About
Narrative Oversight features news, commentary, analysis, information, and media related to ongoing research, work, discussion, and debate in philosophy, culture, science, politics, and the arts that deepens, furthers, explores or otherwise involves itself in or questions of narrative and narrativity. Questions like:
♦ To what larger narrative does this belong or contribute?
♦ How can this be discussed or analyzed as a narrative or story?
♦ What are the narrative implications of this for politics, ecology, art,
science, philosophy, education, religion?
We believe that the best stories more true or meaningful than lesser stories. The best stories are not only true philosophically or objectively, but aesthetically, morally, and psychologically true as well. Of course the fun is establishing or making clear—however provisionally—just what one means by “truth” in each of these different types of discourse.
Many ideas, things, or persons can be explained, discussed, defined, or otherwise understood in terms of narrativity or story. And because narratives can involve and include any and all rhetorical forms, genres, and media, it would seem narrativity is somehow privileged or special, even in science and mathematics.
Gödel and Heisenberg described limits to certainty in mathematics and quantum physics, but a “narrative” of complementarity in physics and Gödel-mapping in information theory enables us to move on and transcend those limits. Does this inclusive, transcendent quality of narrativity render narrative somehow qualitatively different, unique, and somehow superior in relation to other forms of discourse?
Here are a few questions to bear in mind when browsing Narrative Oversight:
1. What exactly makes up a narrative or story?
2. When does discourse become narrative?
3. How does narrative compare to other rhetorical forms like persuasion, description, exposition, analysis, evaluation, and criticism?
4. Can scientific theories be understood as narratives?
5. Are narrative truths different in kind or degree compared with other types of truths?
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Best wishes,
Robert Sandberg, Ph.D.
Managing Editor
January 2009
