Given Nassim Taleb's passage from The Black Swan via Wikipedia's article, he recognizes that people often reason from unreliable narratives to reach conclusions. This is evident, for instance, in current politics, where two sides often rely on different conceptual metaphors to establish and argue political philosophy. The problem is discussed here also, and if it has been empirically or rationally verified, then it would represent some confluence of cognitive biases. It seems very much related to the empirically verified bias of Leveling and Sharpening which is the tendency of the human mind construct and recall narrative in a selective fashion. This is often seen in courts of law where eyewitness testimony has been found to be a somewhat unreliable source of evidence and requires improvement through particular techniques like using a cognitive interview.
Post-hoc rationalization is also related to recalling and dealing with historical, subjective account, but differs in the nature of the activity. They are related, but different. Narrative is essentially a story about the interrelation of agency over time and space, where as facts are propositions which are affirmed as real and consistent with evidence, which in the simplest case is that which is epistemologically self-evident.
An example will help to disambiguate:
Narrative Fallacy:
Bob was a practicing, fundamental Christian who relied on the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, to make decisions. When asked if Bob believed in global warming, Bob scoffed and said that if it the world had only been around for several thousand years, then any claims to establish climate change over a history of the last ten thousand years was ridiculous to him.
In this example, Bob is relying on a religious text with a narrative whose claim to supremacy of is established through divine revelation, and not justification. As Bob takes the narrative to be indisputable fact, all of his reasoning which clashes with scientific evidence that the earth is billions of years old will ultimately lead to a specious conclusion if one accepts science instead of those of fundamental Christianity. Of course, Bob could argue that scientists suffer from narrative fallacy on the basis that the narrative of the Big Bang is erroneous and therefore their conclusions are wrong.
For Post-Hoc Rationalization, let us refer to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink which tackles the notion of intuition's relation to reasoning. His concept of "thin slices" is the idea that one can on very little information using a hunch construct and argument to defends one's position after an event occurs to explain it which is an act of abduction.
Bob happened to be a fireman, and while leading a crew through a blazing building, he ordered everyone out. Minutes later the building collapsed and everyone affirmed the wisdom of Bob's decision. When pressed on how he knew, Bob claimed that he noticed on the way to the second floor that wooden posts holding up the floor looked old, and that while he was hesitant to take a risk, he thought they'd hold awhile, but then realized the way the floor was moving, that they were about to give. When the fire inspector reviewed the plans of the building, he discovered that the second floor was held up with massive laminated girders of wood, and that there were no posts.
Notice how in the first story, Bob reasoned his way to his position based on a narrative that modern science rejects, but in the second example Bob attributed his reasons to events that didn't happen retrospectively. In both cases, a scientist would reject Bob's reasoning since in both cases his claims to support his argument are flawed. The difference between the former and the latter is one is reasoning to a conclusion based on a narrative of past events to make a prediction, whereas the latter is a reasoning process which explains a past prediction based on events prior to it. Both reason from narrative, but one to a prediction about current or future state, the other to explain a past event.
