Narrative possibility and narrative explanation
Introduction
It is often argued that narratives are most appropriate for describing what happened. They are not appropriate for explaining why it happened precisely because they don't go beyond description, most famously or infamously because they don't (and given their descriptive function shouldn't) include lawlike generalizations about what would happen (or would have happened) if; they are, and should be, only about what did. In a previous paper (Beatty, 2016), I argued to the contrary that narratives are especially appropriate for describing what took place in the context of what might have instead. Here I focus on the explanatory and not just the descriptive character of narratives, and the role of what might have been. I'm concerned here with what was “narratively” or “historically” possible at a specific time and place, not just logically or physically possible, and how narratives make productive use of such real (very real) though unrealized possibilities.
I'll be using branching diagrams like Fig. 1 to analyze narrative structure and the structure of the world described and explained by narratives.1 Here the occurrence of event A leaves open the possibility of either B1 or B2. The occurrence of B1 leaves open the possibility of either O1 or O2, and forecloses the possibility of B2 and along with it O3 and O4. A–B1–O2 is one possible history in this world, A–B2–O4 another. There are multiple possible histories in this world; only one can come to pass.
My thesis is that the narrative A–B1–O2 explains O2 in the context of surrounding branches. Such a narrative is a causal explanation in the sense that it highlights counterfactual difference-making events. But it is a particular kind of counterfactual difference-making explanation that satisfies two conditions:
- 1)
An alleged cause like B1 makes a counterfactual difference to the outcome. Had B1 not occurred, then O2 would not have occurred (check the diagram).
- 2)
Counterfactual alternatives to alleged causes like B1 are historically or narratively possible. The particular events leading up to and including the occurrence of A left open the possibility of B2 as well as B1 (check the diagram). For the time being, I'll refer to such historically or narratively possible alternatives as real possibilities.
The unrealized histories A–B2–O3 and A–B2–O4 are relevant context. They communicate that B1 was not bound to occur at the time of A, B2 was also a real possibility, and that O2 would not have happened had B2 occurred instead.
Section snippets
Regret
If I made a mistake yesterday, I regret it, and I replay it, and I have to remind myself that yesterday is as unchangeable as the Conquest of Peru. For I still sense the other choices I might have made . . . .
Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom
I begin with regret because it's familiar—the stuff of so many stories that we tell ourselves and others.2
Beyond regret
[I]f we must marvel, let it be at our presumption in imagining for a moment that we understand the many complex contingencies, on which the existence of each species depends.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Here are two more narratives for consideration, an evolutionary narrative from Darwin, and a historical narrative about him. Both narratives relate what happened, but also communicate that what actually happened might not have, that something else might well have occurred instead,
Telling it like it was, and was not
[W]e must struggle against the tendency to consider the past only from the angle of what is done, unchangeable, and past. We have to reopen the past, to revivify its unaccomplished, cut-off—even slaughtered possibilities.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative
Backing up now. I'm going to rely on a fairly minimal view of narratives: that they relate what happened, one event at a time. All narratives do that. But some, like regret narratives, do more; they relate what happened, one event at a time,
Forward, backward, over and over, and all at once
On the one hand, we contemplate the structure of the whole, and we see signs of it as the action unfolds. On the other, we also identify with Oedipus and his experience, which, like our own, is lived without knowledge of the future. Lacking such identification with the hero, we would probably lose interest in the play. Our experience of time in Oedipus is therefore double: we can imagine what each act feels like, and we also see what it “really” is.
Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom
Explaining why by telling what not, as well as what
Natural historians have too often been apologetic, but most emphatically should not be in supporting a plurality of legitimately scientific modes, including a narrative or historical style that explicitly links the explanation of outcomes not only to spatiotemporally invariant laws of nature, but also, if not primarily, to the specific contingencies of antecedent states [i.e., antecedent states that are contingent per se], which, if constituted differently, could not have generated the observed
Conclusion
That philosophers of science have had so much less to say about narratives than philosophers of history, philosophers of literature, and literary theorists, reflects a widespread view that while narratives are appropriate in history and fictional storytelling, they are at best second-class ways of doing science—compared, for example, to arguments whose premises contain laws of nature and initial conditions, and whose conclusions are the outcomes of interest. But instead of asking whether
Acknowledgments
Thank you Mary Morgan and Norton Wise for organizing this issue and working patiently, but critically, with me. I hope no one else required that much effort! I'm very grateful to our gang of narrative revivers, Mary, Norton, Brian Hurwitz and Paul Roth, for amazing insights (and good times) over the last four to five years. Thank you David Sepkoski for a very careful and thoughtful reading of an earlier draft. I'm also indebted to my students, Eric Desjardins and Alirio Rosales, who have heard
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