Narrative Knowledge: Knowing through Storytelling
This paper deals with the issue of storytelling or narrative as a special form of reasoning. I
will suggest a form of narrative reasoning that illuminates a narrative grammar, which will
ultimately lead me to describe a form of narrative knowledge. Traditional forms of
knowledge (knowing how and knowing that) are not sufficient to cover a third kind of
knowledge (knowing what it is like) in the way that storytelling can. I will argue that this
latter form of knowledge is under-recognized as an essential ingredient to our humanity.
Introduction
People love to tell stories. When something scary, or funny, or out of the ordinary
happens, we cannot wait to tell others about it. If it was really funny etc. we tell the story
repeatedly, embellishing as we see fit, shortening or lengthening as the circumstances
prescribe. When people are bad storytellers we tend not to pay as close attention to their
stories; our minds drift, and we hope for a swift conclusion. We tend not to remember
those stories as well as the ones that were carefully constructed and skillfully delivered.
Storytelling is one of our primary forms of communication with other people. What I will
argue in this paper is that reading, telling, and hearing well-constructed narratives are not just
an idle pastime that we have created for entertainment purposes or even as a mere means of
communication. Rather, I want to argue that there are epistemological benefits to reading,
hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives. In particular, by practicing narrative
reasoning we develop this skill, in a similar way that by practicing discursive reasoning we
develop discursive reasoning skills. In turn, we develop an enhanced reasoning ability that
arises from narrative reasoning and narrative meaning construction. I argue that narrative reasoning
helps us to empathize with other people, become better citizens, increase our intelligence,
and develop a coherent and healthy sense of personal identity. Ultimately, I argue that those
who are able to develop the capacity to reason narratively will be able to have a more
comprehensive understanding of the human experience.
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Defining Narrative
To begin, I will go into some detail about what I mean when I talk about narratives,
since the reasoning skills that will ultimately come from engaging with them will be related to
their inherent meaning and structure. Noël Carroll outlines a theory of narrative that I will
use for working purposes.1 In his description, he outlines not a clear set of necessary and
sufficient conditions, but a networked notion of what he calls the “narrative connection.”2
This connection is like a set of family resemblances that can connect together a number of
the important features of what narratives are generally understood to be. To begin with,
Carroll argues that narrative discourse is comprised of more than one event and/or states of
affairs that are connected, are about a unified subject, and are represented as being
perspicuously ordered in time (the ordering must be at least retrievable if not implicitly
obvious). A narrative is not merely a list or series of events or states of affairs, but there
must be some sort of sequence of events, where the sequence minimally implies a temporal
ordering. An annal might be something that is temporally ordered and will likely have more
than two events or states of affairs, and for this reason it might be put into a category of
“story form.” The primary principle of organization of an annal is, however, merely a
temporal list of events. It cannot count as a full-fledged narrative, since it may be a temporal
list of events that has no unified subject.
For example,
A: “The Space shuttle Challenger explodes in 1988, the Berlin wall comes down in
1989, there was a massacre at Srebenica, Bosnia in 1995.”
B: “The Space Shuttle Columbia blows up upon reentry to Earth; the Space Shuttle
Challenger explodes upon take off.”
3
A is a temporally ordered list of events and is an annal, while B is not because in B there is
no temporal sequence. B does have some characteristics of a story form however, namely a
seemingly unified subject and some possible connection between the events. B contains
none of the elements of a recognizable narrative except for a unified subject (space shuttle
disasters).
A chronicle might also fall into the category of story form. A chronicle includes
more than one event and/or state of affairs, has a temporal order and a unified subject (a
subject being either a topic or a character). Carroll defines a chronicle as a “discursive
representation that (temporally, but noncausally) connects at least two events in the career of
a unified subject such that a reliable temporal ordering is retrievable from it (and/or from
the context of the enunciation).”3 To develop B into a chronicle, we could say “the Space
Shuttle Challenger blew up upon take off in 1986; the Space Shuttle Columbia blew up upon
reentry in 2003.” This has a unified subject (space shuttle disasters) and a perspicuous
temporal order but it is not a full-fledged narrative because it does not display a connection
between events other than a temporal ordering of the events that it recounts.
In addition, then, to the multiple states of affairs and/or sequence of events, a
unified subject, and a perspicuously temporal order, what is it that makes a collection a
narrative? Some sort of causation is most often suggested as the necessary condition that
consistently links the changes in states of affairs together in a way that would make
narratives consistently identifiable as narratives. Carroll argues, however, that it is not a
simplistic view of direct or necessary causation that is the link needed to do this work.
Causation, he says, is “too strong a relation to hypothesize as the relevant connection
operative in all narrative linkages.”4 If causation were the singular necessary relation that
unifies narrative structure, then earlier events in narratives would always necessarily causally
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entail later events. Since this is not the case in all narratives (and perhaps not even most
narratives, Carroll suggests), this cannot be the link that makes these groups of events or
states of affairs narratives, no matter how unified the subject or temporally sequenced the
events are.
Carroll explains that most “narratives are not strings of causal entailments; instead,
the earlier events in a sequence of events underdetermine later events.”5 What seems to be the
case is that an earlier event can be a cause that is necessary to a sufficient condition but is
not necessary itself. These conditions are what J. L. Mackie calls INUS conditions:
Insufficient, but Necessary parts of a condition that is itself Unnecessary but is Sufficient for
an effect of an event.6 That is, an earlier event in a narrative connection is at least a causally
necessary condition or ingredient for bringing about later events. In a more strictly causally
necessary model, earlier events in a narrative would necessitate the latter events. Carroll
explains “on the causal input model, the earlier event plus some causal input necessitates the
succeeding event . . . [but] the narrative relation is often weaker than that of necessitation or
causal entailment.”7 Thus INUS conditions can function as the linchpin that holds the
narrative connection together, but those conditions are much less causally strict than the
directly necessary causal relations. Carroll illustrates INUS conditions in the following
example:
C: “The thief enters the bank to rob it, but subsequently, as he exits, he is
apprehended by the police.”8
This is a narrative, but the first event does not necessitate the second event. Although
robbing the bank is causally relevant to being apprehended by the police, it is not entailed by it.
Robbing the bank is, however, a necessary part of the sufficient cause of the police
apprehension, but it is not necessary in and of itself.
5
If it can be argued that narratives involve changes in the career of a unified subject,
then that change needs to be more than just coincidental; it needs to adhere to a causal or
semi-causal process. The earlier events must be at least causally necessary insofar as they are
sufficient or jointly sufficient for later events. Carroll explains that “the earlier events fall
into the causal network that gives rise to the later events where the weakest, but perhaps
most frequent, way of figuring in that causal network is as a causally necessary condition (or
a contribution thereto) for the causation of later events.”9 The earlier event must, at
minimum be causally relevant to the later event though it need not be directly causal. What
Carroll takes here to be causally relevant, I want to broaden to just what is explanatory. That
there is a thief who enters the bank to rob it explains the fact that the police later
apprehended him. Further, many of the earlier events may not even be causally relevant, but
only contributions to a causally necessary condition. For definitional purposes here, the
necessary, direct, causal connection needs to be bracketed, qualified, and minimized
potentially only to explanatory features.
