Reading notes on Donald Polkingorne's book Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1988). Human beings exist
on three realms: material, organic and the realm of meaning. Narrative
is a meaning structure that organizes events and human actions into a
whole, thereby attributing significance to individual actions and events
according to their effect on the whole. Polkinghorne explores the
cognitive, ethical and biographical implications of narrative
hermeneutics.
Online at SSRN:
18 Pages
Posted: 19 Jun 2025
Date Written: September 06, 2003
Keywords: Narrativity, Experience, Life Stories, Epistemology, Human Sciences, Donald Polkinghorne, Hermeneutics, Narrative
Suggested Citation:
—oOo—
SSRN - Date posted: June 19, 2025
https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=5233137
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NOTES
ON NARRATIVE KNOWING
José Angel García Landa
Universidad de Zaragoza, 2003
Notes on
Donald Polkinhorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences.
Albany (NY): SUNY Press, 1988. (Page numbers refer to this edition)
Human beings existing on three realms: material, organic and the realm
of meaning.
18
“The registering of relationship by the narrative scheme results from
its power to configure a sequence of events into a unified happening. Narrative
ordering makes individual events comprehensible by identifying the whole to
which they contribute”
“In this sense, narrative can retrospectively alter the meaning of
events after the final outcome is known.”
“In summary, narrative is a meaning structure that organizes events and
human actions into a whole, thereby attributing significance to individual
actions and events according to their effect on the whole”
19
Plot construction is based on Peirce’s abduction.
Both plot construction and hypothesis development are interactive
activities which “show a connection among the events and the resistance of the
events to fit the construction.”
“An appropriate configuration emerges only after a moving back and forth
or tacking procedure compares proposed plot structures with the events and then
revises the plot structure according to the principle of ‘best fit’.” (Retrospection,
hermeneutic circle).
20
“Narrative is always controlled by the concept of time and by the
recognition that temporality is the primary dimension of human existence.”
21
“In narrative organization, the symmetry between explanation and
prediction, characteristic of logico-mathematical reasoning, is broken.
Narrative explanation does not subsume events under laws. Instead, it explains
by clarifying the significance of events that have occurred on the basis of the
outcome that has followed. In this sense, narrative explanation is retroactive”
22
Narrative explanation “increases the scope of synoptic judgment in our
reflection on experience” (Mink, qtd. in Polkinghorne).
27
Merleau-Ponty pro study of language beginning with speech not thoughts
(cf. integrationalists).
28 Merleau-Ponty pro structures of lang. deriving from more basic
perceptual structures.
29 “For Merleau-Ponty, linguistic structures are themselves generated by
historical, contingent acts of speech, which they serve and which they
constitute. They have no prior, ultimate existence in reality itself. They are
a means for ordering experience and making it meaningful without having to turn
meaning into universal laws” (cf. integrationalism).
30
Vs. traditional notion of truth as previous to experience:
“Merleau-Ponty proposed that ‘truth’ is not a natural property of the
world in itself but that consciousness discovers truth in contact with the
world. Truth is inseparable from the expressive operation that says it; it does
not precede reflection but is the result of it. In short, truth is a creation
within speech that presents itself as adequate” (cf. my ‘truth effects’, and
symbolic interactionalist theory of meaning).
Notion of “wild logos”, raw meaning which calls for expression (cf. the
prenarrative, and Hillis Miller’s ethics of reading). “Expression is a response
to a solicitation from below.”
Life is unfinished, it requires interpretation, “This interpretation
must be adequate to what is given—it must include the incarnate and temporal
dimensions—but it consists ultimately of contributions from both the given and
the interpreter” (30).
31
Narrative as discourse. (Configurational dimension of discourse not the
same as the configurational dimension of narrative), language organizes life
into meaningful wholes.
35
Bruner: paradigmatic vs. narrative rationality (2 types of configuration
of sentences into larger units).
