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Polkinghorne, D. (1988) Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1)…

- - - - Narrative meaning is a process within the mental realm and functions to organise human experience into temporally meaningful episodes
      - Realm of Meaning
        
        Human Experience
        
        Narrative
        
        Narrative a type of meaning produced by mental realm. is the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful, by drawing together human actions and events that affect humans
        
        Narrative meaning created by noting the connections or relationships among actions and events and configures these parts into whole episodes
        
        Study of Narrative Meaning
        
        Aim is to make clear the explicit operations that produce its particular kind of meaning - and draw out its implications for understanding human existence
        
        Tools to Study Narrative / Realm of Meaning
        
        1) The study of the realm of meaning precedes an understanding of the manner in which human beings create knowledge
        
        2) Characteristics of the realm of meaning are different from the material realm so it requires altered research methods
        
        History
        
        Literary criticism
        
        Psychology
        
        3) The goal of research into the production of meaning is to produce descriptions of the structures and forms of the various meaning systems.
        
        4) Achieved through gathering examples of these systems’ expressions through self-reflection, interviews, and collections of artefacts and drawing conclusions using systematic principles of linguistic analysis and hermeneutic techniques
        
        To ask “what does it mean?” is to ask how something is related or connected to something else. Meaning produced by individuals but within cultures. Not fixed.
        
        Problems in studying human consciousness / realm of meaning
        
        A constantly changing activity
        
        Most meaning-making unconscious
        
        Requires contextually sensitive linguistic data
        
        The required hermeneutic reasoning not as precise as mathematical reasoning
        
        Realm of meaning has complex organisational patterns making it difficult to study
        
        Behaviouralism treated humans as they were objects in the world and that all mental operations were observable through experiments
        
        Products of the Realm of Meaning
        
        One perception is the same as or not the same an another
        
        One is similar or dissimilar to another
        
        One is an instance of another
        
        One stands for the other
        
        One is part of the other.
        
        One is the cause of the other
- - - - Traditionally time was viewed as a succession of “nows” or instantaneous moments advancing along a linear line, independently of human consciousness.
      - But people don’t experience time as a succession of instants but a “thickness of time” in which experience unites previous moments of awareness with anticipated moments of awareness
      - Augustine / Heidegger argued the present wasn’t a single notion, but a threeefold one: a present about the future - expectation; a present about the past - memory; a present about the present - attention
      - But it retains the notion of time as linear succession - just now it appears as an aspect within experience
    - - Ricoeur believes an exploration of narrative offers a deeper understanding of the human experience of time
      - Ricoeur uses Heideggers primary insight that experience organised into strata, analogous to melodies in a symphony, each going on at the same time - one the core theme, below which are others.
      - The first level is closest to everyday awareness with representation of time as linear. The other two more deeply hidden in consciousness and require reflection to bring them to awareness. "Historicality" retains fewer notions of time as linear and the highest level, "temporality " the unique experience of time is most apparent
      - Existence is a unity and past, present and future are aspects of our one existence - which includes what I have done, what I am doing, and what I will do, and each moment is part of the whol that I am
    - - Ricoeur applies these three levels of temporal experience to narrative to investigate whether narrative provides models for articulating in a symbolic way the various levels of the human experience of time
      - First level, a plot makes events into a story, “in” time, rather than reflections on time. They assume an experience of time. Time connected to the actions of characters. Characters act together and interact within or under the pressure of time. It is internal to the story. Narratives invite a lifting out of the “now” into meaningfulness
      - The second level, historicity, Ricoeur argues, is also related to narrative with its power of emplotment. By configuring episodes into a whole, we can translate the story into one “thought” - such as the theme of a story
      - In the third level, narrative is a communication, not just between contemporaries but also predecessors and successors, and the common destiny is more fundamental to it than any individual fate.
      - We tell stories because life is lived above the objective plane and its instantaneous “nows”. Temporal existence draws the past and its possibilities into the present through tales and histories
  - - - There has been little progress using a stimulus - reaction framework in uncovering determinative laws to predict human movement. This treatment of the human body as a mere object rather than the expression of an integrated, incarnate person underlies behaviourism
    - - The approach to understanding action described here conceives of actions as rule-following activities. Three traditions reflecting this notion that action can be understood as conformity to rules are discussed
      - Max Webber
        
        Max Webber’s view that actions can be structured according to an ideal means-end rationality. Guided by the subject, not merely environmental stimuli. He thought the object of inquiry for human disciplines should be the meaning an action has for the actor.
        
