The Narrative Approach to Moral Development: From the Epistemic Subject to Dialogical Selves

Abstract

The narrative approach to the study of moral development is based on central theoretical assumptions about self that are described in this article. Careful attention to narrative yields an approach in which language plays a much larger role in structuring moral life, generating moral experience, and shaping a far more social kind of self than assumed by the cognitive-developmental approach. The narrative approach entails a move away from a paradigm of cognitive representations and internally held principles, in which the self is regarded as a disembodied, transcendental, epistemic subject? toward a paradigm of social construction and intersubjectively possible forms of discourse, in which selves are assumed to be embodied, relational, and thus fundamentally dialogical.