Unless indigenous languages are revitalized in research and instruction, education itself will become the totalizing machine that will shut off spaces of discourse in the regions. This is due to the fact that language is the primary medium through which education and its cosmopolitan aims are carried out in pedagogical institutions. Knowledge, skills and principles are structurally transmitted in schools that employ the mainstream language either of the national, i.e., Filipino, or the international level, i.e., English, in instruction. But the (...) hegemony of the mainstream language, without discounting the cosmopolitan value of the aims of education, threatens to silence diverse voices of discourses that operate within local and regional spaces. This threat becomes real when the agents of the educational enterprise in the regions embrace the promise of cosmopolitanism at the expense of or to the forgetfulness of their own socio-cultural resources especially their language. (shrink)

Narrative views of the self argue that we constitute our self in self-narratives. Embodied views hold that our self is shaped through embodied experiences. In that case, what is the relation between embodiment and narrativity in the process of self-constitution? The question demands a clear definition of embodiment, but existing studies remains unclear on this point (section 2). We offer a correction to this situation by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body that highlights its habituality. On this account, (...) the body has an inherent tendency to cultivate an organization of habits through its history of engagement with the world (section 3). Next, we explore its role in narrative self-constitution by distinguishing between two aspects of the narrative self, the narrated I and the narrating I (section 4). We argue on phenomenological grounds that self-narratives are informed by bodily perspectives in both respects. Furthermore, a focus on the habituality of the body allows for a better explanation of self-constitution than those based on implicit self-narratives (section 5). For these phenomenological and theoretical reasons, we conclude that narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice (section 6). (shrink)

Narrative Entropy (Sn) is a proposed quantitative descriptor within the Bulut Doctrine, intended to capture the rate at which a narrative text imposes processing load on a reader. To date the construct has been defined theoretically but not operationalized against real texts. This report documents the first such operationalization (the v2.0 pilot): two narrative scenes — the opening restaurant scene of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs screenplay and the opening interior-monologue block of Raymond Carver's short story Cathedral — were coded manually (...) by a single rater and scored with the candidate formula Sn = If × Cb × t. -/- The result was contrary to intuitive expectation. The single-voice monologue block (Sn = 30.0) scored higher than the nine-character rapid-dialogue scene (Sn = 18.8). We treat this divergence not as a result to be explained away but as the central finding of the pilot, and we deliberately refuse post-hoc adjustment of the formula. We present three competing interpretations of the divergence formula incompleteness, genuine high-load prose, and measurement error — and we specify, in advance of data collection, the design that would discriminate among them. This document functions simultaneously as a pilot report (n = 2) and as a pre-registration of the next-stage protocol. It explicitly does not claim that Sn has been validated. -/- Keywords: narrative entropy, operationalization, pilot study, pre-registration, falsifiability, Bulut Doctrine, computational narratology, processing load. (shrink)

This edited volume brings together authors from a wide variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. A historian first investigates understudied samizdat literature, a film critic then analyzes Balkan cinema via psychoanalysis, a psychologist examines contemporary European border policies, and a political scientist analyzes the Confederate-memorial debate. Philosophers consider the space of those memorials, ethno-national narratives in India, the Anthropocene and the mind’s historical imaginary, and the notion of home. Literary critics examine recent developments in modes of storytelling (...) and images of Orientalism. What emerges is a new understanding of history, memory, and time. (shrink)

Is the self narratively constructed? There are many who would answer yes to the question. Dennett (1991) is, perhaps, the most famous proponent of the view that the self is narratively constructed, but there are others, such as Velleman (2006), who have followed his lead and developed the view much further. Indeed, the importance of narrative to understanding the mind and the self is currently being lavished with attention across the cognitive sciences (Dautenhahn, 2001; Hutto, 2007; Nelson, 2003). Emerging from (...) this work, there appear to be a variety of ways in which we can think of the narrative construction of the self and the relationship between the narrative self and the embodied agent. I wish to examine two such ways in this paper. The first I shall call the abstract narrative account, this is because its proponents take the narrative self to be an abstraction (Dennett, 1991; Velleman, 2006). Dennett, for example, refers to the self as a centre of narrative gravity, to be thought of as analogous to a mathematical conception of the centre of gravity of an object. The second I shall call the embodied narrative account and this is the view that the self is constituted both by an embodied consciousness whose experiences are available for narration and narratives themselves, which can play a variety of roles in the agent’s psychological life. (shrink)

I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists. . . . We try to make all of our material (...) cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional char- acter . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman). (shrink)

This paper formalizes the concept of Narrative Entropy as a quantifiable metric for assessing structural disorder and informational friction within literary and cinematic systems. While the term finds its roots in Shannon’s Information Theory and Pynchonian metaphors, this study defines it as a core component of the Objective Projection methodology. By analyzing the tension between causal predictability and structural chaos, we establish a parametric framework for Narrative Engineering, allowing for the mathematical modeling of story progression.

Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we (...) interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across different generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. Thus, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology distributes our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine some of the emotional dimensions of oppression under the heading of “emotional alienation.” If the experience of oppression is affectively attuned, then resisting oppression will likely involve dealing with these difficult, often painful, feelings. Resistance may require finding ways of pushing back against their potentially disempowering effects and developing other, more empowering, ways of feeling. Longlasting forms of social oppression have a strong hold in people’s sense of self. Resistance, then, requires self-transformation. If emancipation requires (...) undoing disempowering emotional patterns, then self-transformation will require “undoing” ourselves. How is this undoing tied to developing a new consciousness? How does developing a “radically altered consciousness” (Bartky 1990) involve radically changing our ways of feeling? In this paper, I will argue that emotional disalienation need not be thought of in terms of suppressing or excising disempowering emotional patterns. I will contend that narrative thinking, as a relational process, can play an effective role in the struggle towards emancipation. (shrink)

This paper examines systematically which features of a life story (or history) make it good for the subject herself - not aesthetically or morally good, but prudentially good. The tentative narrative calculus presented claims that the prudential narrative value of an event is a function of the extent to which it contributes to her concurrent and non-concurrent goals, the value of those goals, and the degree to which success in reaching the goals is deserved in virtue of exercising agency. The (...) narrative value of a life is a simple sum of the values of individual events that comprise it. I claim that this view best explains and support common intuitions about the significance of the shape of a life. (shrink)

One goal of this paper is to argue that autobiographical memories are extended and distributed across embodied brains and environmental resources. This is important because such distributed memories play a constitutive role in our narrative identity. So, some of the building blocks of our narrative identity are not brain-bound but extended and distributed. Recognising the distributed nature of memory and narrative identity, invites us to find treatments and strategies focusing on the environment in which dementia patients are situated. A second (...) goal of this paper is to suggest various of such strategies, including lifelogging technologies such as SenseCams, life story books, multimedia biographies, memory boxes, ambient intelligence systems, and virtual reality applications. Such technologies allow dementia patients to remember their personal past in a way that wouldn’t be possible by merely relying on their biological memory, in that way aiding in preserving their narrative identity and positively contributing to their sense of well-being. (shrink)

This paper investigates the point of fame and some historically persistent motivations for its pursuit. These include both immediate instrumental benefits and the determination not to be forgotten after one’s death, the latter being a manifestation of the human existential struggle for permanence against the oblivion wrought by time on memory. The paper begins with a discussion of several epic heroes (Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Beowulf) and their reasons for chasing glory, but then considers more ordinary motivations: the desire to be (...) recognised for one’s achievements or character, or to be remembered by one’s society or descendants in a way that either preserves one’s narrative or that retains one’s agential presence into the future. Consideration is given to problems of accuracy and control of the would-be “hero’s” narrative. It is argued that, beyond any immediate benefit, the desire for fame is humanly understandable but of a specifically limited rationality. (shrink)

This study proposes the formalization of a structural model entitled Narrative Architecture of Textual Invariance (ANIT), characterized by the complete reorganization of a literary work without any alteration to its textual materiality. The study demonstrates that modifying the structural order of narrative segments may generate distinct interpretive experiences while fully preserving each original textual unit. The central hypothesis maintains that textual invariance is independent of the formal sequence applied, making it possible to alter structural architecture without compromising the lexical, syntactic, (...) or punctuation integrity of the work. For empirical verification, two complete versions of the same previously published short story are presented, organized in distinct sequences yet composed of exactly the same textual units. The formal analysis includes descriptive logical modeling, objective criteria of verifiability, and full demonstration in the annexes. It is concluded that ANIT constitutes a verifiable structural model in which order functions as an ontological operator capable of producing distinct narrative realities without any rewriting, suppression, insertion, or modification of content. (shrink)

The triumph of scientific materialism in the Seventeenth Century not only bifurcated nature into matter and mind and primary and secondary qualities, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out in Science and the Modern World. It divided science and the humanities. The core of science is the effort to comprehend the cosmos through mathematics. The core of the humanities is the effort to comprehend history and human nature through narratives. The life sciences can be seen as the zone in which the (...) conflict between these two very different ways of comprehending the world collide. Evolutionary theory as defended by Schelling developed out of natural history, but efforts have been made to formulate neo-Darwinism through mathematical models. However, it is impossible to eliminate stories from biology. As Stuart Kauffman argued, mathematical models attempt to pre-state all possibilities, but in evolution there can be adjacent possibles that can be embraced by organisms but cannot be pre-stated. To account for such actions it is necessary to tell stories. Mathematics provides analytic precision allowing long chains of deductions, but tends to deny temporal becoming and cannot do justice to the openness of the future, while narratives focus on processes and events, but lack exactitude that would provide precise deductions and predictions. In advancing mathematics adequate to life, Robert Rosen argued that living beings as anticipatory systems must have models of themselves, and strove to develop a form of mathematics able to model life itself. It has been convincingly argued that narratives are central to human self-creation and they are lived out before being explicitly told. Their models of themselves are first and foremost, stories or narratives. If this is the case, might not living beings as biological entities be characterized by proto-stories or narratives in their models of themselves? Biosemiotics, largely inspired by C.S. Peirce, provides a bridge between mathematical and narrative comprehension, conceiving them as different forms of semiosis. The study of life through biosemiotics could reveal how mathematics and narratives can be understood in relation to each other. This could have implications for how we understand science and the humanities and their relationship to each other. In this paper I will examine work in theoretical biology that might advance these efforts. (shrink)

