f8

2. Towards Critical Realism

The position which I shall here briefly outline is that which is now known, broadly, as critical realism.⁴ This is a theory about how people know things, and offers itself as a way forward, over against other competing theories that have appeared in several fields (not least in the three with which we shall be particularly concerned) and that seem now to be in a state of collapse. To see this more clearly we need a brief and broad-brush account of these rival theories, which are, more or less, the optimistic and pessimistic versions of the Enlightenment epistemological project, or of a broad empiricism. The technical terms I shall use at this stage are deliberately general, and are of course much debated; but I hope the case is clear in outline.

On the one hand there is the optimism of the positivist position.⁵ The positivist believes that there are some things at least about which we can have definite knowledge. There are some things that are simply ‘objectively’ true, that is, some things about which we can have, and actually do have, solid and unquestionable knowledge. These are things which can be tested ‘empirically’, that is, by observing, measuring, etc. within the physical world. Taking this to its logical conclusion, things that cannot be tested in this way cannot be spoken of without talking some sort of nonsense.⁶ Though this view has been largely abandoned by philosophers, it has had a long run for its money in other spheres, not least those of the physical sciences. Despite the great strides in self-awareness that have come about through (for instance) sociology of knowledge, not to mention philosophy of science itself, one still meets some scientists (and many non-scientists who talk about science) who believe that what science does is simply to look objectively at things that are there.⁷ The reverse of this belief is that, where positivism cannot utter its shrill certainties, all that is left is subjectivity or relativity. The much-discussed contemporary phenomenon of cultural and theological relativism is itself in this sense simply the dark side of positivism.

People thus assume, within the world of post-Enlightenment positivism, that they know things ‘straight’. At what many regard as a common-sense level, this position may be called ‘naïve realism.’ Optical and other similar illusions are regarded as freaks, departures from the norm—which is presumed to be that human beings, with proper scientific controls available, have instant access to raw data about which they can simply make true propositions on the basis of sense-experience. Since it is obvious that not all human knowledge is of this type, the sorts of knowledge that break the mould are downgraded: classically, within positivism this century, metaphysics and theology come in for this treatment. Since they do not admit of verification, they become belief, not knowledge (as Plato had long ago suggested), and then meaningless or nonsensical belief (as Ayer argued). Aesthetics and ethics are reduced to functions of the experiences of one or more people: ‘beautiful’ and ‘good’ simply mean ‘I/we like this’ or ‘I/we approve of that’. Positivism thus manages to rescue certain types of knowledge at the expense of others. There are some things, it claims, for which we have (in principle) a god’s-eye view, and others for which all we have are prejudices and whims. The fact that positivism has been subjected to damaging criticism in recent decades, being drastically modified even by its leading proponents (including Ayer himself), has not stopped it from continuing to exercise an influence at the popular level, where it accords well with the prevailing Western worldview which gives pre-eminent value to scientific knowing and technological control and power while relativizing the intangible values and belief-systems of human society. One meets it among naïve theologians, who complain that while other people have ‘presuppositions’, they simply read the text straight, or who claim that, because one cannot have ‘direct access’ to the ‘facts’ about Jesus, all that we are left with is a morass of first-century fantasy. We will meet a good deal of this sort of thing as we proceed.⁸

History finds itself stuck between the two poles. Is it a sort of ‘objective’ knowledge, or is it all really ‘subjective’? Or is this a false dichotomy?⁹ What sort of knowledge do we have of historical events? On the one hand, historical knowledge is subject to the same caveats as all knowledge in general. It is possible to be mistaken. I may think I am holding a book when it is in fact a lump of wood; I may think Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but it may in fact have been some other river; I may think that Paul founded the church in Philippi, but it is conceivable that someone else got there first. When, therefore, people talk anxiously about whether there is ‘real proof’ for this or that historical ‘event’, usually concluding that there is not, the chances are that they are at least dangerously near the edge of the positivist trap, the false either-or of full certainty versus mere unsubstantiated opinion. The evidence for Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon is ultimately of the same order as the evidence that what I am holding is a book. Very similar verification procedures, in fact, apply to both propositions. Neither is absolutely certain; neither is so uncertain as to be useless. If we do not recognize this fundamental similarity, we may find ourselves ignoring Cartesian doubt in everyday life and embracing it uncritically for more ‘serious’ issues. In the New Testament field, some critics have made a great song and dance about the fact that the details of Jesus’ life, or the fact of his resurrection, cannot be proved ‘scientifically’; philosophical rigour should compel them to admit that the same problem pertains to the vast range of ordinary human knowledge, including the implicit claim that knowledge requires empirical verification.