        One constructs in the imagination different courses of events with their probable consequences, and then compares them with the imagined goal
      - Structuralists
        
        The structuralists’ notion that action is directed by a static set of innate, logically organised formal structures and reasoning principles that underlie and generate experience by organising it into systematic patterns
        
        Piaget maintained the development of thought in human experience governed by an inherent pattern which generates the growth of mental schemes children, used to organise experience by adapting, accomodating or assimilating information about their environment into categories.
        
        Structuralism maintains that human action is an expression of human experience, but that this experience is constructed by deep, innate rules - and so produces a logical organised human experience. They are not the result of learning from interaction with environment or context dependant, they are as unchanging and static as those proposed by formal science. Differs from the flexible and changing narrative organisation
      - Language-Game
        
        The language-game position that action follows socially generated rules. They are not the necessary laws of formal science or the systematic linguistic rules. What is “reasonable” is a function of a particular language game, not a universal or innate sense of rationality
    - - This study has emphasised hermeneutic reasoning and claimed it is the primary form of rationality by which humans organise their experience
      - Narrative Action Is:
        
        Purposeful action is the result of a means-end calculation to achieve personal ends
        
        Action is the enactment of transcendent and logically ordered rules
        
        Action is behaviour conforming to socially agreed upon rules
      - Action is an expression of existence. Acting is like writing a story, and the understanding of action is like arriving at an interpretation of a stor
      - Human action can be reconfigured or represented symbolically in the acts of speaking or writing.
      - Meaning of events dependant on the plot of which it is part
        
        The meaning of a sentence isn’t imposed on individual words, rather the composite of words gives the sentence particular meaning. Although the same group of words can have multiple meanings, not any meaning is possible. So to a set of events can be employed to have multiple but limited meanings
        
        The order of events, as in the order of words, can change the meaning
      - Practical Understanding
        
        Ricoeur believes humans posses a preunderstanding of the world of action that is similar to their competence to recognise which groups of words can produce meaningful sentences
        
        The human competence to know which bodily movements are human actionsprovides the basic unit for composing and understanding narration
        
        Ricoeur's Six Notions of this Competence
        
        Actions refer to motives which explain why someone did / does something
        
        Actions are carried out by agents, the author of an action
        
        Actions imply goals, actions are carried out to achieve results
        
        Actions take place in situations that consist of closed physical systems, there are limits on what can be done
        
        Actions take place in interaction with other persons, whether in cooperation or competition
        
        The outcome of an action may bring about a change in ones fortunes or feelings
        
        Actions, both in life and in narrative, are undertaken with the knowledge of what it will mean to the community. They can evaluate and place a value judgement (good/ bad) on these actions
      - Action is the poetic expression of human existence as it moves toward valued ends. These aren’t simply the fulfilment of personal desires, but include commitments to ethical standards and fulfil promises
  - - - Descartes believed we know the self directly - no need to identify our individuality with a continuous body or the contents of memory ('I think therefore I am'). The self instead conceived as a noncorporeal substance that remains the same throughout our existence and to which thought belongs
      - Hume believed there was no such “thing” or “substance” within which thoughts are maintained - and the self is nothing more than a bundle of difference perceptions - simply the sum of all one’s experiences, without a stable something behind them
    - - William James suggested personal identity an idea that a person constructs and an ongoing effort that involves the synthesis of many different ideas about the self around 1) the material self 2) the social self and 3) the spiritual self
      - A unified and concordant self concept and personal identity requires the person to synthesise and integrate the diverse social responses experienced - symbolic and bodily interaction within the social environment.
    - - For the most part, a person’s self concept is raised, edited and implemented preconsciously at a prelinguistic level of emotion and “felt” dispositions.
      - The position of this study is that we achieve our personal identities and self concepts through the use of narrative configuration and are our existence into a whole by understanding it is an expression of a single unfolding and developing story
      - Self is not a static thing or substance, but a configuring of persona events into a historical unity, not only of what has been but also anticipations of what will become
      - Hermeneutic Analysis
        
        The answer is found in a persons actions, and self-identity is the result of connecting these actions into an integrated plot
        
        The experience of the self is organised along the temporal dimension, in the same manner as events in a story, and this plot gathers them together into a meaningful unity, and therefore gives context and significance to the individual episodes
        