36
“either paradigmatic, concerning an extrinsic reference, or narrative,
concerning the speaker’s experience of a unity”
“Narrative expresses its work of configuration in linguistic
productions, oral and written” (ignora totalemente la narratividad no verbal)
“The narrative scheme serves as a lens through which the apparently
independent and disconnected elements of existence are seen as related parts of
a whole. At the level of a single life, the autobiographical narrative shows
life as unified and whole. In stories about other lives and in histories of
social groups, narrative shows the interconnectedness and significance of
seemingly random activities. And in the imaginative creation of stories about
fictitions characters, either passed on as part of a cultural heritage or
as contemporary artistic creations,
narrative displays the extensive variety of ways in which life might be drawn
together into a unified adventure”
50
Analytic philosophy’s examination of the use of cause in history:
“Danto’s analysis of narrative sentences had three epistemological
implications. First, the notion of cause in narrative sentences is paradoxical
in that it appears that a subsequent event transforms a prior one into a cause”
(50). (e.g. ‘in 1717, the author of Rameau’s
Nephew was born’). 2nd, actor unaware: historian organizes. 3rd:
explanation does not involve prediction. Danto missed the configuring work of
emplotement linking sentences into a story.
51
Gallie emphasized overall story as “The main bond of logical continuity,
which makes its elements intelligible” (Gallie qtd in Polkinghorne).
Reader of stories “is concerned about the norms of acceptability that
have ‘to be gradually recognized and constantly assessed and reassessed as the
story proceeds’.” (Gallie quoted).
51
Mink emphasizes that story presentations of historians gives impression
that their conclusions are inferences from the evidence, “when really they are
only indicators of the way the evidence has been ordered” (Polkinghorne on
Mink).
Mink: 3 structures of comprehension, theoretical, “categoreal” and
configurational (Inferences, classifications and narratives).
59
Dray, Gallie and Mink showed that narrative is a mode of comprehension,
not just a presentation for a content that might just as well be expressed
otherwise: it imposes a type of coherence on its sentences.
“The historical narrative, like other discourses, is composed of two
kinds of referents: (1) a first order of referents, which are the events that
make up the story, and (2) a second order of referents, the plot.”
62
“Thus, historical narratives transform a culture’s collection of past
happenings (its first-order referents) by shaping them into a second-order
pattern of meaning.”
64
“Whatever protocols of coherence actually exist in the physical world,
human existence adheres according to protocols that are literary or narrative
in character. These protocols show up in the explanations humans give for their
actions and in the interpretations they make of the relations among the events
of their lives.”
65
Ricoeur emphasizes link of history writing with elementary forms of
storytelling.
66
“Ricoeur comes to narrative from a concern with the phenomenon of double
or hidden meaning, which he believes figure in the most important
understandings of human existence”
67
“Ricoeur switches the discussion about historical narrative from its
legitimacy as an epistemologically sound method to, more generally, what the
use of historical narrative reveals about human beings and their relation to
the past” “He identifies two basic notions: (1) narrative is related to the
world of human action and (2) narrative is a response to the human experience
of feelings of discord and fragmentation in regard to time.”
68
Position advocated by Polkinghorne: “that aspects of experience itself
are presented originally as they appearin the narration and that narrative form
is not simply imposed on preexistent real experience but helpos to give them
form.” Ricoeur emphasizes more, like Mink, White, and the structuralists, the
imposition of form through narrative.
69 On biography and history:
“In literature and history, the narrator has control of the story and
decides what to include or exclude. In the life narrative, the self is the
narrator of its own story. Unlike authors of fictional narratives, however, the
self has to integrate the materials that are at hand. Authors of historical and
fictional narratives describe events that have already ended, but the self is
in the middle of its story and has to revise the plot constantly without
knowing how the story will end.”
“The historian having the advantage of hindsight, may tell a story about
what has happened that will be different from the variou storeis tol by the
past actors. The historian does not narrate past facts but retells past stories
from a current perspective.”
