Artifactual selves

a response to Lynne Rudder Baker

Daniel Dennett

pp. 17-20

in: Leon de Bruin, Maureen Sie (eds), Narrativity, interpretation and responsibility, Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 15 (1), 2016.

Abstract

Baker's critique of my view of the self as a fiction captures some of its points well but misses the possibility of a theorist's fiction, like the Equator or a center of gravity, which is not an illusion, but rather an abstraction, like dollars, poems, and software—made of no material but dependent on material vehicles. It is an artifact of our everyday effort to make sense of our own (and others') complex activities by postulating a single central source of meaning, intention, and understanding. This is revealed in an example of the heterophenomenological method in action.