Narrative: Agents Acting at a Distance

Abstract:Earlier fusings of cognitive science and narratology have highlighted mindreading (the theory of mind) as a key ability that is engaged while reading, viewing, or composing narratives. Mindreading helps us understand an agent's actions within a given scene or event. But something else is required to understand such actions across the span of a whole text, to track the connections among even non-consecutive events—the text's global coherence—that may have underspecified causes. I suggest that mental time travel into the past (episodic memory) and future (foresight) is the missing ingredient. If so, this has implications for both cognitive science and narratology. A text that requires mindreading but that does not evince global coherence, and hence does not require mental time travel, is like a disjointed dream sequence. A text that does evince global coherence, and so engages mental time travel, but that does not require proficient mindreading is a purely expository text. A text that is totally globally coherent and where all the events are explicable in terms of agents' actions will fully engage mindreading and mental time travel: a paradigmatic narrative, ubiquitous in popular genres like crime novels, sitcoms and superhero movies.