Essentially narrative explanations

Abstract

This essay argues that narrative explanations prove uniquely suited to answering certain explanatory questions, and offers reasons why recognizing a type of statement that requires narrative explanations crucially informs on their assessment. My explication of narrative explanation begins by identifying two interrelated sources of philosophical unhappiness with them. The first I term the problem of logical formlessness and the second the problem of evaluative intractability. With regard to the first, narratives simply do not appear to instantiate any logical form recognized as inference licensing. But absent a means of identifying inferential links, what justifies connecting explanans and explanandum? Evaluative intractability, the second problem, thus seems a direct consequence. This essay shows exactly why these complaints prove unfounded by explicating narrative explanations in the process of answering three interrelated questions. First, what determines that an explanation has in some critical or essential respect a narrative form? Second, how does a narrative in such cases come to constitute a plausible explanation? Third, how do the first two considerations yield a basis for evaluating an explanation offered as a narrative? Answers to each of these questions include illustrations of actual narrative explanations and also function to underline attendant dimensions of evaluation.

The Epistemological Aspect Of Historical Narrative Semantics In The Information Society

“…The methodology of the work is based on the principles of dialectics and hermeneutics, which provide an opportunity to analyze the relationship between representationalism (metaphorical narrativism), non-representationalism, and neorealism in the organic unity of the interpretation of the issues of the semantics of the historical narrative. The article is based on the works of Russian and foreign researchers of historical narrative reference issues (Balakhonskii et al, 2017;Kuukkanen, 2013;Lorenz, 2002;Roth, 2012Roth, , 2017Syrov, 2015;Zeleznak, 2015). The starting point of the analysis is the point of view formed in the narrative studies of the 70s of the XX century in the works of Mink (1978), Ankersmit (1983, White (1975), Danto (1965) and others.…”

Descriptive Accuracy in History: The Case of Narrative Explanations

“…Thirdly, and most crucially, a list of truths is thought to be part and parcel of the time it describes, in other words, not only knowledge but, paradoxically, truth is conceived as belonging to a certain time: "a narrative sentence adds a truth to an earlier time" (Roth, 2017b(Roth, : 44, 2020. It is, of course, true that what we later find out to be the case adds to our knowledge of that earlier time but, as per Roth's argument, the fact that the Thirty Years' War began in 1618 was not part of knowledge at the time nor, of course, could one retrospectively add this piece of knowledge to the knowledge available at that earlier time.…”

The Roles of Possibility and Mechanism in Narrative Explanation

“…This space of possible histories essentially generates a contrasting set of possible explanations, each possible history corresponding roughly to one hypothetical solution to the problem. 2 Obviously there's just one causal history that actually obtained, but the evidential situation is such that this history is not uniquely fixed from an epistemic perspective (see Roth 2017). The historical scientist's explanatory task then consists in finding the best approximation of the true causal history.…”