Just-so Stories Research Articles

Personal Persistence and Post-Mortem Survival

Can a materialist look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come? Dean Zimmerman’s Falling Elevator Model is a speculative account of how persons, understood as material beings, might survive in a post-mortem resurrected state—a just-so story. It assumes endurantism, the doctrine that persons and other ordinary objects are three-dimensional beings which are wholly present at every time they exist. I argue that neither endurantism, nor purdurantism, according to which persons are four-dimensional ‘worms’ who have proper temporal parts at every time that they exist, provides a plausible account of personal survival. If you want to be a Christian materialist you should embrace exdurantism, the ‘stage theory’, according which persons are instantaneous stages and are not identical to their temporal successors either in this world or in any world to come. Exdurantism provides a plausible account of survival in ordinary cases and extraordinary cases of this-worldly fission, and of post-mortem survival.

Surfacing, as well as testing, “elliptical assumptions” in a theory of change: Principled discovery

While the testing of known assumptions in a theory of change is important, so too is the discovery or surfacing of previously unrecognized assumptions. This paper describes and illustrates the surfacing of “elliptical assumptions,” which involve the unknown ingredients that are necessary for a program to be effective. Identifying the ingredients of program success is important for several reasons, which include (a) guiding the development of an improved theory of change, which in turn can guide program improvement, and (b) informing efforts to transfer the program to other settings and populations. However, when an observed pattern, such as differential program effects, points to the existence of a previously unidentified but important ingredient, this might be a just-so story, a seemingly compelling but inaccurate account. Accordingly, the testing of previously unidentified elliptical assumptions is recommended and illustrated.

“Must I Remember?”: A Just-So Story about Shakespeare and His Mother

Somewhere behind the dramatic power that gathers around psychological themes in Shakespeare’s plays traceable to a mother’s role in a child’s experience is the lived mother–child bond of Mary Arden Shakespeare and her oldest son. I will construct a model of Mary’s contribution that I think is consistent with what we know of the circumstances of her life, with what we have learned from psychoanalysis about mother–child bonds, and with the shape of Shakespeare’s artistic development as I understand it. Mary Arden Shakespeare, born to a strong Catholic family, was pregnant and gave birth to William after the deaths in infancy of two daughters, as the most deadly plague of the 16th century made its way toward Stratford, and as Catholic beliefs and ritual traditions were forcefully set aside by Queen Elizabeth’s protestant reformation. The crisis circumstances of Shakespeare’s earliest maternal experience, the later prolonged crisis of his father’s disgrace, and the plausible impacts of these crises on the mother-child bond, suggest a range of infantile and childhood experience consistent with, and reimagined in, the development of Shakespeare’s drama.

Review: Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri, by Ryan J. Lynch

Review: <i>Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri</i>, by Ryan J. Lynch

Al-Maʿarrī’s Anxious Menagerie: The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule

Abstract Around the year 411/1021, blind author and controversial freethinker Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (449/1057) wrote Risālat al-ṣāhil wa-l-shāḥij (The Epistle of the Horse and the Mule), a meandering prose work populated by animal characters who talk about Syrian society on the eve of the crusades. The story exudes a brand of fictionality, namely creative literary exaggeration designed to call forth mental pictures, that sets it apart from other animal texts due to the overwhelming ambiguity it creates. The animal characters suffer existential anxiety when, for instance, they realize that concepts like genus (jins) and species (nawʿ) turn out to be fuzzier than they thought, thereby calling into question whether any species—be it biological or linguistic—is a stable class. Animal ontology gets further confused by just-so stories about hybrids and crossbreeds, and by terms for philosophical contingency that question whether talking animals even exist—this is not just a story that did not happen, but a story that cannot happen except in the imagination. On the other hand, those same philosophical terms may yet affirm that speaking animals could exist, and that they have value in themselves, by hinting at their place in a cosmic order that radiates the goodness of its Source.

The Epistemology of Evolutionary Psychology Offers a Rapprochement to Cultural Psychology.

