The telling moment: narrative as a discursive act

As a work of interdisciplinary dialogue, Mary Jean Walker (2012) successfully straddles the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science, and social psychology in addressing key questions on the role, value, and truth claims of narrative as a mode of self-understanding. However, in the context of neuroethical debate her article raises a set of parallel conceptual and epistemological concerns that confuse and conflate what it is to tell stories. I suggest that Walker’s perspective is philosophically limited in that she does not explicitly acknowledge narrative as a discursive activity. In this, Walker is not alone—the neurosciences and cognitive sciences frequently make assumptions about what narrative is and what it is not. This is significant because a theory of narrative that is blind to narrative as a discursive activity risks diminishing important social contexts involved in the construction of human self-understanding and truth.