History and Theory 47 (February 2008), 19-30

Wesleyan University 2008 ISSN: 0018-2656

Forum:
Historical Explanation
1.
NARRATIVE EXPLANATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS
David Carr
ABSTRACT

In this paper I look at narrative as a mode of explanation and at various ways in which
the explanatory value of narrative has been criticized. I begin with the roots of narrative
explanation in everyday action, experience, and discourse, illustrating it with the help of a
simple example. I try to show how narrative explanation is transformed and complicated
by circumstances that take us beyond the everyday into such realms as jurisprudence,
journalism, and history. I give an account of why narrative explanation normally satisfies
us, and how or in what sense it actually explains. Then I consider how narrative is challenged and rejected as a mode of explanation in many scientific and other contexts and
why attempts are made to replace it with something else. I try to evaluate the nature and
sources of these challenges, and I describe this controversy over narrative against the historical background of its emergence. My paper ends with a pragmatic defense of narrative
explanation against these challenges.

Narrative became a hot topic sometime in the late 1960s, and it has been examined from many perspectives since then. Its role as a literary genre has been
central, of course, where it was long discussed by literary theorists, and then subjected to the careful analysis of the structuralists. It has been seen as a universal
form of human expression found in folk tales, novels, films, plays, paintings, and
comic strips; its ubiquity and transcultural character led to attempts to found a
new discipline called narratology, which would seek out and articulate what was
common to all these manifestations. While the concept turned up fitfully in early,
that is, postwar, analytical philosophy of history, it was closely tied to standard
causal explanation. Through all this the idea of a distinctively narrative form of
explanation was largely unexplored. Do narratives explain, and if so how? Does
narrative explanation differ from other forms of explanation, and if so how? This
paper is an attempt to answer some of these questions.
Let us begin with an example. Suppose that on a busy city street we see a
young man carrying a large potted plant that almost obscures his view, running
so fast that he risks colliding with other pedestrians, and shouting the name of a
woman in a very loud voice. When someone like this attracts our attention, his
action puzzles us. We want to know why hes behaving in this strange way. We
seek an explanation.
We learn that he has returned home to find a note from his girlfriend with whom
he shared his apartment, but with whom he had been quarreling; indeed she had

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decided to leave him and move out, and in fact had removed her belongings and
is gone. The man was shaken and distraught. Then he noticed that she left behind
her favorite plant, and learned from a neighbor that she had left only a few minutes
ago and is walking in the direction of a friends apartment. Seizing on the plant as
a pretext to find her and beg her to return, he picks it up and runs into the street,
hoping to catch up with her.
Most of us would be satisfied with this account as an explanation of the mans
action. We might ask for more details, but we dont really need them. Our perplexity goes away; our question has been answered. We now know why he did
what he did.
What we have given is a typical narrative account. We have explained an action by telling a story about it. The narrative has all the standard elements of a
good story: it has a central subject or protagonist. It has a beginning: we need
not go any further back than his return to the empty apartment, though it helps to
learn that the two had been quarreling before that. That sets the scene. The story
has a middle, in which our hero reacts emotionally to the opening scene, assesses
the situation with the help of some new information (that she had just left), and
decides to take action. What he does then, running with the plant through the
street and shouting his girlfriends name, is where we came in, as it were. There
is an element of suspense here: will he succeed? And the story has an end, even
though we dont yet know exactly what it will be. Hell catch up with her or he
wont. If he does, hell be successful in winning her back, or he wont. But this
range of alternatives, even though we dont know which of them will occur, is
determined by the story so far. They belong to the story.
One thing to be noted about this explanation is that it is probably the same one
that the man himself would give for his own action. Though we could have gotten
this explanation from someone else, we could also have gotten it from him, if we
had occasion to ask. This rather obvious fact suggests that the narrative mode is
very close in form to the structure of action itself, from the agents point of view.
An action emerges from the agents awareness of a situation, a desire to reach a
certain goal, and the choice of means to achieve it. In this case the agent is describing the situation as he perceived it, his reaction in forming the plan to catch
up with and plead with his girlfriend, and his decision to pick up the plant and
rush into the street to carry out his plan. All of these elements are part of the action, whether or not the man tells anyone about it. So its not the case that the action receives its structure from the story thats told later about it. Whether he tells
the story, or I tell it about him on the basis of information received elsewhere,
the action is there beforehand and the story neatly corresponds to and recounts
or renders the action in explicitly narrative form. The story seems to borrow its
form from the very action it is about. It may be objected that people often act
impulsively and only afterward give structure to their action by telling a story
that reconstructs the reasons for the action in retrospect. This may be true in some
cases, but certainly not all. And even when it is true, it does not follow that the reconstruction is somehow incorrect or disingenuous. Again, it may sometimes be
so, but to argue that it is always so would require a theory of motives that would
have to be justified on terms that take us far beyond ordinary discourse.

