Even with more clarity now about the type of explanation (one that involves an underlying nomic constraint), which likely is what the felt need for an explanation points to when it comes to interesting coincidences, it still very much looks as if an essential ingredient is missing. In our guiding example, the story of the death of Damocles, this came into play via two interconnected features: that there is an event (the stopping of the clock) which can be understood as metaphorically expressing another (the death); and that there is someone, another character, who observes that event and grasps the metaphorical meaning (interprets it as metaphorical). We have also noticed a certain fuzziness about precisely these two features when we looked into the analogy alongside which we developed the guiding example: between all this happening in a novel (which you, the author, hypothetically write) and a similar real-world story (some of which, in fact, occasionally happened and were reported about, if somewhat loosely and anecdotally).
Unfortunately, conceptual domains such as “metaphorical significance” and “subjective understanding” are different, more opaque, and arguably less well understood (even today) than those we’ve been dealing with so far, i.e. those of causality, laws, and explanation. We’re into yet less reliably charted territory with narrative technique and its theory (in whose terms I have couched the analogy). I’m going to assume (though I won’t argue for it here) that these more obscure domains aren’t simply reducible to the logic of physical explanation. Still, domains of discourse can carry ontological commitments, and we don’t want to prematurely populate our metaphysics with all sorts of speculative entities either (that would be the pitfall on the other side of reductionism). We’ve got to tread very carefully, then.
9. So, does it need explanation (or should an explanation include) the fact that there is someone, in our scenario, who becomes aware of the events (the death and the clock stopping) and their metaphorical interrelations? Is there, in other words, a psychological factor (awareness or consciousness), along with a kind of conceptually, linguistically, or culturally shared metaphorical structure involved?
The latter seems necessary, but not sufficient. Remember the first, very simple variations we discussed in the beginning: if you, as the author, would simply and factually mention the death (“On Saturday evening, Damocles died in his hospital bed.”), we’d not yet have an interesting phenomenon. But that remains the case if you’d just made the statement metaphorical (“It was on Saturday evening when, still in his hospital bed, the clock ran out for Damocles.”). Only when the metaphorical significance is expressed in another plot event, if it happens, that is, in the outer world (of the novel), do we get an interesting coincidence. It’s not just the metaphorical understanding as such, written into the text: it’s its appearance in the form of an event.
The psychological factor, in contrast, seems not necessary at first glance — at least not on both sides of the analogy. After all, one of the early variations (on the novel side) presented the metaphorical relationship without involving any additional characters at all, purely from the narrator’s “view from nowhere”. It was only in the real world stories that we found there had to be someone else involved who observed and interpreted the events and their metaphorical relationship (for otherwise, there’d not have been a story).
But remember that we’ve repeatedly seen (both when discussing the imperfections of the analogy and later when comparing the analogues under counterfactual probing) that the narrative description (in terms of authors, readers, and characters) and the psychological description (in terms of observers and interpreters) colluded in making the analogy somehow closer than it looked at first. For instance, although in the real-world cases there is no author who can simply make up events, there is an observer who selects events (among those which actually happened) and tells others about them. Both result, in slightly varying ways, in the same: a set of events, metaphorical relations between some of them, and someone who recognizes and interprets them (i.e. someone for whom the metaphorical significance is apparent).
Something similar might hold with respect to that early variation, too: although there is no character from the novel involved in bringing out the metaphorical connection between the events (it’s brought out only by the narrator), there is still a psychological element, a subjective uptake here, though it belongs to the awareness in the reader. (It’s not an in-story psychology, but a psychology of the reception of the story; yet in a sense, they’re both psychological, or subjective, perspectives that involve a metaphorical understanding of those same events.) This kind of fusion (or fuzziness) needs further sorting-out, of course. But it seems to indicate that a psychological factor, even if not strictly necessary, cannot be entirely disregarded whenever we have a phenomenon of interesting coincidences. There must be a conscious psychological uptake of a metaphorical connection between (at least) two events, even though the precise way in which these components play together might take slightly varying forms. And it seems that, in the type of explanation that figures in the felt need (whose phenomenology we’re still looking into), these essential components work together to form (or point to) something like a local nomic constraint. I’m going to work under the hypothesis, in other words, that the phenomenon that interests us can be explained only with a combination of elements from a theory of metaphor, psychology of the individual, and what we’ve found so far in our reflections on underlying nomic constraints.
If that is the case, then the lawlike necessity that interests us won’t be coming from a physical law. We’ve already seen that it’s not that of causal laws, which was excluded by a reflection on logical form: when there was another event bringing the phenomenon about, we’d no longer have a case of our phenomenon. That leaves nomic constraints. However, if our phenomenon could be explained by physical nomic constraints (as in all the examples we’ve looked at so far, such as the relativistic speed boundary, the second law of thermodynamics, the Heisenberg uncertainty relation, and the conservation of momentum in an isolated Newtonian system), we should be able to formulate an explanation in purely physical terms. But if metaphorical relationships and psychological uptake of them come in necessarily, that evidently won’t be possible. (Given the assumption that these are irreducible.) We’ll have to look for nomic constraints that appear in explanations formulated under those terms, then, involving a necessity of a different kind than physical necessity, too. (It would still be necessity, that is, expressible in terms of stability under counterfactual reasoning.)
