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Narrative Scaffolding

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Abstract

Mental capacities, philosophers of mind and cognition have recently argued, are not exclusively realised in brain, but depend upon the rest of the body and the local environment. In this context, the concept of ‘scaffolding’ has been employed to specify the relationship between embodied organisms and their local environment. The core idea is that at least some cognitive and affective capacities are causally dependent upon environmental resources. However, in-depth examinations of specific examples of scaffolding as test cases for current theorising about scaffolding have remained scarce. The aim of the current paper is to help close this gap. To this end, I will offer a characterisation of key aspects of ‘scaffolding’ that can help specify scaffolding relations. In a second step, I will analyse fictional textual narrative as a test case for accounts of cognitive and affective scaffolding. The key claim of this paper will be that fictional textual narrative can be considered as a scaffold that transforms our capacities in social understanding and empathising in the course of ontogeny.

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Notes

  1. In what follows, ‘textual narrative’ refers to a class of material scaffolds. When talking about ‘a textual narrative’ or ‘textual narratives’, I refer to particular members of this class.

  2. It should be noted that the concept of ‘scaffolding’ was first introduced in psychological research on the role of tutoring in children’s acquisition of problem-solving skills (Wood et al. 1976). In this case, the scaffolding relation consists in the guidance provided by a parent, teacher or knowledgeable peer (the scaffold) and a problem-solving capacity (the scaffolded). In this paper, I will focus on philosophical work on scaffolding. For a review of educational research on ‘scaffolding’, see Pea (2004).

  3. Another option would be that cognitive and affective scaffolding would not influence each other in any relevant sense, given that cognitive and affective processes would be clearly distinct. However, I will not explore this modularist option further, given that it is implausible in light of empirical findings and theoretical considerations (see, e.g., Pessoa 2015; Todd et al. 2020).

  4. As stated above, I am concerned with the representation of connected events, not with the nature of connected events themselves. As Goldie (2012) points out, we should clearly distinguish between “a sequence of events; and a narrative or story of the events” (p. 7). Accordingly, the considerations developed in this sub-section are aesthetic and narratological, not ontological. For this reason, they are independent from discussions on the ontological properties of events and their connections. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

  5. The notion of ‘transformation’ as it is used in this context is similar to Sterelny’s (2010) notion and refers to the ontogenetic development of cognitive capacities.

  6. An interesting test case for a transmedial narratological analysis of scaffolding relations would be audiobooks, which transpose the autoglottic space of a fictional textual narrative into a temporal sequence of vocalisations. Arguably, narrative discourse, story, and plot would be preserved in the transposition of a narrative text into an audiobook. However, we should expect to find differences between the identification and interpretation of visually detectable textual features and auditory cues (for a discussion, see Kuzmičová 2016). These differences, I assume, would influence the ways in which fictional textual and audiobook narratives could scaffold cognitive and affective capacities.

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Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Roy Dings and Jussi Saarinen for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank Sabrina Coninx, Maja Griem, Albert Newen, Alfredo Vernazzani, and Julia Wolf for their constructive feedback. My work on large parts of the paper was made possible by a postdoctoral position, funded by Ruhr University Bochum, within the Research Training Group Situated Cognition. I would like to thank the group members for their support. The revision of this paper was funded by an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (grant number DE210100115).

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    Regina E. Fabry

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Fabry, R.E. Narrative Scaffolding. Rev.Phil.Psych. 14, 1147–1167 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00595-w

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