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21

A second thing that stands out about this explanation is that it is perfectly in
line with everyday discourse and common sense. These are slippery terms, but
I mean by them to say that the explanation reflects the way we talk about our
own actions and those of others as we deal in the ordinary way with the world
around us. For most purposes, such an account of an action would be accepted at
face value and we would not be inclined to inquire further. Of course, questions
might arise about whether the man was telling the truth, especially if his story
conflicted with another storysay, his girlfriends storyof the same events.
Here we would indeed have a legitimate reason to question the agents narrative
account of his own action. If it became important for some reason to settle the
discrepancy, we might have to call in other witnesses and ask for their accounts
of the same action.
This could take us from the everyday into the world of legal or juridical institutions, where someonea judge or jurywould have to decide which account of
the action to believe. A journalist might have similar concerns, wanting to reconstruct what really happened out of the varying accounts of the original events.
Historians, too, often see their task as reconstruction of the past along these lines.
Here the value of hindsight is that from its perspective it can reveal elements that
augment the original story. Those looking back can assess the importance of unintended consequences ranging far beyond the perspectives and aims of the original
participants. The actions of political leaders during the Cold War, for example,
look very different to us after its conclusion than they did to agents, participants,
and observers while it was going on. The assassin of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, or Martin Luther in 1519, would have recounted their actions in
terms very different from the ones we now use to tell the story of what they did,
knowing as we do the vast consequences of their actions.
But even if we leave the original story behind, or place it alongside other stories,
in search of the truth about the action in question, we have not departed from the
kind of account we started with: a story that recounts the action by starting from
its meaning for those involved: its initiation in a perceived set of circumstances,
its execution according to plan and means, and its arrival at its conclusion. Even
in the juridical, journalistic, and historical contexts, this kind of account is usually
judged perfectly adequate. It ends an inquiry that began with a puzzle or an anomaly, an event we can describe (a man running wildly through the street, a generals
withdrawal of his troops just when they have an advantage, a risky political tactic)
but which initially doesnt make sense to us. In keeping with this description, we
can say what happened, but we want to know why. The story answers the question
and provides us with the sense we need, often in such a way that the original act is
re-described in a manner derived from the larger story in which it is now embedded. As a result of an investigation into discrepancies and inconsistencies, we may
end with a story that is different from the one we started with, but its still a story,
in the sense that it has all the standard features we described above.
Two important questions arise out of the account so far: why is a narrative account generally satisfying? And how does it explain?
We might say that the narrative explanation is satisfying precisely because it
never strays far from ordinary discourse. The content of the story may in the end
depart considerably in content from that of the surface-story we began withsay,

