E. L. Doctorow has a new collection of essays (Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006). I was particularly taken with his introduction, in which he ponders the process of story-telling:

“Underlying everything—the evocative flashes, the dogged working of  language—is the writer's belief in the story as a system of knowledge. This belief is akin to the scientist’s faith in the scientific method as a  way to truth….Stories, whether written as novels or scripted as plays, are revelatory structures of facts. They connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. They distribute the suffering so that it can be borne. To the skeptic who would not consider the story a reputable means of knowledge, the writer could point out that there was a time when there would have been nothing but stories, and no sharper distinction between what was fact and what was invented than between what was spoken and what was sung. Religion, science, simple urgent communication, and poetry were fused in the intense perception of a metaphor. Stories were the first repositories of human knowledge. They were as important to survival as a spear or a hoe. The storyteller practices the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies of modern intelligence.”

I hope to eventually develop the physical basis for narrative structure, as necessarily crystallizing in any species that exists within asymmetrical time (i.e., time with an arrow—i.e, history). From there I would propose considering scientific method as an ideal (reductionistically resolving matters to a single variable) and conclude that this ideal cannot be met except where time is, in fact, symmetrical—i.e., at the level of quantized time, where the problem is that the whole enterprise gets obliterated by uncertainty.

The short form of my musings is comes down to this: Both science and story-telling try to pose questions of and to nature in such a way as to expect reasonable answers. Much of “doing science” is about how the questions are framed, but…how is the line of questioning chosen in the first place? And what constitutes a “reasonable” answer?

Of course, regarding the latter point, science usually equates repeatability with reasonableness. Still, I suggest that some reasonable answers end up being much more reasonable than others, simply because they fit into an already (at least partially) understandable conceptual framework. This is, it seems to me, exactly how the questions themselves must be chosen. But, then, another word for “conceptual framework” is “narrative”.

My further musings arrive at the same conclusion by a more technical route, one about the methodology itself. The upshot is that, since nature does not, within history, ever resolve matters to a single variable comprehensible to humans (which is to say, nature is not a reductionist), the best science can hope for is to obtain answers on a scale understandable and reasonable to humans (and, here, I am not just talking about the audience of some scientist, but also to the scientist him- or herself!). But, again, this implies a narrative structure, yes?