Narrativism, Reductionism and Four-Dimensionalism

Abstract

In a successful series of papers, Schroer and Schroer presented a reductionist narrative account of personal identity (R. Schroer, 2013; J. W. Schroer & Schroer, 2014). They claimed that their reductionist account had advantages over traditional narrative theories. In this paper I intend to show that they were wrong. Although it is possible to defend a reductionist narrative account, the Schroers’ theory has a problem of circularity. And solving that problem will cause their theory to have much more problems than non-reductionist narrative theories. Consequently, they should either present a new and improved reductionist narrative account, or accept that non-reductionist narrative theories are better suited to account for the problem of personal identity.