In this paper I address the issue of narrativity in music. The central question is the extent to which pure instrumental music in the classical tradition can or should be understood as narrative, that is, as narrating a story of some kind. I am interested in the varying potential and aptness for narrative construal of different sorts of instrumental music, and in what the content of such narratives might plausibly be thought to be. But ultimately I explore, at (...) greater length, an alternative way of construing musical process, namely, as dramatic rather than narrative in nature, following the lead of two musicologists, Anthony Newcomb and Fred Maus. After a comparison of the respective merits of narrative and dramatic construals of music, the paper concludes with an illustrative reading, in dramatic mode, of part of the opening movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845. (shrink)

Narrative as it is used by historians is not merely an incidental, stylistic feature of the historian's craft, but essential to historical explanation. Narrative presupposes a world of things that endure through change. Stories fill in the gaps in our experience and thus make continuity visible. Ideally, narrative stands proxy for experience, though this ideal can never be attained. No criterion can be formulated that will signify when a story is complete enough. The changing perspective of the (...) historian and the infinite detail with which he has to deal makes his task a continuous one. Yet the historian cannot be radically subjective because his story is always limited by the chronology of his events and the accuracy of his details. The rationale of narrative enables the historian to repudiate the covering-law model of historical explanation. (shrink)

A thought experiment on the ultimate non-essence of Time.

Even if the question, “What is the meaning of life?” is coherent, the fact remains that it is vague. Its vagueness largely centers on the use of the term “meaning.” The most prevalent strategy for addressing this vagueness is to discard the word “meaning” and reformulate the question entirely into questions such as, “What is the purpose of life?” or “What makes life valuable?” among others. This approach has philosophical merit but does not account for the intuitions and sub-questions driving (...) the original question as plausibly as does an interpretation that I call the narrative interpretation. I will argue that the question, “What is the meaning of life?” should be understood as the request for a narrative that narrates across those elements and accompanying questions of life of greatest existential import to human beings. (shrink)

This study examines how subtitlers in underground subtitle groups in China perform skills and display competence in applying the rules around which annotations are built. I argue that by annotating, the act of creating notes, representing information not linguistically coded in the original US TV programs, subtitlers engage in a performative act in concert. Annotations reveal not only subtitlers’ stances toward the contents being translated, but also their meta­thinking on these contents. The analysis shows that two contradictory forces provide the (...) impetus for annotations. On the one hand, the desire for objectivity refers to subtitlers’ attempts to represent a professional and organized account of how Chinese subtitles are produced in the process of explicating knowledge. On the other hand, the desire for authenticity is implicit in the subtitlers’ narrative of what they actually experience when translating US TV programs. (shrink)

By studying the logic that unites play, the rules of games and the body of players, this article intends to highlight a spatial mimesis through play and games. It consists of carrying out a Ricœurian anthropology of play and game, taking Ricœur's analysis of the relationship between time and narrative as a model. The article then shows that play prefigures the physical space as a lived space, that game configures a space of rules and that the player's body is (...) refigured by the spatiality of the rules of the game. This application of the ternary model of Ricœurian mimesis thus allows a unified understanding of play and games by space, and of space by play and games. (shrink)

There has been a long-standing interest in the putative roles that various so-called ‘theory of mind’ abilities might play in enabling us to understand and enjoy narratives. Of late, as our understanding of the complexity and diversity of everyday psychological capacities has become more nuanced and variegated, new possibilities have been articulated: (i) that our capacity for a sophisticated, everyday understanding of actions in terms of reason (our folk psychology) may itself be best characterized as a kind of narrative (...) practice and (ii) that acquiring the capacity for supplying and digesting reasons explana- tions might (at least normally) depend upon having a special training with narratives. This introductory paper to the volume situates the claims of those who support the narrative approach to folk psychology against the backdrop of some traditional and new thinking about intersubjectivity, social cognition and ‘theory of mind’ abilities. Special emphasis is laid on the different reasons for being interested in these claims about narrative practice and folk psychology in light of various empirical and philosophical agendas. (shrink)

