory of the self, which is the topic of this paper. To pinpoint the strengths and the weaknesses of Dennett's theory and evaluate it efficiently, it is important to look at other views of earlier philosophers regarding personal identity. I will start with Descartes’ simplified view of the immateriality of the self, and will end with Hume’s bundle theory of the self, in order to make sense of Dennett’s account of the self as a narrative center of gravity. Explaining Dennett’s motivation in introducing his theory and shedding light on its details will enable me evaluate Dennett’s theory as represented in his article “Why Everyone Is a Novelist” (Dennett). Displaying the advantages of Dennett's theory enforces the urgency of displaying the objections that critics raised against it. To assess the theory accurately, I will consider how Dennett could respond to those criticisms before taking a final position towards his theory.

While constructing the foundation of true and false and the criterion of certain truth, Descartes drifts away to talk about his existence and what his self consists of; “whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain” (Descartes Part IV, par.1). Descartes thinks of the self as an immaterial substance that thinks. Asserting its immateriality, he confirms both its independence of any material substance, including the human body, and its indivisibility. According to him, the existence of the self does not require the existence of any external substance distinct of it, “I concluded that I was a thing or substance, whose whole essence or nature was only to think, and which, to exist, has no need of space or of any material thing or body “ (Descartes Part IV, Par.2). Clearly, Descartes explains his views of the self by using the first person pronoun as if the “I” in his text is supposed to mean everyone or as if he was a representative of all human beings. It follows that he equates the Self to the soul and the mind or any immaterial substance.

Unlike Descartes, David Hume seems to associate the Self with perceptions, which he finds inseparable from the very nature of the self. Hume proposes that the self is intangible and is indefinable since he cannot catch what he calls his self without catching a perception. In other words, he cannot be conscious of his self without capturing a consciousness of some kind of perception. Thus, Hume asserts that humans are “nothing but a bundle or collections of different perceptions” (Hume 193). Accordingly, Hume denies the existence of what we call personal identity. In fact, he even thinks philosopher’s attempts to prove the existence of personal identity is a failure, because he believes our concept of personal identity to be imaginary. Hume specifically mentions Berkeley when referring to the fictional dimension of the concept of personal identity, “There are some philosophers (e.g. Berkeley) who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence, and are certain of its identity and simplicity” (Hume 192). Actually, Hume not only thinks that the attempts of those philosophers to prove the existence, continuity and simplicity of personal identity are a matter of imagination, but he concludes that our consciousness of the existence of the self is an imaginary matter as well.

The fictional dimension of Hume's view of the self is illustrated in his analogy of the human mind as a theatre where “perceptions make their appearances, pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (Hume 193). Hume thinks of human perceptions as different characters or different masks that characters put on in a theatrical performance. For Hume, those masks or characters resemble human perceptions because they are unable to reflect the real identity of people who are wearing them; similar to the way different perceptions themselves do not represent the mind’s identity. Actors may identify with the characters the roles of whom they are playing, but no matter to what degree actors identify with them they are not those characters. Similarly, the varying perceptions that one experiences constantly might seem to constitute the true Self. However, those perceptions in fact are the masks that self puts on to maintain the unity and the consistence of its own identity. While characters and perceptions cannot escape this endless„multiplicity, the identity of both, the theatre and the self, always stays the same, “it persists, while the actors come and go” (Hume 194).

According to Hume, what enables people to keep track of the succession of their perceptions is memory. Thus, he considers memory the source of personal identity. Hume finds in the existence of memory the only explanation of the emergence of a sense of continuity in the succession of perceptions in one’s mind. Storing perceptions with the aid of memory is what helps us “extend the same chain of causes, and consequently the identity of our persons beyond our memory, and we can comprehend times, and circumstances, and actions, which we have entirely forgot but suppose in general to have existed “(Hume 200). In other words, the existence of memory is what enables us relate causes to effects and create a mental conception of everything in our world according to our comprehension of the perceptions sorted in our memory. Consequently, our conceptions of the world, including the self, are not factual, since they rely on recalling our perceptions of them from memory. Rather, Hume asserts the fictional aspect of personal identity and states; “The identity that we ascribe to persons is fictitious” (Hume 198). He denies the association of personal identity with “a soul or a substance that our identity consists in” (Hume 192).