This paper is about visual narratives. Most of the examples used in the philosophical literature on narratives are literary ones. But a general account of narrative needs to be able to cover both pictorial and literary cases. In the first part of the paper, I will argue that none of the most influential accounts of narrative are capable of this. In the second part, I outline an account of visual narratives, or, rather, of our engagement with visual narratives.

This volume aimed to highlight narrative identities of European cities or city neighbourhoods that have been overlooked, such as mid-sized cities. These cities are neither small towns nor metropolises, cities that are now unveiling their appeal or specificity. The present special issue thus covers a range of representations of cities. The articles investigate more systematically how different texts deal with various cities from different experiential and fictional perspectives. The issue covers the geographical scope across Europe, from east to west or (...) vice versa, as well as a range of different works of national literature(s), but with a clear emphasis on mid-sized European cities that have until now been deemed as lesser-known, secondary, peripheral, ‘other’ cities that are in the focus of the research of the COST project Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City, within which this journal issue is being published. (shrink)

In this entry, we survey key discussions on the role of narrative in theology and philosophy of religion. We begin with epistemological questions about whether and how narrative offers genuine understanding of reality. We explore how narrative intersects with the problems of evil and divine hiddenness. We discuss narrative's role in theological reflection and practice in general, and in black and feminist theologies specifically. We close by briefly exploring the role of narrative in theorization about life's meaning.

Traditional literary and cinematic criticism has lazily labeled objects that drive character action but remain unexplained as "MacGuffins." The Bulut Doctrine and the discipline of Narrative Engineering reject this interpretive approach, reconstructing the literary text as a physical system. In this study, focal points in storytelling are stripped of being abstract "themes" and are transformed into the "Narrative Gravity" (Ng) parameter—a mathematical gravitational force that holds increasing Narrative Entropy (Sn) together. The famous "briefcase" in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is analyzed (...) not as a literary mystery, but as a "Vacuum Variable" and central mass driving the kinetic energy of the system and preserving the structural integrity of sub-plots. This parametric model transitions story construction from an intuitive act into an engineering calculation that controls chaos. (shrink)

The Bulut Doctrine's existing framework specifies physical parameters at the scene level: thermal gradient, luminous decay, acoustic impedance, kinetic momentum, atmospheric pressure, and spatial geometry. These parameters generate Biophysical Output (Bo) within individual scenes. However, the Doctrine does not yet provide a formal model for the temporal dimension of narrative: how biophysical activation changes across scenes, how emotional states accumulate or decay over time, and how the rate of physical parameter change drives reader engagement across the full narrative arc. This (...) paper introduces Narrative Momentum (Nm) as the Doctrine's temporal operator: the rate of change in Biophysical Output across consecutive narrative segments. Three derived constructs are formalised: Affect Velocity (Av), Scene Transition Rate (STR), and Emotional Arc Engineering (EAE). Together, these constructs close the temporal gap in the existing framework and provide the engineer with tools to design not merely scenes but full-spectrum narrative trajectories. (shrink)

The Bulut Doctrine's Objective Projection methodology models the relationship between a Physical Matrix and a single reader's Biophysical Output. The OPCT v2.0 pre-registered protocol tests this relationship empirically. However, narratives do not exist in isolation: they propagate through social networks, accumulate community interpretations, generate secondary texts (reviews, discussions, adaptations), and return to readers in transformed states. This paper introduces Narrative Ecosystem Dynamics (NED) as the Doctrine's social propagation layer: the formal model of how a Physical Matrix travels through a reader (...) network, what transformations it undergoes, and how ecosystem-level amplification or attenuation affects the Biophysical Output experienced by subsequent readers. NED introduces three constructs: Social Amplification Factor (SAF), Interpretive Drift (ID), and Network Resonance (NR). Together, they extend the Doctrine from the individual reader to the collective reading ecosystem. (shrink)