The pessimistic side of the Enlightenment programme can be most clearly seen in certain more modest forms of empiricism, not least phenomenalism.¹⁰ The only thing of which I can really be sure when confronted by things in (what seems to be) the external world are my own sense-data. This view, with a kind of apparent epistemological humility, therefore translates talk about external objects (this is a mug) into statements about sense-data (I am aware of hard, round, smooth and warm feelings in my hands). Positivism, at this point, would go on to infer, and if possible verify, the presence of external objects; phenomenalism remains cautious, and this caution has affected a good deal of popular speech: instead of the brash ‘this is correct’, we say ‘I would want to argue that this is correct’, collapsing a dangerously arrogant statement about the world into a safely humble statement about myself. The well-known problems with this view have not stopped it from having enormous influence, not least within some parts of postmodernism. When I seem to be looking at a text, or at an author’s mind within the text, or at events of which the text seems to be speaking, all I am really doing is seeing the author’s view of events, or the text’s appearance of authorial intent, or maybe only my own thoughts in the presence of the text … and is it even a text?¹¹

A diagram may help at this point. The positivist conceives of knowing as a simple line from the observer to the object. This results in the following model:

Observer------------------------------------------> Object

—simply looking at objective reality

—tested by empirical observation

—if it doesn’t work, it’s nonsense

The phenomenalist, however, tries this model out and discovers that all results bend back on to the knower:

Observer------------------------------------------> Object

—I seem to have evidence of external reality

<------------------------------------------------------------

—but I am really only sure of my sense-data

There are, of course, all sorts of variations on these themes, but they show the difference between two broad positions. They could be further characterized by an illustration. If knowing something is like looking through a telescope, a simplistic positivist might imagine that he is simply looking at the object, forgetting for the moment the fact that he is looking through lenses, while a phenomenalist might suspect that she is looking at a mirror, in which she is seeing the reflection of her own eye. One logical result of the latter position is of course solipsism, the belief that I and only I exist. What else do I have evidence for?

Over against both of these positions, I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’).¹² This path leads to critical reflection on the products of our enquiry into ‘reality’, so that our assertions about ‘reality’ acknowledge their own provisionality. Knowledge, in other words, although in principle concerning realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower.¹³

We might, then, attempt a preliminary sketch of the shape of knowledge, according to the model of critical realism, as follows:

Observer------------------------------------------> Object

initial observation

<------------------------------------------------------------

is challenged by critical reflection

------------------------------------------------------------>

but can survive the challenge and speak truly of reality

The second and third of these stages need, clearly, further discussion. Critical awareness reveals three things at least about the process of knowing, all of which challenge either a naïve realism or a mainline positivism. First, the observer is looking from one point of view, and one only; and there is no such thing as a god’s-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god’s-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human’s point of view.¹⁴ Second, and consequent upon this, all humans inevitably and naturally interpret the information received from their senses through a grid of expectations, memories, stories, psychological states, and so on. The point of view is not merely peculiar in terms of location (I am standing on this side of the room, not that side, so my viewpoint is different from yours); it is also peculiar in terms of the lenses of my worldview (as various writers have shown, a tacit and pre-theoretical point of view is itself a necessary condition for any perception and knowledge to occur at all).¹⁵ Thirdly, and most importantly, where I stand and the (metaphorical) lenses through which I look have a great deal to do with the communities to which I belong. Some things which I see in a particular way I see thus because I belong to a particular human community, a network of family and friends; some, because I belong to a profession; some, because I am an amateur musician; and so on. Every human community shares and cherishes certain assumptions, traditions, expectations, anxieties, and so forth, which encourage its members to construe reality in particular ways, and which create contexts within which certain kinds of statements are perceived as making sense. There is no such thing as the ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ observer; equally, there is no such thing as the detached observer.¹⁶

All of these factors mean that any ‘realism’ which is to survive has to take fully on board the provisionality of all its statements. How then can it proceed?