        The self, then, is a meaning rather than a substance or a thing.
        
        more hermeneutically orientated research tools will be needed to understand personal identity. These tools will seek to understand the self as an expression and modelled on the processes a person uses to understand the meaning of a sentence, not on the procedures for identifying the characteristics or qualities
      - Roles We Play
        
        Like actors on a stage presenting to an audience, we take on pre-defined roles as a means of guiding behaviour. We borrow aspects of their self-stories from fictive narratives
        
        to play a social role is not the same as configuring ones life into a plot that is ones personal identity - there are many roles over a lifetime and each forms just one of the episodes that make up the content of a life story
        
        Cultures provide specific types of plots for adoption by its members in their configuration of self
      - Reconstructing self narratives
        
        One danger involves constructing a story of self-deception that’s a projection of desires or fears rather than a configuration of real actions
        
        A second danger involves the aimless wandering among character variants supplied by fictitious narratives, the refusal to construct a self story
        
        Some psychotherapy can be understood to be designed to help a client construct a meaningful story out of the unintegrated fragments of action he or she brings
        
        Nietzsche felt an admirable person was one who could integrate a large number of powerful and conflicting tendencies into a harmonised self through the creation of their own style of coherence.
        
        Nietzsche is concerned people will simply adopt a culturally given plot line. He wanted the plot of personal identity to be a creative work of quality and style
- - - - One of our fundamental structures of comprehension / constructing reality - the other is paradigmatic (see Bruner)
      - Narrative is the fundamental scheme for displaying the significance events have for one another and produces form and meaning that is human experience
      - Plot
        
        The organising theme that identifies the significance and role of the individual event into a schematic whole by recognising the contribution certain events make to the development and outcome of the story
        
        The reasoning used to construct a plot (which happens in the realm of meaning) is similar to that used to develop a hypothesis. It’s an interactive mediating process between a conception that might explain or connect events and the resistance of the events to fit the construction
        
        More than one plot can provide meaningful constellation and integration of the same set of events. Different plot organisations change the meaning of the individual events as their roles are re-interpreted
        
        Cultural traditions store a host of plot line that can be used to configure events in stories
        
        Whether narrative Competence is an innate capacity for a learnt skill is still contested in the cognitive development literature, but it appears at an early age and in most cultures
      - Explanation
        
        Event are understood when its role and significance in relation to a human project is explained - differs from logico-mathematical reasoning, where explanation is an instance of established pattern or law along categories
        
        Explanation by narrative is contextually related and therefore different in form from formal science explanation
        
        When someone says something doesn’t make sense, it comes from not being able to integrate the event into a plot whereby it becomes understandable in the context of what’s happened
      - Communication
        
        1) Construction of a story with narrative meaning
        
        2) Representation of a story to others
        
        3) Reception of a story, including interpretation and understanding
      - Narrative ordering makes individual events comprehensible by identifying the whole to which they contribute
      - They link diverse happenings along a temporal dimension and identifying the effect of one event on another
      - The significance of an event can be understood in a number of different light
    - - Searches for universal truths
  - - - Narrative used to describe our own lives, ours and others behaviour and inform decisions by constructing “what if” scenarios.
    - - They give cohesion to shared beliefs and transmit values
  - - - Five Discourse forms (Kinneavy)
        
        Also expressive, persuasive and poetical
        
        Narrational (narrative code)
        
        “demonstrate” by the type of reasoning that understands the meaning of a whole, seeing it as a dialectical integration of its parts
        
        Narrative functions as an expression of global meaningfulness. It organises sentences according to a “narrative logic” which groups sentences according to their contribution to the plot
        
        narrative and formal logic are different orders, because they communicate a different kind of truth
        
        Referential (paradigmatic code)
        
        Demonstrate or prove a statement by linking it to other statements through the connectives of formal logic
      - It’s at the level of discourse that language relates units of understanding given by sentences into meaningful wholes
      - Conventions of discourse organisation similar to grammatical rules that function at the sentence level, providing principles to convey the right meaning, beyond individual words
      - Speakers / writers use different principles of discourse formation to produce an order of meaning beyond what’s possible in the individual sentence
      - Communication Theory (Jakobson’s)
        
        Contact: Between and Addresser and Adressee
        
        Code: Either fully or partially in common forms the organising code of discourse (eg. logic codes, hermeneutics codes and rhetorical codes). Act as criteria to judge “truth or coherence” of a discourse
        
        Context: The general subject of the message (conversation, letter, narrative etc.) must be established
- - - - Literary theory abandoned focus on interpretation of individual texts to focus on comprehension and truth communicated by narrative expression
      - Individual text as autonomous and without reference to external contexts. Task was to show how the various parts of the text contributed to the thematic unity and therefore it’s standing as a literary artefact
    - - Northrup Frye
        
        Authors unconsciously assimilate elements that characterise different periods. These in turn inform our interpretation of human experiences.
        