Narrative Entropy (Sₙ) is a structural-complexity construct of the Bulut Doctrine that quantifies the cognitive resistance and causal uncertainty a narrative imposes on a reader across time. Because the construct has been developed incrementally across the corpus, its operational expression has appeared in more than one form. This technical note serves a single purpose: to fix, in one place, the canonical definition of Sₙ, to document the version history of its operationalisation, and to state plainly the one open formal problem (...) that remains unresolved. -/- It makes no new empirical claim; it is a reference and disambiguation document, not a validation study. The canonical general form is the time integral of the product of Information Friction (If) and Causal Branching (Cb): Sₙ = ∫ (If × Cb) dt. The product form Sₙ = If × Cb × t used in the registered pilot is its scene-constant special case. The known dimensional inconsistency of the product form — both If and Cb being per-minute rates — is documented here as an open question, consistent with the pilot report that first recorded it. The note also includes the full version history of the measurement protocol (v1.0 normalised anchors → v2.0 raw rates), the two worked pilot examples for reference, and the formal distinction between Sₙ and Shannon entropy. -/- Keywords narrative entropy, Sn, Bulut Doctrine, Objective Projection, narrative engineering, operationalization, information friction, causal branching, version history, canonical definition, Shannon entropy. (shrink)

In the wake of critical narrative pioneers such as bell hooks, Bayo Akomolafe, and Austin Kleon, this study proposes a systemic infrastructure that addresses their unrealized visions of narrative authorship. While their contributions expanded the epistemic legitimacy of voice, rupture, and self-publishing, they lacked scalable frameworks for replication, classification, and sovereign canonization. NarrQuest responds to this absence not as a supplement, but as an operational architecture that encodes tone into epistemic diagnostics, rewrites into narrative protocols, and authorship into sovereign practice. (...) Building upon the methodology introduced in previous volumes, this article situates its inquiry through a narrative case study and a technical demonstration. The study includes a minimalist C program to illustrate the disproportionate scale between simple narrative logic and full-stack engineering demands, thereby exposing the infrastructural weight often hidden behind digital storytelling. Finally, through firsthand deployment on platforms such as Pubu and Amazon KDP, the article offers a pragmatic view of how digital narrative sovereignty can be instantiated, exported, and ritualized through publishing infrastructure. This work provides a blueprint for rethinking authorship—not only as expression, but as architecture. (shrink)

The paper explores the potential of using narrative centered pedagogies in Engineering Ethics Education (EEE), drawing insights from their successful application in nursing and business ethics education. While traditional methods in EEE focus on fostering moral reasoning through case study analysis and teaching ethical theories, increasingly, there is a need for fostering soft ethical skills, such as moral sensitivity and creativity, which, in turn, demand new teaching approaches. Initially developed for nursing ethics, narrative pedagogy emphasises understanding experiences through storytelling and (...) dialogue, contrasting with the decision oriented focus of EEE. While narrative pedagogy allows for understanding stakeholders’ motivations, there is a gap in translating this understanding into ethical decisions, which engineering students must make. Drawing from a literature survey of the existing research in ethics education, the paper describes three kinds of narrative pedagogy to be used for EEE. Despite its theoretical potential, narrative pedagogy has not been deployed in EEE due to a lack of systematic research on its effectiveness. The paper calls for more experimentation and documented case studies in teaching to explore the potential narrative pedagogy in EEE. Without such experiments, the theoretical potential of narrative pedagogy in EEE may remain unproven. (shrink)

The expression "analytic narratives" is used to refer to a range of quite recent studies that lie on the boundaries between history, political science, and economics. These studies purport to explain specific historical events by combining the usual narrative approach of historians with the analytic tools that economists and political scientists draw from formal rational choice theories. Game theory, especially of the extensive form version, is currently prominent among these tools, but there is nothing inevitable about such a technical choice. (...) The chapter explains what analytic narratives are by reviewing the studies of the major book Analytic Narratives (1998), which are concerned with the workings of political institutions broadly speaking, as well as several cases drawn from military and security studies, which form an independent source of the analytic narratives literature. At the same time as it gradually develops a definition of analytic narratives, the chapter investigates how they fulfil one of their main purposes, which is to provide explanations of a better standing than those of traditional history. An important principle that will emerge in the course of the discussion is that narration is called upon not only to provide facts and problems, but also to contribute to the explanation itself. The chapter distinguishes between several expository schemes of analytic narratives according to the way they implement this principle. From all the arguments developed here, it seems clear that the current applications of analytic narratives do not exhaust their potential, and in particular that they deserve the attention of economic historians, if only because they are concerned with microeconomic interactions that are not currently their focus of attention. (shrink)

It is widely held that it is good to conceive of one's life narratively, but why this is the case has not been well established. I argue that conceiving of one's life narratively can contribute to one's flourishing by mediating to oneself a second-person experience of oneself, furnishing one with valuable second-personal productive distance from oneself and as a result self-understanding. Drawing on Eleonore Stump's theory that narratives re-present to their audiences the second-person experiences they depict, I argue that conceiving (...) of one's life narratively facilitates taking on the second-person experience that an audience would have in hearing one's life narrative, mediating how someone from a second-person perspective might perceive oneself and as a result yielding valuable self-understanding. I conclude with some practical implications. (shrink)

