“What brings you in today?” you ask after a new patient sits down in your office. The first order of business is a chronology of the present illness. Precisely when did the problem start? What was happening both at that moment and more generally in his/her life? Then the present illness prompts targeted questions about …
Hominin language has always been centrally engaged in the attempt to achieve a “running” consensus about which of a limited number of narratives corresponded to the chaotic events that were happening all around them.
Causal narratives seek to knit together disparate observations, facts, and events into a coherent and inclusive whole that convincingly links later events to prior events.