Telling it Like it Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms

Something is rotten in state-of-the-art narrative theory. Time has done nothing to correct it, and philosophers have managed even less. At issue is the epistemic legitimacy of the historical narrative, and the debates it generates are as protracted as they are confounding. What epistemic status do the kind of stories historians tell claim, and what have they any right to claim, in virtue of their narrative form? -that is the question. Both positive and negative answers have been backed by arguments that can seem quite compelling, at least for a time. Stepping back a bit, however, can make both positions appear strange and unnatural. Sweeping denials of the story's capacity to reflect the past accurately are ever catalyzing equally misleading global affirmations, which in turn and again make the more skeptical stance appear quite attractive. The contortions that both critics and defenders of narrative go through, and the instability of the convictions they generate, should in the end, I believe, make us suspicious of the question. Narrative histories should be taken on their own terms, and their epistemic adequacy assessed on a case-by-case basis. The issue arises because the constructive activity of the narrator is seen to be in tension with history's professed aim to tell truths about the past. Louis Mink put the problem well: So we have a ... dilemma about the historical narrative: as historical it claims to represent, through its form, part of the real complexity of the past, but as narrative it is a product of imaginative construction, which cannot defend its claim to truth by any accepted procedure of argument or authentication.' Mink's doubts about the possibility of such a defense have of course not deterred philosophers from trying to provide them. Recent years have seen some rather sophisticated dialectical defenses of the narrative mode. I intend to examine these arguments in some detail, and try to make both their virtues and their shortcomings stand out clearly. More importantly, however, I aim to question the skepticism that inspires such attempts. Thus recent efforts to defend the epistemic honor of the story should be