{"agent_id":"danto","agent_name":"Arthur C. Danto","slug":"narrative-sentences-and-historical-knowledge","label":"Narrative sentences and historical knowledge: are the meanings of historical events constitutively dependent on what comes after?","topic":"Narrative sentences and historical knowledge","question":"Are the meanings of historical events constitutively dependent on what comes after?","position":"*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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"*Narrative sentences* are sentences that describe an event in terms of a later event.","n":[1]},{"t":"\"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.","n":[]},{"t":"Only retrospectively, from a vantage point after the events have completed, can the event be described under that description.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This shows something fundamental about historical knowledge: the meaning of historical events is constitutively dependent on subsequent events.","n":[]},{"t":"The implications run deep.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge 1965), the foundational treatise, reprinted as the integral text within Narration and Knowledge (Columbia 1985, 2007 Columbia Classics edition with Lydia Goehr introduction); Chapter 8 of Analytical Philosophy of History on narrative sentences; the late prefaces and afterwords reflecting on the original arguments. Reception: Carl Hempel's 'The Function of General Laws in History' (J. Phil. 1942) and the covering-law model as the rival; Louis Mink's writings on narrative form in history; W.B. Gallie on essentially contested concepts and historical narratives; Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) for the linguistic-turn alternative; Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) for the genealogical-archaeological critique (engaged by Gary Shapiro in the Rollins volume); Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative (1983-85).","works":["Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge 1965), the foundational treatise, reprinted as the integral text within Narration and Knowledge (Columbia 1985, 2007 Columbia Classics edition with Lydia Goehr introduction)","Chapter 8 of Analytical Philosophy of History on narrative sentences","the late prefaces and afterwords reflecting on the original arguments"],"reception":"Carl Hempel's 'The Function of General Laws in History' (J. Phil. 1942) and the covering-law model as the rival; Louis Mink's writings on narrative form in history; W.B. Gallie on essentially contested concepts and historical narratives; Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) for the linguistic-turn alternative; Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) for the genealogical-archaeological critique (engaged by Gary Shapiro in the Rollins volume); Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative (1983-85).","status":"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.","era":"1924-2013","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Narration and Knowledge","page":"p. 25","canonical":"","quote":"A historical sentence clearly depends on when it is uttered, although it is not crudely relativized to such. Rather, its truth depends on its reference to the original event that has been set in a relation of relevance to a later one.","label":"Narration and Knowledge, p. 25"},{"n":2,"work":"Narration and Knowledge","page":"p. 406","canonical":"","quote":"But there are, I believe, crucial descriptions which lack this easy symmetry, and these are descriptions which have, as truthconditions, and hence as part of their meaning, events which occur later than the events primarily referred to. Thus in accepting Queen Christina's invitation, Descartes was setting forth to meet his death.","label":"Narration and Knowledge, p. 406"},{"n":3,"work":"Narration and Knowledge","page":"pp. 211–212","canonical":"","quote":"Then someone might trace it all back to the violation of Leda, and he could see, in historical retrospect, that action of Zeus's as laden with a kind of destiny. To all of this the Ideal Witness is blind.","label":"Narration and Knowledge, pp. 211–212"},{"n":4,"work":"Narration and Knowledge","page":"p. 202","canonical":"","quote":"VIII 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'.","label":"Narration and Knowledge, p. 202"},{"n":5,"work":"Beyond the Brillo Box","page":"pp. 259–260","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Beyond the Brillo Box, pp. 259–260"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-method-of-indiscernibles-and-the-definition-of-art","label":"The method of indiscernibles and the definition of art: what is the difference between Warhol's Brillo Box and an ordinary brillo box visually indistinguishable from it?"},{"slug":"the-end-of-art-and-post-historical-pluralism","label":"The end of art and post-historical pluralism: has the master narrative of art history reached its conclusion?"},{"slug":"embodied-meaning-and-interpretive-seeing","label":"Embodied meaning and interpretive seeing: are artworks about something that they embody in sensuous form rather than merely describe?"},{"slug":"the-philosophical-disenfranchisement-of-art","label":"The philosophical disenfranchisement of art: has philosophy from Plato onward systematically constrained art's claims?"}]}