ABSTRACT
The narrative nature of human knowledge When modelling cognitive and memory processes, though by no means on the basis of some social constructivist position, Schank and Abelson (1995: 1) argue for the narrative nature of all human knowledge. They state that ‘Virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences’, and ‘New experiences are interpreted in terms of old stories’. With intuitive insight Schank and Abelson derive nearly any knowledge – from facts to beliefs – from storytelling and story understanding. In this framework, lexical items, words, numbers, even grammar itself can be investigated in the context of stories. Schank and Abelson (1995) question the traditional cognitivist model of human consciousness (cf. Newel and Simon 1972), in which humans work as information-processing machines, and the task of the human mind to prove theorems and solve problems. They point out how atypical these phenomena are in everyday life: ‘very few people spend time trying to prove theorems … and when they do, they don’t ordinarily talk about it’ (Schank and Abelson 1995: 15). However, this idea again implies a semantic distinction between an abstract, theoretical argument and everyday thinking, which precisely reflects the difference between natural and communicative logic mentioned by Moscovici and Bruner’s paradigmatic versus narrative thinking mentioned in the Introduction. Without doubt, Schank and Abelson (1995) explicitly give preference – at least as far as everyday human things are concerned – to the latter type of thinking. Schank and Abelson’s new theory can be viewed as a further refinement of their earlier model of human memory and understanding based on episodes or scripts (Schank 1975; Schank and Abelson 1977), which was essentially meant to question Tulving’s (1972) dual memory system (an episodic, story-like, or semantic, conceptual model) that was fairly influential at that time. Although these two authors are interested in the cognitive construction of stories and the memory effects of storytelling, their observations concerning the social context of storytelling and the concept of narrative framework have far-reaching social implications. When they state that understanding means ‘mapping your stories to mine’, they actually refer to a cognitive constraint that ‘we can only understand things that relate to our experiences’ (Schank and Abelson 1995: 17). However, this cognitivist
statement, which is somewhat trivial in this narrow sense, implies that people can tell only stories that are in some relationship with relatable experiences of other people. It does not simply suggest that stories should be shared socially, but it also addresses the issue as to how stories change in a given society or culture and how they are distributed in them; or even, what is the relationship between story and reality. Referring to the famous scene in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall (1977), in which the male and female leading characters tell their analyst two different stories about how energetically, frequently or regrettably infrequently they make love, Schank and Abelson do not simply state that ‘we and our audience shape our memories by the stories we tell’, but they hasten to add that stories interpret the world, and we can see the world only as is allowed by our stories (Schank and Abelson 1995: 60). Nevertheless, our stories are not merely our own personal – mental or verbal – narratives. Common experience in a culture or society takes shape in common stories or story frames. Every society has its own ‘historically crystallized stories’, and although individuals may view them from different aspects and create different stories out of the same experienced event, culture informs all its members of the set of possible story frames. This fact has been proved by several decisionmaking experiments which have shown that selection among the possible sets of decisions is closely related to making a choice from the set of possible stories that can be spun around an event or action (Abelson 1976; Pennington and Hastie 1992; Wagenaar et al. 1993). Even autobiographies are social constructs (Gergen and Gergen 1988; Nelson 1993), and they are created in the light of local conditions as a function of several different narrative possibilities. It is hard to see this set of story frames in any other way other than as a culturally valid naive psychology, everyday thinking, or – as Bartlett (1932) viewed it – the social framework of rationality. The role of narrative in psychology as a meaning configuration that has some significance beyond associative organization has been raised by several outstanding scholars of the twentieth century. For Bartlett, Binet, Janet or Blonsky, narrative represented the fundamental non-associative organizing principle of mental life. They viewed the logic of these stories as social logic and story memory as social memory, though in different ways. For them, narrative was a metatheory of theoretical assumptions on mental life, as well as the subject matter and the means of carrying out research work on memory processes. Heider’s (1958) naive psychology assigns goals to the movement of objects and shows the role of intentionality in perception. Heider applied the categories of intentionality and other perceptual categories arising from the tale entitled The Fox and the Raven (for instance, the raven possesses the cheese, the fox is not able to get the cheese – for more on this, see Heider 1958: 53-55) in his cognitive balance theory, and explained action in his attribution theory in a way that he was at the same time trying to find out what sort of rules are used to create ‘conceptually good forms’ or, as would be stated today, coherent stories. A decade later, when writing a critique of reductionist and homeostatic approaches to the Heiderian theory, Abelson (1968) suggested that we should return to Heider’s naive psychology, and he outlined the foundations of an independent psycho-logic. A close descendant
of this psycho-logic, the theory of narrated knowledge proposed by Schank and Abelson (1995) (see also Harvey and Martin 1995) comprises all the advantages of this earlier train of thought, but it also exhibits some of its shortcomings. One of the shortcomings is that although he acknowledges that stories can give rise to constructs, he denies that stories themselves have a construed nature. Another reductionist element in the model proposed by Schank and Abelson (1995) is that they simplify narratives to stories. As a result, they introduced the metaphor of an information-generating machine, though they did suggest that human consciousness should not be viewed as a problem-solving machine. The former lacks any experience-like aspect that is made possible, however implicitly, by Bruner’s narrative approach. This is a rather ironic development, for it was precisely Abelson (1975) and Schank (1986) as scientists doing work in artificial intelligence theory that played a leading role in having experience-like representations ‘carried’ by narrative recognized by others. It has to be emphasized here that the narrative paradigm not only can offer a special kind of cognitive logic for intentional actions, thoughts and emotions but also is capable of handling experiences such as emotions, images, time or perspective that have not been treated conceptually thus far. When we read a story, not only can we understand the time and place of actions but also we can imagine the scene and the protagonist. And when we read, for instance, that the protagonist’s wife has died, we do not simply understand that he is in mourning for her but we are also caught up by the feeling of mourning (see Oatley 1992). Jerome Bruner (1986) explains reader involvement by linking the mental states of the characters of a narrated event to the reader through perspectivization. This kind of ability to involve the recipient is utilized most effectively in literature. As noted by Vygotsky (1971), literature captures unconscious, floating, undefined emotions in social relationships, and thereby it can be regarded as the ‘social technique of handling emotions’. However, this capacity of narrative is not limited to literary narratives; they are equally valid for the real life of social groups when they perform joint activities and view their own actions as experience. Consider the notion of collective experience and allusion introduced by Mérei (1949). As the imitation of the sound of a fire-engine among kindergarten children evokes the entire experience of the firefighter game played the day before on the basis of a certain part for whole mechanism, literary narratives can also create the direct intimacy of collective experience in a conscious dimension through reference. However, narratives can be defined not just in the way discussed so far, that is, as the carrier and the ingredient of creating meaning and reality on a socialcognitive basis. In psychology, the research on narratives covers the way in which stories work on the one hand, and several psychologically interpreted forms and functions of narratives on the other, which can be derived from the role that narratives play in people’s lives. Psychologists interested in narratives insist that the psychology of man can be fully unfolded from stories (Bower 1976), or rather, there is no human experience that could not be expressed in a narrative form (Jovchelovitch 1995).
