No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Faith and Narrative:A Reading of The Franklin's Tale Edmond Wright The reason was, there was nothing there but faith. Faith made the whole, yes all they could see or hear Or touch or think, and arched its break of day Within them and around them every way. Edwin Muir, "Nothing There but Faith" (1960: 239) This paper has a twofold objective: to outline a philosophy of narrative1 and to show how it applies to Chaucer's The Franklin's Tale. Central to both will be an elucidation of the concept of faith which is essential to that story. The aim is to show that troth, Chaucer's "trouthe," is ethically prior to truth in the epistemological sense. 1. Human Communication A significant evolutionary change must have taken place when something learnt by one member of the human species could be transmitted to other members. Among the advanced apes transmission of information takes place by chance conditioning or by imitative behavior (such as a chimpanzee learning from others to extract termites from a nest with a wetted stick): if direct communication could take place, the rate of adaptive advantage for the group would be markedly increased. This points to a challenge to which language was to respond: one [End Page 19] ur -human discovers that it has a better understanding of something than another and is faced with the problem of communicating the hopeful improvement. What has to happen is that the singling that it has made from its sensory fields is somehow to be used to upgrade another's memory; that is, a revision of criteria must take place in the hearer, a kind of gestalt-switch. It may be that in philosophy it is best to "begin with the experience of art, which is not necessarily linguistic" but deals in metamorphosis(Ricoeur 1981: 120). 2. The Structure of a Story Let us turn to the patterns of the Joke and the Story to display the means by which this revision is done, for they both share the character of all narratives in producing the transformation of a well-embedded recognition. If philosophy is faced with "conundrums," as is so often unthinkingly said, it is perhaps wise to examine what a conundrum actually is. The central pattern common to jokes and stories can be seen in the following conundrum, a child's riddle: Where do policemen live? Letsby Avenue. (Ahlberg and Ahlberg 1982: 56) This example shows how sensory evidence, once interpreted, can be subjected to further interpretations. A joke has five basic elements (Suls 1972: 82-85): 1. a sensory region over which interpretations can be put in play ("Letsby Avenue"); 2. a first contextual memory-clue or clues to the intentional perspective which gives that first interpretation ("Where do policemen live?"); 3. the first interpretation of that region (the name of a road); 4. a second contextual memory-clue to the intentional perspective that gives the second interpretation (here it is "policemen"); 5. the second interpretation of that region (the phrase traditionally accorded to arresting policemen: "Let's be 'avin' you!"). Strictly speaking, the sensory region (1) should not be given in the spellings presented here; it should be heard. One is not told what interpretation is to be placed on the bare evidence of the sound, for that is precisely the problem: how to interpret evidence that does not [End Page 20] carry its interpretation with it. Any evidence provided by the senses is at base no more than a "natural sign" in H. P. Grice's (1957) sense, the equivalent of a dark cloud that we take as a sign of rain but that does not of itself impart the knowledge that rain is imminent. A key point to note in the Policemen joke is as follows: the two interpretations completely change the boundaries of what is to constitute an entity - in "Letsby Avenue" there are two entities selected from the sensory continuum; in "Let's be 'avin' you!" there are five (two of which, "Let" and "us," are joined by the elision of the "u"). There is a particular significance here for the theory of knowledge: two persons engaged in communication may...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.