Narrative persuasiveness without a narrative essence: A rejoinder to Talbi’s “Recognizing Something Human”

Abstract

Merel Talbi’s (2024a) main article, “The Epistemic Import of Narratives,” concerns how narratives of personal experience can be persuasive in reaching across a significant social or political divide. A primary goal of the article was to defend their role and value against the assumption that our form of argument must be based on logic and science. At the same time, she alerts us to some dangers associated with the use of such narratives, which she develops in her response (2024b) to us (2024b), a theme that we shall discuss, recognising the political context in which these situations occur. What she identifies as the main difference between us about the persuasiveness of narratives of personal experience may be framed as a question: what are the relative contributions of the narrative form and the personal quality?

We shall return to that question by way of a reframing which avoids the assumption that there is an essence of narrative structure. En route to that topic we shall look at ideas about how narratives may mesh well with the structure of the human mind. That will include Schechtman’s (2024) ideas about fiction as a process which mirrors the way human memory works. It will also include the thought that the self is a product of narrative self-creation. This may suggest that narratives can be persuasive given that they mesh well with our makeup. However our makeup is described, we hold that there is no essence of narrative structure that explains persuasiveness, for it comes down to the particularities of the situation. Narratives can occur in a variety of situations and a variety of forms; accounting narratives represent one kind of narrative with a distinct form and function. While there is no essence of a narrative that is linked to persuasiveness, narratives in particular situations certainly can be persuasive, as indeed they are designed to be.