Distributed autobiographical memories, distributed self‐narratives

Abstract

Richard Heersmink argues that self‐narratives are distributed across embodied organisms and their environment, given that their building blocks, autobiographical memories, are distributed. This argument faces two problems. First, it commits a fallacy of composition. Second, it relies on Marya Schechtman's narrative self‐constitution view, which is incompatible with the distributed cognition framework. To solve these problems, this article develops an alternative account of self‐narratives. On this account, we actively connect distributed autobiographical memories through distributed conversational and textual self‐narrative practices. This account enhances our understanding of the memory–narrative nexus and has implications for philosophical conceptions of self.