Postgraduates work in progress

Speaker: Julian Hauser

Title: I have the cake and I eat it too: Being both fictionalist and realist about the self

Abstract: Recent accounts of the self stress the importance of self-models. One question that divides these accounts is the ontological status of the self. Metzinger argues that the experienced self is the content of a self-model, where that self-model does not represent anything real. Thus, on this account the self is fictional. Hohwy and Michael have recently developed a predictive processing account of the self: here the self-model represents real existing causes endogenous to the embodied organism.

It would seem that the two accounts are incompatible. I argue that they are not. The reason is that Metzinger and Hohwy and Michael focus on different aspects of the self. Metzinger focuses on what I term the self-as-subject, that is, the subjective self that acts and experiences. Hohwy and Metzinger talk about the self-as-content, that is, the self we refer to when we speak of our character traits, skills, personal preferences, and more. My claim is that we can be fictionalist about the first and realist about the second. I call this the dual account.

There are benefits to such a resolution of the dispute. Both fictionalism and realism about the self have features that speak in their favour. Fictionalism allows us to avoid a commitment to the existence of the entities referred to, and realism makes room for the possibility of correct and incorrect self-representations. I argue that the proposed dual account -- being fictionalist about the self-as-subject and realist about the self-as-content -- gets to enjoy the best of both worlds.