        Focused on story content, using inductive methods to draw out similarities and themes and recognise patterns. Contrasted later with deductive methods in structural analysis
        
        Differentiated between literary expression directed inwards towards inner imaginative realm and structure / scientific expression which is directed outward towards things. A poetic sentence is objectively false, but subjectively true as operating according to inward meaning structures
      - Scholes & Kellogg
        
        While the social topics of stories changes over time, the kinds of archetypal characters remains stable. Writers draw on characters and current concerns of society then use personal imaginative creativity to produce stories
      - Joseph Campbell and Lord Raglan
        
        Campbell argued that myths, folktales and dreams in various cultures share the same basic pattern, the ‘monomyth’ that describes the hero’s journey. Raglan produced a similar universal myth, which he applied to Eastern as well as Western culture
        
        Some argued a basic plot across cultures is due to oral transmission from travel and migration, but isn’t supported by the anthropological evidence. Instead, the basic story is thought to relate to universal experience
        
        A single deep plot no longer held in esteem in narrative theory. Finding an orderly pattern among surface diversity depends on imaginative function of the person identifying them - and doesn't actually hold. This tendency to look for patterns is itself a demonstration of the power of narrative to configure the past into a coherent story
      - Psychoanalytic Story
        
        Despite universal plots, some still felt novels were the content of individuals imagination - representations of common human tension between ideal and real which could be understood using psychoanalytic theory
        
        Stories created by cultures depends not primarily on social factors of the outer world but on its stage of psychological development
      - Narrative & Temporal Form
        
        Criticism in US shifted from universal plots and underlying psychoanalytic themes to investigations of connections between narrative patterns and human ordering of time
        
        Human temporal experience consists of drawing from a continual flow of moments to create episodic patterns by marking of start and end points
        
        Narrative creates temporal meaning by using plots to link events into an orderly sequence that are understandable as temporal episodes
    - - Structuralism in literary criticism was the application of language models and led to a new literary science, “narratology”. Borrowed research methods from linguistics, literary study became more rigorous and systematic.
      - Method of structural analysis
        
        structuralists believe innate cognitive structures frame all experience - and are so deep, they cannot be changed by experience. Aim was to describe these structures as functional units and their relationship to one another
        
        Structuralism moved to a deductive method - hypothesising features if narrative structure and then examining a sample of narratives to determine if it could account for their characteristics. Should produce generative rules
        
        Assumed narrative like other linguistic forms - that a code can be separated from the message. The code has functional units, whose specific organisation determines meaning. To understand the code, you need to identify a finite number of underlying units the establish rules that determine the internal relationships among them (closed grammatical system - if you know units and rule you can predict resultant story)
        
        Based on a representational system not derived from the external world but from the structures of the mind itself. Means much of our knowledge is universal and inborn (Chomsky)
        
        Ricoeur was critical of their attempts to bypass the experience of temporality (structures fixed and unchanging) because narrative is the form in which temporality is expressed
      - Levi-Strauss and early French structuralism
        
        Began with Levi-Strauss, who saw myths as expressions of a small number of basic structures, if we abstract from the diversity of characters a few elementary functions. This study of elementary elements below the level of awareness was a different approach.
        
        These elementary functions are inherent in the human mind - so looking less at content than the universal mental operations that structure it. That is, myths are devices to think with with, a way of classifying and organising reality
        
        In structuralism, the individual is no longer regarded as the source or end of meaning. They reduce any particular consciousness to a mere function of the structures
      - Propp and the structural analysis of narrative
        
        Propp was interested in uncovering a single plot, or underlying structure, behind Russian folk tales. His significance is more in his methods of investigation. He identified 31 functional units. The units position determines the surface meaning.
        
