Abstract

This dissertation inquires into the interpretation of agents' actions and utterances, and into the role of narrative theory in that interpretation. My thesis is that psychological explanation is an agent-centred, narrative-based interpretive practice. Agent-centred interpretation takes the form of narrative because such interpretations are governed by the need to discover or impose an intelligible explanatory pattern on events involving others like ourselves. I argue that narrative form is not a secondary way of construing action, but is what enables us to recognize the intelligibility of agents' actions. Thus it is a main task of the dissertation to draw attention to the poetical nature of interpretation, and to the auto-poetical nature of self-interpreting agents. Interpretation is in essence intersubjective and communicative, and is doubly committed to intelligibility, since it must not only make sense of an agent's action, but also show how that action could have made sense to her. Conceiving of interpretation as an example of intersubjective communication allows me to present a poetics of psychological explanation. Not only does such a poetics outline the formal constraints on the interpretation of agents and their actions; it also allows me to show that the constraints in question are narrative constraints