Stories Are Still Not Lived but Told

Abstract

In Adrian Currie and Daniel Swaim’s “minimal realism”, the stories we tell about the world can grasp better or worse certain patterns that exist independently of us in the world. Accordingly, from their perspective, disagreements about these stories could at least sometimes be solved by empirical means – by “looking at the world”. In this paper, I offer some reasons why a Minkean narrativist would not be moved by Currie and Swaim’s “minimal realism”, at least when it comes to human history. In short, the Minkean narrativist sees no compelling reasons to assume that the beginnings, middles, and endings of the stories we tell about the world correspond to beginnings, middles, and endings that are inherent in the phenomena themselves. These are not properties of events, but parts of the narrative structure through which we understand certain entities or processes in the world.