In the first section, I describe an epistemological concept and practice that I call “comprehension.”
I argue that this process leads to “ecological explanations” of human agency and actions. The ideas in
this section have strong ties to Dewey and Wittgenstein. In the second section of the essay, I argue that
literature, in the form of tragic realism, brings to light the basis and ground of ecological explanations
and why they matter for agency and responsibility. I argue that tragic realism, while importantly related
to and consistent with empirical psychology, has the possibility of revealing aspect of agency that no
other inquiry can reveal. In the rest of the paper I analyze Russell Banks’ novel