Lizzie in Mind & Language

Two candidate cases of multiple personhood.

Now in Mind & Language, "Two candidate cases of multiple personhood" from Lizzie Schechter. Abstracted below, the article explores the common intuition that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder are multiple persons, more so than people with split brains. In doing so Lizzie brings the subjects own self-conceptions to bear. The real reason for the intuition, she concludes, is not that observers regard the "disunified" behavior of those with DID as the actions of distinct beings, but rather that they are themselves inclined to see themselves that way. 

The split-brain phenomenon and dissociative identity disorder (DID) have been posed as candidate cases of multiple persons in one body. Philosophers have typically argued that DID subjects are better candidates for multiple personhood because their behavior is more disunified. While a DID subject is intuitively more like multiple persons than is a split-brain subject, I argue here that the grounds of this intuition do not concern disunified behavior per se. Rather, they concern the differing self-conceptions of split-brain subjects on the one hand and at least many DID subjects on the other.