In this paper, I return to the well-known apparent inconsistencies in Hume’s treatment of personal identity in the three books of A Treatise of Human Nature, and try to defend a Humean narrative interpretation of the self. I argue that in Book 1 of the Treatise Hume is answering (to use Marya Schechtman’s expressions in The Constitution of Selves) a “reidentification” question concerning personal identity, which is different from the “characterization” question of Books 2 and 3. That is, I (...) maintain that whereas in Book 1 Hume is using his philosophical empiricism to provide his own version of the problem of how to recognize persons as the same at different times, in Books 2 and 3 he is presenting selves from a different, both sentimental and ethical standpoint, as the focus of people’s concerns. I start by discussing Hume’s notion of personal identity as presented in Book 1 and in the “Appendix.” I then specify the narrative conception of the self Hume relies on when dealing with passions and morality as the self-consciousness persons develop as bearers of characters of or about which they can be morally proud or humble. I finally conclude by distinguishing Hume’s narrative self from the idea of “the unity of human life” that Alasdair MacIntyre puts forward in After Virtue. (shrink)

The belief of Gallie, Danto, and others that history is constructing narratives is too simplistic and neglects the role of inquiry and discovery. Teleology in history - only events relevant to a known outcome find a place in a work -while similar to that in narratives is not decisive, since in any explanation the explicandum controls the explicans to some extent. History is not recounting a linear sequence of intelligible human actions but is an analysis of a complex pattern of (...) change into factors that served to make it what it was. Social backgrounds and conditions that are influences but not actually parts of the story of actions are crucial; the fundamental relationship is part to whole, not antecedent to consequent. (shrink)

This paper re-frames business ethical codes as narrative processes by reflecting critically on key ontological assumptions underpinning the existing research, and introducing new and relevant concepts based on alternative assumptions. The first section draws on recent decision-making research to develop a theoretical account of BCEs as complex, socially embedded sensemaking processes. The second section addresses the content of codes, and differentiates between narrative and logico-scientific modes of reasoning. The third section focuses on the quality of code communication and (...) identifies several distinct types of narrative process. We provide research directions for how this new understanding of BCEs may be further developed, as well as implications for practitioners. In response to the call for new conceptual models, the paper provides organizational researchers with a more nuanced understanding of how BCEs enable or constrain ethical behavior in organizations. (shrink)

This chapter takes a look at the argument that is directly against a characterization of will as a “moment of choice”. This argument treats willing as a processual development. The chapter shows that willing can be viewed as a gradual change of orientation from one attentional target to another. In this chapter, thinking of will is a morally loaded process that is achieved through emotion work, thought, conversation, and a variety of other experiences. The chapter also briefly refers to recent (...) anthropological considerations of emotion, agency, and intention. (shrink)

This article explores the extent to which millenarianism can be understood as a narrative structure and even a potential "master plot" akin to quest and stranger motifs. The idea of a radical, utopian response to sociocultural crisis is a recurrent theme in literature, most apparent in science fiction and fantasy but also present in "literary" fiction, poetry, and drama. There have been previous attempts to describe millenarianism as a narrative, but such attempts have been in the direction of (...) sociologists or anthropologists using literary theory to elucidate millenarianism. My methodology is reversed, and my focus is on the way millenarian literature can be understood through a narrative framework. If... (shrink)

In his pioneering study of Grande Dame Guignol (also referred to as hag horror or psycho-biddy), a female-centric 1960s subgenre of horror film, Peter Shelley explains that the grande dame, a stock character in this form of cinematic expression, “may pine for a lost youth and glory, or she may be trapped by idealized memories of childhood, with a trauma that haunts her past” (8). Indeed, a typical Grande Dame Guignol female protagonist/antagonist (as these two roles often merge) usually deals (...) with various kinds of traumatic experiences: loss of a child, domestic violence, childhood abuse, family conflicts or sudden end of career in the fickle artistic industry, etc. Unable to cope with her problems, but also incapable of facing the inevitable process of aging and dying, she gradually yields to mental and physical illnesses that further strengthen the trauma and lead to her social exclusion, making her life even more unbearable. Unsurprisingly, scholars such as Charles Derry choose to name psycho-biddies horrors of personality, drawing attention to the insightful psychological portrayal of their characters. Thus, it would be relevant and illuminating to discuss films such as Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) as narratives of trauma. This will be the main concern of my article. (shrink)

