The Whole Story: Identity and Narrative

The burgeoning use of experimental methods to consider questions of human nature and personal identity has been a fruitful and exciting development, yielding significant and provocative results. This essay argues for the value of including reflection on the treatment of these topics in fictional narratives to complement and deepen results in experimental philosophy. Experimental vignettes are by necessity brief and schematic. This is part of what makes them so effective in the experimental context. The space afforded for detail, complexity, and ambiguity by the format of fiction allows it to highlight and explore issues that cannot easily be incorporated into experimental method. By juxtaposing a fictional narrative in which we are led to view a character as fundamentally bad with a structurally similar experimental vignette in which participants judge the protagonist to be fundamentally good, I demonstrate how reflection on fiction can contribute to debates in experimental philosophy and reveal distinctions between different dimensions of questions about identity and morality.