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A Realist Aspect to the Interpretation of Selves

Posted by alexandra_k on July 21, 2005, at 18:48:10

In the spirit of avoiding present work I have been amusing myself with past work... I still quite like this one even though my thinking has changed quite a lot in the last few years...

A Realist Aspect to the Interpretation of Selves

The phenomenon that was until recently known as Multiple Personality Disorder has generated differing theoretical accounts of the metaphysical status of the alternative ‘personalities’ or ‘identities’ that are exhibited by subjects with the disorder. Some theorists have held that the phenomenon shows that we need to reconsider the status and nature of selves in general as it seems that it is possible for subjects to support, or give rise to more than one self. This has led some theorists to conclude that selves are fictions, whether in the ‘multiple’ individual or in those with a more conventional psychology e.g., Humphrey & Dennett (1998); Gillett, (1997); Hacking, (1991); Kolak, (1993). An alternative to this is to deny that alters are selves, and a popular strategy amongst clinician’s advocating treatment of the disorder is to consider them to be ‘aspects’, ‘segments’, or ‘parts’ of a self. On this view, alters are to be seen as fragments that may be blended or fused together to add up to a single self of the sort exhibited by individuals without the disorder (Putnam, 1995). The other major alternative is to deny that alters are selves, and maintain that there is only one self even in the case of subjects who present with the disorder e.g., Brown, (2001) and Clark, (1990). There has been a general tendency for theorists to reduce the metaphysical status of selves to fictions if one holds that alters are selves; or alternatively, to reduce the status of alters to something less than selves if one wants to attempt to keep the self as a respectable notion. The question as to the metaphysical status of alters is thus related to the question as to the metaphysical status of selves.

 

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poster:alexandra_k thread:531091
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050621/msgs/531091.html