If the elements in a narrative connection bear no sort of causal relation to each
other, then they can seem to be more of an order of coincidence than of a narrative. For
example,
D: the king died and then the queen died.
E: the king died and then the queen died, of grief.
D is merely a chronicle because there is no causal or underdetermined identifiable underlying
cause or explanation from the first event to the second event. It is not clear to a reader, nor
can it really be discerned, what the relationship is between the two events although they
seem to have a unified subject and there is an implied temporal order. E, on the other hand,
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is a narrative because the relationship between the two (unified, temporally ordered) events
is made clear.
Thus, Carroll’s narrative connection obtains when:
1. the discourse represents at least two events and/or states of affairs
2. in a globally forward-looking manner
3. concerning the career of at least one unified subject
4. where the temporal relations between the events and/or states of affairs are
perspicuously ordered, and
5. where the earlier events in the sequence are at least causally necessary conditions for the
causation of later events and/or states of affairs (or are contributions thereto).10
Further, narrative explanation does not focus only on how one event is produced or effected
by another, but on the more subtle transition from beginning to end in terms of explanation
and plot construction. Plot is the structure through which events are connected to a
narrative. A narrative, or story,11 is constructed of events only to the extent to which the
plot crafts events into a narrative. Events are gathered together and it is the plot that makes
the events stand out beyond what they would be in an annal or chronicle. Plot combines
two important aspects: chronological and non-chronological. The chronological aspect of
plot characterizes the events of the narrative and shows the reader how the events follow a
particular timeline. The non-chronological aspect of the plot connects the events together in
such a way that no matter how temporally diverse the events actually are, they can be seen to
form a coherent whole. Plot structures how and in what order the reader becomes aware of
what happens in the story. Although the same set of events can be told in a different order
or with a different plot, there must be some consistently identifiable transformations that
can serve as a basis for the narrative so that it can be handled in different meaning
preserving sequences. The other part of the non-chronological dimension of plot is that of
the human motivations found developed through the story. One of the main reasons we
read narratives, or perhaps one of the main motivations to continue once we are in it, is to
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see how human motivations are played out in the context of the story. Although this is not
going to fit neatly into anything that even resembles necessary and sufficient conditions of
what a narrative might look like, it does seem to be one of the main incentives we have for
reading stories.
With what I have laid out thus far, I want to be clear that I am neither positing a
theory of narrative nor am I dictating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for
something to qualify as a narrative. What I do want to do is gesture toward what seem to be
some of the overarching components of which might make up a “logic” of narrative. I do
not take causation to be the necessary or sufficient condition that makes something a
narrative. By explicating Carroll’s conditions for a narrative connection (especially the INUS
conditions) in conjunction with plot and explanatory reasons, I am hoping to show how a
wide array of narratives can be used as the basis for what I hope to show in what follows. I
also want to make clear that the kinds of narratives I am attempting to include here vary
from the traditional, to the non-linear (or with interruptions of sequence like with the stories
of Italo Calvino), to the oral storytelling traditions that come from long ago.
Narrative Reasoning
There are two general models from which most of our reasoning is generated:
discursive12 and narrative. Discursive reasoning relies on logical, direct arguments, while
narrative reasoning depends on the narrative aspects of a story to order a certain experience.
Discursive reasoning, “passing from premises to conclusions; proceeding by reasoning or
argument”13 is here meant to include inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning. What I
am trying to capture in this term is the ideal of a formal system of description and/or
explanation. It is not merely linear, syllogistic reasoning systems. Narrative psychologist
8
Jerome Bruner explains his version of this kind of reasoning as one that “employs
categorization or conceptualization and the operations by which categories are established,
instantiated, idealized, and related one to the other to form a system.”14 The imaginative
application of discursive reasoning leads to “the ability to see possible formal connections
before one is able to prove them in any formal way” while the imaginative application of the
narrative “leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, [and] believable (though not
necessarily ‘true’) historical accounts.”15 Discursive reasoning is exemplified by the logical
argument:
F: “Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore, Socrates in mortal.” Although
there could be stories told about Socrates’ mortality (as in fact, there are several) F has no
real narrative structure. A narrative about Socrates would look something more like this:
G: “there was a man called Socrates, who, because of his suggestion that people
needed to question the folkways of knowledge in ways they had never done before, was tried
as a heretic, condemned as guilty, and made to drink hemlock.”
There is an identifiable line of argument in F that G lacks. There is, however, in G an
identifiable narrative structure that allows the reader to follow the events in the narrative and
to understand how the conclusion (that Socrates is put to death) logically follows, and even
sufficiently entails what came before. There is no logical conclusion in the second example
that can be proven from what comes before, but there is an identifiable narrative structure
that can be pointed to. Although making the suggestion that people question the folkways
of knowledge does not necessarily entail death by hemlock, it is easily discernable in this
short narrative that this is the sufficient cause of the outcome of the story. If we go back to
the example from C (“The thief enters the bank to rob it, but subsequently, as he exits, he is
apprehended by the police.”) it is clear here too how discursive reasoning can be abstracted
(and I do not want to suggest that discursive reasoning invokes only syllogisms or syllogism9
like kinds of arguments). Although the thief entering the bank neither necessitates being
apprehended by the police, nor does being apprehended by the police causally entail a bank
robber, it is clear to the reader that being apprehended by the police is causally relevant and
more to the point, explanatory, to robbing a bank and readers are not confused about the
relationship of the events.
Discursive and narrative reasoning both have different operating principles and both
have their own criteria for success. They differ fundamentally, however, in the ways in
which they go about verification. Bruner goes so far as to assert that “a good story and a
well-formed argument are different natural kinds”16 even though both are used as ways of
communicating information and of convincing others. He explains that the discursive
“verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical truth”17
while the narrative “establishes not truth but verisimilitude” and lifelikeness. Both can be
used as a means to convince others, but what they convince of is fundamentally different:
arguments convince one of their truth while narrative convinces of its lifelikeness and
believability. Truth often comes in as a distant second to well-constructed and well-executed
stories. Narrative lines of reasoning do not generally prove anything, but they do show how
something might have come to be the case. There are certain causal or underdetermined
causal linkages within a narrative that readers should be able to discern that are not so easily
identifiable or linear as what is found in discursive reasoning. We regularly utilize both
narrative and discursive reasoning in order to organize and make sense of our worlds and
our experience. We explain our lived experiences in terms of plots, and more often than
not, those plot structures produce the most sensible statements and explanations of our
experience and beliefs. Both are legitimate and rational ways of understanding and ordering
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our experience of the world, but both produce cognition by different means which
correspond with the inherent structure of their own logic.
The way that causation is construed in the way narratives are defined and/or
identified is extremely important since this is one of the main factors (if not the main factor
of any real significance) that differentiates narrative structure and discursive structure. If
narrative structure were merely based on direct necessary and simple causation, then
narrative reasoning and narrative meaning construction would look a lot more like discursive
reasoning than it in fact does. Thus it is important to note the differences between the ways
that causation could be construed in the different kinds of reasonings.