Theories by structuralists, Frye, Scholes and kellogg, Robert, Hillis
miller, Kermode… ,
78
“Marthe Robert proposed that stories presented in novels were
representations of the common human tension between the ideal and the real and
that this tension could be understood using psychoanalytic theory.”
79
Kermode: Biblical time not an undifferentiated flow of time, chronos,
but it rather broken by periods of significance (kairos). Ending as resolution
and return to a routine. “Narrative plots provide the form in which these
periods of human drama can be described.”
82
Ricoeur vs. Barthes’ ‘chronological illusion’, Lévi-Strauss and Propp,
narratology is more flexible but “did not move all the way to Ricoeur’s idea of
grasping the whole” (Polkinghorne does not really assess the shortcomings of
Todorov, Bremond, etc.—JAGL)
92
Culler, vs. narrative as simply a construction of discourse. “Without
the notion that the story is about something outside the discourse iself, it
would lose its force as a selection from possible events and its power to
intrigue us.”
93 vs structuralism:
“structural theories have tended to overlook the surface ambiguities of
stories and to assign only one structgural description to stories that have
more than one meaning.” Ricoeur says struct. deprive the temporal dimension of
its configurational dimension as plot. Ricoeur vs. structuralism; his interest
in human experience of time vs. interest in unchanging logical rules below
human awareness.
99
Development of recepttion theory, text no longer simply structure but a
a communication event.
Narrative and psychology:
106
“Scheibe’s thesis is that people undertake adventures in order to
construct and maintain satisfactory life stories. One’s life story needs to
include a series of progressive and regressive periods repeating over time—that
is, needs adventures followed by the return to repose”.
“Narrative enrichment occurs when one retrospectively revises, selects,
and orders past details in such a way as to create a self-narrative that is
cohernet and satisfying and that will serve as a justification for one’s
present condition and situation.”
Stephen Crites: “One’s personal story or personal identity is a
recollected self in which the more complete the story that is formed, the more
integrated the self will be. Thus, self-knowledge is an appropriation of the
past”
107
Self without a story mere personal pronoun for Crites.
“The creation of a future story that imposes on the tightly woven
recollective story and attempts to maintain an unchanged self leads to
unhappiness with the future.” Future
requires an open and adaptive character.
109
“Research programmes have now moved beyond individual sentences to
groups of sentences that are linked together into discourses and conversations,
with particular attention to how the gramamrs for these larger linguistic
groups are acquired”
111
Mandler: Narrative and schematic knowing. “Schematic knowing is
different from serial knowing because the schematic strategy contains the
notion of a whole or theme that pulls together and configures the bits of
information into a systemic relationship: a ‘scene’ in the case of spatial
scheas, a ‘plot’ in the case of temporal schemas”; “After the whole series of episodes has been
presented, the narrative includees ending portions which show that the episodes
coalesce into one story.” Experiments on narrativity, ordering segments, etc.
112
“Stein and Policastro have argued that no single structural definition
can account for the wide range of compositions people accept as stories. Their
research has showed that, although people can readily distinguish good stories
from poor ones, they still accept as stories compositionsthat are deficient in
many of the ways required by the proposed structural models.”
113
Basic roots of narrativity in cognition (Mancuso, Fuller).
118
Gergen: communal prod. of stories, people produce stories together.
119
Gergen: “self-narratives depend on the mutual sharing of symbols,
socially acceptable performances, and continued negotiation” (qtd. in Polkinghorne
119).
120
Freud and rtp. “In view of the retrospective character of all narrative
and the inseparability of the self from its story, the event is a necessary
hypothesis for understanding, regardless of whether it is factual or fictional”
121
Culler and the two logics: “the two logics—one which insists on the
causal efficacy of origins and the other which treats events as the products of
meanings—must exist side by side”
As a result of Freud: “Human
beings are not simply constructions based on past events; they are also
products of narrative structures.” (Cf. Jerome Blumer’s 'self-indications'—JAGL).
