Questions around the explanatory status of narratives
have recently resurfaced in various forms in discussions in the philosophy of
history and historiography (PHH) and several disciplines of the social sciences.
Two theoretical developments seem particularly noteworthy: Firstly, the push
towards postnarrativism in PHH and the discussions its theoretical innovations have
been creating (Kuukkkanen 2015; Roth 2016), and secondly a strengthening interest
in what has been called “the narrative construction of reality” in the social
sciences in the broadest sense construed (for an overview see Hyvärinen 2006). Postnarrativism
with its emphasis on colligatory concepts and epistemic values has broached the
topic of the potentially explanatory role of narrative again without fundamentally
leaving the theoretical terrain of classical narrativism and, other than its
name suggests, the discussion about the narrative construction of reality is
mostly a discussion about narrative as a more or less necessary form of
depiction of reality. Both discussions might come together in a fruitful manner
or both may even be grounded in what Arthur
Danto called the “descriptive metaphysics of historical existence” (Danto
1968: vii); in a philosophy able to express the link between fundamental
elements of our historical being and their depiction in the form of narrative.
The concept of “narrative explanation” (Danto 1968: 236) stands for this
philosophical project.
Danto, the original author of the term
narrative explanation, might in fact just be the right starting point when it
comes to matters concerning the philosophical substance of narrative. As much
as the term narrative explanation has in fact raised eyebrows and caused philosophical
wrinkles when it was first coined by Danto in the middle of the 1960s in the
midst of the discussions about the applicability of Hempel’s Covering-Law-Model
to historiography (Hempel 1942), today there is certainly some intuitive appeal
to it coming from both, quarters of the philosophy of science ranging from the
philosophy of biology to the philosophy of historiography and the social
sciences in general (Beatty/Carrera 2011; Roth 2016; Hyvärinen 2010). Narratives,
there is no doubt in any of the two fields of discussion just mentioned, are
employed in both ordinary discourse and various different sciences when it
comes to the description of change, process, and development, and they are, in
those fields at least, customarily also thought of as being explanatory of those phenomena.
Initially, Danto’s aim in his main publication
on the issue, Analytical Philosophy of
History (Danto 1968), was to “demonstrate an equivalence between
explanation as construed by Hempel, and narratives” (Danto 1995: 71), as he remarks
in reflections written exactly thirty years after the initial publication of
that book, but no such equivalence could generally be established and in the
years that followed the initial publication of his book Danto was among the
first to concede that much. It turned out that epistemologically as well as
ontologically narratives just could not be squared with the rigid premises
imposed by the Covering Law Model; neither could the complex form of argumentation
provided by narratives be assimilated to the strict and generalizing argument
form of deductive logic nor did a notion of causality based on the Humean idea
of constant conjunctions of events and a concomitant symmetry between
explanation and prediction prove to be any useful in dissecting the complex and
multi-layered causal chains found in the narratives of historians, and shortly
after the discussion about the application of the Covering Law Model to
historiography reached a dead end in the end of the 1960s the whole discursive terrain
underwent a significant transformation. Just think of the initial publication
of Hayden White’s Metahistory in 1973
(White 1974), neglecting with its emphasis on linguistic and stylistic concerns
in narrative construction any form of explanatory issue at hand. However, freed
from the strict limitations of the Hempelian model the question of the explanatory purview of narratives
remains acute. - Is there any such thing as genuinely narrative explanations,
including potentially historiographical narrative explanations?
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