Thick Narratives and the Value of Minor Details

Abstract Much social scientific work employs thick exemplary narratives— detailed stories of particular individuals that are supposed to exemplify broader social processes. However, a number of recent critics have argued that such narratives are a poor means of achieving social-scientific aims. Exemplary narratives provide high-resolution detail about particular cases, but such high-resolution detail is irrelevant and distracting if our aim is to understand more general causal dynamics in the social world. This paper defends the use of thick exemplary narratives by providing an account of how high-resolution details of individual stories (i) serve social scientific aims besides description and causal explanation and (ii) enable readers to better “grasp” causal-explanatory claims, even when those details are not themselves parts of the broader causal processes that are of interest to social scientists. Moreover, objections to exemplary narratives in social science can be generalized to the use of exemplars in other domains, so understanding how to address them in this context offers guidance for responding to similar objections in other contexts, such as moral philosophy.