Aims:The aim of this narrative synthesis was to explore the necessary and sufficient conditions required to define moral distress.Background:Moral distress is said to occur when one has made a moral judgement but is unable to act upon it. However, problems with this narrow conception have led to multiple redefinitions in the empirical and conceptual literature. As a consequence, much of the research exploring moral distress has lacked conceptual clarity, complicating attempts to study the phenomenon.Design:Systematic literature review and narrative (...) synthesis (November 2015–March 2016).Data sources:Ovid MEDLINE®In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations 1946–Present, PsycINFO®1967–Present, CINAHL®Plus 1937–Present, EMBASE 1974–24 February 2016, British Nursing Index 1994–Present, Social Care Online, Social Policy and Practice Database (1890–Present), ERIC (EBSCO) 1966–Present and Education Abstracts.Review methods:Literature relating to moral distress was systematically retrieved and subjected to relevance assessment. Narrative synthesis was the overarching framework that guided quality assessment, data analysis and synthesis.Results:In all, 152 papers underwent initial data extraction and 34 were chosen for inclusion in the narrative synthesis based on both quality and relevance. Analysis revealed different proposed conditions for the occurrence of moral distress: moral judgement, psychological and physical effects, moral dilemmas, moral uncertainty, external and internal constraints and threats to moral integrity.Conclusion:We suggest the combination of (1) the experience of a moral event, (2) the experience of ‘psychological distress’ and (3) a direct causal relation between (1) and (2) together are necessary and sufficient conditions for moral distress. (shrink)

The paper presents a historical-epistemological analysis of the notion of “spontaneous symmetry breaking”, which I believe today provides a template for conceiving the relationship between symmetry and asymmetry in physics as well as in other areas of the natural sciences. The central thesis of the paper is that spontaneous symmetry breaking represents an instance of “narrative knowing” in the sense developed by recent research in history and philosophy of science (Morgan and Wise (eds) SI narrative in science, Studies (...) in history and philosophy of science, 2017a). Spontaneous symmetry breaking is best understood as a hybrid narrative comprising formulas, verbal statements, images, and at times also other media. This flexible notion can be deployed in different variations, allowing to explain a broad range of non-symmetric phenomena or models as resulting from (not necessarily observable) processes of loss of symmetry. I will support this thesis by first analysing in detail the way in which spontaneous symmetry breaking, and in particular electroweak symmetry breakdown, are presented in today’s physics textbooks and reference works, and then by reconstructing the emergence of the hybrid construct from the late 1950s until the 1970s, when spontaneous symmetry breaking definitively established itself as a key physical notion. (shrink)

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

Abstract A small but significant number of residents of Second Life (SL) insist that SL is as real to them as Real Life (RL) and that their SL avatars are as much themselves as their offscreen selves. This paper investigates whether this claim can be literally true in any philosophically interesting way. Using a narrative account of personal identity I argue that there is a way of understanding these identity claims according to which the actions and experiences of the (...) offscreen user and the online avatar are indeed actions and experiences of a single person. In the course of describing how this is so, the paper also uncovers new insights into how a narrative approach to personal identity should be structured and developed. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-15 DOI 10.1007/s13347-012-0062-y Authors Marya Schechtman, Department of Philosophy M/C 267, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1423 University Hall, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that medical professionals should protect a future child's rights by prohibiting disabled parents from using technology to deliberately have a disabled child because disability is taken as an inevitable, severe threat to a child's otherwise “open” future. I will first argue that the open future that allegedly protects a child's future autonomy is precluded by the very conditions needed to develop that future autonomy. Any child's future will be narrowed as they are socialized in a way (...) that gives them the capacity for autonomous choice. However, oppressive master narratives can diminish a future child's autonomy by distorting their narrative identity and constricting their agency. In fact, the open future argument does just this by advancing one of the most damaging master narratives about disability: that disability inevitably and severely restricts a person's autonomy and closes their future. (shrink)

In order to summarize a story, it is necessary to access a high level analysis of the story that highlights its central concepts. A technique of memory representation based on plot units appears to provide a rich foundation for such an analysis. Plot units are conceptual structures that overlap with each other when a narrative is cohesive. When overlapping intersections between plot units are interpreted as arcs in a graph of plot units, the resulting graph encodes the plot of (...) the story. Structural features of the graph then reveal which concepts are central to the story, and which concepts are peripheral. Plot unit analysis is currently being investigated as a processing strategy for narrative summarization by both computer simulation and psychological experiments. (shrink)

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is (...) "unscientific," it is inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has in some cases been associated with significant psychological effects and/or personality change. These effects occur sometimes as acute changes experienced intraoperatively or during the initial setting of the stimulator and sometimes as longer term progressive changes in the months following surgery. Sometimes they are the intended outcome of treatment, and in other cases they are an unintended side-effect. In all of these circumstances some patients and caregivers have described the psychological effects of DBS as frightening (...) or disconcerting. I trace the source of these negative reactions to the fear that stimulation-related psychological and personality changes represent a threat to personal identity and agency. This issue has implications both for philosophical theories of personal identity and agency and for clinical concerns. A narrative account of personal identity is developed to illuminate the nature of the threat to identity and agency DBS potentially poses, and to suggest steps that might be taken to mitigate and avoid these threats. (shrink)