ABSTRACT
Narrative understanding is the outcome of people's successful dealings with certain narratives – those narratives that reveal meaningful connections between particular happenings and provide insight into why psychological beings respond to such happenings. Getting clear about the core characteristics of narratives is a good first step toward getting clear about the nature of narrative understanding, what makes it special and what enables it. In everyday life narratives that give an account of someone's reasoning are sought and supplied in order to explain actions that appear aberrant. In serving this function narratives tame and domesticate the seemingly extraordinary. The idea that understanding actions and reasons is essentially a kind of narrative understanding is not trivial. It flies in the face of much mainstream thinking in analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science where it is widely held that reason explanations are a species of theoretical explanation.