Daniel Dennett embraced Hume’s fictional view of personal identity but attempted to develop a narrative theory of the self. Like Hume, Dennett does not believe that the self is real, but rather fictional. He adds that a self is just like the center of gravity of an object in physics; we assume that it resides in the center of an object but actually; it is only conceptual but not corporeal or factual. J. David Velleman in his journal article The Self as Narrator assesses Dennett’s theory and the conclusion he reaches regarding the true story of our lives. Velleman clarifies the reason of Dennett’s ascribing this theoretical aspect to the self, to “understand, and predict, and make sense of the behavior of some very complicated things” (Velleman 2). Velleman sees this reason as the function and the advantage of Dennett’s concept of the self as a “non-existent author of a merely fictional autobiography” (Velleman 2). In fact, the ability to understand human behavior enables us to predict that behavior. Moreover, predicting human behavior indicates knowledge of its causes and effects, and that knowledge in itself is a means to control human behavior or at least to direct it.

Dennett expands on this point and affirms that human storytelling is similar to the spider’s web spinning or the beaver’s dam building, since we approach narration as “our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition” (Velleman 2). Storytelling can lead to self-protection, because understanding human behavior provides one with awareness of its strengths and weaknesses, which enables one to avoid both physical and emotional or psychological pain. Moreover, storytelling enables man to achieve self-control, because the ability to predict human behavior is what helps in controlling it. In addition, storytelling helps him to express his attitudes and characteristics, the thing that makes him more able to both, understand and define himself, to himself and to others.

We can explain Dennett’s theory of personal identity in light of his concept of the Intentional Stance. The Intentional Stance is a theory that describes the behavior of any kind of being according to mental assumptions and properties. Dennett thinks that we establish this stance on the supposition of the rationality of the being or the thing we are thinking of. After that, we try to attribute some beliefs and then some desires to that same thing or being, before predicting its behavior according to our prediction of its goals and in light of its desires. On the foundation of this theory, Dennett explains the evolution of human consciousness, and argues that it is all a matter of “explanatory strategy” (Zawidzki 36). Accordingly, we can conclude that the objective of that process of mental attribution or explanatory stance is to comprehend the behavior of things and beings in our world. Therefore, Dennett describes our world as “mindless”, and thus he attempts to figure out how our narratives of “purposes, reasons, selves and consciousness emerge” from such an environment (Dennett 78). In addition, Dennett attempts to layout the constraints of constructing such narratives in order to “lampoon them as „just-so stories” (Dennett 78). Viewing our narratives as stories can give us a sense of power insofar that we, as the authors of those stories, can control the direction of our stories and make them correspond to our goals and desires.

This very notion can be applied to Dennett’s view of the self, since Dennett does not specify any kind of characteristics to be attributed to the beings whose behavior we are trying to comprehend. Perhaps we assume the rationality of our self, attribute beliefs and desires to it, invent goals for it and predict its behavior, in order to unify the different components of what we think our self is and to make sense of its actions. In fact, Dennett suggests applying intentionality to people as well as axes, meaning objects in general. He asserts that we presuppose the, axehood of an axe even though we do not assume that it is imbued with spiritual axehood. (Zawidzki 34-37). Dennett believes that the real nature of both, people and thoughts is no different from the nature of axes, and thus should be understood the same way.

To describe how the self is not real, Dennett explains the self by applying it to scientific and literary analogies. The literary analogy Dennett refers to is, what may be called a self-character, which has a unified narrative and is employed to make sense of our experiences and our behaviors. He expands on this fictional self to claim that we act in our lives according to what is required for being that specific character or self. While creating this character, Dennett believes we undertake a special kind of thinking he calls “verbal thought” (Dennett 472), which Jerome Burner also refers to as “the narrative mode” of thinking. (McCarthy 10). He argues that much of our conscious thinking is “a variety of a particularly efficient and private talking to oneself” (Dennett 472). In fact, Dennett describes people as “confabulators” who are telling and retelling the story of their own lives (Dennett 471). Trying to self-protect themselves from conveying by mistake undesired information to others, people developed this behavior of talking to oneself or “vocalization” to a “habit of subvocalization” (Dennett 472). As a result, this “subvocalization” is represented in the human consciousness in a form of narrative or “verbal thought” (Dennett 472).

