Every interdisciplinary theory is built from accurately cited sources arranged to produce a conceptual structure that exists in none of the individual sources. This paper identifies and analyzes this structural phenomenon — narrative emergence — and argues that it constitutes the unrecognized mechanism underlying all citation-based theoretical synthesis. We ground the concept in a foundational thesis drawn from Benjamin's montage method and White's metahistorical analysis (arrangement is a meaning-producing act), develop two propositions through analogical extension of Quine's underdetermination thesis and Longino's analysis of background assumptions, and establish a normative foundation through two complementary routes: Habermas's universal pragmatics and the constitutive norms of scholarly communication. The outcomes of narrative emergence range across a spectrum: from legitimate theoretical synthesis (when the narrative structure is disclosed as a choice and background assumptions are made explicit) to what we term narrative occlusion (when arrangement substitutes for argument while preserving its appearance). From this foundation we derive two transparency criteria, narrative-structure transparency and background-assumption transparency, which evaluate where a given instance of narrative emergence falls on this spectrum, and demonstrate their application through a hypothetical case of pure narrative emergence. Existing normative systems (copyright, defamation law, research integrity frameworks) operate exclusively at the level of individual citations and do not recognize narrative emergence as a phenomenon, leaving no tools for distinguishing legitimate synthesis from narrative occlusion. The framework is applied to its own construction: this paper is itself an instance of narrative emergence, and its position on the spectrum is subject to the same criteria it proposes.
Jun Gee Jung (Fri,) studied this question.