The one thing that is not possible at this point is to revive some form of positivism, albeit in a chastened mood. That is, it will not do to say at this point that, when all the above allowances have been made, there simply are some things which can still be said, on the basis of empirical sense-data, about the world external to the observer(s). No: instead of working from the particulars of observation, or ‘sense-data’, to confident statements about external reality, positivistically conceived, critical realism (as I am proposing it) sees knowledge of particulars as taking place within the larger framework of the story or worldview which forms the basis of the observer’s way of being in relation to the world. (I shall discuss what worldviews are, and how they work, in chapter 5.) Instead of working as it were upwards from empirical data, in however chastened and hence cautious a fashion, knowledge takes place, within this model, when people find things that fit with the particular story or (more likely) stories to which they are accustomed to give allegiance. I shall discuss presently the further problems to which this gives rise.

I am well aware that, by itself, this statement will sound very puzzling. It will seem as though knowledge is simply a private matter; the phenomenalists, or the subjectivists, have won after all. All I know about is something that takes place inside my own story. In order to show why this reduction is unwarranted we must look at the matter of verification. What counts as ‘verifying’ that which is claimed as knowledge?¹⁷

The usual accounts of ‘scientific’ method focus (with good reason, in my view) on hypothesis and verification/falsification. We make a hypothesis about what is true, and we go about verifying or falsifying it by further experimentation. But how do we arrive at hypotheses, and what counts as verification or falsification? On the positivistic model, hypotheses are constructed out of the sense-data received, and then go in search of more sense-evidence which will either confirm, modify or destroy the hypothesis thus created. I suggest that this is misleading. It is very unlikely that one could construct a good working hypothesis out of sense-data alone, and in fact no reflective thinker in any field imagines that this is the case. One needs a larger framework on which to draw, a larger set of stories about things that are likely to happen in the world. There must always be a leap, made by the imagination that has been attuned sympathetically to the subject-matter, from the (in principle) random observation of phenomena to the hypothesis of a pattern. Equally, verification happens not so much by observing random sense-data to see whether they fit with the hypothesis, but by devising means, precisely on the basis of the larger stories (including the hypothesis itself), to ask specific questions about specific aspects of the hypothesis. But this presses the question: in what way do the large stories and the specific data arrive at a ‘fit’? In order to examine this we must look closer at stories themselves.

3. Stories, Worldviews and Knowledge

Stories are one of the most basic modes of human life.¹⁸ It is not the case that we perform random acts and then try to make sense of them; when people do that we say that they are drunk, or mad. As MacIntyre argues, conversations in particular and human actions in general are ‘enacted narratives’. That is, the overall narrative is the more basic category, while the particular moment and person can only be understood within that context:¹⁹

Just as a history is not a sequence of actions, but the concept of an action is that of a moment in an actual or possible history abstracted for some purpose from that history, so the characters in a history are not a collection of persons, but the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history.²⁰

Human life, then, can be seen as grounded in and constituted by the implicit or explicit stories which humans tell themselves and one another. This runs contrary to the popular belief that a story is there to ‘illustrate’ some point or other which can in principle be stated without recourse to the clumsy vehicle of a narrative. Stories are often wrongly regarded as a poor person’s substitute for the ‘real thing’, which is to be found either in some abstract truth or in statements about ‘bare facts’. An equally unsatisfactory alternative is to regard the story as a showcase for a rhetorical saying or set of such sayings. Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I shall argue in chapter 5 that all worldviews contain an irreducible narrative element, which stands alongside the other worldview elements (symbol, praxis, and basic questions and answers), none of which can be simply ‘reduced’ to terms of the others. As we shall see, worldviews, the grid through which humans perceive reality, emerge into explicit consciousness in terms of human beliefs and aims, which function as in principle debatable expressions of the worldviews. The stories which characterize the worldview itself are thus located, on the map of human knowing, at a more fundamental level than explicitly formulated beliefs, including theological beliefs.

The stories which most obviously embody worldviews are of course the foundation myths told by the so-called primitive native peoples of the world to explain the origins of the world in general and their race in particular. Anthropologists and others, eager to unearth vestiges of primal viewpoints now hidden from more apparently civilized gaze, study such stories as the appropriate means to this end. But modern analogues are not far to seek, for instance in the use of narrative in political debate. Stories of how things were in the Depression are used to fuel sympathy for the oppressed working class; stories of terrorism are used to justify present right-wing regimes. Closer to home, stories are used in personal and domestic discourse not merely to provide information about events which have taken place, but to embody and hence reinforce, or perhaps to modify, a shared worldview within a family, an office, a club or a college. Stories thus provide a vital framework for experiencing the world. They also provide a means by which views of the world may be challenged.

