The Use of Narrative in Public Philosophy: A Diagrammatic Guide

When the great nonfiction writer Michael Lewis decided to write about the life and works of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky for what eventually became The Undoing Project, he had to dive into specialized academic writing. At the end of The Undoing Project, Lewis had this to say about the genre.

The readers of academic papers, in the mind’s eye of their authors, are at best skeptical, and more commonly hostile. The writers of these papers aren’t trying to engage their readers, much less give them pleasure. They’re trying to survive them.

Unfortunately, Lewis’ characterization could not be truer of academic philosophy today, at least in the tradition in which I have been trained. We socialize today’s philosophers to think and speak by way of, and in response to, objections. If you’re a practicing academic philosopher, compare how much of your work is responsive to audience joy, versus anticipated or merely possible objections? Similarly, how much are we, as gatekeepers, responding to how much pleasure the work is giving us, as opposed to its flaws? Skeptics, objectors, detractors, and reviewer 2 drive our work and thinking far more than engagement, entertainment, captivation, or even education. This isn’t a bad thing. Whether it is academic science or philosophy, we need an institution of inquiry generating claims that survive the highest standards of epistemic scrutiny. The inability of such work to engage those who are not our academic peers is a small price to pay for producing work that passes the highest standards of epistemic scrutiny.

Yet good academic philosophy does not necessarily make good public philosophy. In our public facing work, justification is seldom the primary aim of our writing. Sometimes the aim is educational, sometimes it is meant to contribute to social change, and other times it is there to entertain. The work is also not targeted toward a community of peers with expert knowledge, but a varied group including children, casual hobbyists, and people who never went to college.

Some academics-turned-successful-popular-writers, like Steven Pinker, believe the problem is with academic writing. It sucks. We need to reduce jargon. We need to simplify word choice and syntax. In effect, we need to do what we teach our freshman to do. I think there is also another issue. Academic writing is engineered for epistemic justification, not audience engagement. Fix the writing all you want, and you still have a form of communication tapping into only one particular manner of human thinking, a kind only a small segment of the world’s population, the academics, are disposed to enjoy and do particularly well.

The most impactful work popularizing math, science, or even the technical areas of business or finance, is of a narrative form, not an argumentative one. And the narrative is not just a hook, or instrument for generating interest in the argument. It does not disappear once the serious argumentative work begins. The narrative is the structure, with the argumentative work serving to advance the story rather than vice versa. The result is a history of time, or the number zero, or the conflict between catastrophic impact versus volcanic disruption theories of mass extinction. It is writing with characters, conflicts, revelations, and resolutions, more the stuff of Hollywood than the Journal of Philosophy. The human preference for the narrative over the argumentative form needs no further evidence than the comparative sales of the Da Vinci Code versus Da Vinci’s Notebooks, or the time humans spend gossiping versus experimenting, or the number of people who prefer spending an evening watching blockbuster films versus CSPAN. Even if we compare the audiences of CSPAN and PBS to Fox News or MSNBC, all putative news organizations, we will find higher engagement with the production that generates a coherent narrative with their news. For better or worse, humans are far more creatures of story than creatures of argument.

One good way to increase public engagement with philosophy, then, is to engineer our public work using the power of narrative. It isn’t easy; ethically or practically. Much of the power of narrative is the power it has to bypass our better epistemic faculties, something that philosophy, and the academy generally, is supposed to correct, not exploit. Moreover, narrative storytelling and philosophy make for strange companions; storytelling does not usually have a thesis. When it does, explicitly stating it in the process of storytelling is highly distasteful, “the lesson of this story is….” Storytelling requires structuring for narrative suspense, hiding key elements for a reveal. Engineering a story requires aesthetic decisions, decisions that may increase rather than decrease clarity and understanding. Academic philosophy, being epistemological, is almost never designed aesthetically. Philosophy absent an explicitly stated thesis is obscurantist. Deliberately hiding something in philosophy creates no suspense, simply misunderstanding.

The challenges are not insurmountable; it hasn’t been for popular science and it shouldn’t be for popular philosophy. I started Hi-Phi Nation to create a new genre in a different medium, story-based philosophy in audio, to do just this. I’ve written about preparing for and researching particular episodes in posts on other blogs, but here today I want to talk a little bit about some basic engineering principles for storytelling, and some basic structures of philosophical work, that I have used and hopefully others can experiment with to try and successfully tap into the power of storytelling for philosophical purposes.

The author Kurt Vonnegut famously claimed to capture the shape of many stories in literary history in a single model. There are only two dimensions to a story, time on the x-axis, and a protagonist’s fortune from bad to good on the y-axis.

In other words, stories are changes in fortune over time. One story schema might be this; a most ill-fortuned soul, in the harshest of conditions, through events of magic, marvel, or merit, climbs out into conditions of good fortune, living happily ever after (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). This structure is exhibited below.

Pixar claims that almost all of their blockbuster animated films follow the structure of a boring, mundane, formulaic life changed with a chance encounter, an encounter that leads to adventures of fortune and misfortune, leading to some kind of revelation. (Wall-E, Up, Toy Story, Finding Nemo). This is another structure that fits into Vonnegut’s model.

Vonnegut’s models may not be universal, but they are telling. You will find endless discussions of them on the internet, even algorithms designed to detect and graph every story from English literary history onto the two axes. The fact that so many stories can fit into such a simple model suggests that human responsiveness to stories is predictable.