Many detractors of evolutionary psychology (EP) presume that adaptive arguments are nothing more than whimsical and unfalsifiable just-so stories. The reality though is that the epistemology of EP is precisely the opposite of this antiquated canard in that it fixes the evidentiary threshold much higher than is typically achieved by most scientists. EP amasses evidence across cultures, time periods, disciplines, paradigms, methodologies, and units of analyses in validating a given scientific explanation. These nomological networks of cumulative evidence stimulate greater interdisciplinarity, lesser methodological myopia, and increased consilience (unity of knowledge). A component in building such nomological networks is to examine phenomena that are cross-culturally invariant (human universals) versus those that vary cross-culturally as adaptive responses (the domain of behavioral ecologists and gene-culture coevolution modelers). The epistemological efficacy of this unique approach is highlighted using two cases studies, the sex-specificity of toy preferences and men’s preference for the hourglass figure.

Spoiler Alert

Spoiler Alert

A Brief (Hi)Story of Just-So Stories in Evolutionary Science

In this essay, I examine the usage of the term “just-so story.” I attempt to show that just-so storytelling can be seen as an epistemic concept that, in various ways, tackles the epistemological and methodological problems relating to evolutionary explanations qua historical/narrative explanations. I identify two main, yet mutually exclusive, strategies of employing the concept of a just-so story: a negative strategy and a positive strategy. Subsequently, I argue that these strategies do not satisfactorily capture the core of the “original” meaning advanced by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin at the end of the 1970s. I revisit the foundation(s) of their anti-adaptationist critique in order to reframe it as a critique of distinctive methodological manners and epistemic maxims related to historical inquiry. Last but not least, I suggest that contemporary evolutionary thinkers have two conceptually different options: they can either adhere to the “original” meaning of the term “just-so story” or accept that “just-so story” is a term equivalent to “implausible narrative explanation.”

Unification by Fiat: Arrested Development of Predictive Processing.

Predictive processing (PP) has been repeatedly presented as a unificatory account of perception, action, and cognition. In this paper, we argue that this is premature: As a unifying theory, PP fails to deliver general, simple, homogeneous, and systematic explanations. By examining its current trajectory of development, we conclude that PP remains only loosely connected both to its computational framework and to its hypothetical biological underpinnings, which makes its fundamentals unclear. Instead of offering explanations that refer to the same set of principles, we observe systematic equivocations in PP‐based models, or outright contradictions with its avowed principles. To make matters worse, PP‐based models are seldom empirically validated, and they are frequently offered as mere just‐so stories. The large number of PP‐based models is thus not evidence of theoretical progress in unifying perception, action, and cognition. On the contrary, we maintain that the gap between theory and its biological and computational bases contributes to the arrested development of PP as a unificatory theory. Thus, we urge the defenders of PP to focus on its critical problems instead of offering mere re‐descriptions of known phenomena, and to validate their models against possible alternative explanations that stem from different theoretical assumptions. Otherwise, PP will ultimately fail as a unified theory of cognition.

