| Summary: | The present article re-examines the more general issue of the relationships between storytelling and knowledge positing that knowledge is relative, dependant on situations, on the choice of theoretical frameworks, on hypotheses and on factors taken into account. This assumption has a wide epistemological significance and it equally concerns narrations relating specific stories through the lens of singular characters. We shall confirm this by using the notions of empathy and empathic mobility (1) as well as the linguistic concepts of point of view (POV) and confronted points of view which try to define objects by taking into consideration the fundamental dialogism of language (2). On this basis, the article analyses several examples of POV in internal focalisation in stories and shows how these POV, though partial, are nevertheless capable of illustrating the complexity of the world through the referentiation of objects of discourse which indicates a capacity for reflexivity due to the fact that characters are likely to de-center themselves, to enter someone else’s mind (3). The article argues that these POV, though limited and highly subjective, escape a generalized relativism as the confrontation of PDV can reveal truths that are, indeed, related to the POV considered but that can complement each other as to reveal truths intersubjectively shared (4). This relativity has little connection with relativism ; relativity refers to the fact that reality is complex, multifaceted and cannot be defined by one theory, one notional framework, one observer/experiencer, but rather by the speakers’/participants’ aptitude to change their POV by putting themselves in somebody else’s shoes or by contemplating new perspectives on objects (in a spatiotemporal or notional sense). Although this empathic mode of knowledge is typical of empathic narrations, it is not restricted neither to stories nor to narratology as it is based on a more general enunciative substrate. The genuine cognitive implications of fictions are inseparable from the epistemic implications of enunciation, if we acknowledge the dialogical and praxeological dimension of enunciation ; this dimension is based on the speakers’ capacity of (inter)acting while putting themselves in someone else’s shoes (thus exercising empathy) and changing their points of view (thus exercising empathic mobility), with the purpose of confronting the points of view in order to better reflect — in and by language, in and by enunciation — on their relationship to events, emotions and knowledge which are all the more rich and complex as they depend on the place and the perspective adopted by speakers.
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