Towards Triangulating Epistemology of Narrative Experience

Stories people tell each other are fundamental constituents of shared cultures, such as oral traditions, texts, algorithms, and audiovisual artefacts. While there is a body of literature elaborating on how stories are shared, how these stories first emerge deep in an individual human mind is still largely an unexplored area. To suggest a way to access the preconscious roots of mediated experience, we introduce an epistemology that makes iterative cross-references between three different manifestations of mediated experience and in this manner contributes to the explanatory depth of each: 1) experience as it is self-indicated by first-person, 2) as it is mediated to second persons, and 3) how it is observable as psycho-physiological activity in all involved persons. We focus on narration as a universal sense-making function that organizes and articulates individual experience all the way to communicative and cultural manifestations of experience. Focused to experience of film narration in particular, we assume that each of the following methodologies gives access to one of the mentioned manifestations of experience: self-reported descriptions,, annotations of film narration, and neurophenomenology and its specific film-focused subdiscipline, neurocinematics. We maintain that no two out of these suffice to explain each other but a third is always needed for contextualized and holistic understanding. Theoretically, our approach is based on the conceptualization of mind as a fully integrated system, part and parcel with both its body and environment.