Difficulty with theory

Today I am thinking about what an odd and difficult thing it is to translate content from one genre to another. As an easy example, suppose I give you a short story or a novel that is not overtly philosophical in its language or dialogue and then I ask you to spell out a metaphysical or ethical theory that is "behind" the narrative somehow, the metaphysical assumptions that underly the character's thoughts and actions.

Then of course, you must see the ambiguity in reconstructing the metaphysics of the character distinct from the metaphysics of the author. When you do tease out that theory somehow, whose is it after all?

And assuming you find a place to stand in that difficulty, at what point is one confident that the resulting theory in any way bore a "causal" relation to the events of the narrative? Was the character driven by such a structured theory? Perhaps in doing this theory construction we are really just taking what appear to be motivations and assumptions and creating something with the quality of logical coherence to help us pigeon-hole the actions of the character in question.

These seem to be troubling for all social sciences, most of philosophy, and even theology. For what is Gospel Theology generally but the translation of a narrative into a logical metaphysical/ethical framework.

But the natural sciences are perhaps not safe either. It is still curious to me that we can take a narrative (when we perform an experiment, we essentially tell a story of events... and the "events" are those portions that we discretize from experience to mark the progress of the narrative), and translate that into a theory. In this light the provisional status of all of science is highlighted. The natural world obeys no laws. Rather, we have a theoretical framework that we have put together from a set of defining narratives (experiments). There is no guarantee that those same defining narratives could not be discretized in another way (what are the "events" in question?), or that a large set of stories would not contradict the current theory. To me this, again, is an issue of genre.

In addition to the curiosity of translation from one genre to another (if you put The Raven in prose, what exactly is preserved??), there is the peculiarity of the ostensible human necessity of doing so. Our experiences are the story that we take from it, and then we create other stories which are the logical relations between stories. Theories are in some ways meta-narratives, stories of how our stories relate to one another. How do I understand this-person-now as being the same person as that-person-then? We seem to sacrifice much of the detail of the continuous narrative of experience in favor of a theoretical roadmap that changes the scale (think of drawing a map to your friend's house on a napkin in order to remember rather than committing to memory the entire visual narrative of the car trip there). We don't recall to mind then entire chronology of our interaction with another person; we say "Jack is my friend," or, "Jack is a bastard."

You may have guessed that I have progressed from the first paragraph above about translating a story into a theory to the question of translating our experiences into physical, historical, or philosophical theories. An analogy remains between theory and narrative, but what is the strength of that analogy? (think again of The Raven, what analogy holds between the prose and the poem?)

And when we "explain" something, we seem either to offer an immediate narrative of what happened, as in "How did the garbage wind up on the floor? Ah yes, the dog turned over the can," or to point to a family of narratives by analogy as in "Why does the dog continue to disturb the trash can? Ah, because his evolutionary heritage is that of a scavenger..." or something along those lines. In the latter story we "explain" the dog's drive to invade the trash can as a genetic proclivity, but this "genetic proclivity" is itself a name for a body of stories, in this case a combination of anthropomorphism (proclivities) and definitive scientific narratives in biology.

And where I am getting in this round about way is to suggest that theorizing is an altogether too privileged endeavor. Failing to recognize that theory is little more than an aid to memory (a road map to past narratives) has led to near worship of "rational explanation". If theory points to canonical experiences or narratives, then is it akin to pointing to an object labeled "this"?