Monocausality and pseuintentionality Two principles of storytelling

Abstract

Storytelling has occasionally been considered to result from a cognitive disposition for explanation. In the present article, the cognitive operation of explanation is reformulated as an intuitive identification of cause equivalent to Peirce's notion of ›abduction‹. In an evolutionary perspective, this type of inference is more demanding than induction (which is present in all forms of experiential learning) and less demanding than deduction (which requires explicit knowledge of general principles). Stories can be structured according to either of these three models: as exemplum (deduction), casus (induction), or ›detective‹ narrative (abduction). However, these narrative structures do not necessarily reflect the actual formation of the stories. As so-called urban legends show, stories quite frequently do not emerge ›abductively‹ from an actual event (the causation of which would then be narrated), but ›deductively‹ from a general knowledge about what could happen (and thus narrating the occurrence of such a possible event). Furthermore, the example of urban legends shows, first, that narrative causality tends to be monocausal and, second, that physical causality is frequently superseded by a moral causality that implies a superordinate intentionality (such as ›god‹ or ›destiny/fate‹). Each of these tendencies can be explained evolutionarily: monocausal thinking, though unreliable, may be more successful in decision making, statistically, than the time-consuming consideration of a complex multi-factorial causation; and the pseudo-intentionality of poetic justice may be the result of what Ernst Topitsch has dubbed »sociomorphism«, i.e., the interpretation of events in terms of innate dispositions that originally evolved to maneuver group living and social hierarchies. Both tendencies contribute to the pithiness (›Prägnanz‹) of the narrative gestalt.