RAIL

"Homme assis" by Roger-Noël-François de La Fresnaye, c.1914

In a recent blog post provocatively titled “Kurt Vonnegut turns Cinderella into an Equation” Robert Krulwich (co-host of the excellent WNYC series Radiolab) uses a wonderful pair of cartoons to suggest that if humans are creatures who thrive on pattern, then scientists and mathematicians are compulsive pattern finders,  “pattern addicts” as it were.  Logicians and students of argument, I think, fairly belong in this category as well. Some of us talk about logical form and explain it in terms of complicated relationships between abstract symbols and letters. Or we classify arguments by scheme and develop equally schematic lists of questions with which to test their merits. The dialectically inclined among us give us patterns of argumentation between two or more arguers.  We create argument diagrams, relevance cubes, maps of controversies and many more things like them besides. We’re pattern people. There’s no doubt about it.

Interestingly, Krulwich closes his post by suggesting that even more than than scientists and mathematicians (and perhaps logicians and argumentation scholars too?) artists and storytellers may be even more pattern-aware. As exhibit the first he offers this short (and altogether too good not to reproduce) video of the legendary Kurt Vonnegut:

Let us begin with the obvious: we don’t need Vonnegut to tell us that stories have patterns too (though of course his way of telling us is very entertaining and we’re very lucky to have it). Clearly they’re there. The deeper issue has to do with the nature and significance of such patterns. How do we interpret them? How do we reason about them? How do we reason with them?

I certainly don’t have the answers to these questions, but Krulwich’s post put me in mind of some of the interesting work going on in some of the scholarship on legal argumentation that draws heavily on the patterns we use in reasoning about stories. A good summary of the approach developed by Floris Bex, Henry Prakken, Bart Verheij and Peter van Koppen–one of the better worked out approaches that exist–can be found here. The promise of their work is that it draws from good work on reasoning in cognitive psychology and in argumentation theory to forge links between the kind of patterns that occur in narratives and the reasoning patterns with which theorists of argument are familiar. It aims to

combin[e] stories and arguments into one theory. In this hybrid theory, hypothetical stories about what (might have) happened in a case can be anchored in evidence using evidential arguments. Furthermore, arguments can be used to reason about the plausibility of a story.

The article (and its many helpful links) are well worth your time, especially if you’re interested in finding ways into the subject of narrative arguments. Their work is clear, admirably grounded in empirical research on legal reasoning, and avoids the sort of worries I’ve expressed before on this blog about getting the theoretical cart before the horse. For all its merits this research doesn’t seem to me to be widely known outside of a relatively constrained group of researchers, so I hope to do them a service by shining a little light on their hard work.

To be fair though, the narratives that concern Bex & co. are not precisely the same sort that Krulwich (or, one surmises, Vonnegut) has in mind. Thus, if I’m skeptical of Krulwich’s claim that Vonnegut really has “turned Cinderella to an equation” it’s because there has yet to emerge an analysis of the reasoning patterns in fictional narratives that does what that of Bex, Prakken, Verheij and van Koppen does for the kind of stories that turn up in legal settings.  And I think something like this is probably what a theory of fictional narrative as argument needs to get off the ground. Patterns are wonderful, to be sure, but without a sound theoretical framework of some or other sort with which to interpret them, they’re as likely to lead us astray as they are to enlighten. After all, no one wants to end up like poor Max…