This book will be available in March, 2016 in hardback, paperback, and e-book. Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
A New Theory of Mind:
The Theory of Narrative Thought
Lee Roy Beach, with Byron Bissell,
by James A. Wise
Part I: Fundamentals
Chapter 1: Mind
Chapter 2: Cognitive Abilities
Part II: Narrative Thought
Chapter 3: Narrative Urge
Chapter 4: Narrative Thought
Chapter 5: Narrator
Chapter 6: Narrative Errors
Part III: Narrative and Action
Chapter 7: Managing the Future
Chapter 8: Narrative-based Decisions
Chapter 9: Public Narratives
Chapter 10: Narrative Tyranny
Part IV: Mind Revisited
Chapter 11: A New Theory of Mind
The discussion begins with a
description of the ebbing fortunes of “mind,” as a scientific concept and how, over the past 50 years, it has
come back under a new name. Now called cognition, mind has been subjected to an immense amount of research by workers
from various disciplines. Recently, these researchers have come together to form a new discipline, cognitive science, which
has facilitated the sharing of techniques and ideas, prompting an even greater flow of imaginative and insightful research.
And yet, other than the computer analogy and information processing metaphor, no encompassing theory has yet resulted from
all this effort. Even so, it seems to be a widely held belief that when an encompassing theory is achieved, it will be neurological
in nature and will explain everything, from the micro world of neural activity to the macro world of subjective experience
In contrast to this rather imperial belief, which Alva Noë (2015) calls the “brain
theory of everything,” is another widely held belief; that neural activity and experience are two qualitatively different
things. If so, an encompassing theory couched in terms of only one of them cannot suffice. If, on the, other hand, the theory
recognizes both things as legitimate, co-existing, and linked, it must describe how the linkage works. Key to such a theory
is an adequate description of how the substance of one of is transformed into the substance of the other. The Theory of Narrative
Thought is about how this transformation takes place.
Narratives are the stuff of ongoing conscious experience, of
moment-to-moment thinking, of the richness of mental life, and they are the foundations for informed guesses about the future.
They are a mixture of memories, of visual, auditory, and other imagery, and the accompanying emotions. Their elements are
symbols that stand for real or imagined events and actors (including oneself), where the actors are animate beings or inanimate
forces. The events and actors are linked by causality and implied purpose. That is, a narrative consists of a temporal arrangement
of events that are purposefully caused by animate beings (including oneself) or are the result of inanimate forces. The narrative’s
storyline is its meaning, which is created by a coherent arrangement of the events and actors; where coherence is provided
by causality and an underlying timeline.
Causality is the structural backbone of narratives, in large part because it implies temporality, which is a defining characteristic
of narratives. This temporal aspect of causality works both retrospectively (reasoning from effect to cause, which allows
one to account for what is happening now as a result of what has happened in the past) and prospectively (reasoning from cause
to effect, which allows one to set expectations for what will happen in the future as a result of what is happening now and
what came before). A good narrative is plausible if its actors’ actions contribute to the story line and are not uncharacteristic,
i.e., are reasonably consistent across narratives. A good narrative is coherent if the actions of the actors and the effects
of those actions conform to the narrator’s causal rules. In short, a good narrative makes sense.