Shaun I found this talk fascinating! I just love Trevarthan's idea that one can identify 'propositional sequences' in postural modifications, modulated by emotion. I want to have a go at defending "problematic pan-narrativism". You argue against this because, you claim, it entails that everything we do is narrative. You see this as an empty claim, citing the example of a 'making a coffee narrative' as an obvious reductio of it. First of all, I hope that your Italian audience had something to say about this example, speaking as a Melburnian whose cafe culture was transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by beverage artists from the Appenine peninsula! But secondly - and more seriously - I would urge that the claim is not empty if it pertains to everything that we do, because not every movement that we make is something that we do. And what distinguishes what we do from mere bodily movements? If we understand all action as in some sense the continuation and intelligent modification of habits which stretch back to the organism's earliest development, why not say that what distinguishes the doing is the organism performing it as an intelligible act within the context of their own long-running habitual 'story'?
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Shaun I found this talk fascinating! I just love Trevarthan's idea that one can identify 'propositional sequences' in postural modifications, modulated by emotion.
I want to have a go at defending "problematic pan-narrativism". You argue against this because, you claim, it entails that everything we do is narrative. You see this as an empty claim, citing the example of a 'making a coffee narrative' as an obvious reductio of it. First of all, I hope that your Italian audience had something to say about this example, speaking as a Melburnian whose cafe culture was transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by beverage artists from the Appenine peninsula! But secondly - and more seriously - I would urge that the claim is not empty if it pertains to everything that we do, because not every movement that we make is something that we do. And what distinguishes what we do from mere bodily movements? If we understand all action as in some sense the continuation and intelligent modification of habits which stretch back to the organism's earliest development, why not say that what distinguishes the doing is the organism performing it as an intelligible act within the context of their own long-running habitual 'story'?