narrative-unity.
6 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-186 | Ethics of Parasocial Relationships | 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. | Read |
| NOTE-364 | The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity | A self is an abstractum like a centre of gravity, posited by interpretation, and like a fictional character it is indeterminate beyond what its story fixes. A mindless novel-writing robot can author a self whose story is true of the robot. Brains are bundles of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere into one autobiography, and when the story coheres around two points there are two selves. The essay argues by analogy and thought experiment. Its evolutionary account of self-talk is speculation, and its evidence is cited. | Read |
| NOTE-377 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | A short review that sets the minimal self (present self-consciousness) against the narrative self (extended in time), splits the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, and ties their dissociation in schizophrenic thought insertion to Frith’s forward comparator model. It reports an embodied minimal self in neonatal imitation and a momentary one in Strawson and in Tani’s robot, and proposes, against Dennett, that the narrative self is the sum of its narratives. Evidence is cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-383 | Against Narrativity | Rejects the descriptive and the normative Narrativity theses. Separates Diachronic from Episodic self-experience, and form-finding, story-telling and revision within Narrativity. Places Dennett, Schechtman, Sartre and himself on that grid. Argues that Episodic lives are normal and can be good, that a from-the-inside memory need not present as one’s own, and that self-narration risks falsification. The argument is testimony and distinction-drawing; the empirical claims are asserted. | Read |
| NOTE-470 | “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The Evolution of Narrative Identity | McAdams’s review essay on 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”. Storytelling is placed in human evolution as a tool for simulating social life and binding groups. The self is layered as actor, then agent, then author, with the life story arriving in adolescence on the back of autobiographical memory, theory of mind and autobiographical reasoning. Story features predict well-being and generativity. Culture supplies master narratives. Claims are cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-547 | Stories and the Meaning of Life | Fischer’s own sketch of his framework (guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; guidance control is ownership plus moderate reasons-responsiveness; responsibility is historical and compatible with determinism; the Frankfurt cases’ moral is the actual sequence), followed by the paper’s thesis: acting freely is artistic self-expression that gives a life narrative value, a product judged mainly morally and prudentially, so the activity’s aesthetic nature does not fix how the life is evaluated. | Read |