Like a novelist who cannot separate himself from his characters, Dennett thinks that we are all novelists; unable to separate ourselves from the self-character we create. In addition, trying to make everything happens fits with that character’s coherency; he argues that we do create a convenient narrative context for our self-character. The outcome of this process is a story of our lives, “We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography” (Dennett 473). If our lives are series of endless stories including the creation of our own fictitious selves, how can we know what the true story is, if there is any? Does it matter if our life story is true or false, since it is only a story after all? Dennett’s answer to this question is that “there is no true story” because he thinks that even attempting to figure out the true story in itself is a mere error, “If we wanted to settle what the true story was, we’d be falling into error” (Dennett 471). To be able to assess Dennett’s conclusion, we should look at critics’ views of his theory. Some critics have objections to Dennett’s narrative theory and accordingly, to his conclusion regarding the self. One of the biggest and most common objections that those critics raised is the limitedness and restrictiveness of Dennett's narrative view of the self.

Critics such as Joan McCarthy and Tadeusz Zawidzki think that the narrowness of Dennett’s account of the self emerges from the association of linguistic ability with the self, that gives, according to those critics, priority to a kind of ability that not all people possess. McCarthy argues that according to Dennett’s theory, people who do not have the appropriate linguistic capacity cannot express or/and identify with their selfhood, and thus cannot comprehend their world accurately. In her opinion, Dennett limits self-interpretation and self-comprehension to verbalization, “private talking to oneself” (Dennett 472), which she thinks, is improbable. Zawidzki, on the other hand, emphasizes the lack of self-identification and self-comprehension that the language-deprived experience. Zawidzki claims that Dennett does not give an assertive answer regarding the degree of consciousness for the language-deprived and the non-human animal (Zawidzki 97). Nevertheless, Zawidzki is inclined to think that Dennett at least credits those creatures with a minimal degree of consciousness, without underestimating the privileges speaking humans do have. Zawidzki illustrates that by quoting Dennett in his Consciousness Explained; “ one does not do deaf-mutes a favour by imagining that in the absence of language they enjoy all the mental delights we hearing human beings enjoy” (Zawidzki 98). Clearly, those critics claim the inconsistency and invalidity of Dennett’s account of the self, because it cannot be applied to people with poor linguistic abilities and/or to people with hearing and speaking disorders.

On the other side of the coin, other critics have a different interpretation of Dennett’s account, which serves as a response to McCarthy’s and Zawidzki’s objections particularly regarding the role of language in the conception of the self. Joan McCarthy in her book; Dennett and Ricoeur on the Narrative Self, presents the view of a leading, as she claims, neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, who in his The Feeling of What Happens distinguishes between two types of a self; a non-verbal self and a verbal or “autobiographical self” (McCarthy 80). Damasio thinks of the narrative aspect of the self in a broader sense, since his account includes the notion of a “non-verbal story teller” (McCarthy 80). Therefore, in light of this view, the narrative theory of the self generally and the occurrence of self-comprehension specifically, do not require the usage of language or verbalization. Damasio’s inclusive view of the narrative self suggests a “wordless” kind of storytelling, which is more like “registering what happens in the form of brain maps” (McCarthy 81). Similarly, Dennett in his Consciousness Explained clarifies that “Metaphors are the tools of thought” (McCarthy 73) implying that metaphors are incorporated in all kinds of thinking and can be in all kind of forms; verbal, non-verbal, visual, audible, etc. Accordingly, creating narratives is different from verbalizing or reporting narratives, which indicates that storytelling existed prior to language (McCarthy 81). Moreover, Damasio scientifically supports the independence of self-narration from language by asserting that while the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for language; both the right and the left hemispheres are responsible for storytelling (McCarthy 81). Thus, the interpretation of Dennett's evaluation of the relationship of verbalization with selfhood varies from a critic to another. Unlike critics who view verbalization as a required companion of the self, Damasio does not consider language and the so-called verbal thought to be a required condition for the existence of a self (McCarthy 83). Given the previous facts, we can conclude that we can distinguish between two kinds of narrations; verbal and non-verbal self-narration which both serve the narrative mode of thinking we employ to make sense of our world.