Criticism and Judgment

Criticism and Judgment Robert S. Lehman In his seminal 1937 essay "Criticism, Inc.," the founder of the American New Criticism John Crowe Ransom describes literary criticism in the following terms: "Criticism," he writes, "is the attempt to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature."1 This brief account of what we do, or ought or do, as critics appears in Ransom's essay very much in passing, in the context of an attack on New Humanist moralism.2 There is no reason to believe that Ransom means for it to be anything like a definitive statement on the aims of the discipline. And as the essay progresses, Ransom makes clear that the approach to literature that he is prescribing "shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject."3 Enjoyment, then, as well as those evaluative terms that convey enjoyment—"moving, exciting, entertaining, pitiful; great, if I am not mistaken, and admirable, on a slightly different ground; and, in strictness, beautiful itself"—these have no place in an objective criticism.4 Nonetheless Ransom's initial formulation deserves attention, not so much because in its brevity and offhandedness it undercuts loftier appraisals of our work, but because—like a perfect New Critical poem—it manages to pack into a relatively small linguistic container a remarkably complex ideational content. Again, criticism is the attempt to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature. What Ransom has done here is bring together two conceptions of literary criticism (and, at least implicitly, two conceptions of the literary object) whose complementarity is easy to assume only so long as they are kept safely apart. First, there is the notion that to criticize is to define the characteristic values of literature; and, second, there is the notion that to criticize is to enjoy the aesthetic values of literature. The first task finds the critic doing to literature something very much like what Ransom is doing to criticism: dissecting it, figuring out how it works. The second task—which is probably better described as an invitation—locates the critic in the same position as the perhaps uncritical reader, who finds pleasure in the words on the page. In most metacritical writings, these two tasks—let's say the task of formal analysis, on the one hand, and the task of (or invitation to) aesthetic judgment, on the [End Page 1105] other—are distributed between distinct individuals or across discrete moments. So, we can tell a story in which judgment begets analysis, with the critic (or critic-to-be) struck by a poem, a painting, or a piece of music that he or she then labors to understand. Or we can tell a story in which analysis begets judgment, a story in which the fruits of critical analysis help the amateur finally to grasp, and so to enjoy, a particular work of art. At least in the aforecited epigram, Ransom steers clear of these stories; instead, he brings analysis and judgment together through that least narrative of all figures, chiasmus—define and enjoy / aesthetic or characteristic—the effect of which is further secured through the ambiguity of the culminating reference to literature's values. This gesture having been made, enjoyment is pushed out of "Criticism, Inc."—and out of New Criticism proper—as an instance of what will, a decade later, be termed "the affective fallacy."5 In what follows, I am going to focus on the relationship between formal analysis and aesthetic judgment, on why this relationship is problematic in a way that most contemporary critics fail to recognize (blinded, perhaps, by just-so stories or rhetorical slights-of-hand), and on what it would mean to bring analysis and judgment together in a way that might be productive for the discipline of literary studies.6 If I begin with Ransom, the reason is not that I take his work or the work of any of the New Critics to be a model of how to accomplish this task. The reason, rather, is that this work tends to be characterized—by its supporters, by its detractors, and occasionally by the New Critics themselves—as...

Just-So Stories in Real Estate History, or, How the Apartment Tower Got Its Glass Skin

Just-So Stories in Real Estate History, or, How the Apartment Tower Got Its Glass Skin

The Ruins of Urban Modernity: Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Against the Day’ by Utku Mogultay

