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).
6 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-044 v2 | In relational frame theory the self is verbal behaviour’s content, its process and its context, and the self as context is a perspective learned from deictic relations that cannot itself be found as content | Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) define three selves: the conceptualized self, the content of verbal relations about oneself; the knowing self, their ongoing process; and the transcendent self, their context. Hayes et al. (LIT-555) say the third arises from deictic frames (I–you, here–there, now–then) as “a sense of self as a locus or perspective”, and is “a context for verbal knowing, not the content”, so its limits “cannot be consciously known”. The account maps the three onto the record’s holdings: the content is the narrative self (Dennett, Gallagher, Strawson), and the context is what Hume could not find among his perceptions and what Metzinger calls a transparent perspective. It differs from the minimal self (Gallagher) on origin: RFT says the perspective is learned in language. The evidence for the learned origin is cited, not read, so Proposed. The clinical claim is THEORY-051. | Proposed |
| THEORY-060 v2 | A life story constructed from adolescence on is the form a person’s diachronic identity takes, and its content shapes later well-being | McAdams (2019), LIT-595: narrative identity is “a person’s internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, which gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. It arrives in adolescence and young adulthood, on the back of autobiographical memory and autobiographical reasoning, as the third layer of a psychological self after the actor of traits and the agent of goals. Stories with agentic and redemptive themes go with well-being and generativity, and in one longitudinal therapy study the story “changes first, and then the storyteller gets better”. A review essay: every finding is cited, not shown, and it concedes that having a life story may be a modern cultural construction. Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452) denies the first half for many people. | Proposed |
| THEORY-076 | Diachronic self-governance is constituted by cross-temporal links of intention that are intrapersonal analogues of shared intention, not by narrative unity and not by intertemporal bargaining | Bratman (2018), LIT-567: an agent governs herself over time when she is self-governing at each time along a planned activity and her intentions at those times interlock as the intentions of people acting together do, so that she acts “together” with herself. Her standpoints include a conditional, reflexive end of her own diachronic self-governance, which is what lets resolve against temptation be self-governed while following through on Kavka’s toxin is not. He rejects the bargaining model (McClennen, Ainslie) in two sentences and calls narrative unity less basic in one. A philosophical model argued from cases; the analogy is partial by its author’s account and its terms come from a book the record has not read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-525 | In fan–celebrity parasocial relationships the celebrity mostly directs fans’ identities and the fans mostly interpret the celebrity’s, so a mass audience that refuses uptake of a legitimately presented change of persona holds one person’s identity fixed, which is a failure of recognition respect that restricts the celebrity’s agency | Archer & Robb (2025), LIT-172, read in NOTE-186. Three structural asymmetries (attention, communication, epistemic) yield an identity asymmetry, after Cocking & Kennett’s directive and interpretive influence; on Darwall’s and Lindemann’s accounts, refusing uptake of a presented self is a wrong. Informal argument from one main case (Taylor Swift, 2018). The duties derived are fans’ only, though the abstract promises celebrities’ too. It needs a person on the far side, so it does not carry over to AI companions without an argument about their moral status. | Proposed |
| THEORY-684 | Experiencing oneself as a self that was there in the further past, seeking pattern in one’s life, fitting it to a story and falsifying it in the telling are separable, and fitting it to a story suffices for narrativity; on testimony that some normal people are Episodic and live good lives, neither the claim that people experience their lives as narratives nor the claim that a good life or full personhood needs it holds in general | Strawson (2004), LIT-452, read in NOTE-383. The separation of Diachronicity, form-finding, story-telling and revision is strong as conceptual analysis. That many normal people are Episodic rests on testimony, the author’s and that of writers he classifies, with no measure. It does not say that the remoter past did not happen to the human being, only to the self one now experiences oneself to be, and that metaphysical claim is asserted from earlier papers. | Proposed |
| THEORY-691 | A self is an abstractum like a centre of gravity, posited by interpreting a person’s behaviour and talk, the brain’s own autobiography included; it is as determinate as that story, it can be authored by a process with no self in it, and a body holds as many selves as the points the best story coheres around | Dennett (1992), LIT-442, read in NOTE-364 from a copy-edited transcription. Argued by analogy and by thought experiments whose premises are stipulated, notably that a mindless machine could write a passable novel. It does not say the self is an illusion: a centre of gravity is a legitimate posit that figures in explanations. It is a claim about selves, not about consciousness or about what makes a person persist. | Proposed |