Benefits of a narrative approach to personal identity

Abstract

The problem of personal identity is often defined as a problem of reidentification of a person at different moments. This way it is defined in psychological, biological and substance theories of personal identity. Proponents of the narrative approach replace the question of reidentification with the question of characterization and suggest that framing it this way resolves some practical aspects of the problem more efficiently, as far as the attribution of actions and responsibility and the determination of the conditions of survival are concerned. The author of this paper maintains that the priority of first-person view and the four-dimensional model of a person, extended in time, are also special features of the narrative approach. Narrative approach presupposes that the attribution of actions and personal characteristics is based on the inclusion of these properties in a holistic, unified autobiographical narrative. Internal requirements of such narrative include unity of perspective, intelligibility and teleological direction of the story. External requirements of the narrative include the possibility of presentation (primarily from the first person viewpoint) and credibility. The author concludes that narrative approach is on the whole successful in both attributing actions and determining survival in actual and hypothetic situations.