        Meaning of a narrative not found in surface characters as they could be substituted for one another or located in different positions. He also warned against the symbolic themes these surface elements might stand for. Instead, meaning was to be found in the deep level functional units and their placement, and each story was a repetition in these units
        
        Ricoeur was critical of this approach that ended with a tale that is unrecognisable as a tale that is told - it turned a cultural object into a scientific one. He believed this misunderstood the origin of meaning - meaning of a unit is the function of a story, not of the kind of unit it is
      - Extended Structural Analysis
        
        Claude Bremond
        
        A narrative unit is not the function but the sequence, where a choice is given it is accepted or declined and if accepted, either succeeds or fails. A story is one possible pathway through the choices presented. Different plot types emerge from different stories
        
        Tzvetan Todorov
        
        Begins with assumption there’s a universal grammar that reflects the actual structure of reality. He built a structural hierarchy, in which each unit is built from the units below. The highest is the story, below are the sequences, then propositions and at the base, parts of speech
        
        The basic units from which narrative is built are the proper noun (character), verb (action) and the adjective (attribute). Three kinds of adjective or attribute: a state, a quality and a condition. Three basic verbs: to change or modify, to transgress or sin and to punish.
        
        Roland Barthes
        
        Also undertakes a hierarchical structural analysis. He breaks narrative into units, functions and indices (indicators of character, atmosphere etc)
        
        Functions
        
        Cardinal functions: Sequences that move the plot along and describe choices made by agents
        
        Catalysers or satellites: Optional actions not essential to moving the action along that are used to fill space between cardinal functions
        
        (actions linking the story surface)
        
        Indications
        
        Indices: Character traits, thoughts and atmosphere that require deciphering
        
        Informants: minor indices that fix the setting and time
        
        (static elements integrated at the thematic level)
        
        Structural theory not only needs to define the categories of units but describe the rules that govern their combinations. Barthes model is flexible, so what’s a cardinal function on one level could be a catalyser at the next highest level
        
        Structuralists changed character from being a static element to a dynamic, unfolding element of the plot. Character and plot become interdependent: the action in the plot defines the characters and the development of an understanding of the characters gives significance to the the actions in the plot
        
        But for them, narrative is a set of linguistic statements. It doesn’t reflect reality. Characters are a set of verbal statements loosely held together by a name.
        
        Jonathan Culler
        
        Events (inc. characters and setting) exists prior to and independently of their narrative presentation. The discourse is a presentation or expression of these events - so everything can be treated as a way of interpreting, valuing and presenting events.
        
        For Culler, the very notion of plot is dependant on causation. “The king died, and then the queen died” is not a narrative. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a narrative. This is contradictory to the logic of events that maintains that prior events are the cause of later ones
        
        He restates Nietzche’s proposal that a normal cause and effect sequence is not an aspect of reality, but a construct
        
        Gerard Genette
        
        Three categories to represent time in the narrative telling of a story
        
        Duration: Temporal condensations such as summary, ellipses, omissions etc.
        
        Order: For example, flashbacks and flashforwards changing the order of events for dramatic effect
        
        Frequency: The number of times an incident is recounted - a repeating event gives the impression of an extended time past
        
        Next generation of structuralists made Propps model more flexible. They extended his sequence of functional units that could be actualised in various ways - for example different surface structures could have different meanings and different surface meanings can be developed from the same deep structure
    - - Issues with structuralism
        
        Like all deductive theories, need to account for why stories are different. Overlooked ambiguities and multiple readings of stories in favour of categorising them
        
        Ricoeur argued against structuralists notion that narrative is ultimately the product of a set of static rules or innate gramma - rather than grounded in human experience
        
        Narrative study in literature criticism shifted emphasis from deep structure to point of view - and the devices used to solve problems of presenting the thoughts of characters
      - Point of View
        
        Mikhail Bakhtin opposed Propp’s structuralism, describing the novel as a presentation of ways of relating to the world - which couldn’t be seen by breaking down language and looking at its parts in isolation.
        