 Reviews Blair ultimately dismisses theoretical perspectives though, maintaining a strictly evolutionary line in her readings of Woolf. But while she demonstrates how Woolf’s novels may be therapeutic in some sense, there is little specific evidence in the book establishing narrative’s unambiguous role in evolutionary adaptation. Instead, Blair occasionally resorts to hypothetical just-so stories about early humans and passé Jungian archetypes from Joseph Campbell. Besides these interpretative missteps, the book also suffers from a number of conspicuous errors and stylistic tics. Blair frequently misspells the Ramsay family as ‘Ramsey’ in discussions of To the Lighthouse and incorrectly refers to the title of the novel Mrs Dalloway as ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. She also strings together numerous unanswerable queries, such as, ‘What does it mean to be human? What is the meaning of life? What can life mean in the face of certain death?’ (p. ). It is also unclear why Blair tends to capitalize the first letters of ‘Human’ and ‘Story’, despite never using those terms in anything but an ordinary, non-technical way. One of the main strengths of Blair’s book, however, is how it is framed by personal instances of grief and loss—both from Blair herself and from Woolf—adding a welcome immediacy and urgency to her readings while also making them open to more general readers. Each of the chapters on Woolf’s novels productively mines her endlessly fascinating diaries, providing a rich biographical dimension to the texts in question. ese more intimate forays reaffirm that if, as Blair suggests, ‘[s]tories help us with this imprecise science of life’s navigation’ (p. ), we would be well served to revisit the life and works of Virginia Woolf for guidance. B C M G e Ruins of Urban Modernity: omas Pynchon’s ‘Against the Day’. By U M. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. . vi+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Utku Mogultay is a very learned critic who persuades us that Pynchon’s Against the Day is not just zany and deliberately obscure. Rather, Pynchon is deeply read in the history and concept of cities, up to speed on modernist vs. postmodernist theories of cities, and drawn to popular fiction, which he recycles as pastiche or irony. Mogultay focuses on ideas about cities, since several famous ones function as significant locations and undergo phantasmagoric changes in the course of the novel. e theories of what a city was and should be were emerging at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the time-frame of Against the Day’s complex plots. New building techniques and forms of transportation made immense city growth—vertical and horizontal—possible, but also brought new problems. e  World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago produced a model city center as the fair’s high-culture showpiece. Neoclassical façades with extended waterways flaunted prestige by taking elements from Rome and Venice. e Midway Plaisance held the popular displays: tribal villages, belly dancers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild MLR, .,   West show, and other amusements to be gaped at. Pynchon’s adventure-hero aeronauts , the Chums of Chance, visit the fair, as do Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Merle Rideout, Lew Basnight, and several other characters. e focus on cities, Mogultay argues, spreads out from the Exposition, and in many we find variations on themes first offered here. e Archduke goes slumming in the Black region of Chicago, and that desire to view enclaves touristically is repeated in other cities, particularly in Venice and New York. e city is theorized as spectacle, and as something to be arranged in the viewer’s memory as an adventure. e city is also studied in terms of its governance and planning. Some of Pynchon’s work, as Mogultay shows, sets up the city as the new frontier, and Pynchon makes use of popular frontier novel tropes both in themselves and as they morphed into detective plots, first about the Pinkerton men, then in London with the Sherlock Holmes style of operator, and then as the focal figure of hard-boiled noir fiction. All three phases of detection are undertaken by Lew Basnight in his quest to understand himself morally. He must in the end admit his...

Virginia Woolf and the Power of Story: A Literary Darwinist Reading of Six Novels by Linda Nicole Blair

MLR, .,   more broadly. is volume provides an excellent foundation upon which Edmundson or other scholars might build. It would be particularly exciting to see more work emerge on women’s African Gothic, given the continent’s diversity, or scholarship that seeks to complicate the gender binary at the heart of this study. As well as suggesting new angles via which we might approach familiar authors, Edmundson introduces us to several strangers in strange lands on whom future scholarship might focus. is is an important step in the reclamation of marginalized voices, both academically and politically commendable. U  B E D Virginia Woolf and the Power of Story: A Literary Darwinist Reading of Six Novels. By L N B. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. vii+ pp. $.;£.. ISBN ––––. As scholars of literature tackle interconnected issues of culture and science that have a potentially global scope, it has become increasingly necessary to bring literary and scientific discourses into an interdisciplinary nexus. It is at such a nexus that Linda Nicole Blair situates Virginia Woolf and the Power of Story. Blair considers how we might see evidence of the evolutionarily adaptive potential of narrative in six of Woolf’s mature works by focusing on how they ‘convey the power of stories to comfort us in grief, to connect us one to another, and to create a world full of possibilities for an as-of-yet undreamt future’ (p. ). In Blair’s schema, Jacob’s Room () and To the Lighthouse () allowed Woolf to process grief over the death of family members, Mrs Dalloway () and Between the Acts () showcase the social connections that are forged through storytelling, and Orlando () and e Waves () engage readers with creativity crucial for training the mind. Stories, Blair contends, were not only essential for Woolf’s personal survival, but offer beneficial adaptive tools for the human species. e result of the six readings is an uneven book that nevertheless offers some keen insights into Woolf’s writings and personal life, and compellingly argues that ‘stories can help us survive in increasingly turbulent times’ (p. ). e key argument of Blair’s book is that stories are more than mere entertainment : ‘without the basic connective tissue of stories, which sometimes appears to be in danger of eroding in our society, we have little hope for survival’ (p. ). Intent on ‘[p]lanting the arts firmly in the ground of our biology’ (p. ), she advocates literary Darwinism, a positivist approach to literature with similarities to the related fields of ‘evolutionary science, cognitive science, cognitive aesthetics, and evolutionary psychology’ (p. ). Blair acknowledges literary Darwinism’s reputation, especially within contemporary poststructuralist theory, for reductionist scientism and biological essentialism. Yet she intriguingly suggests that, given their shared appreciation for meaning’s dependency on contingency and context, ‘there are ways in which Literary Darwinism and some of the basic theories of post-structuralism intersect’ (p. ).  Reviews Blair ultimately dismisses theoretical perspectives though, maintaining a strictly evolutionary line in her readings of Woolf. But while she demonstrates how Woolf’s novels may be therapeutic in some sense, there is little specific evidence in the book establishing narrative’s unambiguous role in evolutionary adaptation. Instead, Blair occasionally resorts to hypothetical just-so stories about early humans and passé Jungian archetypes from Joseph Campbell. Besides these interpretative missteps, the book also suffers from a number of conspicuous errors and stylistic tics. Blair frequently misspells the Ramsay family as ‘Ramsey’ in discussions of To the Lighthouse and incorrectly refers to the title of the novel Mrs Dalloway as ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. She also strings together numerous unanswerable queries, such as, ‘What does it mean to be human? What is the meaning of life? What can life mean in the face of certain death?’ (p. ). It is also unclear why Blair tends to capitalize the first letters of ‘Human’ and ‘Story’, despite never using those terms in anything but an ordinary, non-technical way. One of the main strengths of Blair’s book, however, is how it is framed by personal instances of grief and loss—both from Blair herself and from Woolf—adding a welcome immediacy and urgency to her readings while also making them open to more general...