The fact that stories are a fundamental characteristic of worldviews can be further illustrated in relation to the Jewish worldview and its various mutations. These can never be reduced to sets of maxims. Even at its most proverbial and epigrammatic, Jewish writing retains the underlying substructure of the Jewish story about the covenant god, the world, and Israel. For most Jews, certainly in the first century, the story-form was the natural and indeed inevitable way in which their worldview would find expression, whether in telling the stories of YHWH’S mighty deeds in the past on behalf of his people, of creating new stories which would function to stir the faithful up in the present to continue in patience and obedience, or in looking forward to the mighty deed that was still to come which would crown all the others and bring Israel true and lasting liberation once and for all.²¹

Stories, never unpopular with children and those who read purely for pleasure, have thus become fashionable of late also among scholars, not least in the biblical studies guild. Within the last generation several writers have drawn on the work of folk-tale analysts such as Vladimir Propp to help them understand the structure and significance of various bits of the Bible. Instead of ‘translating’ narrative into something else, we are now urged to read it as it is and understand it in its own terms.²² In both literary and theological terms, this seems to me an altogether admirable development; it needs, no doubt, some checks and balances, but in principle can be welcomed with enthusiasm.

This research has, further, examined how stories work both in themselves and in relation to other stories. At the internal level, stories have structures, plots and characters. They use various rhetorical techniques, which include mode of narration (is the narrator a character in the drama, or does (s)he have privileged insight into all the events?), irony, conflict, different narrative patterns such as ‘framing’, and so forth. They will quite likely have, by implication, what has been called an ‘ideal reader’, that is, they imply and perhaps invite an appropriate reading of a particular kind. All of these have their own effect on how their actual readers see things. We are, in other words, invited to do with a complex story what (as we shall see in the next chapter) we do with any literary criticism, that is, to study the effect created and the means by which it is created. Authorial intent should not be excluded from this process, though it often is: for instance, when dealing with ancient texts we should remember that ancient commentators on rhetoric were perfectly well aware of the varied possible effects of narratives, and we are not bound to regard all the evangelists as ignorant of such ideas. Equally, however, a writer like Mark might well have produced such effects in the same way that a ‘natural’ orator would do, using a variety of techniques without thinking or even knowing about them.²³

When we examine how stories work in relation to other stories, we find that human beings tell stories because this is how we perceive, and indeed relate to, the world. What we see close up, in a multitude of little incidents whether isolated or (more likely) interrelated, we make sense of by drawing on story-forms already more or less known to us and placing the information within them. A story, with its pattern of problem and conflict, of aborted attempts at resolution, and final results, whether sad or glad, is, if we may infer from the common practice of the world, universally perceived as the best way of talking about the way the world actually is. Good stories assume that the world is a place of conflict and resolution, whether comic or tragic. They select and arrange material accordingly. And, as we suggested before, stories can embody or reinforce, or perhaps modify, the worldviews to which they relate.²⁴

Stories are, actually, peculiarly good at modifying or subverting other stories and their worldviews. Where head-on attack would certainly fail, the parable hides the wisdom of the serpent behind the innocence of the dove, gaining entrance and favour which can then be used to change assumptions which the hearer would otherwise keep hidden away for safety. Nathan tells David a story about a rich man, a poor man, and a little lamb; David is enraged; and Nathan springs the trap. Tell someone to do something, and you change their life—for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. Stories, in having this effect, function as complex metaphors. Metaphor consists in bringing two sets of ideas close together, close enough for a spark to jump, but not too close, so that the spark, in jumping, illuminates for a moment the whole area around, changing perceptions as it does so.²⁵ Even so, the subversive story comes close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them; and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

