Hume, Pinker, Dramatica

theory
#1

I’m really gaining traction using the quads, writing from them, and it’s interesting to consider/reconsider :wink: why this works so well.

I’m reading Stephen Pinker’s Words and Rules, and was reminded of Hume’s point, so far unimproved on, that human beings connect ideas in 3, and only 3, ways:

1 Resemblance
2 Cause and effect
3 Contiguity

Resemblance, one thing looks like another thing, and how do we feel about that, is handled in narrative with recognitions, cases of mistaken identity and so on, stuff that goes as far back as the Greek playwrights.

Cause and effect, well, that’s our bread and butter, including in Dramatica. One damn thing leads to another, and Aphrodite (she’s beautiful but flighty, she doesn’t wear a nighty but she’s good enough for me) help you if you get in the way of the oncoming train. When Armando recommends deploying the z-pattern and thinking about well, what led to this, and what does this lead to, he’s talking about cause and effect.

Contiguity is what caught my attention this morning. This simply means, one thing gets placed near another thing, and over time we associate them because we get used to it. The argument is, words are symbols without inherent meaning. The sound ‘car’ could mean boy; it just doesn’t happen to in English, for reasons lost to history that have nothing to do with anything internal to the language. A dog making that dog noise we all know is called “bark” in English but “gong gong” in Indonesia and “boo boo” in Japan. The assignment of meaning to sound is conventional, historically contingent and arbitrary. Saussure in his founding of semiotics referred to this as the ‘arbitrary sign’.

This led me to think about working through a quad, an organization of kind of substructure. So first you have the substructure, the emotions it creates and our spontaneous associations, and rational calculations, that are our responses as writers.

It’s been somewhat mysterious to me why Dramatica works as well as it does. Yes, yes, our subconscious responds and so on, but I’m not much for hocus pocus or handwaving. I like to know what’s going on.

It occurred to me this morning that what’s going on is contiguity. We’re expressing story bits and associate them with these great symphonic undercurrents that underlie a story, as described by Dramatica, as if the story bits were riding a huge wave of music or a river (and I claim not to be much for hocus pocus.) Anyway, that’s what it feels like. It works because of contiguity and juxtaposition.

For example, one of my characters really likes to steal things and isn’t remotely apologetic about it and doesn’t drive within ten miles of Remorse County. And it occurred to me this is working in the story because of it’s juxtaposition near, and coloring by, the variations and elements it’s near. After all, what’s the relationship of a boat to a river? When we place stealing next to a variation that it’s not used to being near, but then justify it and rationalize it consciously through other means, we can get some very interesting fiction.

Some early thoughts, still mulling this through a bit.

Another thought - the contiguity principle is present in the PSR – juxtaposing the elements in a PSR quad to a variation on the through-line. You imbue something with theme by placing one thing near another thing. Sure, in a detective story the reader puts two and two together, or the author does it for them; but in other stories, isn’t it true that we just accept the proximity of two things because of the power of the author saying it’s so? Thinking of the thoughts on Propaganda in the Dramatica theory book here.

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#2

Let me also throw this out as a challenge.

Three only, Hume? Resemblance, Cause and Effect, Contiguity?

Is there a 4th kind of connection that mind makes between ideas, that would make the 4th element of a quad?

I have a thought but I am curious what others might come up with. Hint cause and effect are temporal.

#3

I’m still trying to work out how Resemblance and Contiguity are actually different. I mean basically they are both a function of compare. I frequently look for what’s missing. so maybe that?

#4

Hmm. This is always an interesting experiment, but I haven’t given it much thought. Here’s one mapping that might have some merit:

Resemblance => Induction (If these two items are similar in some ways, they’re probably similar in other ways.)
Cause & Effect => Deduction (If this happens, then that must happen.)
Contiguity => Production (If there’s a correlation between these two things, maybe there’s a causation?)
So the last part of the quad would be Reduction. This might be the “proof by non-black non-raven” method of creating ideas. Or it would be, “Once we eliminate the impossible, the improbable remains” theorycrafting.

#5

You can google up the trio, well known. See if this helps a bit, just the first stuff.

http://s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-documents.ri-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/9781138793934/A2/Hume/HumePsychology.pdf

#6

wow interesting analysis. let me think about this.

#7

Following your line of thinking…what about an Absence?

#8

It seems to me these are just the 4 domain’s view of the inequity.

If memory serves correct, Hume’s work largely reinforces skepticism about causality. So, empircism falls short of delivery on that accord even though we are happy with science as it stands today.

I think your best bet is to get really clear on how inequities or problems function in Dramatica.

An Inequity is an incongruity between expectation and occurrence.

As a philosopher, I can tell you all these old models are steps of conceptualizing what we now have today. Dramatica, in a way, stands on the shoulders of rationalists, empircists and Kant…but, also psychologists like Jung and Freud. The net result is a model of how we deal with incongruity from an objective point of view.

There are three other models as Melanie refers to them, but they are quite different in their approach and output. For example, the subjective approach to telling stories sheds light on incongruity from within each character’s negative capability.

I would go deep into Dramatica instead of matching it up with old models. It is kind of like learning all the old models of the atom and trying to do quantum mechanics. The history is great, but can be very confusing. Dramatica is a current model.

#9

Thank you! I’ve been trying to figure that out and track it down in the literature.

I’m not clear on what you mean by the other three models. What’s the first model, and what are the other three?

Thanks for the detailed thoughts, it sounds well advised.

#10

Oh, also — Dramatica it is the current model of what? The story mind, yeah, but that’s a unique innovation, right? You seem to be pointing at some prior model that it supersedes. I’m not a philosopher, but I did read Kuhn in my philosophy of science class way back when. So this is more of a paradigm shift? Or a Richard Rorty like change of the topic of conversation?

