We think what happens within a revolutionary trajectory can better be understood as the result of the intersection of a number of causal mechanisms. The explanatory work that their account provides occurs at two levels: the discovery of a relatively small number of social mechanisms of contention that recur across multiple cases, and the construction of complex narratives for particular episodes that bring together their understanding of the mechanisms and processes that were in play in this particular case. In their treatment of various contentious periods, they break the given complex period of contention into a number of mechanisms and processes, conjoined with contingent and conjunctural occurrences that played a significant causal role in the outcome. We might illustrate this idea by looking at the approach taken to contentious episodes and periods by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention. What were the contextual features that were relevant to the outcome - the settings at one or more points in time that played a role? What were the actions and choices that agents performed, and why did they take these actions rather than other possible choices? What causal processes-either social or natural-may have played a role in bringing the world to the outcome of interest? (29) A narrative is intended to provide an account of how a complex historical event unfolded and why. What is a narrative? Most generally, it is an account of the unfolding of events, along with an effort to explain how and why these processes and events came to be. Here is how I characterized a historical narrative in New Contributions to the Philosophy of History: And in my view, it will be a pluralistic account, in that it will freely invoke a number of causal ideas: powers, mechanisms, necessary and sufficient conditions, instigating conditions, and so forth. So a causal narrative will include a number of causal claims, intersecting in such a way as to explain the complex event or process that is of interest.
#Narrative causality full
It is a series of answers to “why and how did X occur?” designed to give us an understanding of the full unfolding of the process.Ī narrative is more than an explanation it is an attempt to “tell the story” of a complicated outcome.
The narrative pulls together our best understanding of the causal relations, mechanisms, and conditions that were involved in the process and arranges them in an appropriate temporal order. Here I would like to sketch out what I had in mind there.Įssentially the idea is that a causal narrative of a complicated outcome or occurrence is an orderly analysis of the sequence of events and the causal processes that connected them, leading from a set of initial conditions to the outcome in question. In a recent post I referred to the idea of a causal narrative ( link).
0 kommentar(er)