Damasio's view supports Velleman’s interpretation of the role of speech or verbalization in the determination of human behavior. Velleman affirms that the utterance of our self-narrations can lead us to act according to our narrations, in order to maintain correspondence between our narrations and our life. In addition, he refers to the importance of the casual role of the uttering of our narrations in the corresponding outcome of our behavior. However, Velleman redefines the role of those utterances and makes them indicate a kind of self-commitment that “feeds back into your behavior” (Velleman 12). In other words, sometimes reporting what you are going to do makes you do it, and other times reporting what you are not going to do prevents you from doing it.

In reporting your future action, what motivates you is to maintain correspondence between your narrations and your actions, just like a novelist who should maintain correspondence between his narrations and the actions of his characters. Consequently, it is not a matter of uttering narrations, but rather it is a matter of commitment to conform our behaviors to our narrations whether we utter a verbal commitment or we do not.

Whether Dennett’s account of the narrative aspect of the self is dependent on language as verbalization or as self-explanation and/or non-verbal narration, does not answer the question if the true story of our life matters when it is just a story. In other words, Dennett’s fictional view of the self does not logically indicate the truthfulness or the falseness of one’s narratives. Nevertheless, characters in some novel, even though they are unreal in the sense that they do not exist outside of their fictional world, do exist as real fictional characters and we can predict and evaluate their behavior as well.

Moreover, one can evaluate the accuracy of their narratives by reviewing the incidents of their lives as depicted in the novel and be able to decide if they are true. If a novelist decides that one of his characters does something or says something, it means that whatever he does or says is true. The fact that they are fictional characters has nothing to do with the truthfulness of their actions and accordingly, the truthfulness of the novelist’s narration and/or his identity. The novelist is the one who decides what his characters will do and thus he is the one who knows and determines what the true narration is. If the self is like a novelist, it follows that it can create various narrations, can decide what narration it prefers and can determine which narration is true. Accordingly, a self is both the creator of the narratives and the controller and the decision maker of the preferable version of those narrations in order to achieve narrative coherence. Hence, I support Velleman's objection to Dennett’s account of the self as fictive and false. Velleman claims that the fact that self is fictitious can mean that it is true as well.

My only disagreement with Dennett's claim that attempting to figure out the “true story of our life is a mistake; is that the rapid and constant changeability of the narratives of our life, not the falseness of its narratives, makes it hard to determine the “true story of our life, yet not impossible” (Dennett 471). Like a river, whose water changes constantly, we still think of it as the same river because of the unity of its components, which causes its continuity. A self, even though it has different narrations, counts as the same when it maintains its narrative coherence. Moreover, with fictional entities such as characters, one should follow the logic of the world of fiction, i.e. the accuracy of the incidents within a novel, to be able to evaluate the correspondence of their narrations to their actions. In that sense, figuring out the true story of our self and our life can be possible.

Nevertheless, whether Dennett was concerned with proving the truthfulness or the falseness of our narratives, his main objective was to pinpoint the advantages of the narrative mode of thinking that we fall into, in helping us predict our behavior and control it in order to make our life easier. His depiction of the self in light of his narrative theory does not mean to give credit or priority to one narrative, even his own, regarding the conception of the self over another narrative. Dennett attempts to explain how the narrative technique develops and works in the human mind by observing its effect on the human behavior and without deciding about validity of one’s narrations. Knowing that the creation of our self-narration corresponds to the creation of characters in a novel can help us view our life in an objective approach, which can contribute to widening the perspectives of our life. Furthermore, focusing on the narrative aspect of the self, we will be able to reshape our selves by changing the context of our narration and /or by recreating a new narration for our lives.


Works Cited

Dennett, Daniel C. "Why Everyone Is a Novelist." Selves Part VIII. London: The

Times Literary Supplements, 1988. 466-474.

Descartes, Rene'. Discourse on Method. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett

Publishing Company, 1998 Translated by Donald A. Cress.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature Introduced by Michael P.Levine.

New York: The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading, 2005.

McCarthy, Joan. Dennett and Ricoeur on the Narrative Self. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2007.

Velleman, J. David. "Narrator, The Self As." Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan Fall 1999: 1-23.

Zawidzki, Tadeusz. Dennett. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007.


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