#11

Lit Theory. It is a form of Structualism. But, not the kind that says all stories are the same. The kind that recognizes patterns in story.

Gestault psychology was the precursor to Dramatica.

So, you could call it post-post-structuralism until the Lit Theory community cares enough to embrace it and give it a name.

Otherwise, we call it a type of Story Theory. Essentially, the analogy of a single human mind resolving a gestault. The same way a math proof is done. Math is beholden to Story the same way science is beholden to it.

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#12

The model was designed exactly in the manner you describe: Resemblance, Cause and effect, and Contiguity. Those adequately describe the techniques used by Male Mental Sex problem solving, which we also refer to (inaccurately) as “linear” problem-solving. We did this primarily because much of American culture, including the English language, constructs meaning through those three ideas (Resemblance, Cause and effect, and Contiguity), i.e. Male Mental Sex (linear) problem solving.

However, the Dramatica theory and its implementation ALSO account for a different mental OS: Female Mental Sex. In that way of thinking, the three ideas are less meaningful. Ideas like gravitation, spin, and acceleration (my imperfect attempt to describe exclusively Female Mental Sex equivalents) create meaning. Dramatica includes BOTH Male and Female Mental Sex concepts because they are part of human psychology, even though they are difficult to describe in a Male Mental Sex-based language and mindset.

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#13

The model was designed exactly in the manner you describe: Resemblance, Cause and effect, and Contiguity.

Thank you for this note. When I was listening to Pinker, some intuition twitched as those words went past me. Fascinating about the male language and the Female Mental Sex considerations.

I am not a philosopher, I can barely get it together to order Chinese food for takeout, but according to Pinker, who does cog-sci, this was pre-cog-sci developed by Hume as a theory of Associationism, the relationship between stimuli and behavior, eventually leading through Mill etc to Skinner and behavioral psychology.

Then he goes into a discussion of Chomsky/Halle and generative grammar as a set of rules and deep structure, which THEN leads to a discussion of connectionism - there are no rules, just simultaneous asynchronous connections between nodes in parallel, and news words and thoughts are generalized from old ones. For associationism it’s rules all the way down, for connectionism it’s memory all the way up. For anyone interested, this stuff is in Chapter 4, IN SINGLE COMBAT, in WORDS AND RULES by Stephen Pinker. I recommend the audible, it’s helping me grind through it, then. I go back and look at the book.

Anyway, I can’t wait to see how the novel–I mean book–ends. I’m reading through most of Pinker to try to get a grip on at least his take on cog-sci. I’m sure there are better ways to get more ‘serious’ about it but I don’t wanna. This is probably the best I can do.

#14

Perhaps the right way to express that is to note that different sorts of tools are used to create meaning, and that those tools tend to go together in groups. group 1 takes things and does stuff with them; group 2 is a thing that does stuff, like a particle or planet.

#15

I am pasting this into my main document right now. Thank you again for this. I’m rereading all the places it occurs in the theory book now that I bloody understand it.

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#16

FWIW, my idea for the fourth element was Dependence, a fourth way of linking ideas together, that one idea requires a prior idea that it descends from in order to be coherent as an idea at all. If cause and effect is horizontal and linear, inheritance or dependence is vertical.

#17

Was just reading Melanie’s STORY MIND UNPLUGGED, and the Jack Ryan example makes it, for me, intuitively obvious.

The ‘linear’ male thinking is very will driven. The act of thinking through a problem is like a muscle: the people who think that way do it naturally and they are at the center of the moves. I am not one of those people and it is fascinating to me to watch them. I can think that way for brief periods, it is very stressful and sometimes it actually hurts. It is always exhausting. It’s like you have a big guy standing in front of a pile of thought and pushing it, pushing it–he knows what he wants it to do and by golly he’s doing it.

I solve problems–and that is what I do for a living no matter what form that takes – by seeing the whole thing and then ‘feeling’ what’s missing. It’s how I’ve always been. I’m very good at it but it is impossible to explain to people and I sound like an idiot when I try. That means I have to rely on work for people who know me and who’ve seen results, because, for example, I can’t whiteboard in front of a bunch of people I don’t know. I’m not shy, not in the least: but I just stop thinking, and I can’t think in the way they want me to. I just created a whole department and completed a half million dollar project by saying, oh well, I’ve just seen this so many times, I know what’s missing, trust me. And they did and we succeeded.

So yeah, I get it. The holistic thinker works by…evacuating, vacating themselves from a spot and then watching that spot, that net, that absence, and feeling what makes it ripple, and then a thought ‘comes’ to them. I couldn’t will myself into most of my thoughts even if I wanted to. I don’t want to though–for me, a lot of the flavor of life is the pleasure and fascination of watching really good thoughts come, usually in cycles (meaning if I forget it, don’t worry, I’m in some kind of a space where it will come up again shortly because it’s emergent from a feeling matrix). there’s nobody pushing a pile of thought, they are trying to step back and get out the thought’s way so it can do its thing.

In fact emergent is the word I want – that’s connectionism in a nutshell, emergent properties from vast multiple distributed connections. Perhaps associationism and connectionism are simply technical descriptions of the male and female mind, as indicated in Dramatica theory.

Gee, Chris, among other things, thank you for giving me language and impetus to put this down in writing. I never have before. I recognize myself here in what I wrote. What a strange feeling, this has always been private and something I’ve hidden, even been a little ashamed of. It’s how I work, but it can be…hmm. Isolating? I have so much fun between my ears waiting for the next interesting thoughts.