Arthur C. Danto, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Narrative sentences are sentences that describe an event in terms of a later event. "The Thirty Years War began in 1618" is a narrative sentence: in 1618, when the Bohemian rebellion broke out, no one could have uttered that sentence in its current sense, because the thirty years of war that gave the war its name had not yet happened. Only retrospectively, from a vantage point after the events have completed, can the event be described under that description.
This shows something fundamental about historical knowledge: the meaning of historical events is constitutively dependent on subsequent events. The implications run deep. Complete contemporary histories are impossible: at any given moment, the events of that moment cannot yet be described in terms of their future consequences, and so their full historical meaning is not yet available.
The historian writing about 1618 in 1620 cannot know that she is writing about the beginning of the Thirty Years War; the historian writing about 1789 in 1791 cannot know that she is writing about the beginning of the Napoleonic period. Hempel's covering-law model of historical explanation cannot accommodate this because it treats historical events as instances of timeless regularities, missing the constitutive role of later events in fixing what earlier events were.
The narrative-sentence thesis is the central contribution of Analytical Philosophy of History (1965) and remains, I think, the most permanent of my philosophical contributions outside aesthetics.12345
For the latter describes what could be witnessed. But nobody could witness the act under the description ' Zeus engenders the death of Agamemnon'. For that king is not yet even born, and much will happen before his tragic end, as we now know. The death of Agamemnon may be witnessed, only much later.Narration and Knowledge, pp. 210–212
And so on and so on. What counts as part of this event? Temporally, an event under one description may suggest that it lasts for one period of time but, under another description, for a different period of time. How long did the Second World War last? It depends on whether the end is marked, say, by the end of hostilities in Europe or in the Pacific.Narration and Knowledge, pp. 24–25
NARRATIVE SENTENCES I mean to isolate and to analyse here a class of sentences which seem to me to occur most typically in historical writings, although they appear in narratives of all sorts and may even enter into common speech in a natural kind of way. I shall designate them as 'narrative sentences'.Narration and Knowledge, p. 202
To be sure, there now really was a unity of science, in the sense that all of science was brought under history rather than, as before, history having been brought under science construed on the model of physics. I have always found it ironical that Kuhn's book was a volume in the projected Encyclopedia of Unified Science, a thirty-volume mon- ument to Neo-Positivist thought.Narration and Knowledge, pp. 11–12
The same information could be presented in an encyclopedia of such beliefs, where entries are alphabetical, under the names of their holders. My cobbled narrative a sentence is trivial fallout from the circumstance that makes a doctrine of internal relations seem initially plausible—that anything can be redescribed with reference to anything else, which incidentally underlies a lot of narrative theory at the moment.Beyond the Brillo Box, pp. 237–238
Analytical Philosophy of History (1965) is one of the most cited works in the analytical philosophy of history and has been engaged by Mink, Gallie, Ricoeur, White, and the broader narrativist tradition. The covering-law model (Hempel) is the principal analytical rival. The Foucauldian-archaeological critique (Shapiro in the Rollins volume) presses from the post-structuralist side. Hayden White's linguistic-turn version of the narrativist position took the thesis in a more rhetorical direction than I would. The narrative-sentence apparatus is still the operative analytical tool for thinking about historical retrodiction.