122-23.
Narrative and organizational consultation
Culture of specific associations, self- representations, identity
themes, emergence of more integrative narratives, narr. a necessary form of
coherence for an organization’s realm of meaning.
125
“Heidegger has proposed that human experience in its original form is
hermeneutically meaningful. Narrative is a primary scheme by means of which
hermeneutical meaningfulness is manifested.”
126
Linguistic realm as an activity, a process of menaing creation for
existence.
“The temporality of human experience is punctuated not only according to
one’s own life (for example, one’s fiftieth birthday) but also according to
one’s place within the long-time-spans of history and social evolution (e.g.,
the 1980s). Narrative is the mode of meaning construction that displays these
various experiences of time.”
127
Vs purely chronological notion of time “People simply do not experience
time as a succession of instants.”
129
Augustine and complex present infused by past and future too (memory,
attention and expectation). “Augustine also introduced two other problems. The
first was that time is sometimes experienced as a concordant whole and at other
times as splintered and discordant fragments.”
Ricoeur beyong Husserl’s notion: “limited because it has overlooked the
privileged access that narrative provides for the way we articulate our
experience of time.” (129).
130
Heidegger’s levels of temporal experience, culminating in an awareness
of personal finitude
131
Ricoeur and plot. “Plot can be isolated from judgments about the reference and content of a story, and to
be viewed instead as the sense of a
narrative” (Careful here: a sense proposed by the narrative, for
Polkinghorne. Not the sense we see ourselves: cf. my papers on friendly vs.
unfriendly criticism —JAGL).
Ricoeur uses Mink:
“The act of the plot is to elicit a pattern from a succession, and it
involves a kind of reasoning that tacks back and forth from the events to the
ploot until a plot forms that both respects the events and encompasses them in
a whole. The ‘humblest’ narrative is always more than a chronological series of
events: it is a gathering together of events into a meaningful story” (131).
(To be added: A new type of configuration emerging from the observation
of narration, of its recontextualization: a new plot beyond the plot, including
the observer or reader - JAGL).
133
“Narrative describes the phenomenon of intervention, in which a
character’s power to act is linked to the objective order and its serial time”
Heidegger’s second level of time experience (historicity) also addressed
by Ricoeur as we extract from a narrative its theme, point or ‘what it is
about’ (i.e. we reconfigure the narrative as readers; cf. my idea of the
'literary statement' - JAGL).
“The past is not over, because it can be retrieved in memory. The going
back into the past is not a mechanical reproduction of what has been; rather,
it is a fetching back of the possibilities that have passed by in order to make
them real again in the present”
(A contact point here between Ricoeur and Michael André Bernstein's 'sideshadowing'
- JAGL).
134
“Ricoeur holds that narrative calls Heidegger’s primacy of individual
existence into question and acts as a corrective to Heidegger’s analysis of
experience of time remembered. Says Ricoeur: ‘Narrativity, from the outset,
establishes repetition on the plane of being-with-others.’ Narrative opens the
experience of history and moves it beyond personal history to create a communal
history. Narrative is a communication not just between contemporaries but also
between predecessors and successors, and the common destiny is more fundamental
to it than any individual fate. Through the transmission of past possibilities
to present hearers, the tradition of a historical community’s common destiny is
repeated or retrieved. thus, narrative enlarges Heidegger’s analysis of the
experience of time, and his personal memory is expanded to a communal memory.”
Heidegger’s 3rd level, “temporality”, an analogy with God’s position,
seeing time as a whole, acceptance of one’s place in temporality (—cf. myths
of overall organization and the life of the universe - JAGL). Ricoeur sees
it as insufficiently related to the experience
of time. “there may be in narrative analysis the uncovering of a level
in which the awareness of deathe precedes and makes possible the awareness of
history and the memory of dead heroes”
135
Ricoeur: “The reasons for which we tell stories are rooted in the same
temporal structure that connnects our ‘élan’ towards the future, our attention
to the present and our capacity to emphasize and recollect the past” —quoted in
Polkinghorne; “Life is lived above the objective plane and its instanteous
‘nows’” (Polkinghorne).