It would be possible, and in principle desirable, to chase this insight through various further ramifications. Societies are complex entities, and the worldviews that dominate them give rise not only to straightforward stories but also to fragmented and distorted versions of those stories, as different groups and individuals mark out their own way within a larger setting. Humans live in overlapping worlds, and, as individuals or as groups, they may well tell themselves different and overlapping, but also competing, stories. In addition, the stories that are explicitly told by a group or individual may well be consciously or unconsciously deceitful, and will require checking in the light of actual praxis and of a wider symbolic universe. What someone habitually does, and the symbols around which they order their lives, are at least as reliable an index to their worldview as the stories they ‘officially’ tell.²⁶

The result of all this in our particular field, i.e. the New Testament, is as follows. A certain group of first-century Jews, who held, and wished to commend, one particular variant of the first-century Jewish worldview (which we shall describe in detail in Part III) wished to say: the hope which characterizes our worldview has been fulfilled in these events. And they chose to say this in the most natural (and obviously Jewish) way, by telling the story, in order thereby to subvert other ways of looking at the world. To be more explicit: first-century Jews, like all other peoples, perceived the world, and events within the world, within a grid of interpretation and expectation. Their particular grid consisted at its heart of their belief that the world was made by a good, wise and omnipotent god, who had chosen Israel as his special people; they believed that their national history, their communal and traditional story, supplied them with lenses through which they could perceive events in the world, through which they could make some sense of them and order their lives accordingly. They told stories which embodied, exemplified and so reinforced their worldview, and in so doing threw down a particularly subversive challenge to alternative worldviews. Those who wished to encourage their fellow-Jews to think differently told the same stories, but with a twist in the tail. The Essenes told a story about the secret beginning of the new covenant; Josephus, a story about Israel’s god going over to the Romans; Jesus, a story about vineyard-tenants whose infidelity would cause the death of the owner’s son and their own expulsion; the early Christians, stories about the kingdom of god and its inauguration through Jesus. But one thing they never did. They never expressed a worldview in which the god in question was uninterested in, or uninvolved with, the created world in general, or the historical fortunes of his people in particular. To this we shall return.

The reason why stories come into conflict with each other is that worldviews, and the stories which characterize them, are in principle normative: that is, they claim to make sense of the whole of reality. Even the relativist, who believes that everybody’s point of view on everything is equally valid even though apparently incompatible, is obedient to an underlying story about reality which comes into explicit conflict with most other stories, which speak of reality as in the last analysis a seamless web, open in principle to experience, observation and discussion. It is ironic that many people in the modern world have regarded Christianity as a private worldview, a set of private stories. Some Christians have actually played right into this trap. But in principle the whole point of Christianity is that it offers a story which is the story of the whole world. It is public truth. Otherwise it collapses into some version of Gnosticism.²⁷

We can therefore draw up something of a sliding scale to show what happens when stories which one group tells about the world come into contact with stories that other groups tell. At one end of the scale there is the phenomenon of direct confirmation: the story implied by an ‘object’, an action, or an event fits unproblematically into my worldview. At the other end is direct confrontation: if I were to make sense of the stories I see enacted in front of me, I would have to abandon my controlling story and find a new one, which would happen not by my constructing it out of the evidence of the sense-data before me but by my overhearing some other community’s story that could, apparently, make sense of this (at present puzzling) event.²⁸ The only other way of handling the clash between two stories is to tell yet another story, explaining how the evidence for the challenging story is in fact deceptive. This is a very common move in science (the experiment did not ‘work’; therefore some unexpected variable must have intruded into the proceedings), history (the texts do not fit the facts; therefore, someone has distorted them), and other areas. And, in between these two extremes of confirmation and confrontation, events and ‘objects’ can either modify or subvert the story or stories with which we began. And, as always, the proof of the pudding remains in the eating. There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ proof; only the claim that the story we are now telling about the world as a whole makes more sense, in its outline and detail, than other potential or actual stories that may be on offer. Simplicity of outline, elegance in handling the details within it, the inclusion of all the parts of the story, and the ability of the story to make sense beyond its immediate subject-matter: these are what count.²⁹

We have returned, therefore, to something like a notion of hypothesis and verification. A hypothesis (in any field) is usually held to be ‘verified’ if it includes the relevant data, does so with a certain sort of simplicity, and proves fruitful in areas beyond its immediate concern. What we have done, however, is to fill in the gaps in the account of what a hypothesis actually is, and of what counts as verification. A full account, it now appears, must include the following elements: question, hypothesis, testing of hypothesis.³⁰

