Cognition may require access to past events, for example to
understand undesirable outcomes or diagnose failures. When
cognition is distributed between multiple participants, a
particular representational challenge occurs because not all of
the participants may have directly experienced the focal
event. Language can transcend temporal and physical
limitations on event accessibility. We suggest that people
create complex linguistic constructs as tools to facilitate
retrospective cognition. We illustrate this process by
analyzing the use of a particular linguistic construct
(narrative) in the domain of clinical reasoning. Results
demonstrated that narratives support clinical cognition during
practitioner-patient interactions. Narratives extended access to
clinically relevant events providing information about
circumstances, subjective experiences, patient functioning,
and prior decisions. Whereas, the hermeneutic nature of
narrative allowed collaborative hypothesis testing and
creation of meaning. The use of narrative in clinical cognition
challenges Bruner’s (1991) distinction between narrative and
paradigmatic reasoning and enriches the understanding of
medical narratives.