First Detailed Anatomical Study of Bonobos Reveals Intra-Specific Variations and Exposes Just-So Stories of Human Evolution, Bipedalism, and Tool Use

Just-so stories are prominent in human evolution literature because of our tendency to create simple progressionist narratives about our 'special' place in nature, despite the fact that these stories are almost exclusively based on hard tissue data. How can we be so certain about the evolution of human facial communication, bipedalism, tool use, or speech without detailed knowledge of the internal anatomy of, for instance, one of the two extant species more closely related to us, the bonobos? Here I show how many of these stories now become obsolete, after such a comprehensive knowledge on the anatomy of bonobos and other primates is finally put together. Each and every muscle that has been long accepted to be 'uniquely human' and to provide 'crucial singular functional adaptations' for our bipedalism, tool use and/or vocal/facial communication, is actually present as an intra-specific variant or even as normal phenotype in bonobos and/or other apes.

First detailed anatomical study of bonobos exposes bonobos as best model for human‐chimp ancestor and just‐so stories of human evolution, bipedalism and tool use

Just‐so stories are prominent in human evolution literature because of our tendency to create simple progressionist narratives about our ‘special’ place in nature, despite the fact that these stories are almost exclusively based on hard tissue data. How can we be so certain about the evolution of human facial communication, bipedalism, tool use, or speech without detailed knowledge of the internal anatomy of, for instance, one of the two extant species more closely related to us, the bonobos? Here I show how many of these stories now become obsolete, after such a comprehensive knowledge on the anatomy of bonobos and other primates is finally put together. Specifically, each and every muscle that has been long accepted to be ‘uniquely human’ and to provide ‘crucial singular functional adaptations' for our bipedalism, tool use and/or vocal/facial communication, is actually present as a variant or even as normal phenotype in bonobos and/or other apes. Importantly, chimps and in particular bonobos also provide a remarkable case of evolutionary stasis: within &gt;120 head‐neck (HN) and forelimb (FL) muscles, since the chimp‐human split c.8Mya there were only four minor changes in the chimp clade, and all were reversions to the ancestral condition. Outstandingly, since the common chimp‐bonobo split c.2 Mya not even a single change occurred in bonobos, i.e. regarding the HN‐FL musculature bonobos are the best living model for the common chimp‐bonobo LCA and the chimp‐human LCA. The extremely static Pan evolution becomes even clearer when hindlimb data are added: only two muscle absence/presence differences occur between common chimps‐bonobos, and none of these species has muscles not found in other primates. Puzzlingly, there is an evolutionary mosaicism between each of these species and humans. I discuss these data in the context of available genomic information and debates on whether the common chimp‐bonobo divergence is linked to heterochrony, and put these data together with that available for humans and other other primates in order to provide a more comprehensive, and less biased, understanding of primate and human anatomical evolution.Support or Funding InformationThis project has received funding from NSF grants 1516557 and 1440624, as well as an American Association of Anatomists Innovation grant to RDThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Tytuł polski: Filozofia Nauki tytuł angielski: The Philosophy of Science