138
Ideal of rational purposeful behaviour as fully human in Weber.
140
Structuralism and rules, unchanging and static, governing human
behaviour. Vs. structuralists: “Ultimately, they have failed to bridge the gap
between their descriptions of formal structures and actual expressive human
activity, in all its variety and ‘illogic’.”
141
Peter Winch: “that the rules of behavior are socially generated and
exist merely as the sedimented and exist merely as the sedimented agreements
developed over time within a social organization” Language game approach, based
on Wittgenstein, vs. structuralism:
“In the language game approach, the rules are grounded and maintained by
sedimented social agreement”.
141
Alternative to structuralism, language game and purposeful rationality
is possible, based on narrative action.
“The concept of human action proposed by a narrative approach is that
action is an expression of existence and that its organization manifests the
narrative organization of human experience. Acting is like writing a story, and
the understanding of action is like arriving at an interpretation of a story.”
143
“the composition of plots draws on the human competence to distinguish
the domain of action from the domain of physical movement”
144 (interactive common assumptions of narrator and listener: competence
to understand concepts like agent, goal, etc., culturally given meaningfulness
and valuation of actions, understanding of human temporality…
145
“Narrative is the form of hermeneutic expression in which human action
is understood and made meaningful” (Cf. Aristotle). “The Poetics, then, is about the composition of narratives,
identified as a hermeneutic activity in which the relationship between parts is
made apparent”
149
The concept of the self, disregarded by human sicences because of their
formal science model, now reemereges in human disciplines.
150
“It appears that the for the major part of daily life a person’s self
concept is raised, edited and implemented preconsciously, at the prelinguistic
level of emotion and ‘felt’ dispositions.”
“Self, then, is not a static thing nor a substance, but a configuring of
personal events into a historical unity which includes not only what one has
been but also anticipations of what one will be.”
151
“The answer proposed here is that the self is a concept defined as the
expressive process of human existence, whose form is narrativity.”
“Self identity becomes linked to a person’s life story, which connects
up the actions into an integrating plot.”
152
Personal emplotment has to integrate events which result from accidents,
givens, unintended consequences, etc. as well as personal motivation, roles one
plays, which may be confused with the development of a personal plots.
153
Alasdair MacIntyre: stories build on the intrinsic narrativity of life
development, “cultures do provide specific types of plot for adoption by its
members in their configurations of self”.
154 (heroic, tragic tales…)
Nietzsche, self as something becoming, a construction, knows itself
indirectly through signs and symbols of self-interpretation: admires style
which connects one person’s actions into a whole.
155 “Nietzsche wanted the plot of personal identity to be a creative
work of quality and style.” (Now this is dramatized in postmodern reflexive
styles, I would say - JAGL).
Practice and narrative.
159
Human disciplines “These disciplines do not produce knowledge that leads
to the prediction and control of human experience; they produce, instead,
knowledge that deepens and enlarges the understanding of human existence.”
160
“Narrative meaning consists of more than the events alone, it consists
also of the significance these events have for the narrator in relation to a
particular theme”
161
Polkinghorne stresses believability and verisimilitude in human science
rather than logical certainty.
162
“Descriptive narrative research … attends to the collection of narrative
schemes that operate for a person or group and to the situations that trigger
or draw the particular narratives into interpretive expression.”
165
Mishler: a story is also a self-presentation through which the teller
claisms a particular kind of self-identity.
167
Vs purely abstractive use of narrative typologies: “Typologies of
narrative function in a very weak sense, and are only useful if seen as an
inventory of abstractions and concepts.”
168
“The uniqueness of the particular narrative being described by the
researcher is as important as the features it has in common with other
stories.”
