Coda

Martin Middeke

Christoph Reinfandt

pp. 255-260

in: Emily Rolfe Grosholz, Great circles, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Two great schemata dominate human discourse, the argument and the narrative; we might have been tempted to identify them separately with mathematics and poetry, but I hope I have persuaded you of the historicity of mathematics and the formal structure of poetry. In any case, deductive argument explains and supports a conclusion, by marshalling evidence in its favor; its purpose is to force us logically to accept a conclusion on the basis of accepted premises. It presents atemporal inferential relations among propositions. By contrast, a narrative tells a story, and takes us from the beginning, through the middle, to the end: a good narrative is both unified but complex, where the unexpected reversals and discoveries in the middle are by the end understood to flow from the conditions of the action. It presents relations among actions that are not only temporal, but historical, and relates them to the modal conditions of what was possible but not actualized. Aristotle in his Prior Analytics and in his Poetics introduces us to these two schemata for thought, and by his careful methodological taxonomy of human discourse counsels us not to confuse them.