Narrative and psychological understanding.

Abstract

NARRATIVE understanding is based in philosophical hermeneutics, a tradition regnant in Europe but only recently penetrating the American intellectual consciousness. Within this epistemology, there is only the text (communicated in language), which is itself about a text, and dialogue within and among these texts. There is no priori place to stand to make truth claims: there are only interpretations made from a particular historical and value-implicated stance. The "hermeneutic circle" describes a process in which understanding requires reference to a priori understandings such that knowledge accrues in a circular, dialectic fashion. No knowledge can be independent of context or interpreter. The enterprise of science then becomes conversation from which emerge consensual ideas that constitute ways of perceiving and interpreting future texts.