170 (The Challenger catastrophe as an example):
“Narrative explanations are retrospective. They sort out the multitude
of events and decisions that are connected to the launch, and they select those
which are significant in light of the fatal conclusion….The story highlights
the significance of particular decisions and events and their roles in the
final outcome.”
171
“The report is retrodictive rather than predictive, that is, it is a
retrospective gathering of events into an account that makes the ending
reasonable and believable. it is more than a mere chronicling or listing of the
events along a time line: it configures the events in such a way that their
parts in the whole story become clear”
172
Max Weber and the “logic of singular causal imputation” as a “what if”
procedure: “constructing by imagination a different course of events, and then
comparing these consequences with the real course of events” (cf. the role
of science fiction – JAGL).
173
“Genesis” better than “cause” in narrative to avoid confusion with the
sense it has in formal science.
175
“A valid finding in narrative research, however, although it might
include conclusions based on formal logic and measurement data, is based on the
more general understanding of valididty as a well-grounded conclusion.”
176
Truth in narrative research is not a conformity to actuality. “Narrative
research, then, uses the ideal of a scholarly consensus as the test of
verisimilitude rather than the test of logical or mathematical validity.”
178
Therapeutic value of narrative in self-help groups.
179
“The point of the analytic work is not to lead the analysis and to
create a literal description of or to recover the past. Instead, the past is to
be reconstructed in the light of the client’s present awareness” (and their needs, I should say—JAGL).
180
“The analyst knows that the person strives for multiple goals and
gratifications, and is required to maintain a balance and integration of the
various wants and desires”.
“For both Spencer and Eagle, the therapeutic narrative needs to include
those factual events that do exist. A personal story that neglects or denies
the events in one’s life in order to be more pleasing or coherent—that is, a
fictional account of one’s self—is counter to the therapeutic commitment to
truth.”
181
“Hillman holds that it was Freud’s development of the psychoanalytic
case history that took medical empiricism out of psychotherapy and brought
stories into it.”
182
Reconfiguration of existing life stories in therapy. “The reflective
awareness of one’s personal narrative provides the realization that past events
are not meaningful in themselves but are given significance by the
configuration of one’s narrative. This realization can release people from the
control of past interpretations they have attached to events and open up the
possibility of renewal and freedom for change.” (182-83)
183
“I have argued that human beings exist in three realms—the material
realm, the organic realm, and the realm of meaning. The realm of meaning is
structured according to linguistic forms, and one of the most important forms
for creating meaning in human existence is the narrative.”
—oOo—
(211 n. 35: Polkinghorne vs. Habermas’
identification of consensus as truth. “the best” understanding is not
necessarily identical with “a true” understanding).
—oOo—
Also here:
García
Landa, José Angel. "Notes on Narrative Knowing." Ms., 2003. Net
Sight de José Angel García Landa 20 Jan. 2025.* (Donald Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the
Human Sciences).
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/polkinghorne.pdf
2025
_____. "Notes
on Narrative Knowing." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 6 May
2024.*
https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2024/05/notes-on-narrative-knowing.html
2024 DISCONTINUED 2025 – Online at the
Internet Archive.*
https://web.archive.org/web/20250118074527/https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2024/05/notes-on-narrative-knowing.html
2025
_____. "Notes on Narrative
Knowing." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 24 June 2025.*
https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/06/notes-on-narrative-knowing.html
2025
https://x.com/JoseAngelGLanda/status/1937559148029219122
2025
_____.
"Notes on Narrative Knowing." SSRN 19 June 2025.*
https://ssrn.com/abstract=5233137
2025
Epistemology eJournal 19 June
2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Epistemology.html
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Ethics eJournal 19 June 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Ethics.html
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Philosophy of Action eJournal 19
June 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Philosophy-Action.html
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Philosophy of Mind eJournal 19
June 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Philosophy-Mind.html
2025
Philosophy of Action eJournal 19
June 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Developmental-Psychology.html
2025
Social
and Personality Psychology eJournal
19 June 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Social-Personality-Psychology.html
2025
