Abstract

“The world is,” William James notes, “full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds”. As a radical empiricist, he takes there to be more to experience than any of our stories or other forms of account can ever capture. Here as everywhere else, “ever not quite” and “ever not yet” qualify even our master strokes. As a radical pluralist, accordingly, he takes these partial stories to be the best we can ever do. The plurality of narratives can never all be gathered into our hands and woven into a fully coherent metanarrative or even an all-inclusive story. Loose...