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the agents own accountbut its proximity in form and style to our day-to-day
dealing in human situations lends it an air of familiarity that we may find comforting. Familiarity is reassuring, especially when contrasted with the prospect of
veering into the hidden and the arcane. The familiarity of the narrative context
also opens up immediately recognizable strategies for dealing with the situation,
if indeed we are called on to intervene. In other words, the kind of understanding we achieve through telling a story is also the kind that can lead, if need be,
to action.
The familiarity of the context of narrative helps answer our second question:
how does narrative explain? If we start from a puzzling action, as we did in our
example, the story we tell places that action in a temporal continuum, relating it
to previous actions and events that led up to it; and it places the action also in
relation to a future scenario or set of possible futures. The original action was
puzzling in part because we didnt have its temporal contextwe didnt know,
literally, where the young man was coming from and we didnt know where he
was going. The story doesnt have the character of a mere chronicle, however; it
selects the relevant and leaves out the irrelevant, and it does this, I would say, by
appealing to the familiar. A lovers quarrel, a feeling of distress and a desire to
remedy an emotionally fraught situation, even an impulsive action like running
into the street: these are all feelings, actions, and situations we can recognize
right off, and our narrative performs the function of placing the puzzling action
not only in a temporal context but also within a familiar repertoire of actions,
emotions, and motives. These are things weve seen before, and we illuminate the
unfamiliar by relating it to the familiar. No doubt some version of the so-called
covering law enters in here, since we tacitly appeal in part to general tendencies
and patterns, repeatable instances of the way people are and the ways they act.
Causality, however, with which the early covering-law theorists tried to link
the elements of a narrative, is totally out of place here. A perceived situation, an
emotional reaction, taking on a goal and initiating a plan for reaching itthese do
not cause the action but serve to motivate it. Whats the difference? Its not just
that the laws in question are so tenuous and of such limited application, or that
we could never deduce the action from their conjunction with the antecedents,
as Hempels early critics pointed out. Its that the causal account leaves out a
conscious agent whose relation to the antecedent situation is at least a subjective
and practical, if not a deliberative, one. Consciousness and at least some degree
of reflection are elements of the initiation of the action.
These are some of the elements, then, of how narratives explain and why for
the most part they satisfy us.
But its another matter if we leave the context of the everyday and enter the
domain of the scientific. In one way or another, any account of an action that
aspires to scientific status will likely not be satisfied with such a narrative
explanation. The term scientific is itself very broad, of course, as we shall
see, but a common element of most approaches that bear this name is precisely
their departure from common sense or ordinary discourse. It is the vocation of
science, historically and culturally, to go beyond the surface of things, to penetrate behind what Wilfred Sellars called the manifest image of the world, to

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23

cast off appearance and arrive at reality. Modern physical science serves as the
paradigm: according to most accounts, it began when the common sense explanations inherited from Aristotle were rejected. Copernicus overturned our everyday
observations of the heavens, and physics has never looked back, taking us ever
further from common sense.
Those bent on establishing a science of human action claim that as soon as
our search for knowledge of this sort of event gets serious, narrative explanation is simply not satisfying. Storytelling, after all, does not seem intellectually
respectable, much less scientific. It leaves too many questions open. Given the
initial situation, for example, why did the man react in the way he did, rather
than some other way? Does the narrative provide sufficient conditions for the
action in question, or even necessary ones? There are too many possible why
questions left unanswered, questions that would have to be answered by adopting a different approach. Further, the narrative explanation seems to require that
we depart from observation and engage in some dubious speculation, such as
attributing thoughts, motives, and intentions to the agent. Science, by contrast,
supposedly requires that we stick to what we can derive from observable events.
The same patterns of inquiry that have been so successful in dealing with other
observable phenomena should work for these human events too. They are, after
all, just part of the observable world. This world obeys laws that are everywhere
the same. Motives and intentions are ruled out; they dont belong in physical or
biological accounts.
Here we are getting at the origins of a very old and familiar debate, and I want
to relate this discussion of narrative to its antecedents in the history of reflection
on explanation. The early positivists wanted to find in human events the same
relation between observations and laws found in non-human events. The emerging idea of social science proposed to find in the human world the laws that
governed its behavior in the same way that physical laws governed the behavior
of inanimate objects. From the nineteenth century down to Hempels coveringlaw model of the 1940s, hopes and demands were high for a genuinely scientific
approach to human behavior and for a convergence of all sciences around a single
model of explanation.
Those unconvinced by this development allowed the term explanation to
be co-opted by the reductionists and contrasted it with what they called understanding. The point was not to explain but to understand an action, and attempts
were made to describe the process of understanding in terms of a method that
had its own rigor and even scientific character. It was here, beginning with the
work of Dilthey and the neo-Kantians, that the idea of the Geisteswissenschaften
was born; in this way, though they relinquished the goal of explanation, they still
wanted to be scientific in their own way. But the point was to understand the action from the agents point of view, and this meant discerning by empathy and
analogy what was going on in the agents mind. Language had to be interpreted,
which brought the notion of hermeneutics into play. To what extent was the interpretation of language, whether in texts or in the statements of individuals about
their actions, capable of following a clearly defined method? The battle between
the models of Erklren and of Verstehen continued unabated into the twentieth
century and reproduced itself in debates among philosophers of social science

