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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
The answer to the title question which I want to defend in this paper is ‘none’. That is: I doubt strongly that the notion of ‘a self’ has any use whatsoever as part of an explanans for the explanandum ‘person’.
Put another way: I shall argue that the question itself is misguided, pointing the inquirer in quite the wrong direction by suggesting that the term ‘self’ points to something which can sustain a philosophically interesting or important degree of reification.
2 I have attempted to defend this view of ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ in Real People, and in Wilkes, K. V., ‘…, Yishi, Duh, Um, and Consciousness’, in Marcel, A. and Bisiach, E. (eds), Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar
3 See Koch, S., ‘Psychology as Science’, in Brown, S. C. (ed.), Philosophy of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1974), 4.Google Scholar
4 Diels, H. and Kranz, W. (eds), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Dublin and Zurich: Weidmann, 1968), vol. i, Fragment 45, p. 161.Google Scholar
5 Hemisphere neglect, and the agnosias, are relatively well-known. But pure alexia may not be: it is a rare, but well-documented, condition. Briefly: pure alexics can write but cannot read (although they can sometimes read numbers). All visual objects except letters and words can be recognized, except colours. However, the pure alexic can say that the sky is blue, bananas yellow, blood red, etc.; and they can sort red and orange colour-chips into the appropriate piles. There is an explanation for this (see Real People, 158–60)Google Scholar; but what is beyond doubt is that the normal inter-linkage of competences has broken down in a way difficult for common sense to grasp.
6 Geschwind, N., ‘The Development of the Brain and the Evolution of Language’, in Stuart, C. I. J. M. (ed.), Monograph Series on Language and Linguistics, (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1964).Google Scholar Reprinted in Geschwind, N., Selected papers on Language and the Brain. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16 (Dordrecht-Holland: Reidel, 1974), 321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Prince, M., The Dissociation of a Personality (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1905).Google Scholar
8 But why should any reader of this volume have read Real People? Perhaps it would be as well to repeat, in a footnote, the burden of my preference for Prince over the cases described in Sybil or The Three Faces of Eve. First: Prince was writing for his colleagues and not for the popular market. Thus his tome is less ‘sensational’, less aimed at startling and intriguing the reader (although it does both), and goes into considerably more dry detail. Second, he is laudably sceptical about some of the more extreme claims of some of the personalities (or alleged personalities) with which he thought himself confronted. Third, he wrote before Freudian psychoanalysis had swept the US, and so his work is relatively free from the strong influence of Freudian and neo-Freudian analysis. Fourth: although he did not have to hand the psychological and physiological tests now available—and which were used to good effect to distinguish between the personalities of Jonah/Jusky, as well as in several more cases—he unearthed a whole host of differences in tastes, preferences, attitudes, dress-sense, religious convictions, competences, which encourage one to believe that the modern tests would have endorsed his distinctions. Finally, it is really very easy to spot and discount his biases and presuppositions. For instance, he rejected BIV as ‘the real’ Miss Beauchamp because—crudely—she was insufficiently feminine by the canons of turn-of-the-century Boston society.
9 Ludwige, A. M. et al. , ‘The Objective Study of a Multiple Personality; Or, Are Four Heads Better than One?’, Archives of General Psychiatry 26 (1972).Google Scholar