The Epistemological Status of Autobiographical Accounts or How to Treat Personal Narratives

The purpose of this article is to show how different understandings of truth-correspondence, consensual, subjective, and fictional, as well as the truth of a particular interest group, affect the treatment and interpretation of autobiographical accounts. At the same time, these accounts are understood here as personal narratives told from the perspective of the narrator's personal experience, presenting events in a specific temporal and causal order. An autobiographical account captures a person's life in terms of a story about himself, but also about those whom the story depicts. The article opens with a discussion of the epistemological status of autobiographical data most often cited in the literature, which amounts to treating narratives as objective events or merely subjective accounts of them. Moving beyond this dichotomous division is presented in the remainder of the article, which discusses the meaning of truth in the four views of social reality and how this affects the treatment of life stories. The analytical areas identified provide an understanding of how to treat empirical data and what cognitive results should be expected if one adopts a given understanding of truth.