title: What are narratives good for?
abstract: Narratives may be easy to come by, but not everything is worth narrating. What merits a narrative? Here, I follow the lead of narratologists and literary theorists, and focus on one particular proposal concerning the elements of a story that make it narrative-worthy. These elements correspond to features of the natural world addressed by the historical sciences, where narratives figure so prominently. What matters is contingency. Narratives are especially good for representing contingency and accounting for contingent outcomes. This will be squared with a common view that narratives leave no room for chance. On the contrary, I will argue, tracing one path through a maze of alternative possibilities, and alluding to those possibilities along the way, is what a narrative does particularly well.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Canada. Electronic address: john.beatty@ubc.ca.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Beatty
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D033262:Narration / Q000266:history; D019021:Natural History / Q000266:history; D010684:Philosophy / Q000266:history; D012586:Science / Q000266:history*
keywords: Contingency; Historical sciences; Narrative; Replaying life's tape; Stephen Jay Gould