Understanding and the limits of rationality

If there is a fundamental difference between understanding and explanation, what tools are there for fitting understandinginto nursing practice? One possibility - already hinited at - is that narrative or stories can provide a way to make sense of human lives. But how seriously should we take that idea? And what makes a narrative different from a scientific theory (that is, how can narratives provide understanding rather than explanation)?

There is a further difficulty lurking here. If one of the key ideas about narratives is that they have a charactersitic way of making sense, does that not mean that we have to impose our views of what makes sense on others?

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