Misunderstandings Understood

摘要

Simon Beck offers a series of insightful challenges to an earlier paper in which I argue for a self-understanding, or narrative, view of personal identity (Schechtman 2005). His objections have shown me that my earlier paper conflates two issues that, although connected, are not connected in the straightforward way I implied. One is the.claim that narrative views, unlike psychological theories, capture what is compelling in Locke's account of personal identity. What draws us to Locke's approach is the intuition that personal continuation is at bottom a phe-nomenological fact. I suggest that psychological continuity theorists' development of the notion of 'sameness of consciousness' in terms of the contents of consciousness loses this phenomenological connection. The other claim is that the narrative approach can avoid an objection that would seem to apply to any view that does capture the intuitive appeal of Locke's account, that it has difficulty making sense of the attribution of non-conscious psychological states.