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negotiation of different narrative versions starts early and is deeply imbedded
in such practical social actions as the offering of excuses, not merely in story
telling per se (Dunn 1988). I think it is precisely this interplay of perspectives
in arriving at “narrative truth” that has led philosophers like Richard Rorty to
abandon univocally verificationist views of truth in favor of pragmatic ones
((Rorty 1979); see also (Taylor 1989)). Nor is it surprising that anthropolo-
gists have increasingly turned away from positivist descriptions of cultures to-
ward an interpretive one in which not objective categories but “meanings” are
sought for, not meanings imposed ex hypothesi by an outsider, the anthropol-
ogist, but ones arrived at by indigenous participants immersed in the culture's
own processes for negotiating meaning (see particularly (Geertz 1983); see also
(Rabinow & Sullivan 1979) and (Stigler et al. 1990)).
On this view, it is the very context dependence of narrative accounts that
permits cultural negotiation which, when successful, makes possible such co-
herence and interdependence as a culture can achieve.
10. Narrative accrual. How do we cobble stories together to make them into
a whole of some sort? Sciences achieve their accrual by derivation from gen-
eral principles, by relating particular findings to central paradigms, by couch-
ing empirical findings in a form that makes them subsumable under altering
paradigms, and by countless other procedures for making science, as the saying
goes, “cumulative.” This is vastly aided, of course, by procedures for assuring
verification though, as we know, verificationist criteria have limited applica-
bility where human intentional states are concerned, which leaves psychology
rather on the fringe.
Narrative accrual is not foundational in the scientist's sense. Yet narratives
do accrue and, as anthropologists insist, the accruals eventually create some-
thing variously called a “culture” or a “history” or, more loosely, a “tradition.”
Even our own homely accounts of happenings in our own lives are eventually
converted into more or less coherent autobiographies centered around a Self
acting more or less purposefully in a social world (see, for example, Chapter 4
in (Bruner 1990)). Families similarly create a corpus of connected and shared
tales and Elinor Ochs's studies in progress on family dinner-table talk begin to
shed light on how this is accomplished. 3 Institutions too, as we know from the
innovative work of Eric Hobsbawm, “invent” traditions out of previously or-
dinary happenings and then endow them with privileged status (Hobsbawm &
Ranger 1983). And there are principles of jurisprudence, like stare decisis ,that
guarantee a tradition by assuring that once a “case” has been interpreted in one
way, future cases that are “similar” shall be interpreted and decided equiva-
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