Daniel C. Dennett (1992), “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”, in F. S. Kessel, P. M. Cole and D. L. Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum (Library of Congress 91012733; viii, 124 pp.; “Papers presented at the sixth Houston Symposium, organized by the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, held in the spring of 1983”). Reissued by Psychology Press in 2014 (DOI 10.4324/9781315807652, where Crossref adds Milton D. Hakel as a fourth editor).
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: the title, the three editors, the volume’s title, Erlbaum and 1992. Four things need adding:
- Pages. Secondary citations give pp. 103–115. I could not see the volume or a contents list with pages, so the range is unconfirmed. It fits a 124-page book.
- Date and first appearance. The catalogue gives 1992 and no month, so
published:carries the year as the first of January. Dennett’s own web header lists a Danish translation, “Selvet som fortællingens tyngdepunkt”, Philosophia 15 (1986), 275–88. That is earlier in print than the English, but I could not check it. The volume collects papers from a symposium held in spring 1983. The Tufts Digital Library says that “Why Everyone is a Novelist”, Times Literary Supplement, 16–22 September 1988, is a later version of an article first titled “The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity” (hdl.handle.net/10427/57594). - No DOI. Semantic Scholar gives the chapter the DOI 10.4324/9781315807652-11. It does not resolve: doi.org and Crossref both return 404. The 1992 printing has no DOI, so the identifier is the volume’s Library of Congress record.
- The text read is not Dennett’s exact wording. See the history note.
Key takeaways
- A self is an abstractum. A centre of gravity “has no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location”. It is “a theorist’s fiction”, yet a legitimate posit of physics that figures in explanations. A self is the same kind of thing, posited by “people-physics” (hermeneutics or phenomenology) to organise the interpretation of a person. To look for it in the brain is “a category mistake”.
- Selves are like fictional characters. A character is indeterminate beyond what its text and the rules for extrapolating from it fix. Did Holmes have a mole on his left shoulder blade? “There is simply no fact of the matter.” Bivalence fails for fictional objects, as it does for centres of gravity.
- A selfless process can author a self. “Gilbert” is a robot that writes an autobiography that turns out to be true of the robot. The robot “doesn’t know what it’s doing” (“the same is just as true of your brain”), yet its behaviour is interpretable as “accreting biography”, and the robot is itself a self-interpreter.
- Selves are made more determinate as life goes on. As Updike could write a new novel about the young Rabbit, a self is extended and revised by further narrative, including one’s own retelling of one’s past.
- Unity is an achievement, and sometimes fails. After Gazzaniga, the mind is “a problematically yoked-together bundle” of partly autonomous systems that “put the best ‘faces’ on it” in one story. When the best story coheres around two points, there are two selves. That needs no “metaphysical miracles”, only another abstraction.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request for Daniel Dennett, as the record’s statement of his account of the self. The record holds one other Dennett work, “Real Patterns” (LIT-220), whose reading (NOTE-190) finds centres of gravity used there as the model of a “good abstract object”. This essay applies that model to the self. No anthology topic holds it, it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.
NOTE-364 is the reading, and it placed the work: Active. It is the essay later work means by “the narrative self”, and it is short. Its claims rest on analogy and on thought experiments whose premises are stipulated, notably that a mindless machine could write “a passable novel”.
Where it meets the record’s threads, set out in the NOTE:
- Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop (LIT-423, unread). Its publisher asks whether “our ‘I’” is “merely a convenient fiction”. This essay answers yes, and that the fiction is a legitimate one. The book, by its description, gives the “I” causal power. The essay’s own centre of gravity figures in explanations that “appear to be causal”, so the two may be closer than the word “fiction” suggests. That pairing is mine.
- Minsky’s Emotion Machine (LIT-432, read in its draft). Minsky also calls the Single-Self a useful fiction, and has the Self as a network of partial self-models. Both deny a central self. They differ in what replaces it: many models switched among, for Minsky, and one posited point per coherent story, for Dennett.
- The bridge between a society of mind and a conscious United States (THEORY-043). The essay sits on the decomposition side. Its selves are produced by disunified parts that know nothing of them, and it counts selves by interpretation, not by nesting. It does not discuss groups.
The essay cites Ryle’s On Thinking (1979), not The Concept of Mind (LIT-318).