Although these two modes of understanding are complimentary, it is important to
note that they are neither reducible nor translatable to one another. It seems dubious, and
worse, futile, to attempt to either reduce or translate from one to the other since they are, at
base, fundamentally different kinds of reasoning. This is not to say, moreover, that stories
cannot exemplify both the narrative and discursive structures. Many Sherlock Holmes
mysteries, for example, are presented in the form of a narrative, but what motivates the
reader in this case is not the narrative aspects of the novel (although that may be a part of it)
as much as the discursive and clues that one has to follow in order to figure out the mystery.
Ultimately, Holmes relies most heavily on abductive reasoning, carefully couched in plot.18
Although it is also true that both discursive and narrative reasoning can exist in a single text,
that does not mean that they cannot be clearly differentiated.
Further, it is clear that we get better at discursive reasoning with practice. This
would seem to be the underlying assumption of much of the philosophy we teach, especially
of critical thinking and logic courses. The explicit expectation in these classes is for students
to learn to identify various valid and invalid logical inferences. Students are taught these
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inferences with the hope and expectation that they will be able to identify the same
inferences in their own reasoning and the reasoning of others, whether it be in a
philosophical treatise, arguments of their own making, or of the opinions section of the
newspaper. In teaching students even basic logical rules like Aristotle’s Barbara, modus
tollens, and modus ponens, students are often able to apply these logical inferences to their
own (and their friends’) reasoning processes. The formalization of logical structure, formal
reasoning, and the identification of logical fallacies are an essential part of the development
of reasoning capabilities. My argument relies on the assumption that the process that occurs
when we practice narrative reasoning parallels that of discursive reasoning. If such reasoning
processes behave consistently (as we have every reason to assume they would) then with
practice we should get better at narratively reasoning in similar ways as we do with discursive
reasoning.
Nussbaum on Narrative
Martha Nussbaum makes the argument that reading literature can help us to expand
our study of ethics because we can practice expanding our moral imaginations by engaging in
narratives. She argues that with literature, the conjunction of the form and the content
together allows a particular style to emerge that can prompt us to reflect on our own moral
situations in a significantly different way than we can with philosophical ethical treatises.
She explains that “certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated
in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist.”19 Her suggestion is that by
adding good literature to our study of ethics, we should be able to produce a more
comprehensive and meaningful understanding of ethical life.
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Part of the basis of Nussbaum’s claim is that the style of narrative is uniquely
qualified to present what she calls a view of life. She explains that the “telling itself—the
selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary of the whole manner of
addressing the reader’s sense of life—all of this expresses a sense of life and value, a sense of
what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, or life’s relations
and connections.”20 All of this, in addition to the notion that events are never experienced
except through a human perspective, (although there may ideally be omniscient narrators, we
can never experience narratives except through a particular perspective) adds to the fact that
reading literature for Nussbaum helps us to experience the world more fully. Life is never
presented straightforwardly but always through the lens of a speaker (whose lens(es) may be
or are likely to be very different from ours). Nussbaum also argues that “literature is an
extension of life not only horizontally, bringing the reader into contact with events or
locations or persons or problems he or she has not otherwise met, but also, so to speak,
vertically, giving the reader experience that is deeper, sharper, and more precise than much
of what takes place in life.”21 Reading good literature then can make us more moral, the
argument goes, since we can experience the world in ways that we cannot on our own
through our own experience. For Nussbaum, narrative and literary imagining are not
opposed to rational argument or discursive reasoning, but they can provide benefits that
discursive reasoning on its own cannot provide.22
Nussbaum makes an additional argument in Poetic Justice that reading good literature
can help one to become a better citizen. By using the imagination in the ways that literature
requires of us, we can imagine, practice imagining and get better at imagining the position of
others. Unlike more social scientific or historical texts, literary narratives typically invite their
readers to centrally imagine characters’ experiences—experiences that are often very
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different from their own. In the way that the text invites the reader to participate, it gives
the sense of a number of different kinds of possibilities between the characters and the
reader. Novels present themselves in ways that are necessarily perspectival. But it is not just
that literary narratives present themselves this way. It is more to the point that literary
narratives ask the reader to see a given state of affairs in a particular way over other,
alternative ways. Nussbaum writes “the novel presents itself as a metaphor. See the world
in this way, and not in that, it suggests. Look at things as if they were like this story, and not
in other ways recommended by social science.”23 By practicing doing this, we can learn how
better to be “judicious spectators”24—and in turn better citizens. The emotion of a judicious
spectator must be, importantly, the emotion of a spectator, and not a participant. Nussbaum
explains “this means not only that we must perform a reflective assessment of the situation
to figure out whether the participants have understood it correctly and reacted reasonably; it
means, as well, that we must omit that portion that derives from our own personal interest in
our own well being.”25 We imagine the lives of others that are presented through narrative
form and by expanding the moral imagination we are better able to empathize with others
and we can become better at public thinking. Nussbaum argues that this can make one a
better juror, citizen, and public thinker.
The underlying assumption that Nussbaum uses here, which is the explicit notion
that I want to defend, is that through engaging with well-constructed narratives (what
Nussbaum focuses on specifically is “good literature” and my scope of narrative is
purposefully much broader than that) our own way of reasoning is changed through the
moral imagination; our reason is heightened and thereby influenced through the structure of
what we read. Although it is not true that we automatically or even quickly begin to pick up
the thinking patterns of the kinds of narratives we read, it is true that in certain ways our
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reasoning abilities are influenced by the reasoning structures with which we engage. What
Nussbaum focuses on is the form or the structure of literature, in addition to its inherently
subjunctive nature. This structure is what she argues to be so different from the
philosophical or discursive structure of other ethical treatises that might cover similar
ground. Similarly, bad literature, says Nussbaum, can cause one to become morally corrupt.
With the shift of focus that I want to provide, morally bad content will not be the corrupting
influence cognitively (although it might be with another focus) as much as poorly told and
poorly delivered stories. So while there is a long history of philosophical criticism about the
potential moral corruption caused by literature, the corruption I might worry about is less
dependent on the content of the story as much as it is on the form and the delivery. Thus
while my distinction between discursive and narrative reasoning is played out in Nussbaum’s
work (which argues that narrative can make us more moral, within specific constraints) it
does the same work for my argument which suggests that narratives can help us to be better
able to reason.
Imagination and Understanding
It is clear now, that there are (at least) two different kinds of reasoning skills that we
use and can develop. Without going into great detail about what the imagination can do in
conjunction with this, I will say that the imagination plays a very important role in narrative
reasoning and narrative meaning construction. Narrative reasoning and the capacity to
imagine are mutually dependent and both should begin to develop at an early age.
Imagination can help to facilitate causal judgments about how things might have turned out
differently. Historians use this kind of speculation, as do philosophers with our thought
experiments. In a much more mundane sense, we do this in our everyday lives. This is, in
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fact, how we can learn from our mistakes; we identify what when wrong and then imagine
alternate ways things could have turned out and what we could have done or said differently
to make those alternatives happen.
