Galen Strawson (2004), “Against Narrativity”, Ratio (new series) 17(4): 428–452, December 2004 (online 17 November 2004) — DOI 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2004.00264.x
On the citation. The brief’s details are all right: author, title, journal, 17(4), pp. 428–452, 2004.
Key takeaways
- Two theses, both rejected. The psychological Narrativity thesis is “a straightforwardly empirical, descriptive thesis”: people experience their lives as a narrative. The ethical Narrativity thesis is that a “richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood”. The dominant academic view holds both; Strawson holds neither.
- Episodic and Diachronic. A Diachronic “naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future”. An Episodic does not, while knowing perfectly well that the human being persists. Strawson counts himself Episodic and calls it “one normal, non-pathological form of life”.
- A from-the-inside memory need not be “mine”.* He remembers falling out of a boat from the inside, and is “strictly, literally correct” in thinking it did not happen to me*: “that which I now experience myself to be when I’m apprehending myself specifically as an inner mental presence or self”.
- What Narrativity is. Form-finding (seeking unity or pattern in one’s life), story-telling (fitting one’s life to a narrative genre, which entails form-finding) and revision (non-conscious falsification). Being Diachronic is neither necessary nor sufficient. Story-telling is sufficient. Revision is common but not necessary.
- Where the named authors fall. Dennett is ”[+D +F +S +R]”, Schechtman ”[+D +F +S ±R]” with accuracy required, Sartre ”[+F +S +R]”, Strawson himself ”[−D −F −S −R]”. On Schechtman’s strong form, he is “not really a person”.
- Narration distorts. Every studied recall alters the memory, so “the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding”. Narrativity in ethics is “more of an affliction or a bad habit than a prerequisite of a good life”.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request to fill out the record’s coverage of selfhood, and read against Dennett’s “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity” (LIT-442) and Schechtman (LIT-468). No anthology topic holds it, it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.
NOTE-383 is the reading, and it placed the work: Active. It is the paper the narrative literature answers, and it is short. Its distinctions are its lasting contribution. Its thesis rests on testimony, the author’s and that of writers he classifies, so as a claim about how people are it is a report, not a finding.
Where it meets the record:
- Dennett. Strawson’s Dennett is the “virtuoso novelists” passage from “Why everyone is a novelist” (TLS, 16–22 September 1988, p. 1029). LIT-442 records that the Tufts Digital Library calls that piece a later version of the essay held here, and its sentence “The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self” is that essay’s conclusion nearly word for word. Strawson reads Dennett as committed to revision. The essay as read in NOTE-364 makes the self a legitimate abstractum rather than a lie, so “revision” in Strawson’s sense, falsification of facts, is not obviously what Dennett holds.
- The minimal self. Gallagher’s review (LIT-453) presents Strawson’s earlier “The Self” and “The Self and the SESMET” as the minimal-self view: a self that lasts as long as a period of experience. The Episodic is what that metaphysics feels like from the inside.
- Who it agrees with. Strawson’s Shaftesbury, “let me lose self every hour, and be twenty successive selfs … ‘tis all one to me”, is close to Parfit’s view, as the SEP map (LIT-454) reports it, that identity is not what matters. Parfit is being filed in parallel by another reader. Strawson names him only once, among those who think of themselves as things whose persistence conditions may differ from the human being’s.