Narrativity from the Perspectives of Economics and Philosophy: Davis, Ross, Multipleselves Models... and Behavioral Economics

Narrativity broadly refers to the way humans construct and use stories, be them the widely known ones in a given culture or the more private ones people tell to each other or to themselves. The main goal of this paper is to clarify the extent to which the notion of narrativity can play a role in economic analysis with respect to the representation of economic agents in models of individual behaviors. To do so, we scrutinize a set of contributions from a twofold perspective. From the perspective of economics, we seek to clarify the issues regarding which we, as economists, should be interest in narrativity. From the perspective of philosophy, we, as economic methodologists or philosopher of economics, seek to clarify the conceptual issues inherent to the notion of narrativity that are not trivial or can be of some use for economic analysis. To some extent, this twofold perspective on narrativity and economics has already been taken by John Davis (2009; 2011) and Don Ross (2005; 2014), who use the notion of narrativity to account for individuals’ sense of a unified self and identity, notably with respect to the recent surge of multipleselves models in economics. We propose to further Davis’ and Ross’ efforts in at least three respects: firstly, through a comparative study of their contributions focused on narrativity from the perspective of economics; secondly, by discussing the connections between their contributions and the set of existing contributions related to narrativity in behavioral economics that none of them discuss; and, thirdly, by taking, at least for the sake of argument, a philosophically critical perspective on narrativity.