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Narrative

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-M031-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-M031-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/narrative/v-1

3. Narrative and antirealism

Antirealists (see Realism and antirealism §2) reject the idea that there is a determinate reality, largely independent of human activity and conception, to which our cognitive powers give us only limited access. They claim that the world is indeterminate in those regions inaccessible to our investigations or – in a more extreme version – multiple and conflicting in a way that mirrors our own multiple and conflicting conceptions of the world. Some antirealists have supposed that science, biography and history are species of fiction, giving rise to narratives unconstrained by correspondence with reality.

One version of this argument holds that historical narrative imposes on a series of events features that the series does not intrinsically possess, by means of selectivity, teleology and closure. Narrative selects among events, highlighting some and placing others in the background; but the events themselves do not stand in relations of salience and no event is intrinsically more important than any other. Narrative is teleological in so far as the reason for including events in a narrative is their contribution to outcomes distant from those events and identifiable, once again, only in terms of interests that are variable across cultures, times and individuals. Narrative imposes closure on events by claiming to identify a natural stopping place for the narrative; in fact there are no natural stopping places intrinsic to the events themselves, but only relative to the events as they are ordered and selected by interest. Let us call such features ‘plot-like’, so as to remind us of the antirealist’s presumption that they are features which push historical writing into the realm of the fictional.

One realist response would be to argue that plot-like features, while not intrinsic to the historical events themselves, are none the less real, relational features of those events, much as colours are said to be real, relational properties of things, since the colour of a thing depends on the kind of visual experience it causes us to have. And just as an account of the colours of things can be thought of as reporting matters of fact, so the attribution of plot-like features to events and their relations in an historical narrative counts as (potentially) fact-stating. On this view, narratives which seem to disagree in their attributions of plot-like features may genuinely contradict one another, and only one narrative can be right. But another possibility for the realist is that the appearance of disagreement is the result of the failure of the plot-like features to be properly relativized. Such a conflict would dissipate if what is said to be significant according to one narrative and insignificant according to another is intended to be understood as significant from one point of view according to the first narrative, and insignificant from another point of view according to the second.

A more moderate realist response admits that plot-like features are not genuinely features of the historical events themselves. It insists, however, that there is another set of features (hereafter ‘truth-making’ features), which are genuine features of the events themselves, and that historical narratives can be thought of as correct if and only if they attribute these features correctly. Correctness of a narrative in this sense is independent of its plot-like aspects, in that narratives will only count as rivals when they differ over attributions of truth-making features. When they differ over the attribution of plot-like features, they merely count as alternatives. Thus two correct but different narratives would be like two photographs of the same scene taken from different angles. Each photograph/narrative is correct as far as it goes, though one might be more comprehensively correct than the other. Perspective-related differences between the pictures that affect the apparent spatial relations of objects will not count as disagreements between them. Likewise, differences between the narratives in respect of plot-like features will not count as genuine contradictions.

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Citing this article:
Currie, Gregory. Narrative and antirealism. Narrative, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-M031-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/narrative/v-1/sections/narrative-and-antirealism-1.
Copyright © 1998-2024 Routledge.

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