        Human consciousness and its expression are not components of a sealed interior realm that is divorced from social interaction
        
        Investigated the authors use of a character perspective to tell a story, so that they look through a character to see what they see or know
      - Reception Theory
        
        More recently attention has turned to role of the reader in producing meaning. Hermeneutic process now concern of reception theory
        
        It’s an interactive process between reader and text and is not discovery but experiencing the work that creates meaning
        
        Interpretations of the same text vary because of the diversity of the receivers, who all bring a different set of personal experiences, social understandings and expectations
        
        So over the last 15-years, the reader and the writer have been reinstalled alongside the text itself
- - - - Recognition human experience is a construction involving figurative language (words used to create non-literal images and adorn reality in a forceful and dramatic manner above what is contained in the ideas themselves) creates several problems
      - Because the realm of meaning exists in a different ontological mode from the physical reality (examining the ink on a page tells us nothing of the meaning of the word) we cannot use the same procedures we use to know the physical realm
      - Knowledge of the realm of meaning is gained through interpretive or hermeneutic procedures
      - These disciplines do not produce knowledge that leads to the prediction and control of human experience, but knowledge that deepens and enlarges the understanding of human existence
    - - Through the action of emplotment, the narrative form constitutes human reality into wholes, manifests human values, and bestows meaning on life. It does so in a process similar to the one grammar employs to develop meaning from words
      - There are not extra linguistic realities that can be investigated empirically. But the placement of that event within the narrative suggests different interpretations and significance. Plots are meaning expressions, and the only appropriate question to ask of them is what the events have meant to someone
  - - - Interview
        
        For the researcher the basic source of evidence about narratives is the interview through narrative explanations. The researcher needs to move from the specific stories of particular episodes to more general life stories that provide self-identity and give unity to the person’s whole existence
        
        “If we wish to hear respondents’ stories, then we must invite them into our work as collaborators, sharing control with them, so that together we try and understand what their stories are about” Mishler
        
        Labov
        
        Labov proposes a model for analysising interview materials for narrative content which abstracts from particular content a core story, which can be compared to other stories with similar structures but told in different contexts. also suggests analysts must also bring their knowledge of the speakers to interpret story accurately
        
        Agar & Hobbs
        
        Gives more attention to the particular content than Labov. Focus on how an episode in the story is related to the general story. Propose three levels of coherence: local (statements connected to prior statements by syntactic, temporal or causal relations); global (statements cohere with the overall theme or intent of the story; themal (general culture themes or values are expressed
        
        Descriptive narrative investigations most often examine stories in the fluid oral form rather than the more stable written form
        
        Researchers look for one over-arching narrative that gives unity and wholeness to the events of the organisation. If none can be found, the organisation must be operating in a conflicting and fragmented manner
      - Types of Plot
        
        Plots are constantly changing. Catorgorising a narrative doesn’t identify the effect and its relationships to other narratives in the same way as formal science.
        
        Typologies of plot should be considered as statements of similar events that are shared by various stories, not descriptions of a species of stories. No single typology or system of categories.
        
        A full description of a story should include what is unique to that story and comparisons and contrasts with other stories. However:
        
        The unique aspects of it are at least as important as the similarities
      - Results
        
        The research report is not a simple presentation of the story, but a scholarly, argued essay.
        
        Alternate interpretations are discussed and supporting evidence presented for conclusions. Transcripts of interviews must be available for other researchers
        
        It’s purpose is to present the narrative schemes the storyteller intended, and as they understand the temporal connections between events to be.
        
        Should also account for the storytellers motives, reasons, expectations etc.
      - This research produces a document describing narratives held in or below awareness that make up the collection of interpretive schemes of that people or community use to establish the significance of past events - and anticipate the consequences of of possible future actions. Also the situations that trigger or draw the particular narratives
      - It doesn’t construct new narrative, just reports existing ones
    - - Explanation
        
        Narratives are explanatory when they provide meaningful answers to questions that are worth asking
        
        Max Webber constructs imagined events by way of testing different outcomes, and therefore whether the original action was crucial to the outcome.
      - Data Collection
        
        Interviews, documents etc help uncover the events leading up to the phenomenon. Courts of law have established procedures for arriving at an authentic story
        
        Because past “facts” are not open to direct, present observation, they must be established on the basis of traces, for instance documents, memos and personal memory
      - Validity, Significance, Reliablility
        
        It doesn’t produce certainty or "truth", it produces likelihood and verisimilitude
        
        Narrative reasearch uses scholarly consensus as the test of verisimilitude rather than the test of logical or mathematical validity
        