The proliferation of conspiracy theories poses a significant threat to democratic decision-making. To counter this threat, many political theorists advocate countering conspiracy theories with ‘more speech’ (or ‘counterspeech’). Yet conspiracy theories are notoriously resistant to counterspeech. This article aims to conceptualise and defend a novel form of counterspeech – narrative counterspeech – that is singularly well-placed to overcome this resistance. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I argue that conspiracy theories pose a special problem for counterspeech for three interconnected (...) reasons relating to salience, emotion and internal coherence. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology, philosophy of emotion and cognitive science, I then demonstrate that narrative forms of counterspeech constitute an apt response to this diagnosis. Finally, I forestall two objections: the first questions the likely effectiveness of narrative counterspeech; the second insists that, even if it were effective, it would remain unacceptably manipulative. Neither objection, I contend, is ultimately compelling. (shrink)

In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology of artifacts (...) in our environment. Lifelogs, photos, videos, journals, diaries, souvenirs, jewelry, books, works of art, and many other meaningful objects trigger and sometimes constitute emotionally laden autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is thus distributed across embodied agents and various environmental structures. To defend this claim, I draw on and integrate distributed cognition theory and empirical research in human-technology interaction. Based on this, I conclude that the self is neither defined by psychological states realized by the brain nor by biological states realized by the organism, but should be seen as a distributed and relational construct. (shrink)

Narrative views of agency and identity arise in opposition to reductionism in both domains. While reductionists understand both identity and agency in terms of their components, narrativists respond that life and action are both constituted by narratives, and since the components of a narrative gain their meaning from the whole, life and action not only incorporate their constituent parts but also shape them. I first lay out the difficulties with treating narrative as constitutive of metaphysical identity and turn to its (...) function in practical identity. I then explore the ways narrative shapes our agency—by tapping into our motivational structures, providing an understanding of the social background within which our agency operates, guiding our agency through an understanding of our histories and aspirations, providing the links that structure actions internally, and allowing us to change the meaning of our pasts. I suggest that putting these functions of narrative together may allow us to genuinely shape our past motivational structures through our actions. Finally, if life has the form of a narrative, it may seem as if mortality is necessary for our lives and their contents to be meaningful: a narrative, it might seem, relies on the ending for its meaning. If so, an immortal life would be meaningless. I examine the possibility that even an immortal life may draw meaning from local narratives that constitute projects within such a life, while arguing that, to the contrary, narrative may be a tool exclusively adapted to mortal lives. (shrink)

Some stories generate in us a peculiar experience of intense narrative engagement. This common experience, which we call narrative immersion, has been the object of a vast literature in psychology and other disciplines. Philosophers, however, have only recently engaged with this topic and the tendency has been to explain it by postulating specific kinds of mental states. We propose a different approach, explaining narrative immersion by means of a particular distribution of attention over the content of ordinary mental states. First, (...) we provide a characterization of narrative immersion based on studies by psychologists and other theorists. Then, we discuss alternative views and develop our own proposal. We articulate how attention works as we engage with the narrative, and how the adequate distribution of attention over the mental states involved in understanding the storyworld can offer the resources to explain the characteristic features of narrative immersion. Unlike alternative proposals, ours avoids the need to postulate controversial mental states. (shrink)

The objective of this article is twofold. In the first part, I discuss two issues central to any theoretical inquiry into mental imagery: embodiment and consciousness. I do so against the backdrop of second-generation cognitive science, more specifically the increasingly popular research framework of embodied cognition, and I consider two caveats attached to its current exploitation in narrative theory. In the second part, I attempt to cast new light on readerly mental imagery by offering a typology of what I propose (...) to be its four basic varieties. The typology is grounded in the framework of embodied cognition and it is largely compatible with key neuroscientific and other experimental evidence produced within the framework. For each imagery variety, I make some elementary suggestions as to how it may typically be cued by distinct narrative strategies. (shrink)

The Bulut Doctrine's Objective Projection methodology models the Biophysical Output generated by a Physical Matrix at the moment of reading. Narrative Momentum extends this to the temporal arc within a single reading session. However, the Doctrine does not yet model what happens to the Physical Matrix in reader memory after the reading event ends: how biophysical traces persist, how they decay, how re-reading modifies them, and how accumulated life experience transforms the reader's retrospective interpretation of a Physical Matrix encountered years (...) earlier. This paper introduces Narrative Memory Evolution (NME) as the Doctrine's long-term temporal layer: the formal model of Physical Matrix persistence in reader memory across days, months, and years. Three constructs are introduced: Biophysical Trace Decay (BTD), Experiential Recontextualisation (ER), and Re-reading Amplification (RA). Together, they extend the Doctrine's explanatory scope from the moment of reading to the full lifespan of a text's influence on a reader. (shrink)

Claude Shannon's 1948 entropy formula H = −Σ pᵢ log pᵢ established the mathematical foundation of information theory, quantifying uncertainty in discrete symbol distributions within communication channels. This paper introduces Narrative Entropy (Sn), a formally distinct but epistemologically related metric developed within the Bulut Doctrine framework, which measures the dynamic accumulation of cognitive resistance and structural uncertainty across the temporal dimension of narrative experience. We demonstrate that while Sn draws its foundational intuition from Shannon's H, the two metrics differ across (...) six critical dimensions: domain, temporal structure, measurement object, operational unit, directionality, and engineering function. Sn is not an application of Shannon entropy to literature — it is a structurally independent metric that addresses phenomena Shannon's framework was not designed to capture. We further demonstrate the relationship between Sn, Narrative Gravity (Ng), and biophysical reader output, and provide benchmark calculations for Crime and Punishment, Moby Dick, and Pulp Fiction. (shrink)

