Narrativity and Knowledge

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (1):25-36 (2009)
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Abstract

The ever-expanding literature on narrative reveals a striking divergence of claims about the epistemic valence of narrative. One such claim is the oftstated idea that narratives or stories generate both “hot” and “cold” epistemic irrationality. A familiar, rival claim is that narrative has an exclusive capacity to embody or convey important types of knowledge. Such contrasting contentions are not typically presented as statements about the accidents or effects of particular narratives; the ambition, rather, has been to identify a strong link between a single, positive or negative epistemic valence and narrativity, or the traits in virtue of which some discourse, utterance, or series of thoughts is aptly classified as a narrative or story. In this essay I contend that arguments in this vein are dubious.Not only are contentions about the specificity of narrative tenuous and controversial, but even if they were not, there are serious problems with the postulated connections between narrativity and the epistemic merits or demerits of narratives. These difficulties are identified in a critical discussion of prominent examples from the literature. My conclusion is not that there is nothing worth saying about relations between narratives and various epistemic desiderata, but that one prevalent theoretical ambition in this area ought to be renounced in favor of more viable avenues of inquiry

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Paisley Livingston
Lingnan University

Citations of this work

Ethics and Imagination.Joy Shim & Shen-yi Liao - 2023 - In James Harold (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 709-727.
Narratives and Action Explanation.Thomas Uebel - 2012 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (1):31-67.

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References found in this work

Causes and Conditions.J. L. Mackie - 1965 - American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (4):245 - 264.
Narrative explanation.J. David Velleman - 2003 - Philosophical Review 112 (1):1-25.
The Narrative Construction of Reality.Jerome Bruner - 1991 - Critical Inquiry 18 (1):1-21.
Narrative Explanation.J. David Velleman - 2003 - Philosophical Review 112 (1):1-25.

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