290 ANALYZING DATA
on the theories, concepts, and categories central to folk psychology, and these surely must be
judged reasonable; indeed, the failings of positivism appear to leave human scientists no viable
option but to work with folk psychology. A rejection of naive positivism implies that the past
does not present itself to us as a series of isolated facts upon which we impose a narrative so as to
bring the facts to order. Rather, experience presents itself as an already structured set of facts.
Human scientists cannot grasp facts about the world save in their relation to one another and also
to the other theories they hold true. They cannot experience the past apart from the categories
given them by folk psychology. We might say, therefore, that the world they experience already
has a narrative structure. We are, to circle back, working with interpretations of interpretations.NOTES- Philosophers typically use the term “folk psychology” to describe those concepts that thus govern our
prescientific thought and language about the mental; often they do so in contrast to formal psychologies and
especially cognitive science. - Although Foucault is a leading example, even he appears to have needed a concept of agency at times
(Dews 1989).