Utilizing our imaginations requires more than just discursive reasoning. Psychologist
Paul Harris explains “there is a great deal of work showing that when adults listen to a
narrative they build in their mind’s eye, so to speak, a mental image or a model of the
situation that is being described and of the events that unfold. And it is that mental model
that they retain over a long period of time rather than the particular words.”26 We tend to
keep the gist of the story,27 in what Daniel Dennett might call the Cartesian Theater,28 as
opposed to any particular sentences that might constitute the story. Thus when called to tell
the story, we can adapt as the circumstances prescribe. Badly told or badly constructed
stories, on the other hand, are more difficult to construct in imagination than wellconstructed
stories. Badly told stories are ones that do not make even implicit causal
connections, are difficult to follow, they go on too long before getting to a point or a punch
line, have irrelevant details, or do not develop the motivations of the characters. Thus wellconstructed
stories facilitate a better use of the imaginative faculties. Harris argues that these
mental models, constructed in the imagination, develop out of the early childhood
engagement with narrative and pretend play. The capacity that children have to engage in
make-believe early on is not something that they lose as adults. Rather, adults, although we
unfortunately engage in much less physical pretend play than do children, use this capacity to
imagine and narrate various kinds of possible situations and outcomes.
Harris cites an example that is helpful to understanding the development of the
schema of discursive and narrative reasoning. He describes a study conducted by Sylvia
Scribner,29 which showed that in the absence of formal education, children and adults alike,
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adopt an “empirical orientation” towards reasoning. That is, they use their own experience
to “supplement, to distort or even to reject the premises supplied by the interviewer; they
reason instead on the basis on their empirical experience.”30 After two or three years of
formal education they are able to adopt what might be called a “theoretical” or “syllogistic”
approach to reasoning. With the discursive capacity to reason better developed, subjects
were able to “focus on the claims encapsulated in the premise of the problem, even when
those premises do not fit into their everyday experience and they confine their reasoning to
what follows from these premises.”31 Although Harris ultimately argues that the discursive
capacity is not something unusual or unnatural that can only be developed through formal
schooling, it is important to note that this capacity to reason is significantly different from
the more literal empirical stance.
According to Harris, encouraging a make-believe attitude helps to engage the analytic
stance. For example, Harris conducted an experiment with 4 and 6 year olds where he began
by telling the children something contradictory to what they knew, like “all fishes live in
trees.” Then the children were given a second, minor, premise; “Tot is a fish.” The
question thus posed to the children was “Does Tot live in the water?” An empirical
approach to this question should prompt a “yes” answer, but an analytic approach, if the
child accepts the initial premise which is counter to what they know, the logically correct
answer is “no”. These hypotheticals were presented to each group of children in two
different ways; as matter of fact, or with a make believe prompt like “lets pretend I’m on
another planet” and the experimenter continued the hypothetical in dramatic, story-telling
voice. Within both age groups, the make believe presentation prompted more logical replies
than the matter-of-fact presentation. Harris’ conclusion to all of this is that counter to the
common suggestion that narrative, fiction and/or make-believe scenarios generally constrict,
17
rather than enhance epistemological performance, he has shown how setting up theoretical
analytic scenarios—even when asked to imagine that fish live in trees, that there is a
wardrobe with no back on it that leads to a magical world, or that there is a magical ring that
can make one disappear—allows analytic reasoning to continue and to develop. Harris
explains that even with a wide variety of make-believe cues given to the children, they all
seem to converge in producing a similar psychological stance. Harris explains that this
stance prompts “children to treat the problems as descriptions of an imaginary world; this
imaginary world contains creatures and events that violate their everyday knowledge.”32
Thus unlike many theories which argue that make-believe (fiction or narrative) works
counter to healthy reasoning because it enlists fanciful premises, Harris shows how it is, in
fact, the case that these reasoning structures continue to function well in an
epistemologically significant way.
I would like to take Harris’ argument one step further and suggest that not only do
discursive reasoning processes remain intact, and can even be enhanced by engaging in
narrative, but that the narrative ability to reason is engaged, and thereby enhanced, to an
even greater degree by reading, hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives. Parallel to
what Harris points out about the development of discursive reasoning from an analytic
education, the development of the narrative reasoning ability emerges in a similar way.
When we begin to learn to reason, it is not entirely discursive or empirical. We learn through
the structure of stories. That is, we learn to reason through the reasoning provided to us
through hearing and telling stories. By engaging with narratives, we practice using our
narrative reason. The structure found within narratives helps us to imagine more broadly
than we are called to with discursive thinking. Narrative comprehension or understanding is
enhanced from engagement with narrative structure in the same way that discursive
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understanding is enhanced from engagement and practice with discursive structure. This is
significant because it tells us about our engagement with narrative generally, fiction more
specifically and gives us insight into the role that the imagination plays in the world as we
construct it. The way we construct our narratives (fictional and non-fictional) is importantly
tied to the way we understand, order, and construct our own reality and our own personal
identity. Whatever information might be available from a given sequence of events available
as a story must be turned into a story. Thus even the creation of a narrative from a sequence of
events requires the narrative capacity to reason. The more developed one’s ability to
narratively reason the more one can get out of stories. The better one is at constructing
stories, the more intelligent one should be able to become—assuming intelligence is related
to the ability to retrieve information readily and to find coherence where it does not
obviously exist.
Thus engaging with well-constructed narratives helps us to be better reasoners in a
general way; more general than the way Nussbaum argues, but for similar reasons. Reading
fiction in particular can help with this skill perhaps even more readily than not engaging with
it, as good stories from early on can help us to develop this capacity. Reading narrative
fiction and experiencing life both involve people’s performing actions in pursuit of goals and
having various emotional reactions to events. Thus understanding how our different
inferencing mechanisms work might help us to be able to develop these capacities further.
The inferencing mechanisms that are used to make sense of the everyday world are the same
ones utilized during the comprehension of narratives. There is no real justification to believe
that readers (or moviegoers or game players etc.) would turn these inferencing mechanisms
off while engaging with fictional narratives as the concern might go with some Platonists.
19
Conclusion
If it is legitimate to assume that there are (at least) two different kinds of reasoning
methods (discursive and narrative) and that we can clearly be trained to think in the
discursive mode, I think it can be legitimately argued that we can be and are trained to think
in the narrative mode. It would seem also that it is just as important that we foster our
narrative reasoning skills, since it is such a prevalent form of communication.
What I want to do with this argument, however, is say that the kind of reasoning
skills that one can acquire from reading narratives could make one a better thinker, not just
morally in the way that Nussbaum might argue, but more broadly. It might also be argued
then, that the epistemological benefits of reading literature are significantly different from
the epistemological benefits of engaging with other kinds of non-narrative art. The
epistemological benefits of reading literature may in fact be greater than with other kinds of
arts. That is, when the question “can we learn from art?” is raised, or more particularly,
“what can we learn from art?” aestheticians have had trouble answering this since whatever it
is that we seem to gain from art or literary narrative is non-propositional. We might be
better prepared to answer this question now by saying that we gain narrative reasoning skills
from reading literature. In turn, these reasoning skills add not to our storehouse of
propositional knowledge necessarily, but to our storehouse of skills that make us more
interesting and more empathetic human beings—the kinds of human beings who need
narrative arts and good conversation, who are interested in other human beings, and who
have knowledge that is more than just propositional.
will suggest a form of narrative reasoning that illuminates a narrative grammar, which will
ultimately lead me to describe a form of narrative knowledge. Traditional forms of
knowledge (knowing how and knowing that) are not sufficient to cover a third kind of
knowledge (knowing what it is like) in the way that storytelling can. I will argue that this
latter form of knowledge is under-recognized as an essential ingredient to our humanity.