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and philosophers of history. (Interestingly, the advocates of Verstehen did not

initially employ the concept of narrative, which entered the scene somewhat later.
We shall return to this point in a moment.)
The mid-twentieth-century unity-of-science movement, to which Hempel belonged, was only one manifestation of these debates. At the time it was linked
to a behaviorist psychology that was at odds with other models, such as the
psychoanalytic, which also claimed the dignity of scientific status. For the psychoanalytically inclined too, our straightforward narrative account was deemed
insufficient; a scientific explanation has to penetrate beyond the surface of things,
in this case by dealing in unconscious motives. For example, why did the girlfriend leave the plant behind? Was this not an unconscious message that her departure was not a complete break and that the outcome was still negotiable? Did
the man not unconsciously realize this when he took the plant as his pretext for
chasing after her? To this behaviorists would object that such explanations do not
leave the language of motives, reasons, and narrative behind, but just replace the
common sense story with a farfetched second-level story based on speculatively
constructed unconscious reasons and motives.
Nowadays, of course, both the behaviorist and the psychoanalytic approaches
have long since largely gone out of fashion, and any scientific explanation worthy of the name would have to employ neurological concepts. Once again the
common-sense level of discourse, where we find narrative explanations, would
be replaced by sophisticated accounts centered on the brain and nervous system.
Neurobiology and cognitive psychology would provide the conceptual repertoire,
rounded out in the end by concepts derived from evolutionary biology as the matrix for all explanation of behavior. Common-sense accounts, including narrative
explanations, have meanwhile been provided, from this perspective, with a new
name: folk psychology, they are called, on the analogy of folk medicine, which
has long since been superseded by scientific medicine. Common-sense discourse
about human behavior is thus seen as a kind of aspiring but deficient explanatory endeavor, trying hard but failing to do what real science is now presumably
ableor soon will be ableto do, namely to explain, predict, and control human
behavior. Neurophysiological explanations are at least conceivable even if they
are not immediately available. But the distance between these and evolutionary
explanations is still so great that the whole enterprise has the character of a promissory note pending a great deal of future research. It is not clear in any case how
an evolutionary account could ever get beyond the explanation of general traits or
dispositions and descend to the level of particular motivations and reasons.
On the other side of the debate, the concept of narrative started being taken
seriously in the 1960s as a supplement, or even as an alternative, to such notions as Verstehen, empathy, and hermeneutics. One reason for this is that these
concepts are too much centered on individual actions and the reasons given for
acting. Even interpretation, at least in its pre-Gadamerian sense, seems to focus
on recapturing an act of thought that lies behind and gives meaning to a linguistic
expression. The idea of telling a story about what people do seems broader and
richer in its scope than that of simply understanding their actions by means of
their intentions, though it may involve this too. A story seems capable of encom-

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25

passing multiple actions and events, as well as longer-term actions, sub-actions,

and reactions to events; it calls attention to the narrators retrospective point of
view, introducing the ironic element of viewing actions in relation to their unintended as well as their intended consequences; and it appeals to a logic of the
flow of actions through time, a structure of events that gives them a distinctive
form. These features make it seem especially appropriate for history, which is
interested in individual actions but only as they fit into larger patterns of events
that range far beyond particular persons and particular events. Thus many historians and philosophers of history, who had reacted negatively to Hempels
covering-law approach to history because it seemed to be so at variance with the
way historians actually think and write, embraced the concept of narrative as the
key to historical knowledge.
To be sure, the emphasis on narrative in history was opposed by another current within the discipline, the turn to social and economic explanation that started
with the Annales school in France and soon spread far and wide in the historical
profession. This development was directed against the focus on individuals and
their actions in traditional political history, whose accounts had typically been
presented in narrative form. Again, the move away from storytelling was represented as making history more scientific and less literary. But there was more to it
than that. Underlying the work of Fernand Braudel in his The Mediterranean and
the Mediterranean World, usually considered the outstanding and characteristic
work of this school, is not just an epistemological but also a metaphysical view
of history. His well-known extended metaphor, drawn from the sea itself, places
traditional history at the level of surface agitations, the brief, rapid, nervous
oscillations of histoire vnementielle. These are the events that individuals have
felt, described, lived according to the rhythm of their lives, brief as our own.
But this level is moved, unbeknown to these individuals, by the deeper-lying and
slower-moving currents of social history, those of peoples and groups and their
economic and cultural forces. This second level, however, presupposes a third,
even deeper and almost immobile history of the relations of humans with their
environment, the geographical time of climate, sea, soil, and agriculture.
Here we can say not that men make history, but that history makes men and
fashions their destiny. This is the longue dure, the anonymous, profound,
and often silent domain that covertly determines everything above it. This view
is metaphysical in the sense that it is an expression of what history essentially is,
of what has ontological priority and what is secondary and derived.
This metaphysics of history has its epistemological consequences, of course,
and they lead inevitably to the measurable, the countable, and the statistical. Thus
history for Braudel is one of the social sciences whose method is increasingly that
of mathematical models. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, another Annales historian,
. On this account the explanation of individual actions retains a crucial role in historical narratives, as Karsten Stueber argues in Reasons, Generalizations, Empathy, and Naratives: The
Epistemic Structure of Action Explanation, his contribution to this Forum (History and Theory 47
[February 2008], 31-43).
. These passages are from Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur lhistoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), 11f.
. Ibid., 21.
. Ibid., 61.

