Antonia Siebeck
Universität Luzern
Within the narrativist debate about personal identity, it is often postulated that there is ‘false’ self-understanding or that its falsity is at least a constant threat (see e.g. Mikkonen 2021: 48, Crone 2020: 67). However, it remains unclear how the truth value of self-understanding should be measured. After all, it is questionable whether self-understanding is truth-apt at all.
The central thesis of the presentation is that personal self-understanding can be conceptualized coherentist and is thus indeed truth-apt. In order to pursue this thesis, Linda M. Alcoff’s coherentist epistemology (1996|2018) will be used as an example and applied to personal self-understanding. The approach is chosen since there are two challenges for a truth-apt concept of self-understanding, which Alcoff’s approach should be able to solve: The first challenge is the frequently criticized problem that individual memories (which serve as the basis for personal self-understanding) are selective and often distorted. The second challenge is that – unless one assumes a psychological essentialism – there is no static self, independent of self-understanding, which could function as a truthmaker for the self-understanding. As the presentation will show, Alcoff’s coherentist concept of truth, in which truth is immanent to lived reality (cf. Alcoff1996|2018: 215), allows a truth value to be attributed to personal self-understanding. In this sense, it can be conceptualized as a form of understanding (in an epistemologically substantial sense) despite its particularity.
Chair: Lea Spiegl
Time: 05 September, 14:40 – 15:10
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 