Language, Action and Thought

The project aims at developing an empirically-informed theory of personal identity and the self-other distinction. In philosophy, the bulk of the literature on personal identity has concerned identity over time. The background idea seems to be that we have a decent sense of what personal identity consists in at any one time. The problem is how to keep it, as it were (e.g. Hume 1739/1978, Locke 1694/1975, Reid, 1785/2002). Even views that are skeptical about whether we exist in anything like the sense we think we do typically find problems in change over time (Nagarjuna 1995, Ganeri 2012, Parfit 1984). A lot of stock is also put in our ability to identify with ourselves over time (Parfit 1984, Schechtman 2004). And although people certainly are doing some work sorting out what personal identity at any one point is (Strawson 1997, Neisser 1988), what is usually ignored is the question of what separates us from other people. Prominent figures working on intersubjectivity insist on solid distinctions between self and other (Zahavi 2014). By contrast, Metzinger (2009) propounds a modern empirically informed version of the Buddhist no-self view, according to which the self is more like an illusion. Recent research, however, suggests that our identity is far more malleable than we think. Thus, Chemero (2016) suggests that we sometimes unite with other agents and create something like human synergies, and Metzinger (2009) has shown that we can easily be tricked into incorporating foreign objects into a body map. It is therefore time to re-assess personal identity. Are we as distinct from others at any one point as we think we are?

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This question also has an interesting impact on clinically relevant phenomena. In this project we explore how a novel account of personal identity and a more porous self-other distinction may better explain some complex and otherwise puzzling experiences. Our first case study centers around the so called analytic third, that is the co-created experience of analyst and analysand whereby the experiences of two people become almost unified in a shared cognitive-affective space. Our second example is emotional contagion, the phenomenon whereby I catch an emotion that someone else experiences - e.g I become sad after talking to someone who is sad. Our third example is autistic camouflaging, which indicates a range of strategies employed by some autistic people to better fit in social situations and to hide autistic traits. These three cases have something important in common: they are well- documented phenomena from an empirical perspective, but they have not been adequately theorized. This project aims to fill this gap by offering a novel approach to personal identity, one that calls into question the sharp boundary between self and other and rather points towards a more interactive, dynamic, and porous account. In this respect, our case studies may be seen as somewhat extreme variations of how people shape their personal identity: we all relate to others through experiences of imitation, contagion, and fusion, although we do so in ways that are less pervasive and systematic than the ones highlighted by the case studies above.