Ulatowski, Joseph W.Lumsden, David2025-08-032025-08-032024Ulatowski, J., & Lumsden, D. (2024). New Zealand's 'Abuse in Care' report, childless cat ladies, and narratives of personal experience: A response to Talbi's 'The Epistemic Import of Narratives'. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 13(8), 4-11.https://hdl.handle.net/10289/17531Convincing others to take up a position different from the one that they currently occupy can be extraordinarily difficult when it comes to deeply held social and political commitments. In ‘The Epistemic Import of Narratives’ (2024), Merel Talbi argues that narratives of personal experience can be employed to bridge an epistemic divide that exists between two people who maintain deeply held commitments on different sides of a social and political issue. We build our reaction to Talbi’s work around two main themes: (1) We argue that the persuasive nature of narratives of personal experience should not be framed as solely the result of the narrative structure, and; (2) We believe that narratives of personal experience may be persuasive when they mesh well with some part of the audience’s own self-narrative.enAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/disagreementself-narrativessocial epistemologyJournal Article