Introduction
People love to tell stories. When something scary, or funny, or out of the ordinary
happens, we cannot wait to tell others about it. If it was really funny etc. we tell the story
repeatedly, embellishing as we see fit, shortening or lengthening as the circumstances
prescribe. When people are bad storytellers we tend not to pay as close attention to their
stories; our minds drift, and we hope for a swift conclusion. We tend not to remember
those stories as well as the ones that were carefully constructed and skillfully delivered.
Storytelling is one of our primary forms of communication with other people. What I will
argue in this paper is that reading, telling, and hearing well-constructed narratives are not just
an idle pastime that we have created for entertainment purposes or even as a mere means of
communication. Rather, I want to argue that there are epistemological benefits to reading,
hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives. In particular, by practicing narrative
reasoning we develop this skill, in a similar way that by practicing discursive reasoning we
develop discursive reasoning skills. In turn, we develop an enhanced reasoning ability that
arises from narrative reasoning and narrative meaning construction. I argue that narrative reasoning
helps us to empathize with other people, become better citizens, increase our intelligence,
and develop a coherent and healthy sense of personal identity. Ultimately, I argue that those
who are able to develop the capacity to reason narratively will be able to have a more
comprehensive understanding of the human experience.
2
Defining Narrative
To begin, I will go into some detail about what I mean when I talk about narratives,
since the reasoning skills that will ultimately come from engaging with them will be related to
their inherent meaning and structure. Noël Carroll outlines a theory of narrative that I will
use for working purposes.1 In his description, he outlines not a clear set of necessary and
sufficient conditions, but a networked notion of what he calls the “narrative connection.”2
This connection is like a set of family resemblances that can connect together a number of
the important features of what narratives are generally understood to be. To begin with,
Carroll argues that narrative discourse is comprised of more than one event and/or states of
affairs that are connected, are about a unified subject, and are represented as being
perspicuously ordered in time (the ordering must be at least retrievable if not implicitly
obvious). A narrative is not merely a list or series of events or states of affairs, but there
must be some sort of sequence of events, where the sequence minimally implies a temporal
ordering. An annal might be something that is temporally ordered and will likely have more
than two events or states of affairs, and for this reason it might be put into a category of
“story form.” The primary principle of organization of an annal is, however, merely a
temporal list of events. It cannot count as a full-fledged narrative, since it may be a temporal
list of events that has no unified subject.
For example,
A: “The Space shuttle Challenger explodes in 1988, the Berlin wall comes down in
1989, there was a massacre at Srebenica, Bosnia in 1995.”
B: “The Space Shuttle Columbia blows up upon reentry to Earth; the Space Shuttle
Challenger explodes upon take off.”
3
A is a temporally ordered list of events and is an annal, while B is not because in B there is
no temporal sequence. B does have some characteristics of a story form however, namely a
seemingly unified subject and some possible connection between the events. B contains
none of the elements of a recognizable narrative except for a unified subject (space shuttle
disasters).
A chronicle might also fall into the category of story form. A chronicle includes
more than one event and/or state of affairs, has a temporal order and a unified subject (a
subject being either a topic or a character). Carroll defines a chronicle as a “discursive
representation that (temporally, but noncausally) connects at least two events in the career of
a unified subject such that a reliable temporal ordering is retrievable from it (and/or from
the context of the enunciation).”3 To develop B into a chronicle, we could say “the Space
Shuttle Challenger blew up upon take off in 1986; the Space Shuttle Columbia blew up upon
reentry in 2003.” This has a unified subject (space shuttle disasters) and a perspicuous
temporal order but it is not a full-fledged narrative because it does not display a connection
between events other than a temporal ordering of the events that it recounts.
In addition, then, to the multiple states of affairs and/or sequence of events, a
unified subject, and a perspicuously temporal order, what is it that makes a collection a
narrative? Some sort of causation is most often suggested as the necessary condition that
consistently links the changes in states of affairs together in a way that would make
narratives consistently identifiable as narratives. Carroll argues, however, that it is not a
simplistic view of direct or necessary causation that is the link needed to do this work.
Causation, he says, is “too strong a relation to hypothesize as the relevant connection
operative in all narrative linkages.”4 If causation were the singular necessary relation that
unifies narrative structure, then earlier events in narratives would always necessarily causally
4
entail later events. Since this is not the case in all narratives (and perhaps not even most
narratives, Carroll suggests), this cannot be the link that makes these groups of events or
states of affairs narratives, no matter how unified the subject or temporally sequenced the
events are.
Carroll explains that most “narratives are not strings of causal entailments; instead,
the earlier events in a sequence of events underdetermine later events.”5 What seems to be the
case is that an earlier event can be a cause that is necessary to a sufficient condition but is
not necessary itself. These conditions are what J. L. Mackie calls INUS conditions:
Insufficient, but Necessary parts of a condition that is itself Unnecessary but is Sufficient for
an effect of an event.6 That is, an earlier event in a narrative connection is at least a causally
necessary condition or ingredient for bringing about later events. In a more strictly causally
necessary model, earlier events in a narrative would necessitate the latter events. Carroll
explains “on the causal input model, the earlier event plus some causal input necessitates the
succeeding event . . . [but] the narrative relation is often weaker than that of necessitation or
causal entailment.”7 Thus INUS conditions can function as the linchpin that holds the
narrative connection together, but those conditions are much less causally strict than the
directly necessary causal relations. Carroll illustrates INUS conditions in the following
example:
C: “The thief enters the bank to rob it, but subsequently, as he exits, he is
apprehended by the police.”8
This is a narrative, but the first event does not necessitate the second event. Although
robbing the bank is causally relevant to being apprehended by the police, it is not entailed by it.
Robbing the bank is, however, a necessary part of the sufficient cause of the police
apprehension, but it is not necessary in and of itself.
5
If it can be argued that narratives involve changes in the career of a unified subject,
then that change needs to be more than just coincidental; it needs to adhere to a causal or
semi-causal process. The earlier events must be at least causally necessary insofar as they are
sufficient or jointly sufficient for later events. Carroll explains that “the earlier events fall
into the causal network that gives rise to the later events where the weakest, but perhaps
most frequent, way of figuring in that causal network is as a causally necessary condition (or
a contribution thereto) for the causation of later events.”9 The earlier event must, at
minimum be causally relevant to the later event though it need not be directly causal. What
Carroll takes here to be causally relevant, I want to broaden to just what is explanatory. That
there is a thief who enters the bank to rob it explains the fact that the police later
apprehended him. Further, many of the earlier events may not even be causally relevant, but
only contributions to a causally necessary condition. For definitional purposes here, the
necessary, direct, causal connection needs to be bracketed, qualified, and minimized
potentially only to explanatory features.
