Canonical Narratives

There has been a little bit of disgruntled chatter about the decidedly philosophical turn the blog has taken. Humor me for a paragraph or two and then I'll get back to the dog in the next post.

So, continuing the thoughts of the last post, I am struck by how much common law, theology, and science have in common. In each case a system is produced by the continual interpretation and repositioning within a set of canonical narratives. For law the narratives are court cases, for theology they are scripture and the body of tradition, for science they are the published accounts of experiments. Just look at the dialogue occurring at the forefront of each discipline. Each is in the business of drawing together past narratives (or even past meta-narratives, in the case of theology especially) to tweak the modern understanding in some way... this is what citations are all about. Each discipline is self-consciously a tradition building on particular narratives and each wrestles with the continual difficulty of translating those narratives into a theory.