Reflections on the Unnarratable: Free Will, the Intentional Stance, and a Narrative Model for Emergence

Abstract

Reflections on the Unnarratable: Free Will, the Intentional Stance, and a Narrative Model for Emergence1 Toon Staes (bio) Let me begin with a quotation that also frames the introduction to this special issue, from David Herman’s “Narrative, Science, and Narrative Science,” now almost a quarter-century old: “science will not be left unchanged by its encounter with narrative inquiry, but neither will narrative inquiry” (383). The past two decades have seen this prediction come true, or at least its second part, with cognitive narratology. The first part, whether narrative inquiry has changed science, remains a tricky question. Herman’s claim suggests that science has its own style and rhetoric, structured by narrative. And yet, when narratologists train their lens on scientific discourse—the contributors to the present issue included—they usually imply that narrative lacks the precision that science demands. Science communication studies often voice a similar concern: at best, ‘storytelling’ oversimplifies the results of experimental research, but more likely, it distorts them (Katz; Dahlstrom, “(Escaping) the Paradox”). Such concern is not altogether a surprise, given that science works with testable ideas, whereas narratives deal with perspective and interpretation. But the news for narratologists is not all bad: if done responsibly, narratives can make a meaningful connection between science and human experience, thus making factual information more palatable (Dahlstrom, “The Narrative Truth”). This essay will suggest that science narratives which seek to explain unnarratable phenomena choose narrativity over accuracy in order to [End Page 87] get their message across,2 but perhaps, for experienced readers, that shouldn’t even come as a revelation. As literary theorists recognize, novels can help us navigate abstract science (see, for example, Caracciolo and Trauvitch in this issue). While my concern is not with fiction, one example will suffice to demonstrate my purpose. Early in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), we find ourselves at a séance in London in December 1944. German V-2 rockets are dropping nearby, but attendees of the séance—an eclectic bunch of scientists, mystics, and military men—gather around to hear a recently deceased engineer sound off about control mechanisms, or feedback loops, which supposedly give systems such as free financial markets the capacity to regulate themselves: A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable. (30, original emphasis) The passage is quite difficult to unpack, even in the context of Pynchon’s mega-novel, but readers can already see some of the book’s larger themes come into focus: issues of freedom and control, choice and responsibility, technological determinism, and the rise of the military-industrial complex that would soon shape the course of world history. The passage also introduces the problem of free will, which, from the perspective of Pynchon’s speaker, doesn’t exist at all. If we are just cogs in a vast machine, he appears to ask, how can we act freely? Or: how could our lives and actions have meaning when things “only happen,” when we have no control over the rules and laws that govern them? Of course, it is one of the novel’s many ironies that the speaker here is a spirit medium channeling the words of a dead man, a ghost in the machine, whose presence in the book seems to suggest that we are more than soulless mechanisms. The problem the passage presents falls into the category of problems [End Page 88] that push against the limits of our understanding, or “representationally hungry problems” (Spolsky 50–51). Representationally hungry problems confuse and intrigue us. They test our ability to solve them in satisfying ways, which explains the constant “hunger” to represent them, for instance, in literature.3 Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (1796...