If the elements in a narrative connection bear no sort of causal relation to each
other, then they can seem to be more of an order of coincidence than of a narrative. For
example,
D: the king died and then the queen died.
E: the king died and then the queen died, of grief.
D is merely a chronicle because there is no causal or underdetermined identifiable underlying
cause or explanation from the first event to the second event. It is not clear to a reader, nor
can it really be discerned, what the relationship is between the two events although they
seem to have a unified subject and there is an implied temporal order. E, on the other hand,
6
is a narrative because the relationship between the two (unified, temporally ordered) events
is made clear.
Thus, Carroll’s narrative connection obtains when:
1. the discourse represents at least two events and/or states of affairs
2. in a globally forward-looking manner
3. concerning the career of at least one unified subject
4. where the temporal relations between the events and/or states of affairs are
perspicuously ordered, and
5. where the earlier events in the sequence are at least causally necessary conditions for the
causation of later events and/or states of affairs (or are contributions thereto).10
Further, narrative explanation does not focus only on how one event is produced or effected
by another, but on the more subtle transition from beginning to end in terms of explanation
and plot construction. Plot is the structure through which events are connected to a
narrative. A narrative, or story,11 is constructed of events only to the extent to which the
plot crafts events into a narrative. Events are gathered together and it is the plot that makes
the events stand out beyond what they would be in an annal or chronicle. Plot combines
two important aspects: chronological and non-chronological. The chronological aspect of
plot characterizes the events of the narrative and shows the reader how the events follow a
particular timeline. The non-chronological aspect of the plot connects the events together in
such a way that no matter how temporally diverse the events actually are, they can be seen to
form a coherent whole. Plot structures how and in what order the reader becomes aware of
what happens in the story. Although the same set of events can be told in a different order
or with a different plot, there must be some consistently identifiable transformations that
can serve as a basis for the narrative so that it can be handled in different meaning
preserving sequences. The other part of the non-chronological dimension of plot is that of
the human motivations found developed through the story. One of the main reasons we
read narratives, or perhaps one of the main motivations to continue once we are in it, is to
7
see how human motivations are played out in the context of the story. Although this is not
going to fit neatly into anything that even resembles necessary and sufficient conditions of
what a narrative might look like, it does seem to be one of the main incentives we have for
reading stories.
With what I have laid out thus far, I want to be clear that I am neither positing a
theory of narrative nor am I dictating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for
something to qualify as a narrative. What I do want to do is gesture toward what seem to be
some of the overarching components of which might make up a “logic” of narrative. I do
not take causation to be the necessary or sufficient condition that makes something a
narrative. By explicating Carroll’s conditions for a narrative connection (especially the INUS
conditions) in conjunction with plot and explanatory reasons, I am hoping to show how a
wide array of narratives can be used as the basis for what I hope to show in what follows. I
also want to make clear that the kinds of narratives I am attempting to include here vary
from the traditional, to the non-linear (or with interruptions of sequence like with the stories
of Italo Calvino), to the oral storytelling traditions that come from long ago.
Narrative Reasoning
There are two general models from which most of our reasoning is generated:
discursive12 and narrative. Discursive reasoning relies on logical, direct arguments, while
narrative reasoning depends on the narrative aspects of a story to order a certain experience.
Discursive reasoning, “passing from premises to conclusions; proceeding by reasoning or
argument”13 is here meant to include inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning. What I
am trying to capture in this term is the ideal of a formal system of description and/or
explanation. It is not merely linear, syllogistic reasoning systems. Narrative psychologist
8
Jerome Bruner explains his version of this kind of reasoning as one that “employs
categorization or conceptualization and the operations by which categories are established,
instantiated, idealized, and related one to the other to form a system.”14 The imaginative
application of discursive reasoning leads to “the ability to see possible formal connections
before one is able to prove them in any formal way” while the imaginative application of the
narrative “leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, [and] believable (though not
necessarily ‘true’) historical accounts.”15 Discursive reasoning is exemplified by the logical
argument:
F: “Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, therefore, Socrates in mortal.” Although
there could be stories told about Socrates’ mortality (as in fact, there are several) F has no
real narrative structure. A narrative about Socrates would look something more like this:
G: “there was a man called Socrates, who, because of his suggestion that people
needed to question the folkways of knowledge in ways they had never done before, was tried
as a heretic, condemned as guilty, and made to drink hemlock.”
There is an identifiable line of argument in F that G lacks. There is, however, in G an
identifiable narrative structure that allows the reader to follow the events in the narrative and
to understand how the conclusion (that Socrates is put to death) logically follows, and even
sufficiently entails what came before. There is no logical conclusion in the second example
that can be proven from what comes before, but there is an identifiable narrative structure
that can be pointed to. Although making the suggestion that people question the folkways
of knowledge does not necessarily entail death by hemlock, it is easily discernable in this
short narrative that this is the sufficient cause of the outcome of the story. If we go back to
the example from C (“The thief enters the bank to rob it, but subsequently, as he exits, he is
apprehended by the police.”) it is clear here too how discursive reasoning can be abstracted
(and I do not want to suggest that discursive reasoning invokes only syllogisms or syllogism9
like kinds of arguments). Although the thief entering the bank neither necessitates being
apprehended by the police, nor does being apprehended by the police causally entail a bank
robber, it is clear to the reader that being apprehended by the police is causally relevant and
more to the point, explanatory, to robbing a bank and readers are not confused about the
relationship of the events.
Discursive and narrative reasoning both have different operating principles and both
have their own criteria for success. They differ fundamentally, however, in the ways in
which they go about verification. Bruner goes so far as to assert that “a good story and a
well-formed argument are different natural kinds”16 even though both are used as ways of
communicating information and of convincing others. He explains that the discursive
“verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical truth”17
while the narrative “establishes not truth but verisimilitude” and lifelikeness. Both can be
used as a means to convince others, but what they convince of is fundamentally different:
arguments convince one of their truth while narrative convinces of its lifelikeness and
believability. Truth often comes in as a distant second to well-constructed and well-executed
stories. Narrative lines of reasoning do not generally prove anything, but they do show how
something might have come to be the case. There are certain causal or underdetermined
causal linkages within a narrative that readers should be able to discern that are not so easily
identifiable or linear as what is found in discursive reasoning. We regularly utilize both
narrative and discursive reasoning in order to organize and make sense of our worlds and
our experience. We explain our lived experiences in terms of plots, and more often than
not, those plot structures produce the most sensible statements and explanations of our
experience and beliefs. Both are legitimate and rational ways of understanding and ordering
10
our experience of the world, but both produce cognition by different means which
correspond with the inherent structure of their own logic.
The way that causation is construed in the way narratives are defined and/or
identified is extremely important since this is one of the main factors (if not the main factor
of any real significance) that differentiates narrative structure and discursive structure. If
narrative structure were merely based on direct necessary and simple causation, then
narrative reasoning and narrative meaning construction would look a lot more like discursive
reasoning than it in fact does. Thus it is important to note the differences between the ways
that causation could be construed in the different kinds of reasonings.
