[FRIAM] Narrating Complexity

[uǝlƃ ☣]

This was helpful:

https://www.academia.edu/4163381/Narrating_Complexity_The_Antipathy_of_Stories_and_Systems

Ultimately, I'm a little worried about the idea that narrative is somehow fundamental to thought/understanding. I'm completely ignorant of any official domain called "Narrative".  But I tend to associate it with stories, most importantly *including* stories that include concrete detail.  And concreteness is antithetic to the type of "conceptual model" I'm inferring from both Stepney's and Walsh's (from the above presentation) sense/use of the term.  This is my core concern.

But first, I'd like to broach a more peripheral concern.  Walsh's defn: "The semiotic articulation of linear temporal sequence" very clearly lays out the sequentiality.  But, at least with computation, isn't it relatively accepted that any parallel process can be simulated by a sequential process?  And if so, couldn't we claim that this sequentiality isn't that much of a limiting factor?  I mean, sure, it may be merely approximate, or inaccurate, or whatever.  But, basically, this would mean their research program would become showing which, in particular, types of complex adaptive systems cannot be approximated by narrative and the naive claim that *no* CAS can ever be adequately approximated would be unjustified or too extreme.

The more important concern goes back to the accusation of idealism I often lob.  I don't believe narrative is core to *my* cognition.  Yes, when interacting mostly in symbols (like books, email, etc.), narrative seems dominant.  But I would claim that's an artifact, a side effect, of the underlying process(es). A quick way to my point is the accusation of "book learning" vs. doing.  It's notoriously difficult to *tell* someone how to, ride a bike or hit a baseball with a bat.  Such telling does tend to be narrative, a kind of recipe, I suppose.  But is the narrative necessary for *understanding* how to hit a baseball?  Or for understanding what it *means* to ride a bicycle?  I would say "no."  

Understanding is a concrete thing, done with the *body*, not with some abstraction in the *mind*. To go a step further, the objects pointed to by the signs in a narrative, are fully complex processes. The narratives really are just lossy models of the complex experiences. So, one person compresses her experience(s) into a word salad.  Another person reads that word salad and the signs are interpreted to map to concretely *different* complex processes in the receiver.  I like the quote from Herman below.  But even that doesn't go far enough.  Rather than say it the way Herman does, I'd prefer to say narrative is a justificationist technique for formulating hypotheses (whether testable or not).  Then the concrete experiences of executed *tests* of those hypotheses are understanding (like when a child actually slides a block down an incline as opposed to hearing descriptions of blocks sliding down inclines). The experiment is the understanding.  The narratives are only related to reality to the extent they cause repeatable experiences (through both inter- and intra-agent repetition).

Anyway, none of what I say is probably new to Walsh or Stepney and they probably have answers.  But it's curious.  I'm intrigued by one of the text boxes in the "Cognition" box of slide 60: "Narrative cognition (relation to other modes of cognition)".  It'll be interesting to see if the upcoming book talks about that.


On 12/17/2017 09:03 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> 
>       Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences
> 
> [...]
>     David Herman, ed.
>     /Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences/.
>     CSLI. 2003
> [...]
> Herman
> 
>     /Narrative can have many cognitive functions. It is a system for structuring patterns of events progressing through time: for structuring processes. It can be used to “chunk” experiences into “frames” of stereotypical experiences, then used to compare this typical against the actual. This helps us to understand the world more, and therefore have to memorise less. It allows us to generate and evaluate what-if scenarios. It allows us to draw coherent system boundaries: to extract and bound a relevant collection of participants, events, and structures from the overall stream of events we experience. /


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