Marya Schechtman (1996), The Constitution of Selves, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (Library of Congress 96016537; xi, 169 pp.). Paperback 2007; eBook as DOI 10.7591/9781501718380.
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: author, title, publisher, 1996. Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452) cites the book as 1997 throughout; the catalogue record gives 1996. The DOI is the eBook’s, the only edition with one.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description, the catalogue record, the chapter list, and what two works read in this batch quote from it, not a reading.
- The publisher’s description, verbatim as far as this session could see it (the page served it truncated): “An amnesia victim asking ‘Who am I?’ means something different from a confused adolescent asking the same question. Marya Schechtman takes issue with analytic philosophy’s emphasis on the first sort of question to the exclusion of the second.”
- Contents (Crossref chapter DOIs, with pages): Preface (ix–xiv); Introduction (1–4); 1. The Reidentification Question (7–25); 2. The Problems of Logical Form (26–50); 3. The Extreme Claim (51–66); Conclusion (67–70); 4. The Characterization Question (73–92); 5. The Narrative Self-Constitution View (93–135); 6. Characterization and the Four Features (136–162); Selected Bibliography (163–164); Index (165–173). The Conclusion at pp. 67–70 closes a first part on reidentification, before chapter 4 opens a second.
- Library of Congress subject headings: identity (philosophical concept); individuality; self; self-knowledge, theory of.
- Quoted by Strawson (LIT-452), with his page references: a person “creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life” (p. 93); one must have a full and “explicit narrative [of one’s life] to develop fully as a person” (p. 119); “constituting an identity requires that an individual conceive of his life as having the form and the logic of a story … where ‘story’ is understood as a conventional, linear narrative” (p. 96). Strawson calls p. 96 “a strong expression of her view, which has usefully weaker forms (cf. e.g. pp. 117, 159)”.
- The SEP map (LIT-454) takes the term “characterization question” from the book’s first page.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request to fill out the record’s coverage of selfhood, as the founding statement of the narrative self-constitution view. Dufner’s survey (LIT-130) lists it among its primary sources and, as NOTE-166 reads it, places the characterization question among the “methodological alternatives” of its §10. No anthology topic holds it, it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.
Deferred because it was not read. Where it bears on the record, inferred
from the description, the contents and two readings in this batch, not from
the book:
- Against Olson (LIT-448). The two books of the same year take the opposite sides of the SEP’s split: Olson answers persistence with no psychology, Schechtman says persistence is the wrong first question. The SEP entry’s reconciliation, that they answer different questions, is exactly what Schechtman’s first part disputes.
- Dennett’s narrative self (LIT-442). Both make narrative constitutive of the self. Strawson classes Schechtman’s view as requiring diachronic self-experience, form-finding and story-telling but not revision, where Dennett’s includes revision. On Strawson’s reading the difference is that her self-narrative must be essentially accurate, and Dennett’s self is a fiction.
- Against Narrativity (LIT-452, read in full) is the best-known attack on it, and Strawson concludes that on her strong form he is “not really a person”.
- Agency over one’s own life. “Characterization”, what is attributable
to me, is the question Frankfurt’s identification (LIT-293) and
Velleman’s critique of it (LIT-292) also ask, from the side of the will.
The pairing is mine.
ethicsis carried because Strawson reads the book as “twisting the ethical and the psychological Narrativity theses tightly together”: narrative is how one develops “fully as a person”. What the “four features” of chapter 6 are, I could not see.
Access when seeded: Crossref (chapter list); the Library of Congress JSON record; Cornell University Press’s product page (description, served truncated); Open Library (Internet Archive copy for print-disabled users only, so not opened). The De Gruyter and JSTOR pages did not load in this session. Google Books’ API refused for an exhausted daily quota.