HOW NARRATIVES EXPLAIN 289from views with little theoretical content to complex theoretical constructs only remotely linked
to views about the real world. What is more, we cannot straightforwardly identify dilemmas with
allegedly objective pressures in the world. People vary their beliefs or actions in response to any
new idea that they come to hold as true. They do so irrespective of whether the new idea reflects real
pressures or, to be precise, irrespective of whether it reflects pressures that human scientists as
observers believe to be real. In explaining change, interpretivists do not privilege their academic
accounts of the world; rather, they again offer interpretations of interpretations, concentrating on the
subjective and intersubjective understandings of the actors who bring about the change.
EPISTEMIC VALIDITY
Interpretive approaches instantiate a narrative form of explanation in which actions are explained
by pointing to conditional and volitional connections between beliefs and in which beliefs are
explained in terms of traditions and dilemmas. As such, interpretivism deploys the same type of
narrative structures found in works of fiction. We can acknowledge this similarity without assimi-
lating interpretive studies to fiction. Human scientists typically offer us narratives that they be-
lieve retell the way in which things happened in the past or really are today, whereas writers of
fiction do not do so. Human scientists cannot ignore the facts, although we surely should accept
that no fact is simply given to them.
Critics of interpretive research still might argue, however, that all narratives are constructed in
part by the imagination of the writer, so if interpretivism relies on narrative, it lacks proper epistemic
legitimacy. This argument even seems to be made by some advocates of interpretive approaches.
Louis Mink, for example, doubted whether one could resolve the problem that although narrative
“claims to represent... the real complexity of the past,” it is an “imaginative construction, which
cannot defend its claim to truth” (1978, 45). Similarly, Hayden White argues that human scien-
tists endow the past with meaning by “the projection” of narrative structures on it, where the
choice of narrative structures, or “genres of literary figuration,” is the result of an a-rational,
aesthetic judgment (1987, 47).
In fact, we can easily defend the epistemic legitimacy of narrative provided only that we reject
naive positivism. The failings of naive positivism are recognized so widely now that I hope I will
be excused for taking for granted the assumption that we cannot have pure perceptions of given
facts, but rather must always approach the world with a prior body of theories, concepts, or
categories that help to construct the experiences we have. This rejection of naive positivism im-
plies, first, that in all human knowledge—natural science as well as narrative—we imaginatively
construct the world of our experience. Thus, we can accept that narratives are in part imaginative
constructs and still defend their epistemic legitimacy, for their legitimacy cannot be undermined
by the fact that they exhibit a characteristic that is common to all knowledge. Many concerns
about the epistemic legitimacy of narrative make sense only if one assumes the possibility of
forms of knowledge that do not entail anything akin to what Mink called “imaginative construc-
tion.” Certainly, White’s reference to the way in which we project narrative structures onto the
world becomes critical only if one assumes the possibility of a sort of pure data onto which we do
not project prior categories.
The second important consequence of rejecting naive positivism is that we must judge the
epistemic legitimacy of a form of explanation by reference to the reasonableness of the theories,
concepts, or categories it embodies. There are, of course, numerous competing postpositivist
analyses of what counts as reasonable in this context. Fortunately, we do not need to decide
between these competing analyses to defend the epistemic legitimacy of narrative. Narrative rests