Although these two modes of understanding are complimentary, it is important to
note that they are neither reducible nor translatable to one another. It seems dubious, and
worse, futile, to attempt to either reduce or translate from one to the other since they are, at
base, fundamentally different kinds of reasoning. This is not to say, moreover, that stories
cannot exemplify both the narrative and discursive structures. Many Sherlock Holmes
mysteries, for example, are presented in the form of a narrative, but what motivates the
reader in this case is not the narrative aspects of the novel (although that may be a part of it)
as much as the discursive and clues that one has to follow in order to figure out the mystery.
Ultimately, Holmes relies most heavily on abductive reasoning, carefully couched in plot.18
Although it is also true that both discursive and narrative reasoning can exist in a single text,
that does not mean that they cannot be clearly differentiated.
Further, it is clear that we get better at discursive reasoning with practice. This
would seem to be the underlying assumption of much of the philosophy we teach, especially
of critical thinking and logic courses. The explicit expectation in these classes is for students
to learn to identify various valid and invalid logical inferences. Students are taught these
11
inferences with the hope and expectation that they will be able to identify the same
inferences in their own reasoning and the reasoning of others, whether it be in a
philosophical treatise, arguments of their own making, or of the opinions section of the
newspaper. In teaching students even basic logical rules like Aristotle’s Barbara, modus
tollens, and modus ponens, students are often able to apply these logical inferences to their
own (and their friends’) reasoning processes. The formalization of logical structure, formal
reasoning, and the identification of logical fallacies are an essential part of the development
of reasoning capabilities. My argument relies on the assumption that the process that occurs
when we practice narrative reasoning parallels that of discursive reasoning. If such reasoning
processes behave consistently (as we have every reason to assume they would) then with
practice we should get better at narratively reasoning in similar ways as we do with discursive
reasoning.
Nussbaum on Narrative
Martha Nussbaum makes the argument that reading literature can help us to expand
our study of ethics because we can practice expanding our moral imaginations by engaging in
narratives. She argues that with literature, the conjunction of the form and the content
together allows a particular style to emerge that can prompt us to reflect on our own moral
situations in a significantly different way than we can with philosophical ethical treatises.
She explains that “certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated
in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist.”19 Her suggestion is that by
adding good literature to our study of ethics, we should be able to produce a more
comprehensive and meaningful understanding of ethical life.
12
Part of the basis of Nussbaum’s claim is that the style of narrative is uniquely
qualified to present what she calls a view of life. She explains that the “telling itself—the
selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary of the whole manner of
addressing the reader’s sense of life—all of this expresses a sense of life and value, a sense of
what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, or life’s relations
and connections.”20 All of this, in addition to the notion that events are never experienced
except through a human perspective, (although there may ideally be omniscient narrators, we
can never experience narratives except through a particular perspective) adds to the fact that
reading literature for Nussbaum helps us to experience the world more fully. Life is never
presented straightforwardly but always through the lens of a speaker (whose lens(es) may be
or are likely to be very different from ours). Nussbaum also argues that “literature is an
extension of life not only horizontally, bringing the reader into contact with events or
locations or persons or problems he or she has not otherwise met, but also, so to speak,
vertically, giving the reader experience that is deeper, sharper, and more precise than much
of what takes place in life.”21 Reading good literature then can make us more moral, the
argument goes, since we can experience the world in ways that we cannot on our own
through our own experience. For Nussbaum, narrative and literary imagining are not
opposed to rational argument or discursive reasoning, but they can provide benefits that
discursive reasoning on its own cannot provide.22
Nussbaum makes an additional argument in Poetic Justice that reading good literature
can help one to become a better citizen. By using the imagination in the ways that literature
requires of us, we can imagine, practice imagining and get better at imagining the position of
others. Unlike more social scientific or historical texts, literary narratives typically invite their
readers to centrally imagine characters’ experiences—experiences that are often very
13
different from their own. In the way that the text invites the reader to participate, it gives
the sense of a number of different kinds of possibilities between the characters and the
reader. Novels present themselves in ways that are necessarily perspectival. But it is not just
that literary narratives present themselves this way. It is more to the point that literary
narratives ask the reader to see a given state of affairs in a particular way over other,
alternative ways. Nussbaum writes “the novel presents itself as a metaphor. See the world
in this way, and not in that, it suggests. Look at things as if they were like this story, and not
in other ways recommended by social science.”23 By practicing doing this, we can learn how
better to be “judicious spectators”24—and in turn better citizens. The emotion of a judicious
spectator must be, importantly, the emotion of a spectator, and not a participant. Nussbaum
explains “this means not only that we must perform a reflective assessment of the situation
to figure out whether the participants have understood it correctly and reacted reasonably; it
means, as well, that we must omit that portion that derives from our own personal interest in
our own well being.”25 We imagine the lives of others that are presented through narrative
form and by expanding the moral imagination we are better able to empathize with others
and we can become better at public thinking. Nussbaum argues that this can make one a
better juror, citizen, and public thinker.
The underlying assumption that Nussbaum uses here, which is the explicit notion
that I want to defend, is that through engaging with well-constructed narratives (what
Nussbaum focuses on specifically is “good literature” and my scope of narrative is
purposefully much broader than that) our own way of reasoning is changed through the
moral imagination; our reason is heightened and thereby influenced through the structure of
what we read. Although it is not true that we automatically or even quickly begin to pick up
the thinking patterns of the kinds of narratives we read, it is true that in certain ways our
14
reasoning abilities are influenced by the reasoning structures with which we engage. What
Nussbaum focuses on is the form or the structure of literature, in addition to its inherently
subjunctive nature. This structure is what she argues to be so different from the
philosophical or discursive structure of other ethical treatises that might cover similar
ground. Similarly, bad literature, says Nussbaum, can cause one to become morally corrupt.
With the shift of focus that I want to provide, morally bad content will not be the corrupting
influence cognitively (although it might be with another focus) as much as poorly told and
poorly delivered stories. So while there is a long history of philosophical criticism about the
potential moral corruption caused by literature, the corruption I might worry about is less
dependent on the content of the story as much as it is on the form and the delivery. Thus
while my distinction between discursive and narrative reasoning is played out in Nussbaum’s
work (which argues that narrative can make us more moral, within specific constraints) it
does the same work for my argument which suggests that narratives can help us to be better
able to reason.
Imagination and Understanding
It is clear now, that there are (at least) two different kinds of reasoning skills that we
use and can develop. Without going into great detail about what the imagination can do in
conjunction with this, I will say that the imagination plays a very important role in narrative
reasoning and narrative meaning construction. Narrative reasoning and the capacity to
imagine are mutually dependent and both should begin to develop at an early age.
Imagination can help to facilitate causal judgments about how things might have turned out
differently. Historians use this kind of speculation, as do philosophers with our thought
experiments. In a much more mundane sense, we do this in our everyday lives. This is, in
15
fact, how we can learn from our mistakes; we identify what when wrong and then imagine
alternate ways things could have turned out and what we could have done or said differently
to make those alternatives happen.
