Narrative Explanations: The Case of History

Abstract

Narratives are stories, a telling that something happened. A explanation, presumably, presents an account of the linkages among events as a process leading to the outcome one seeks to explain. Examples of explanations in a storylike format are readily found in history books, certain anthropological accounts, case histories in psychoanalytic writings, and the sort of stories one hears daily from students and colleagues as to why this paper was not done or that committee meeting was not attended. The use of narratives to explain is unquestioned; what is subject to philosophical dispute is whether this habit is to be tolerated or condemned. An important focus of this dispute is not the fact that much is obscure with regard to the notion of narrative. Rather, objections arise because the notion of explanation is deemed by some clear enough to rule out any category of explanation, no matter how narrative is to be understood. Indeed, the very idea of a explanation invites two objections. The first I term methodological. It runs as follows. Explanations have a characteristic logical form. And while the precise constituents of form are a subject of much study and debate in literary theory, there exists a prima facie distinction between narratives and the standard form of a proper scientific Specifically, narratives relate discrete events; they do not invoke laws. The methodological complaint, in other words, is that structure is too far from the form of a scientific explanation to count as an There cannot be explanations, then, because such a category runs afoul of a received explication of explanation. This objection is closely associated, of course, with positivism. Although my purpose in this paper is not to review the too familiar debate inspired by positivist models of historical explanation, I sketch reasons for believing that much of the debate both pro and conon the form of historical explanation is misguided. The second objection I call metaphysical. This objection may be formulated in the following way. The academic division of labor is such that while, for example, historians work to construct true accounts of the past, philosophers toil to understand by what marks the truth may be known. Any satisfactory analysis of the notion of explanation, and so of historical explanation, should reveal the conditions which must be satisfied if that explanation is to be counted true. Attention to form, however, slights this critical point. Since analyses of structure underline the parallels between history and fiction, the study of is not going to illuminate the relevant differentia of historical expla-