p.1-2 I read Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981). What impressed
me most about this book was the observation that "man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions,
essentially a story-telling animal" (p.201). Given this view, "enacted dramatic narrative" (p.200)
is the "basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions" (p.194). These ideas are the
foundation of the paradigm I am proposing - the narrative paradigm... By "narration," I refer to a theory of symbolic
actions - words and/or deeds - that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them.
p.2 The narrative paradigm challenges the notions that human communication - if it is to
be considered rhetorical - must be an argumentative form, that reason is to be attributed only to discourse marked by clearly
identifiable modes of inference and/or implication, and that the norms for evaluation of rhetorical
communication must be rational standards taken essentially from informal or formal logic.
p.3 The ground for determining meaning, validity, reason, rationality, and truth must be a narrative
context: history, culture, biography, and character.
p.3 Neither "the facts" nor our "experience" come to us in discrete and disconnected packets
which simply await the appropriate moral principle to be applied. Rather, they stand in need of some narrative which
can bind the facts of our experience together into a coherent pattern and it is thus in virtue of that narrative
that our abstracted rules, principles, and notions gain their full intelligibility. [Goldberg, Theology
and Narrative, p.242]
p.6 Many different root metaphors have been put forth to represent the essential nature of human beings...
when narration is taken as the master metaphor, it subsumes the others. The other metaphors are then
considered conceptions that inform various ways of recounting or accounting for human choice and action...
Accounting for takes the forms of theoretical explanation or argument... Recounting and accounting for are, in addition,
the bases for all advisory discourse... they... are stories we tell ourselves and each other to establish a meaningful
life-world.
p.6 the homo narrans metaphor is an incorporation and extension of Burke's definition of "man"
as the "symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal"... The idea of human beings as storytellers indicates the generic
form of all symbol composition; it holds that symbols are created and communicated ultimately as stories meant to
give order to human experience
p.7 Fantasy, Bormann holds, is a technical term, meaning "the creative and imaginative
interpretation of events that fulfills a psychological or rhetorical need"... Fantasy themes arise
"in... a dream of what a group might do in the future"
p.7 What they [Frentz and Farrell (1976)] call an "episode," a "rule-conforming sequence of symbolic acts
generated by two or more actors who are collectively oriented toward emergent goals," can be thought of as the process by
which one or more authors generate a short story... deciding on plot, the nature of characters, resolutions, and their meaning
and import for them and others [JLJ - sounds a lot like the scenario planning concept developed by Schwartz and others]
p.7-8 The presuppositions that structure the narrative paradigm are: (1) humans are essentially
storytellers; (2) the paradigmatic mode of human decision-making and communication is "good
reasons" which vary in form among communication situations, genres, and media; (3) the production and practice
of good reasons is ruled by matters of history, biography, culture, and character along with the
kinds of forces identified in the Frentz and Farrell language action paradigm; (4) rationality is determined
by the nature of persons as narrative beings - their inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes
a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories they experience
ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives... and (5) the world is a set of stories which must be chosen
among to live the good life in a process of continual recreation. In short, good reasons are the stuff of good stories,
the means by which humans realize their nature as reasoning-valuing animals.
p.8 The materials of the narrative paradigm are symbols, signs of consubstantiation, and good reasons, the
communicative expressions of social reality.
p.8 the absence of narrative capacity or a refusal of narrative indicates an absence
or refusal of meaning itself
p.8 Gregory Bateson goes so far as to claim that "If I am at all fundamentally right in what I am saying,
then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds..." [JLJ - perhaps this is
a new-paradigm definition for artificial intelligence]
p.10 all persons have the capacity to be rational in the narrative paradigm. [JLJ - even machines]
p.10 As [Hayden] White asserts: "Where, in any account of reality, narrativity is present, we can be sure
that morality or a moral impulse is present too" [JLJ - substitute "values" for "morality" and "normative" for "moral", and
you now have an approach for playing a game]
p.11 It should be apparent by now that I think that MacIntyre's (1981) After Virtue is a remarkable
work. [JLJ - so do I]
p.15 I think that the concepts of public and social knowledge should be reconceived in light of the narrative
paradigm.
p.17 immortality is, he [Gilgamesh] apparently concludes, to be found in the monuments that one leaves behind.
p.18 [MacIntyre] The unity of human life is the unity of a narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated,
abandoned or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the criteria for success
or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest.
(1981, p.203)
