Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Narrative unity — the unity a life has as a story — narrative identity, the narrative self, autobiographical reasoning, and the claim and counter-claim that a self is the story told of it. One of four unities kept apart (group: philosophy; ADR-024).
11 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-172 v3 | Ethics of Parasocial Relationships | Archer & Robb (2025), DOI-10.1093/9780198928188.003.0012. Fan–celebrity parasocial relationships are personal relationships (the fan relates to the celebrity as a unique individual, with reasons for partiality), built from three structural asymmetries: attention, communication and epistemic. These yield an “identity asymmetry”: celebrities mostly direct fans’ identities, while fans mostly interpret celebrities’. Fans who refuse uptake of a celebrity’s changed public persona commit a failure of Darwallian recognition respect. The chapter derives from this a responsibility for fans, which is mitigated when the celebrity’s self-presentation is misleading or ambiguous. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-186); worth reading as the clearest short philosophical analysis of parasociality as a relationship type. Its directive/interpretive split and its recognition-respect argument are portable to other one-sided relationships, though the chapter itself only gestures at them. |
| LIT-442 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | Dennett (1992), in Kessel, Cole & Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, Erlbaum. A self is an abstractum, “a theorist’s fiction”, like a centre of gravity: no part of the brain, but a well-behaved posit of interpretation. It is like a fictional character, indeterminate beyond what its “text” fixes, and a selfless process can produce one (a novel-writing robot whose story is true of it). Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography; when the story coheres around two points, there are two selves. Read in a copy-edited transcription. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-364), in a third party’s copy-edited transcription of the text Dennett posted, not in the Erlbaum printing; worth reading as the short, canonical statement that a self is an abstractum, a “theorist’s fiction” of the same kind as a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation around which a life’s narrative coheres. Read it as an analogy and two thought experiments (the novel-writing robot “Gilbert”, the Updike sequel), not as an argument from evidence. Its evolutionary story of self-talk is labelled speculation, and its empirical support (Gazzaniga’s split-brain work, multiple personality cases) is cited, not shown. |
| LIT-443 v2 | Consciousness Explained | Dennett (1991), Little, Brown. Per its publisher, a “full-scale exploration of human consciousness” that “refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence”. Its fourteen contents entries run from “How are hallucinations possible?” and “A method for phenomenology”, through “Multiple drafts versus the Cartesian Theater” and “The architecture of the human mind”, to “Qualia disqualified” and “The reality of selves”. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), no publisher or author copy is posted, and the Tufts Digital Library holds Dennett’s papers but not the book or draft chapters of it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-452 | Against Narrativity | Strawson (2004), Ratio 17(4):428–452. Rejects both the psychological Narrativity thesis (people do experience their lives as a story) and the ethical one (they should, to be full persons), naming Sacks, Bruner, Dennett, Taylor, MacIntyre and Schechtman. Distinguishes Diachronic self-experience (the self I am now was there in the past) from Episodic (it was not, though the human being was), and splits Narrativity into form-finding, story-telling and revision, with only story-telling sufficient. Episodics are normal and can live well; self-narration risks falsifying the self it describes. Argued from the author’s own case. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-383), in the published typeset text; worth reading as the standard objection to narrative accounts of the self, and for its distinctions: Episodic versus Diachronic self-experience, and form-finding, story-telling and revision as separable parts of “Narrativity”. Read it as a report of a temperament argued from the author’s own case and literary examples. Its empirical claims (a genetic “individual difference variable”, the spread across cultures) are asserted, not shown, and its central metaphysical claim, that the remoter past did not happen to “me*”, is stated rather than argued. |
| LIT-453 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | Gallagher (2000), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1):14–21. Divides philosophical accounts of the self into the “minimal self”, accessible to present self-consciousness without temporal extension, and the “narrative self”, extended in time through memory and story. The minimal self splits into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which come apart in involuntary movement and, after Frith, in schizophrenic thought insertion when a forward comparator fails. Neonatal imitation suggests an embodied minimal self; Strawson’s and Tani’s are momentary. Against Dennett’s narrative centre, the self is “the sum total of its narratives”. Read in the author’s preprint. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-377), in the author’s preprint, not the typeset article; worth reading as the paper that set the minimal self against the narrative self for cognitive science, and for the split of the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which it ties to Frith’s comparator model of schizophrenic thought insertion. It is a short review: the empirical support is cited, not shown, and its own proposal, the self as “the sum total of its narratives”, is offered in two paragraphs. |
