ABSTRACT
This chapter will develop a new account of how we should think about the relationship between our empathic capacity of perspective taking and our capacity for comprehending narratives in understanding individual agency. Empathy and narrative competence have to be viewed as different epistemic abilities that contribute to the understanding of individual agency cooperatively but in distinctive ways. The main cognitive function of narratives consists in providing us with a developmental portrait of specific entities in order to make explanatory sense of their unique individuality rather than their typicality. Yet narratives do not only play a role in the context of the human sciences but are also found in the natural sciences, such as geology, evolutionary theory and cosmology, to name a few. Accordingly, narratives about humans are epistemically special in an additional sense. The narrative form is called for insofar as we are concerned with making sense of the unique individuality of a person. We can, however, explicate the individuality of rational agents only if we also grasp their specific reasons for acting. For this very reason, we have to activate our empathic capacities, particularly, what I call ‘reenactive empathy’.