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is well known for stating that history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to
be scientific. But some historians, French and British, who have followed the
lead of the Annales school, have developed a more modest view of what is to be
gained by the quantitative approach. Franois Furet, in a now-classic study from
1975, describes the move from narrative history to what he calls the problemoriented history of demographics and statistics. He thinks that history has undoubtedly gained by opening up new topics and new methods, but he doubts that
history has in the process become more scientific. It is incorrect to believe, he
writes, that the passage from narrative history to problem-oriented history . . .
suffices to enter ipso facto into the scientific domain of the demonstrable. Nor
will narrative history ever be supplanted. But it will, he thinks, be enriched and
improved by the new developments.
Lawrence Stone, the British historian who had himself contributed to the rise
of social history, is in the end more skeptical than Furet. In a well-known 1979
paper, though he praises the work of the major social historians like Braudel, he
thinks that the findings of much quantitative history are a smokescreen meant to
bedazzle their audience, often expressed in so mathematically recondite a form
that they are unintelligible to the majority of the historical profession. The focus
was on population, birth and death records, food supply, prices and other such
quantifiable items, to the neglect of the values, customs, culture, and actions of
groups and individuals. Moreover, the sources that provide data to the mathematically inclined historians are often sketchy and unreliable. Stone concludes that
quantification has not fulfilled the high hopes of twenty years ago. Economic
and demographic determinism has collapsed in the face of the evidence, he
writes, and finds much evidence for a return to narrative in the historical profession at large. Like Furet, he values the better contributions of quantitative history,
but rejects the scientistic pretensions often advanced by their authors. In the end,
the whole dispute seems to have been downgraded to a difference in emphasis.
When we think of narrative as it has functioned in history, how close are we
to the idea of common-sense narrative explanation with which we began? On
the whole those who have championed narrative have been reluctant to think of
it as a form of explanation, continuing in the practice of reserving that term for
causal accounts. Understanding still seems the preferred term, even though it
has clearly been extended beyond its original association with ideas of empathy
and interpretation.
One of the interesting features of the turn to narrative, however, at least in
relation to history, is that it soon intersected with the theory of literature, where
narrative had long been a topic of interest. In the process, its significance as a
mode of explanation or understanding changed considerably. Hayden White was
a key figure here, of course. In keeping with structuralist theories of narrative,
. Quoted in Lawrence Stone, Reflections on a New and Old History, in The Narrative and
History Reader, ed. G. Roberts (London: Routledge, 2001), 283.
. Franois Furet, From Narrative History to Problem-Oriented History, in Roberts, ed., The
Narrative and History Reader, 279.
. Stone, in Roberts, ed., The Narrative and History Reader, 283.
. Ibid., 288.
. Ibid. 293.

