HOW NARRATIVES EXPLAIN 287then encourages affective individualism. The interpretive analyst thereby further develops a nar-
rative explanation of the subject under study.
Volitional connections enable us to make sense of the fact that agents moved from having
desires for states of affairs to intending to perform actions and then on to acting as they did.
Whereas our beliefs and desires give us all sorts of grounds for doing all sorts of things, the
individual will selects the particular actions we are to perform from among the alternatives thus
presented to us. The will forms an intention to act by deciding which action we should perform
out of the many we have grounds for performing. We have to postulate the will here because
there is a space separating desires from intentions. This space suggests that we should conceive
of the will reaching a decision in an unrestricted process in which previously formed inten-
tions, current preferences, and future possibilities all interact with one another. Although our
decisions give us intentions, we can act on such intentions only because of the ability of the will
to command us to do so.
Volitional connections come into being when the will operates so as to transform one’s stance
toward a given proposition, first, from being favorable to it to a decision to act on it, and then from
a decision to act on it to a command so to do. No doubt human scientists are unable to say much
about the way the will operates—they can say little other than that an individual will did operate
with a particular result—but that they are unable to do so is not a failing so much as a necessary
consequence of the nature of the will: The will is a creative faculty. Typically, then, human scientists
do not unpack volitional connections so much as take them for granted. Folk psychology tells us
people are capable of acting on their beliefs and desires, and because they can do so, to elucidate the
relevant beliefs and desires is to explain an action or practice. Hence, as we saw earlier, to under-
stand these beliefs and desires is just to explain the relevant action or practice.
TRADITIONS AND DILEMMAS
Narratives explain actions and practices by pointing to the conditional and volitional connec-
tions between beliefs and desires embedded in them. They explicate actions in relation to the
webs of beliefs of the actors. Once we accept this analysis of narrative, we confront the ques-
tion: How might we explain why actors hold the webs of belief they do? Explanations of webs
of belief revolve around two sets of concepts. The first set includes concepts, such as tradition
and paradigm, that explore the social context in which individuals exercise their reason. The
second set includes those, such as dilemma and anomaly, which explore how and why agents
change their beliefs.
Because interpretivists emphasize the holistic nature of beliefs, they conceive of all reasoning
and experience as laden with prior theories, so they reject any strong concept of autonomy. For
interpretivists, people cannot have pure reason or pure experience; individuals necessarily con-
strue their experiences using theories they inherit. People’s experiences can lead them to beliefs
only because they already are embedded in traditions. However, although tradition is thus un-
avoidable, it is so only as a starting point, not as something that governs later performances. We
might be cautious of representing tradition as an unavoidable presence in everything people do in
case we leave too slight a role for local reasoning. Tradition is not constitutive of the beliefs
people later come to hold or the actions they then perform. It is just a first influence on people
who possess a capacity for situated agency.
No doubt some interpretivists appear to leave little, if any, room for agency.^2 They suggest that
languages, paradigms, or epistemes determine the beliefs people adopt and so the actions they