Narrative and its Epistemological Features

The article opens a cycle of five works that analyze the epistemological features of narrative as a tool for structuring social information based on its meanings. The article formulates research hypotheses that are common to all works in the cycle: on the expression of the semantic structure of narrative in an implicit form; on the semantic decomposition of the plot of the narrative; on the expression of latent knowledge through text; on the possibility of generating the semantic unity of narrative in the form of its semantic structure; on the existence of narratives of different types. The presentation is based on the disclosure of the concept of “semantic operation”, emphasizing the specificity of verbal narration as a practically used tool that allows a person to manifest his latent knowledge through a grammatically structured text. Among the key epistemological features of narrative, formulated in the article: the possibility of overcoming with its help the paradigmatic limitations of natural scientific approaches; pragmatic use of skills as a semantic justification for narrative; the transient nature of the textual method of expressing latent human knowledge. Proposals are formulated to improve the functional capabilities of social information analysis based on meanings by creating a structural narrative. The structural narrative is presented as a conceptual basis for new information and communication technologies that provide their users with the functionality of modern ontological methods when operating social information based on meanings.