By revealing the centrality of stories to action, to social life and to inquiry together with the implicit assumptions in polyphonic stories about the nature of humans, of life and of physical reality, this paper examines the potential of stories to transform civilization. Focussing on the failure of environmentalists so far in the face of the global ecological crisis, it is shown how ethics and political philosophy could be reconceived and radical ecology reformulated and reinvigorated by appreciating and exploiting the (...) potential of stories. This could enable radical ecologists to effect the major social and economic changes necessary to meet the global ecological crisis. What we need, it is argued, is a new, polyphonic grand narrative. (shrink)

Background: The education of medical students necessitates teaching not only the science of medicine but also the skills needed for ethical reflection and moral reasoning as well as professionalism. At the Université de Montréal, starting in 2004, third-year medical students were initiated to ethics and professionalism during a weekly seminar on clinical skills during their surgery rotation. Students had to recognize an ethical dilemma or a professionalism issue that occurred during the rotation and write a case narrative and reflection on (...) the moral issue. Method: Student narratives describing ethical or professionalism incidents were collected between 2004 and 2020. These were analyzed to identify the moral challenges that students experienced, and how they reacted to ethical dilemmas or professionalism issues. Results: Of the 1145 narratives collected, 396 were coded as an ethical dilemma, subdivided into end-of-life decisions, decision for treatment, dilemmas concerning justice and resource allocation, and student educational dilemmas including relationships with residents. Professional issues were more frequently reported (n=749), subdivided into communication of bad news, professional behaviour and attitude, consent, confidentiality, truthful disclosure of sensitive results, errors, professional responsibility and commitment and relationships with colleagues. In 40% of narratives there was a positive opinion about the issues reported, while in 60% students felt the ethical decision or professional attitude or conduct was less than ideal. Conclusion: This seminar was an effective means for medical students to identify and discuss the ethical and professional issues experienced during their clerkship – issues regarding communication were the primary concern followed by professional behaviour. These narratives provide a good picture of the hidden curriculum; and they show that students can reflect meaningfully on issues concerning ethics and professionalism. (shrink)

‘Therefore’ can be used narratively to explain how events came about, as in ‘John pushed Max. Therefore, Max fell’. I argue that such narrative uses undermine a popular view on the semantic contribution of ‘therefore’ that dates back to Grice’s infamous ‘He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave’ passage. I consider two ways of resuscitating the Gricean view and find them wanting. I conclude with a more promising account of narrative ‘therefore’. Along the way, I argue that ‘therefore’ is (...) polysemous. (shrink)

A significant and burgeoning problem associated with artificial intelligence is its capacity to generate mirrors of ourselves, or digital duplicates of varying complexity consisting of our likeness and (perhaps ostensibly) behaviors, using our personal information. This chapter will explore how digital duplicates impact our narrative identity, relying upon Paul Ricoeur’s narrative philosophy to argue that digital duplicates undermine or challenge the construction of personal identity through narrative in appropriating elements of the idem (sameness) and interfering with our ipse (selfhood). This (...) challenge is generated and exacerbated by, and compounds, breaks in the contextual integrity of our personal information, and therefore causes a rupture in narrative privacy itself, where narrative privacy is a state of being able to narrate our lives without arbitrary or unjust efforts to read or co-author those narratives by third parties. We argue that there are two key sources of harm to the narrative self and privacy in the case of digital duplicates: the other or corporation responsible for constructing the duplicate, and the digital duplicate itself, which can transmit both true and untrue information about its subject with little regard to the appropriateness of the receivers of the information. This occurs through a mixture of abuse of the idem self, and possibly an imitation of the ipse by duplicates that can represent changes in disposition over time. The result is constrained capacity to narrate and become who we wish to be. (shrink)

Heidegger, like Kierkegaard, has recently been claimed as a narrativist about selves. From this Heideggerian perspective, we can see how narrative expands upon the psychological view, adding a vital teleological dimension to the understanding of selfhood while denying the reductionism implicit in the psychological approach. Yet the narrative approach also inherits the neo-Lockean emphasis on the past as determining identity, whereas the self is fundamentally about the future. Death is crucial on this picture, not as allowing for the possibility of (...) a final meaning to our lives, but as determining Dasein as ‘pure unactualizable possibility.’ Ultimately, therefore, narrative is not what constitutes selfhood – but this does not mean that narrative is not relevant to personal identity, because narrative allows identity to be expressed in action. (shrink)

