DANIEL HUTTO
School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, UK

Composing Ourselves: Embodied Engagements and Narrative Extensions

Selves are formed not found. Although ordinary language encourages us to believe that the term 'self' is a class noun, only philosophical confusion ensues if we think of selves as naming special sorts of referent (e.g., Cartesian egosand the like). Against this common tendency, I will try to motivate the idea that we will make best sense of talk of different kinds of selves (e.g., embodied, narrative - and finer distinctions within these categories) by focusing on the activities and interactions (developmental and sustaining) that are criterial for such attributions. In this context, I introduce and motivate my radical enactivist account of basic forms of intersubjectivity (which are best understood as nonrepresentational, unprincipled, embodied engagements). I then show (insketch) how these interactions can be extended by socio-cultural narrative practices in ways that allow more sophisticated folk psychological (FP) competences to emerge. The result is a suitably modest account of 'selfhood' that explains why disruption to the sustaining activities (i.e. the ability to interactively engage with others or produce/consume relevant narratives) results in disorders to the formation and maintenance of different kinds of selves. I illustrate this by considering the case of autism (but the conclusion generalizes).

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