        Reliability in narrative research refers to the dependability of the data, and validity to the strength of the analysis of the data
      - Data Analysis
        
        the goal of analysis is to uncover the common themes or plots in the data. Done using hermeneutic techniques for noting underlying patterns across examples of stories
      - They are retrospective, sorting through the multitude of possible events to highlight the significant ones. The final report reads more like a historical account
      - The results draw on evidence, including individual interpretations of information, the social forces operative, individual motives etc
      - The report doesn’t create generalisable laws (although locates decision points that could have produced different outcomes) and is retrodictive rather than predictive
      - Also not a chronicle of events. It configures events in such a way that their parts in the whole story become clear but differs from everyday explanatory storytelling in its reflectiveness and consciousness
- - - - Formal science develops knowledge of the natural realm (subject to object), while hermeneutics is required for the study of the human realm (subject to subject). Norms of culture provide the values that are able to describe human consciousness
    - - Neo-Kantian view that meaning (human) could be known in the same manner as objects (physical) - only difference is the set of concepts that organise mental objects: individualising, value-related (human) or generalising (physical).
      - Abandons Dilthey’s position that knowledge of human expression (apprehension of meaning) requires a different form of experience to the natural scientist observations of sense data. A universal set of values to describe historical (a kind of formal logic)
    - - First to reject presupposition of objective, universal values (Neo-Kantian) or that they're grounded in culture. Replaced it with pre-rational choice - pragmatism meant only objective criteria were those of effectiveness, not values
    - - Unified idea of explanation
        
        Deductive
        
        Explanation occurs when an event can be formally deduced from a general law
        
        Exploratory Sketch
        
        Hemple. Explanation that excluded the mention of certain laws or facts that were taken for granted. No difference between historical and physical event
        
        Law-like explanation
        
        Gardiner (1952) Historical events caused by a "complex" of laws, not a single one. Included actors attitudes, habits and inclinations but stopped short of Dilthy that would allow imaginative re-construction of actors reasons
      - Break-Up of the unity of explanation
        
        Forms of Narrative Discourse
        
        History as Explanatory Discourse
        
        History as Narrative Discourse
        
        Historical Narratives
        
        The knowledge (and meaning) provided by narrative history is what results from the application of the systems of meaning originally elaborated by cultures in their myths and (in some cultures) their literature
        
        Ricoeur on narrative and history
        
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        Thus, historical narratives transform a cultures collection of past happenings by shaping them into second-order pattern of meaning
        
        The truth of first order referents is concerned with whether the events actually happened (historians developed a number of tools for this). The truth of second-order referents is established by the principles of coherence that a particular discourse uses.
        
        In formal science, a research report is more than first-order observational statements, it requires second-order coherence among statements. In historical narrative, second-order displays itself as synoptic judgement in which events are seen together in a manner that cannot be replaced by the techniques of analytic logic.
        
        The truth of narrative is linked to the more general question of the truth of literary coherence, a truth ignored by formal science in favour of logical coherence
        
        Narrative moved from being viewed as explanatory to being a special kind of discourse that could be assessed with an alternate form of coherence - a configerative protocol (rather than logical protocol) whereby units are gathered into a whole idea
        
        White viewed it as a story about reality, rather than a direct representation of it. Best understood as a literary reconstruction - not so different from fiction - including an ideological perspective
        
        The kind of meaning distinct to narrative organisation requires the coherence brought about by emplotment. Historical narrative, like other discourses, is made up of two kinds of referents: 1) first order, the events that make up the story 2) second order, the plot (which are drawn from those available in a particular culture)
        
        Same first order referents - events - can create different second order referents. Either paradigmatic (for example using chronological protocol or encyclopaedic protocols) or narrative protocols (emplotment)
        
        The kind of truths narratives deal with are of a different order than formal logic of science. It produces as its second order meaning a coherence of events ordered by narrational or “poetic logic”
        
        Narrative as a form of cognitive explanation greatly enhanced by engagement between history and the role of language in shaping human experience
        
        The issue is not whether narrative sentences are true, but whether narrative functions as demonstrative discourse
        
        Functions of discourse
        
        Paradigmatic
        
        Thought to be transparent vehicle for transmission of information about extrinsic references and the logical patterns relating sentences reflected the logical patterns in reality
        
        Narrative
        
        Narrative discourse retains an awareness of the added level of communication that results from its form of organisation
        
        A text can combine variety of discourse conventions, but one dominant - and so judge a text by the criteria of that function.
        
        Assumption its fiction is demonstrative (i.e. following logical coherence among statements - such in regards to temporal order)
        
        Understanding of narrative discourse as a scientific form - how history really happened - didn't see meaning being added to events - the same as writing an equation
        
        Literature
        
        Myth
        
        All produce meaning through plot structures but in historical narrative, first order events are real rather than imaginary.
        