Utilizing our imaginations requires more than just discursive reasoning. Psychologist
Paul Harris explains “there is a great deal of work showing that when adults listen to a
narrative they build in their mind’s eye, so to speak, a mental image or a model of the
situation that is being described and of the events that unfold. And it is that mental model
that they retain over a long period of time rather than the particular words.”26 We tend to
keep the gist of the story,27 in what Daniel Dennett might call the Cartesian Theater,28 as
opposed to any particular sentences that might constitute the story. Thus when called to tell
the story, we can adapt as the circumstances prescribe. Badly told or badly constructed
stories, on the other hand, are more difficult to construct in imagination than wellconstructed
stories. Badly told stories are ones that do not make even implicit causal
connections, are difficult to follow, they go on too long before getting to a point or a punch
line, have irrelevant details, or do not develop the motivations of the characters. Thus wellconstructed
stories facilitate a better use of the imaginative faculties. Harris argues that these
mental models, constructed in the imagination, develop out of the early childhood
engagement with narrative and pretend play. The capacity that children have to engage in
make-believe early on is not something that they lose as adults. Rather, adults, although we
unfortunately engage in much less physical pretend play than do children, use this capacity to
imagine and narrate various kinds of possible situations and outcomes.
Harris cites an example that is helpful to understanding the development of the
schema of discursive and narrative reasoning. He describes a study conducted by Sylvia
Scribner,29 which showed that in the absence of formal education, children and adults alike,
16
adopt an “empirical orientation” towards reasoning. That is, they use their own experience
to “supplement, to distort or even to reject the premises supplied by the interviewer; they
reason instead on the basis on their empirical experience.”30 After two or three years of
formal education they are able to adopt what might be called a “theoretical” or “syllogistic”
approach to reasoning. With the discursive capacity to reason better developed, subjects
were able to “focus on the claims encapsulated in the premise of the problem, even when
those premises do not fit into their everyday experience and they confine their reasoning to
what follows from these premises.”31 Although Harris ultimately argues that the discursive
capacity is not something unusual or unnatural that can only be developed through formal
schooling, it is important to note that this capacity to reason is significantly different from
the more literal empirical stance.
According to Harris, encouraging a make-believe attitude helps to engage the analytic
stance. For example, Harris conducted an experiment with 4 and 6 year olds where he began
by telling the children something contradictory to what they knew, like “all fishes live in
trees.” Then the children were given a second, minor, premise; “Tot is a fish.” The
question thus posed to the children was “Does Tot live in the water?” An empirical
approach to this question should prompt a “yes” answer, but an analytic approach, if the
child accepts the initial premise which is counter to what they know, the logically correct
answer is “no”. These hypotheticals were presented to each group of children in two
different ways; as matter of fact, or with a make believe prompt like “lets pretend I’m on
another planet” and the experimenter continued the hypothetical in dramatic, story-telling
voice. Within both age groups, the make believe presentation prompted more logical replies
than the matter-of-fact presentation. Harris’ conclusion to all of this is that counter to the
common suggestion that narrative, fiction and/or make-believe scenarios generally constrict,
17
rather than enhance epistemological performance, he has shown how setting up theoretical
analytic scenarios—even when asked to imagine that fish live in trees, that there is a
wardrobe with no back on it that leads to a magical world, or that there is a magical ring that
can make one disappear—allows analytic reasoning to continue and to develop. Harris
explains that even with a wide variety of make-believe cues given to the children, they all
seem to converge in producing a similar psychological stance. Harris explains that this
stance prompts “children to treat the problems as descriptions of an imaginary world; this
imaginary world contains creatures and events that violate their everyday knowledge.”32
Thus unlike many theories which argue that make-believe (fiction or narrative) works
counter to healthy reasoning because it enlists fanciful premises, Harris shows how it is, in
fact, the case that these reasoning structures continue to function well in an
epistemologically significant way.
I would like to take Harris’ argument one step further and suggest that not only do
discursive reasoning processes remain intact, and can even be enhanced by engaging in
narrative, but that the narrative ability to reason is engaged, and thereby enhanced, to an
even greater degree by reading, hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives. Parallel to
what Harris points out about the development of discursive reasoning from an analytic
education, the development of the narrative reasoning ability emerges in a similar way.
When we begin to learn to reason, it is not entirely discursive or empirical. We learn through
the structure of stories. That is, we learn to reason through the reasoning provided to us
through hearing and telling stories. By engaging with narratives, we practice using our
narrative reason. The structure found within narratives helps us to imagine more broadly
than we are called to with discursive thinking. Narrative comprehension or understanding is
enhanced from engagement with narrative structure in the same way that discursive
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understanding is enhanced from engagement and practice with discursive structure. This is
significant because it tells us about our engagement with narrative generally, fiction more
specifically and gives us insight into the role that the imagination plays in the world as we
construct it. The way we construct our narratives (fictional and non-fictional) is importantly
tied to the way we understand, order, and construct our own reality and our own personal
identity. Whatever information might be available from a given sequence of events available
as a story must be turned into a story. Thus even the creation of a narrative from a sequence of
events requires the narrative capacity to reason. The more developed one’s ability to
narratively reason the more one can get out of stories. The better one is at constructing
stories, the more intelligent one should be able to become—assuming intelligence is related
to the ability to retrieve information readily and to find coherence where it does not
obviously exist.
Thus engaging with well-constructed narratives helps us to be better reasoners in a
general way; more general than the way Nussbaum argues, but for similar reasons. Reading
fiction in particular can help with this skill perhaps even more readily than not engaging with
it, as good stories from early on can help us to develop this capacity. Reading narrative
fiction and experiencing life both involve people’s performing actions in pursuit of goals and
having various emotional reactions to events. Thus understanding how our different
inferencing mechanisms work might help us to be able to develop these capacities further.
The inferencing mechanisms that are used to make sense of the everyday world are the same
ones utilized during the comprehension of narratives. There is no real justification to believe
that readers (or moviegoers or game players etc.) would turn these inferencing mechanisms
off while engaging with fictional narratives as the concern might go with some Platonists.
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Conclusion
If it is legitimate to assume that there are (at least) two different kinds of reasoning
methods (discursive and narrative) and that we can clearly be trained to think in the
discursive mode, I think it can be legitimately argued that we can be and are trained to think
in the narrative mode. It would seem also that it is just as important that we foster our
narrative reasoning skills, since it is such a prevalent form of communication.
What I want to do with this argument, however, is say that the kind of reasoning
skills that one can acquire from reading narratives could make one a better thinker, not just
morally in the way that Nussbaum might argue, but more broadly. It might also be argued
then, that the epistemological benefits of reading literature are significantly different from
the epistemological benefits of engaging with other kinds of non-narrative art. The
epistemological benefits of reading literature may in fact be greater than with other kinds of
arts. That is, when the question “can we learn from art?” is raised, or more particularly,
“what can we learn from art?” aestheticians have had trouble answering this since whatever it
is that we seem to gain from art or literary narrative is non-propositional. We might be
better prepared to answer this question now by saying that we gain narrative reasoning skills
from reading literature. In turn, these reasoning skills add not to our storehouse of
propositional knowledge necessarily, but to our storehouse of skills that make us more
interesting and more empathetic human beings—the kinds of human beings who need
narrative arts and good conversation, who are interested in other human beings, and who
have knowledge that is more than just propositional.
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