This paper makes a case for the weakness of the scientific hypotheses about the origin of first life (hereafter OoL). There is no consensus on when, where, and — most importantly — how and why life emerged on Earth. There are significant impediments to the scientific explanation of OoL, at least in relation to the accepted (meta)heuristic postulates of scientific study of OoL and (meta)theoretical postulates that hypotheses must satisfy to be recognized as true explanations and not just-so stories. Following these rules and methodologies did not help to bridge the gap between the most complex inorganic components and the simplest living entities. The main arguments for the weakness of the scientific hypotheses about OoL are: (i) there is no scientific hypothesis that successfully explains OoL, and (ii) there is an evident experimental failure of the attempts to (re)create life from inorganic components. The long-term resistance of the problem and the weakness of the hypotheses about OoL stem from the commitment to the ontology of repeated occurrences and/or from inappropriate epistemological-methodological tools used to explain the transition from inorganic to simple life forms (exclusively by means of the “language” and methodology of physical-chemical sciences). Accordingly, either the scientific study of OoL rests on a mistake or science must reduce the scope of phenomena that can be scientifically explained.

Just-So Stories and Origin Myths: Phosphorylation and Structural Disorder in Circadian Clock Proteins

Some longstanding dogmas in the circadian field warrant reexamination in light of recent studies focused on the role of post-translational modifications and intrinsic disorder in core circadian clock proteins of mice and fungi. Such dogmas include the role of turnover in circadian feedback loops and the origin myths describing evolutionary relatedness among circadian clocks. In this Essay, the authors recapitulate recent findings on circadian clock protein regulation by taking an unconventional approach in the form of a dialog between Wizard and Apprentice.

Dugald Stewart on Conjectural History and Human Nature

Dugald Stewart claims that conjectural history is ‘the peculiar glory of the latter half of the eighteenth century’. Yet it is hard to see why, in his view, conjectural histories are not merely confabulated just-so stories. This paper examines Stewart's views about the epistemic and moral value of conjectural history.

:Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh

:<i>Kitāb al-Taḥrīsh</i>

First detailed anatomical study of bonobos exposes just‐so stories of human evolution, anatomy, variations, bipedalism and tool use

Just‐so stories are prominent in human evolution literature because of our tendency to create simple progressionist narratives about our history and how special and unique we are. One point that is particularly striking about such stories is how confident their authors are about the origin and evolution of our specific soft tissues and their ‘functional adaptations’, despite the fact that they are almost exclusively based on hard tissue data. How can we be so certain about stories on the evolution of human facial communication, bipedalism, tool use, or speech that were put forward without any phylogenetic analysis including muscle data or detailed knowledge of the internal anatomy of one of the two extant species more closely related to us, the bonobos? Here I show how many of these stories now becomes obsolete, after such a comprehensive knowledge is finally put together with the first detailed study of bonobo soft tissues. Each and every muscle that has been long accepted to be unique for humans and to provide ‘crucial singular functional adaptations’ for our bipedalism, tool use and/or vocal/facial communication, is actually present as variants or even as the normal phenotype in bonobos and/or other apes.Support or Funding InformationThis project has received funding from NSF grants 1516557 and 1440624 to RD.