There is, first, the question in answer to which the hypothesis is formed. The question does not arise out of thin air: it emerges precisely from the stories that certain human beings are telling themselves, at whatever level. One asks questions because one’s present story is in some way either puzzling or incomplete. I am driving along the road, thinking about all sorts of things, but taking for granted an underlying story about cars, driving and roads. The car then begins to shudder. At once I begin to tell myself a variety of stories which might explain this phenomenon. Perhaps the council has been digging up this bit of road, and has not yet smoothed it out again. Perhaps I have a flat tyre. Perhaps there is something wrong with the suspension. These hypotheses offer themselves to me as potential missing links within the stories; when inserted appropriately, they turn my habitual stories into would-be explanatory stories. Where they themselves come from is difficult to describe, though it is not unimportant: they appear to arrive by a process of intuition. Then (resuming the illustration) the car behind me flashes its lights, and the driver points at one of my wheels. At once the second story looms larger. I pull over and examine the tyre, which, sure enough, is looking decidedly sorry for itself. Two further bits of data, namely, the action of the other driver and the sight of the tyre, convince me that the second story meshes with reality. One of the stories I have been telling has emerged as a successful explanatory story. Of course, there may also be something less than perfect with the road, and the suspension; but the simplest explanation is that the shuddering was caused by the flat tyre. At each stage of the process what matters can best be expressed in terms of story: the story which prompts the question, the new stories which offer themselves in explanation, and the success of one of these stories in including all the relevant data, doing so within a clear and simple framework, and contributing to a better understanding of other stories (I always was just a bit suspicious of the garage where I had bought those tyres). This description of a quite simple process of knowledge demonstrates what is involved in the ‘hypothesis-and-verification’ model, locating it on the map, which I shall develop more fully in chapter 5, of the nature of worldviews and of the place of stories within them. This will be extremely important in discussing history in particular (chapter 4 below), where we will also discuss some of the more fine-tuned problems about the process of ‘verification’.

When, therefore, we perceive external reality, we do so within a prior framework. That framework consists, most fundamentally, of a worldview; and worldviews, as we have emphasized, are characterized by, among other things, certain types of story. The positivist and phenomenalist traditions are wrong to imagine that perception is prior to the grasping of larger realities. On the contrary, detailed sense-perceptions not only occur within stories; they are verified (if they are) within it. The crucial thing to realize is that what the positivist tradition would see as ‘facts’ already come with theories attached; and theories are precisely stories told as the framework to include ‘facts’. What is true of ‘facts’ is also true of ‘objects’: ‘objects’ also carry stories about with them. The word ‘cup’ does not just denote an object of certain physical properties, nor when I look at or handle a cup do I merely ‘see’ or ‘feel’ those physical properties. The word, and the object itself, have to do with the set of implicit stories within which the cup can feature, whether they concern a pottery class, a family tradition, a tea-party, or the borrowing of sugar from a neighbour. In other words, we only know what objects are when we see them, at least implicitly, within events. And events have to do with (in principle) intelligible actions. The result of this is that instead of the dialogue or conversation we examined earlier, between ‘observer’ and ‘object’ as conceived within the empiricist tradition, whether in its optimistic or its pessimistic form, we have a dialogue or conversation between humans (not merely neutral and detached observation-platforms) and events (not merely detached or meaningless objects). And on both sides of this dialogue we therefore have stories: the stories that the humans are implicitly telling about the world, and the stories that are implied by events and, within them, by the ‘objects’ that form their component parts.³¹

We may therefore draw a modified version of the earlier diagram of critical-realist epistemology, taking account of the new details we have now introduced:

Story-telling humans-----------------------------------------------------------> Story-laden world

initial observation (already within a story)

<----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

is challenged by critical reflection on ourselves as story-tellers (i.e. recognizing that

our claims about reality may be mistaken)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

but can, through further narrative, find alternative ways of speaking truly about the

world, with the use of new or modified stories

This has, I think, several similarities to the hermeneutic of ‘suspicion and retrieval’ advocated by Paul Ricoeur, though to discuss the point here would take us too far afield.³² It suggests that, where before the Western world has tended to divide knowledge into ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, a less misleading way of speaking would think in terms of ‘public’ and ‘private’ knowledge. The publicness of certain sorts knowledge is not threatened, but rather enhanced, by the fact that particular people are doing the knowing.