British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary Conference
On Narrative Coherence
Professor Sir Neil MacCormick
School of Law, University of Edinburgh
Old College, South Bridge Edinburgh EH8 9YL
An abstract presented to the conference
‘Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary conference’
at the British Academy, London, on 14 December 2007
Biography
Neil MacCormick has been Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at Edinburgh University since 1972, and is currently also a Leverhulme Research Professor there. Honorary Doctor of Laws from Uppala, Sweden; the Saarland, Germany; Maccrata, Italy; Queen’s, Kingston, Ontario; Glasgow, Scotland; He is a foreign member of the Finnish Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy, a Member of the Academia Europaca, and an honorary QC. Author of many books and articles on legal and political theory, his most recent contributions are Institutions of Law (2007) and Rhetoric and the Rule of Law (2005), both from OUP. He served as a Member of the European Parliament for Scotland 1999-2004, and was an alternate member of the Convention of the Future of Europe 2002-3. He is currently a Special Adviser to the First Minister of Scotland.
Abstract
Our understanding of the continuum of events in the world as these are significant for us seems inevitably to have a narrative character. Events occur in a sequential way, connected causally or connected through the plans and purposes persons are pursuing. To understand what is going on is to have a story about it, one that makes sense in accordance with either or both of causality and rational motivation. But that is not enough for a true story. The coherence of the stories we tell about events is one condition for having justified belief in them. There are others. True stories have to have some anchoring point in reality, in a way that the most convincing and attractive of fictional stories do not, for all the coherence of the narratives they recount. Silver Blaze and Sherlock Holmes’s dog that did not bark in the night differ essentially from the story of the brides in the bath.
In this paper I shall:
- Consider the situation of narratives in some time frame;
- Discuss Paul Veyne’s concept of the ‘plot’ that unifies historical accounts
- Discuss what is meant by ‘coherence’ in the narrative context, using some legal examples
- Consider in what way and for what reason the coherence of a narrative makes convincing the conclusion it seeks to establish
- In this light, the principle of universal causation becomes relevant, and also that of rational motivation as a partial exception to causation.
- In this light, I shall reconsider the relationship between evidence and proof in law.
The argument will largely recapitulate points made in my Rhetoric and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) chapter 11.