Aiming for truth and the dangers of retreating to narratives.

In this episode, host Dr. Laurance Splitter invites listeners to think about why they make the decisions and choices that they make, which refers to our capacity for agency, whereby our beliefs and desires cause us to interact with the world deliberately or intentionally. He then broadens the topic to focus on the types of causal explanations that are appropriate in the major disciplines and intellectual traditions. If we assume that explanations in the sciences are structured by well-tested laws and theories, we can also assume that the concept of causality has its most natural home in the context of the natural world and science. However, when we shift to consider events and explanations in which we humans/persons are directly involved, things become less clear, because while intentional and causal agency, which plays a central role in disciplines such as history, social studies, the law, politics, etc., the nature and status of such causation seems puzzling, because these disciplines are not governed by universal laws and theories.

In line with the views of analytic philosopher Donald Davidson, causal explanations in these domains – indeed, even in relatively simple contexts involving our everyday agency – rely on appealing to a holistic network of mental states such as belief, desire and intention. In other words, there is no single, complete causal pathway outside the domain of the sciences, because our mental states are interwoven and bound together. This sense of holism relating to agency raises questions about the status of history, for example, in which we remain committed to finding what is true – as in all cases of inquiry – but must acknowledge a level of subjective interpretation on the part of historians and commentators, who make choices about what actions and events to focus on, as well as the language they use in describing and reporting them.

Laurance casts a critical eye on what is becoming an increasingly popular tendency providing explanations in the humanities and social sciences, especially contemporary and contested fields such as politics, namely, to propose that explanations in these domains commonly take the form of narrative, in which the ideal of truth or truthfulness gives way to such elements as believability, “telling a good story”, etc. While acknowledging the benefits of narratives and stories in our lives, he relates this tendency to the growth of populism and the ascendency of political leaders who sow tribal divisions using narratives about “us” and “them”, etc. He maintains that such ideals as truthfulness remain important, and points, yet again to the potential of dialogue as an appropriate context for deliberating about matters of importance, whether they be strictly scientific or not.

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