        They are attempts to impose a satisfactory, graspable, humanising shape on experience
        
        Explanation by Reasons
        
        Dray (1957) used causal analysis, applying deductive and pragmatic tests to possibilities. He developed a process of reasoning what actors must have thought, including moral, emotional and motivational factors.
        
        Teleological Explanation
        
        Von Wright (1971) introduced agents having the ability to interfere with the natural flow of events and that actions can be intended to accomplish something.
        
        It included human actions in the explanatory scheme by allowing for the idea that humans understand that they can interfere with and effect the world. The significance of actors intentions became the subject of inquiry
        
        Narrative Explanation
        
        Danto (1965) the first to move from causal to narrative explanation. A subsequent event transforms a prior one into a cause. A causal account attributes significance to an action that the actor would not have been aware of - it's the historian who organises to demonstrate significance
        
        Argument Vs Narrative
        
        Gallie, rather than focus on the means by which history is known, argued it's communicated as a narrative. Story and arguments use different processes. Arguments use deductive reasoning, and therefore you can deduce the ending. You have to follow narrative through to conclusion - hence its surprise and tension
        
        Configurational Comprehension
        
        Minks noted "synthetic judgement", seeing a whole load of information as a single act of understanding. Can't be replicated by analytic technique. He described narrative as having this Configurational Comprehension (rather than theoretical or categorical comprehensions)
        
        White uses an organisational hierarchy to describe how historians shape history into comprehensive archetypal story: Chronicle (chronological order); Storyline (motifs and themes that unify and delineate); Emplotment (cultural modes of plot)
- - - - Narrative form of case study
        
        Individual Personalities
        
        Self Narrative
        
        Identities are evolving constructions, emerging out of constant social interaction through life
        
        Narrative enrichment occurs when one retrospectively revises, selects and orders past details in such a way that will serve as a justification for one’s present condition and situation
        
        Stephen Crites
        
        Appropriating the past and anticipating the future require different narrative strategies. When strategies are mixed, the resulting self-narrative is confused, inconsistent, and even chaotic
        
        Self-knowledge is an appropriation of the past - but when this is not recollective, integrative and self-discovering, the person experiences unhappiness or despair. One can forget or repress a past or be so intent on a future project they let their roots grow weak
        
        Not only must we integrate past events into a coherent story, we must construct a hopeful future story. There needs to be some continuity between past and future stories - this requires an open and adaptive character
        
        These stories are always some version of the general cultural stock of stories about how life proceeds
        
        Cognitive Psychology
        
        Cognitive psychology was about the acquisition, organisation and use of knowledge - and argued that behaviours were the result of complex internal processes
        
        Experience is constructed when a person assimilates the stimuli and matches them with his or her existing structural representations of events
        
        Narrative Competence
        
        Jean Mandlers
        
        Representative of cognitive psychology’s approach to cognitive structures in general and narrative in particular. Holds that knowledge is not an accumulation of disconnected facts, but an organised composition of facts into a particular pattern
        
        Four Knowledge Structures
        
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        She holds that stories have an underlying or base structure than remains relatively unchanged, despite surface differences.
        
        Memory
        
        Some studies of memory processes showed that stories are better retrieved when they include material representing all of the properly sequenced parts of the story
        
        However, the specification of the ingredients has turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated
        
        Rather than a rigid recipe, our concept of a story consists of a prototype and its variants. The prototype is a character, facing a prediciment and their attempts to resolve it
        
        The story schema can be applied to almost all events in our social life and provides plausible accounts of how and why something has happened. As such, is important to organising experience and seeing human actions as meaningful
        
        Individual & Cultural Development
        
        The widespread capacity to tell and understand stories, in all cultures and its early appearance in individual and cultural development has meant, in addition to structure and function of narrative, cognitive psychologists have been concerned with the acquisition and development of narrative skills by children
        
        Rather than innate organising patterns, the more accepted position is that narrative structures, while dependant on basic human capacities, are acquired by abstraction from experience of stories
        
        Susan Kemplar
        
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        Lifespan Development
        
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        One discourse that’s been of special interest is narrative: 1). What is the basic structure of narrative discourse and 2) what is the process by means of which children gain the capacity to tell and understand narratives?
        
        Organisational Narratives
        
        Narrative structures operate to give significance and unity to group events in a manner similar to the way they operate in the lives of persons. Organisations as cultures, networks of meanings, means narrative provides information about norms and values and the role of individuals