Session Information
Session 7A, Educational Research Methodology (Part 3)
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
09:00-10:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Volker Kraft
Contribution
In my paper I shall discuss the problem of narrative truth. The point of departure is the discussion about truth in narrative educational research. Narrative truth is a highly contentious issue. Some writers reject it altogether as unimportant. Some suggest narratives should be true in a straightforward correspondence sense of true, and yet others again suggest that an artistic literary conception of truth is more appropriate. Furthermore, the participants in the debate tend to be unclear as to what they take narrative to be; sometimes it is discussed as individual pieces of research, with a focus on the truth of descriptions of particular events or actions. Sometimes it is discussed as a procedure, more in terms of demands on the researchers. I shall argue that this debate is guilty of a sin of omission - it neglects to take the narrative beginning-middle-ending form into account. The beginning- middle-ending form (or structure) is an old genre demand in narrative; and it (ideally) turns a narrative into a well- rounded, coherent, meaningful whole. Hence, neglect of form is a sin because it is precisely this form that distinguishes narrative research from any other piece of qualitative research. This is not to say that discussions of truth and procedure in general are unimportant, it is just to say that they do not capture the distinctive features of narrative. But form is vital in distinguishing narrative from other forms of representation.One way of dealing with the truth of narrative is alluded to above, namely a focus on its constituent elements. Are actions, events, intentions and so on truthfully described? Attention to form adds further complexities to the truth issue. It may well be that constituent elements are truthfully rendered, but what of the form itself? Can such a structure be said to be true or false? When these questions are probed into, we encounter problems of reference, of consequences of selection, of the concept of approximation and of the relation between the form and the constituent elements in the narrative. Can, for example, a narrative form be true even if (some of) its constituents are false? I shall discuss whether narrative form admits of truth or falsity, and if so, what the truth conditions may be. My overall conclusion will probably be that there is no need for a special concept of narrative truth. The correspondence theory of truth will at the outset serve narrativists well, I believe, and being the common sense way of thinking about truth it is hard to avoid in any case. However, I do think that narrativists need to state carefully what they want their theory of truth to do for them, and a number of possible topics for further investigation will be supplied.
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