Conflicting images of the self: A metaphilosophical inquiry into the constitution of selfhood

Abstract

This article develops a metaphilosophical account of the constitution of selfhood by situating contemporary debates on the minimal and the narrative self within Wilfrid Sellars’s distinction between the manifest and the scientific images. I argue that neither a minimal nor a narrative conception of the self straightforwardly entails a commitment to either image. Rather, depending on how they are articulated, both can be used to support either framework. The paper proceeds in four steps. First, I outline the main positions in the current debate, showing how narrative and minimal accounts of the self negotiate, in different ways, the tension between first-person experience and scientific explanation. Second, I argue for a reconciliation between phenomenological–enactive accounts of minimal selfhood with non-eliminativist neurobiological models, suggesting that the appeal to “mental images” in neuroscience often relies on an uncritical transfer of metaphors from the manifest image into the scientific one. Third, I reconsider the narrative self through the lens of niche construction theory, proposing a continuist interpretation in which language is understood as a form of second nature grounded in embodied sense-making rather than as a break with biological selfhood. I conclude by distinguishing four kinds of primacy—ontological, epistemological, heuristic, and pragmatic—and maintain that a synoptic integration of the manifest and scientific images is both possible and philosophically necessary for an adequate account of selfhood.