| LIT-468 v2 | The Constitution of Selves | Schechtman (1996), Cornell University Press. Separates the reidentification question (is this the same person?) from the characterization question (which actions, experiences and traits are this person’s own?), and argues against analytic philosophy’s attention to the first at the expense of the second. Chapters 1–3 take up reidentification; chapters 4–6 give the narrative self-constitution view, on which, as Strawson quotes it, a person “creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative”. The source of the term “characterization question” in the SEP map. Unread: registered from the description and the contents. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress record and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Cornell/De Gruyter eBook is sold, not open, and the Internet Archive copy is for print-disabled users only. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-572 v2 | Narrative Identity | McAdams & McLean (2013), Current Directions in Psychological Science 22(3):233–238. Per its abstract, narrative identity is “a person’s internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose”. Narrators who find redemptive meanings in adversity and whose stories feature agency and exploration “tend to enjoy higher levels of mental health, well-being, and maturity”. Unread: registered from the abstract; the construct is read in LIT-595. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref record and its abstract, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. SAGE does not make it open, Unpaywall and OpenAlex report it closed with no repository copy, Kate McLean’s publications page lists it without a file, the APS journal page offers no PDF, and ResearchGate refused this session (403). Its definition and its role are read first-hand in McAdams’s 2019 essay (LIT-595, read in full), which quotes the definition and builds on it. Filed because it is the canonical citation for narrative identity in psychology. A human reader with SAGE access could read its six pages and move it to Active. |
| LIT-595 | “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The Evolution of Narrative Identity | McAdams (2019), Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 3(1):1–18. Narrative identity is “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, giving a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. Storytelling evolved with human hypersociality. The self develops from social actor (by age 2) to motivated agent (school years) to autobiographical author (adolescence). Agentic and redemptive stories go with well-being and generativity, and cultures supply master narratives. “Biology guides and culture fills in the details.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-470), as the read substitute for McAdams & McLean, “Narrative Identity” (2013; LIT-572), which has no lawful copy and whose definition this essay takes over word for word. Worth reading as McAdams’s own short statement of narrative identity: “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, which gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. It places the life story as the third layer of a self that develops from actor to agent to author, and reports that story features (agency, redemption, coherence) predict well-being and generativity. A review essay: the empirical claims are cited, not shown, and the evolutionary story is offered as plausible, not tested. |
| LIT-689 | Stories and the Meaning of Life | Fischer (2009), Philosophic Exchange 39(1), pp. 3–15. Section I sketches his framework for moral responsibility: guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; it consists in acting from one’s own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism; responsibility is historical and compatible with causal determinism; and the moral of Frankfurt-style cases is that it depends on how the actual sequence unfolds. The paper’s thesis is that the value of acting freely is the value of artistic self-expression: free action makes a life a story with narrative value, though the life is judged mainly by moral and prudential standards. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-547); worth reading as the only first-hand, lawful statement by Fischer that the record holds of his framework for moral responsibility: guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; guidance control is mechanism ownership plus moderate reasons-responsiveness; responsibility is historical and compatible with causal determinism; and the moral of Frankfurt-style cases is that responsibility depends on the actual sequence. Its own thesis is that the value of acting freely is the value of artistic self-expression, which gives a life narrative value. It lists the framework’s elements without arguing for them. |
| LIT-1369 v2 | Dense amnesia in a professional musician following herpes simplex virus encephalitis | Wilson, Baddeley and Kapur (1995). The case study of the musician Clive Wearing after herpes simplex encephalitis in 1985: very dense anterograde amnesia and extensive retrograde amnesia, with musical performance (playing, sight-reading, conducting) largely preserved. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability. The article is closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy and no repository full text, Taylor & Francis offers it only behind a paywall, PubMed (8557808) has the abstract only, the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit bibliography lists it without a file, and a web search found no author’s or institutional copy. The abstract, read from PubMed, confirms the dense amnesia but does not mention preserved musical skill, and says the patient’s belief that he has just woken “appears to be the result of a delusion rather than the consequence of his amnesia”. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1777 | A theory of generativity and its assessment through self-report, behavioral acts, and narrative themes in autobiography | McAdams & de St. Aubin (1992). Models Erikson’s generativity, concern for and commitment to the next generation, as seven features: cultural demand, inner desire (for symbolic immortality and to be needed), concern, belief in the species, commitment, action and narration. Introduces the Loyola Generativity Scale and a checklist of generative acts, with evidence from adult samples and autobiographies. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; a summary on a Notre Dame page was unreachable, Northwestern’s Foley Center pages return 404, and copies on Scribd and a commercial site were not used. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Kruse and Schmitt 2012 (LIT-1691) and Sandoval-Obando et al. 2026 (LIT-1693). |