This study introduces narrative phase-topology as a descriptive analytical vocabulary for examining how narrative structures generate states of existential commitment—positions in which characters (and readers) are placed in relations of irreversibility, responsibility, and non-recoverable consequences. The framework does not propose a formal mathematical model; instead, it provides a structural language for tracing how motivation, action, and consequence are distributed, reordered, or collapsed across narrative time. Using the Attack on Titan (pre-Sea arc) and Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End as contrasting case studies, (...) this paper demonstrates that the two works—despite stark differences in tone, pacing, and affective density—instantiate the same existential root-structure through sharply opposed narrative configurations. Attack on Titan exhibits a high-curvature collapse topology, in which action precedes clarified motivation, multi-layered sacrifice reveals competing motivational vectors, and ethical cycles compress characters into unavoidable positions of responsibility. In contrast, Frieren presents a stable radiative topology, where performative declarations pre-establish a steady existential position, actions unfold as long-duration extensions of prior commitments, and emotional visibility emerges gradually across an extended temporal field. To account for cross-temporal phenomena in Frieren, the paper proposes the notion of a temporal relay: a material anchor (e.g., Himmel’s statues) that stores an uncompleted affective or ethical vector, allowing it to re-enter perception at a later temporal slice. This articulation highlights a form of asynchronous love or non-reciprocal ethics, in which meaning is constituted without guarantees of recognition, reciprocity, or synchronous understanding. Across both works, existential meaning arises not from moral intention or thematic content, but from how narratives configure phase sequences, distribute tension, and position agents within structures of irreversibility. The phase-topological vocabulary developed here may support future research in narrative theory and AI narrative generation, suggesting that the depth of a story depends less on emotional expression and more on how the narrative engineers commitment, non-recoverability, and reactivation nodes across time. A full version including references is available. (shrink)

Human relationships are formed and maintained through interactions between individuals, but they are also influenced by the ways in which people understand and interpret relationships. Individuals interpret the meaning of relationships not only through their own experiences but also through culturally shared narratives and concepts, and these interpretive frameworks significantly shape how relationships are formed, maintained, and evaluated. However, it remains unclear whether such modes of understanding adequately reflect the actual structure of relationships. Existing approaches to understanding relationships generally appear (...) in two forms: the emotion-centered model and the responsibility-centered model. The emotion-centered model regards emotional bonds such as love, attraction, and intimacy as the core foundation of relationships and tends to explain the formation and persistence of relationships in terms of the intensity and authenticity of emotions. In contrast, the responsibility-centered model explains the maintenance and stability of relationships based on elements such as responsibility, roles, and mutual expectations formed within relationships. While these two models each explain important aspects of relationships, they differ in their underlying assumptions and structural frameworks for understanding relationships. This paper focuses on the idea that these two modes of understanding function as narrative frameworks through which human relationships are interpreted and constructed. It analyzes how emotion-centered and responsibility-centered relationship narratives differ in their structural approaches to explaining relationship formation, maintenance, and conflict or breakdown. Through this analysis, the paper aims to clarify how cultural narratives shape individuals’ perceptions of relationships and their evaluative standards. Furthermore, this paper argues that emotion and responsibility are not opposing elements, but rather components that perform different functions within relationship understanding. It proposes that relationships should not be reduced to either emotion or normative structures alone, but should instead be reconstructed in connection with the structure of interaction. This perspective reveals the tension between narrative interpretations of relationships and their actual structural dynamics, and provides an analytical framework for bridging the two. (shrink)

A story does more than recount events; it recounts events in a way that renders them intelligible, thus conveying not just information but also understanding. We might therefore be tempted to describe narrative as a genre of explanation. When the police invite a suspect to “tell his story,” they are asking him to explain the blood on his shirt or his absence from home on the night of the murder; and whether he is judged to have a “good story” will (...) depend on its adequacy as an explanation. Can we account for the explanatory force of narrative with the models of explanation available in the philosophy of science? Or does narrative convey a different kind of understanding, which requires a different model and perhaps even a term other than ‘explanation’? (shrink)

Narrative is a downstream coherence‑propagation operator that organizes embodied meaning into a stable, transmissible form. This paper develops a structural account of how narrative emerges from the dynamics of formation, persistence, and redistribution, and outlines the invariant sequence through which raw experience becomes narrativized. The analysis clarifies how stories compress complexity, stabilize meaning across time, and maintain coherence under changing conditions. By examining personal, cultural, and religious narratives through the same structural lens, the paper shows that narrative functions as a (...) meaning‑stabilizing technology rather than a representational mirror of experience. This framing explains narrative resonance, narrative rupture, and the characteristic failure signatures that appear when coherence cannot be maintained. (shrink)

This essay offers a rationale for the employment of narrative pedagogies in introductory philosophy courses, as well as examples of narrative techniques, assignments, and course design that have been successfully employed in the investigation of philosophical topics. My hope is to undercut the sense that “telling stories in class” is just a playful diversion from the real material, and to encourage instructors to treat storytelling as a genuine philosophical activity that should be rigorously developed. I argue that introductory courses focused (...) on student narratives fulfill the ideals of learning-centered teaching. Since narrative learning also promotes self-knowledge and empathic understanding, there is good reason to consider replacing or supplementing canonical texts or arguments with narrative assignments. The concluding sections provide details as to how such assignments can be constructed,integrated into course units, and assessed. (shrink)

While environmental philosophers have been striving to extend ethics to deal with future generations and nonhuman life forms, very little work has been undertaken to address what is perhaps a more profound deficiency in received ethical doctrines, that they have very little impact on how people live. I explore Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on narratives and traditions and defend a radicalization of his arguments as a direction for making environmental ethics efficacious.