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27

storytelling was associated primarily with creative fiction, and the emphasis was
on the patterns and conventions of constructing narratives, not only in novels but
also in films, theater, and even comic strips. White is primarily a philosopher of
history, but he sees historical writing as a literary artifact. The link to common-sense discourse is severed, or at least neglected, and the difference between
narrative and the everyday world becomes more important than what they have
in common. From Barthes and Foucault, White picks up the idea that narrative
structures in history are imposed on the past by those in power for the sake of
domination and control.
Paul Ricoeur was very much influenced by Hayden White, but takes this line
of reasoning in a slightly different direction. For Ricoeur narrative is an essential
feature of human existence by which we humanize and thus deal with time. It
gives our individual and social existence sensible contours and projects, and thus
gives meaning to life. It does this in both fiction and history, and also in religion.
The biblical narrative is never far from Ricoeurs mind, as he discusses the role
of narrative in the creation of the self. Ricoeur never went so far as to collapse the
distinction between fiction and history, but he did talk about the ways in which
they are interwoven, and he was more interested in these than in the differences.
In the end his theory of narrative was focused on its literary productions, whether
fictional or historical, and he was more interested in how these affect and transform everday life than how they arise out of it.
In short, at the hands of these two important authors, the putative explanatory
role of narrative was not an issue. They both had a great deal to say about narrative, and about history, but the idea that storytelling could serve a role in the
social sciences or in history, answering our questions about social events and
about the human past, was not their concern. The gap they opened up between
narrative in its literary guise and the everyday world of action and experience
made it seem unlikely that this connection could be reestablished. The perhaps
unwitting irony of this development, however, is that these authors join hands
with the positivistically inclined social scientists in not taking narrative seriously
as a candidate for explanatory significance. For White narrative is imposed on
a non-narrative world, distorting it and thus concealing rather than revealing it.
For Ricoeur narrative takes up certain features of the prenarrative world, but its
primary function is to transform it into something new rather than to discover its
truth. In the end, its function is ethical rather than epistemological.
Thus we can see that for various reasons narrative, which seems to function
very well in ordinary life as a mode of explanation, has not fared very well in this
regard at the hands of theorists who are concerned in various ways with human
actions and events. After examining some of the contexts in which this rejection
of narrative has occurred, it might be useful to examine some of the motives
behind it. It would seem that narrative is judged as providing either too little or
too much.
We have mentioned the motives that go along with moving beyond common
sense to science. Here it would seem that a story-type explanation can seem
inadequate. But it is important to distinguish here between what we might call
ideological and skeptical reasons. A healthy skepticism regarding common sense

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and received opinion may be said to belong to any genuine inquiry worthy of
the name. An explanation, or even a mode of explanation, can be unsatisfying
because it has the air of being superficial or incomplete. There can be reasons for
rejecting it or regarding it as insufficient. But it is altogether different to reject a
mode of explanation because it does not fit an a priori metaphysical conception
of reality. We saw this in the case of Braudels views on history. He had a very
broadly conceived metaphysical view of the essence of historical reality, and he
presented it with the help of some very striking metaphors. We can also assume
that this view is informed by long years of historical research; Braudels view is
supported by his eminence in the profession. But we cant say that he actually
gave us arguments for it. His metaphysical views would have to be supported by
metaphysical arguments, and these he did not provide. So his theory of historical
layers has the character of an a priori framework governing his research. Only on
the assumption of this framework does his disparaging view of ordinary historical
events and the closer-to-common-sense explanations that seek to illuminate them
have any justification.
Something similar seems to be going on in the move to neurological-evolutionary explanations. The reductionist unity-of-science movement seems alive and
well among the practitioners of this approach. According to this view, because
human action belongs to physical reality, and the workings of physical reality
are supposed a priori to be everywhere the same, any genuine explanation must
be in keeping with a causal-scientific approach borrowed from physical science.
Today, of course, it is biological reality that serves in this role. As weve seen, the
reduction of all reality to physical reality goes hand in hand with a reduction of all
science to physical science as the preferred model of scientific explanation. The
disparaging term folk psychology, applied to all inquiry that does not follow
this path, is really a bit of what we might call persuasive terminology designed
to achieve by rhetorical means what it does not attain by argument. This strategy
shows us better than anything else that we are dealing here with an a priori commitment to a certain worldview rather than with the results of scientific inquiry.
This view is that the common-sense world of social interaction, from which many
of our concepts of motivations, reasons, and even stories are drawn, is really an
outdated and failed, or at least inadequate, form of explanatory social science.
One thing that seems not to be considered is that the context of everyday interaction might have other motivations than the search for laws, causal explanations,
prediction, and control that we associate with the ideas of natural and biological
science.
Perhaps the conclusion to be drawn is that it belongs to the spirit of inquiry
to be skeptical of common-sense and easy explanations, both in general and in
particular; but discarding a mode of explanation simply because it does not fit
an a priori ontological mold is not truly scientific. Thus if we depart from a
common-sense mode of explanation, such as narrative explanation, in favor of
another model, we had better have good reasons for doing so. It may be that in
some instances narrative explanation leaves us unsatisfied, and we need to go
deeper, and in some cases shift conceptual frameworks. But I would maintain, in
good pragmatist fashion, that conceptual frameworks are meant to serve inquiry,
and not the other way around. In other words, skepticism works both ways, and

