Abstract
After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as “enactivism” has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. (2010) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a “joint process of sensemaking”: just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story.
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Notes
I am referring here to the claim—advanced by Dennett (1991, 1992) himself, and more recently by philosophers of mind like Schechtman (1996, 2007) and Velleman (2006)—that our personal identity and “self” are constituted, in a strong sense, by the narratives we tell about ourselves. Exploring in full this debated problem would take me too far from my present concerns (for discussion, see Strawson, 2004).
The terms “big stories” and “small stories” have been first used by Bamberg (2004a).
Richard Menary has made a similar claim about writing: “the act of writing is itself a process of thinking” (Menary, 2007, p. 622).
For a recent update to Searle’s theory, see Hutto (forthcoming b)
See, for example, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama on the survival function of narratives: “Narrative may function as a virtual reality, enabling humans to acquire knowledge useful to the pursuit of fitness without undertaking the risks and costs of first-hand experience” (Sugiyama, 2001, pp. 223–224).
For a wide-ranging review of this discussion, see Krausz (2002).
The reference is to Lamarque’s (2008) institutional theory of literature.
Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher recognize this possibility at one point (Di Paolo et al., 2010, p. 72).
Fludernik (1996) has built her “natural” narratology around this term, which she—however—uses in a different sense.
Such a transformation of our landscape of significance bears a close resemblance to what Paul Ricoeur called “mimesis 3,” or the refiguration of our experience brought about by stories: “a work, in acting on the reader, affects that reader. This being affected has the noteworthy quality of combining in an experience of a particular type activity and passivity” he wrote in Time and Narrative (Ricoeur, 1988, p. 167).
Along similar lines, Gibson (2007, pp. 106–107) traces a connection between the cognitive value of literary works and this kind of “recognition.”
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Acknowledgments
An early version of this essay was presented at the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in St. Louis (April 2011). David Herman has introduced me to enactivism; I am indebted to him for his generous support and invaluable feedback. I would also like to thank two anonymous readers for providing great help in improving this essay.
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Caracciolo, M. Narrative, meaning, interpretation: an enactivist approach. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 367–384 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9216-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9216-0