Marya Schechtman's The Constitution of Selves presented an impressive attempt to persuade those working on personal identity to give up mainstream positions and take on a narrative view instead. More recently, she has presented new arguments with a closely related aim. She attempts to convince us to give up the view of identity as a matter of psychological continuity, using Derek Parfit's story of the “Nineteenth Century Russian” as a central example in making the case against Parfit's own view, and (...) offers a form of narrative theory as a way out of the problem. In this paper I consider this new case, and argue that we should not be persuaded towards the narrative. (shrink)

I defend the claim that fictional narratives provide cognitive benefits to readers in virtue of helping them to understand character. Fictions allow readers to rehearse the skill of selecting and organizing into narratives those episodes of a life that reflect traits or values. Two further benefits follow: first, fictional narratives provide character models that we can apply to real-life individuals (including ourselves), and second, fictional narratives help readers to reflect on the value priorities that constitute character. I defend the plausibility (...) of these cognitive benefits against certain worries raised by Gregory Currie and Peter Goldie. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reconcile two apparently opposed ways of thinking about the imagination and its relationship to literature, one which casts it as essentially concerned with fiction-making and the other with culture-making. The literary imagination’s power to create fictions is what gives it its most obvious claim to “autonomy”, as Kant would have it: its freedom to venture out in often wild and spectacular excess of reality. The argument of this paper is that we can locate the literary imagination’s (...) complementary power of cultural articulation in this fictional activity. The suggestion is that we should conceive of the literary imagination as expressing its interests in culture not mimetically but by producing a certain kind of meaning. This meaning is irreducibly narratological, and understanding it helps us to see the role of narrative in bringing into harmony the literary imagination’s interests in both the imaginary and the real. (shrink)

A pressing question for the philosophy of personal identity in the digital age is the extent to which people can be identical to their various digital self-representations, from virtual avatars and social media profiles to AI digital duplicates and future mind uploads. This article addresses this question in the case of virtual avatars: user-controlled, visual representations of self in online environments like video games and virtual reality worlds. I interpret the metaphysical relationship between avatar and user implied by the ‘avatar (...) identity question’ through the lens of the extended self thesis. Drawing on the narrative theory of identity, I argue for the avatar extended self (AES): the view that virtual avatars can become constitutive components of a user’s personhood. After establishing criteria for avatar-user narrative integration and responding to objections to the view, I examine its ethical implications, arguing that AES raises the ethical significance of virtual actions involving one’s avatar and, in so doing, sheds light on the question of what grounds the moral weight of virtual phenomena. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent years, philosophers of mind have explored the relationship between lived embodied experiences and self-narratives in bringing about a sense of self. This relationship has been vividly debated, with no consensus in the field. While some have argued that lived embodied experiences influence, but are not influenced by, self-narratives, others have maintained that lived embodied experiences and self-narratives influence each other across time. However, the very concept of ‘self-narrative’ and its scope of application has remained underspecified. The debate, (...) I will argue, can only be resolved if we arrive at a better theoretical understanding of self-narrative. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual account of the notion of ‘self-narrative’ and a descriptive account of its scope of application. It will then be shown how these accounts can pave the way towards resolving the debate on the experience-narrative nexus. (shrink)

Our ability to tell stories about ourselves has captivated many theorists, and some have taken these developments for an opportunity to answer long-standing questions about the nature of personhood. In this essay I employ two skeptical arguments to show that this move was a mistake. The first argument rests on the observation that storytelling is revisionary. The second implies that our stories about ourselves are biased in regard to our existing self-image. These arguments undercut narrative theories of identity, but they (...) leave room for a theory of narrative self-knowledge. The theory accommodates the first skeptical argument because there are event descriptions with retrospective assertibility conditions, and it accommodates the second argument by denying us epistemic privilege in regard to our own past. The result is that we do know our past through storytelling, but that it is a contingent feature of some of our stories that they are about ourselves. (shrink)

Oral history interviews, and the testimony collected, depend on the interaction between the narrator and the interviewer. A different interviewer, interviewing for a different project, would prompt different responses. We argue that, to properly assess the status of the data collected in oral history interviews, we need to attend to the dynamic and oral nature of nar- ration. In this paper, we draw on resources from the philosophy of language to offer a toolkit that can track negotiation of narratives within (...) oral history interviews. We argue an understanding of the reliability of oral history data must be sensitive to the ways in which narratives are co-constructed within interviews. (shrink)