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should apply equally to all unquestioned and unargued theoretical commitments,

whether they be common-sense or scientific-reductionist in character.10
If narrative explanation has seemed to the advocates of a reductive idea of science to offer too little, to the theorists of literary narrative it has been thought to
offer too much. Telling a story about an event in order to make it comprehensible
is likened to a literary creation that embellishes and restructures the events rather
than illuminating them. Depending on whom one reads, literary values, rhetorical
tropes, or unconscious cultural patterns take the place of inquiry, and we are left
to judge the resulting narrative according to aesthetic and ethical rather than epistemological criteria. Because retrospective narrative has in some cases been used
to distort the facts for propaganda purposes in the interests of power, it is thought
that all narrative accounts must to some degree be guilty of this, consciously or
unconsciously. The assumption behind this is that narrative structures are at odds
with the real world such that any attempt to apply the one to the other will result
in distortion. Narrative is thought to issue from an autonomous mental or cultural
realm that has no roots or connections beyond itself.
I hope that the previous exposition has shown up the fallacy in this mode of
reasoning. Storytelling obeys rules that are imbedded in action itself, and narrative is at the root of human reality long before it gets explicitly told about. It is
because of this closeness of structure between human action and narrative that we
can genuinely be said to explain an action by telling a story about it.
I have been making this argument for a long time. It does not mean, as some
of my critics have assumed, that the true or only explanation of an action lies in
retrieving and stating the motives of the agent just as they were involved in the
action at the time it was performed. That account of explanation would be closer
to the classic idea of Verstehen, empathy, or the rational reconstruction theories
of Collingwood and Dray. Telling the story of an action, as weve seen, involves
more than just finding the motive, thought, or intention behind the action. It ties
the action to its background circumstances, its antecedent events, and its subsequent results. Telling a more extended story, or contrasting the agents original
story with other accounts of the same event, often involves questioning the prima
facie reason and revising it. The explanatory story, in other words, may be very
different in many respects from the initial agents story. But the point of emphasizing the sameness of form between narrative explanation and what it explains
is to show that the narrative explanation does not inhabit a different conceptual
universe from the narrated, and hence explained, original scene. In fact, the business of revising motives, reassessing the reasons for actionthat is, changing
the storymay occur in the course of the action itself. As agents acting in the
world we try to understand our own actions and experiences as we go along, often
revising our own story in the course of the action. So the narrative account of the
10. Thus I agree with Tor Egil Frlands resistance to what he calls the explanatory imperialism of methodological individualism in Mentality as a Social Emergent: Can the Zeitgeist have
Explanatory Power?, his contribution to this Forum (History and Theory 47 [February 2008], xx-xx).
Though I am not arguing here for plural subjects and social entities such as the Zeitgeist as elements
in narrative explanations, I have done so elsewhere. I thus agree with his pragmatic defense of what
he calls an explanatory ecumenism, which would allow the careful and circumscribed use of such
notions.

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action, far from moving into a different universe of discourse from the events it
depicts, is located on a continuum of repeatedly revised explanations, understandings, and interpretations that is part of life itself.
Not only is it narratives all the way down, then, but the storytelling never
ends. That is, there is no definitive story. As theorists as different as Dilthey and
Danto have pointed out, because of their hindsightful character narratives need to
be revised in light of later developments, and at the limit the full significance of
any event would have to await the end of history, or the end of time. This is perhaps an aspect of narrative explanation that sometimes makes it frustrating, rather
than satisfying, to those in search of definitive answers. Narrative can satisfy
most of the time, as long as we do not expect too much of it. The satisfaction we
normally feel with a narrative explanation should not be taken at face value, nor
should it close off further inquiry. But there is no reason why we should not take it
for what it is, a valuable and useful implement for understanding human action.
Emory University