Other recognizable features of good stories help us fill out the details of Vonnegut’s functions, or curves. They constitute the central turns of the curves, or who, what, when, where, and why fortune turns for the worst or better. This American Life founder and host Ira Glass identifies characters, action, conflicts, and stakes as the central features of good stories (Abel, 2015). Sometimes a character alone can drive a story forward. The comedian Dane Cook is a commercially successful stand-up comedian in America who is reputed in the comedy world to have absolutely no clever material. The power of listening to Dane Cook comes from his personality alone. In philosophy, we find analogs with celebrity intellectuals, or individuals who gain prominence and following in the public sphere in virtue of their large personas and the controversy they generate, which thereby create antagonistic groups trying to take them down or elevate them to guru-like status. Followers and critics of such academic celebrities seem to care at least as much if not more about the celebrities’ social fortunes and misfortunes than they do the ideas themselves, suggesting that the draw to the ideas only arises from the draw to the personality and personal story.

More often, mere action, absent a strong personality, is enough to keep a listener riveted. On an early episode of This American Life, Ira Glass tells the story involving a man, Brett, standing on a subway platform watching a stranger approach waiting passengers on the platform, saying to each of them “You’re out” or “You’re in.” Nothing else is happening. There is no threat or reward, the stranger is well dressed and perfectly ordinary. He is simply walking around passing some inexplicable judgment on others. The stranger approaches Brett. Brett is getting a little nervous. He couldn’t make heads or tails of why some of the other waiting passengers made the cut, while others were out. A 50ish woman was in, as was a homeboy with baggy shorts, but a man in a cardigan was out. Brett desperately doesn’t want to be out. Finally, the stranger comes up to Brett, rendering his verdict.

Glass uses this example to exhibit that nothing particularly exciting is happening. The action is minimal, but it is enough to elicit curiosity in a listener, or the desire to know what happens next. And there isn’t anything in particular that is important about what happens next. The listener does not have any independent stake in whether Brett is “out” or “in.” But somehow in the course of the story, Brett has a stake in what happens next, and we have a stake in finding out the answer. We have a stake simply in virtue of the action and the suspense; the withholding of the information about what happens next. We have so much of a stake that we’ll wait for the answer even if there is a 30 second commercial, or a pedantic paragraph, in between the set-up and reveal of the story.

It turns out Brett was “in.” He felt so relieved.

Suspense in storytelling generates what cognitive scientists call “need to know.” “Need to know” is the human desire to settle ambiguity and uncertainty. A curious fact about humans is that simply beginning a narrative and withholding its conclusion is enough to generate a need to know, even of information that is not independently valuable to the listener. My own experience of this phenomena occurs when I show up to the movie theater early and am subject to odd movie trivia questions. I never cared about how many White-Castle burgers Kal Penn and John Cho ate on the set of the first Harold and Kumar movie, but raise the question for me, and I’ll watch two Coke ads to wait for the answer. Another example is the genre of “frustrating videos” on Youtube, consisting in a medley of mundane events, like flipping a pancake, or striking a match, in which the viewer is prevented from seeing the act performed to completion. The pancake is never flipped, the match is never lit, the bag of chips in a snack machine never drops. The videos are so frustrating that a viewer must subsequently click on an “oddly satisfying” video consisting of such events performed to completion just to overcome the unsettling feeling.

We know that the human mind is disposed to engage with the narrative form, and stays with a story or series of events undergoing oscillations in fortune until there is an ending or resolution. So to harness the power of storytelling for public philosophy, we have to connect philosophy to a character. We need to find a way for philosophy to contribute to the character’s change in fortune over time. We need to use the action in a story to manufacture a “need to know,” giving the listener a stake in a philosophical question. And we need philosophical considerations to be essential to the resolution of the story.

To date, I have 20 episodes of Hi-Phi Nation where I do this, but instead let me use an example from Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History. The story involves how the legendary comedian Bob Hope helped to artificially exempt exclusive private golf clubs in Los Angeles from paying their fair share of property taxes in the middle of the 20th century. Bob Hope personally lobbied politicians, including old Hollywood friend Governor Ronald Reagan, to exempt private golf clubs from being taxed at rates of private property, but rather got them categorized as nonprofit charities. Then, during the drafting of Proposition 13, the famous California initiative capping property taxes, private golf clubs had their taxes assessed 1% of their 1975 value, which would last until there was a change in ownership. Upon a change in ownership, the club would then owe annually 1% of the value assessed at the time of the change. These private golf clubs are in the most expensive parts of LA, such as Bel Air, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills. As a result of these practices, over the course of 40 years, Los Angeles ranks near the bottom of US metropolitan areas for public parks and public recreational areas, while private golf clubs make up the largest areas of green spaces in the city. The Bel-Air Country club pays approximately $200,000 annually in property taxes on a property that is currently worth billions. Assessed at its current value, the country club would owe $90 million in taxes annually to the city, a fact that would bankrupt the club and effectively turn the green space over to the city.

Here’s the kicker. These country clubs are owned by their members, who pay membership dues. Very few members who were members in 1975 are still members today. Why doesn’t that count as a change in ownership?

The verdict from the tax assessment office states that, because there was no one event that constituted a change in ownership, but rather there was a gradual change in members over time, private golf clubs in Los Angeles must still be taxed at 1975 rates as though no change in ownership occurred. Their view is that the owners today are identical to the owners of 1975. In fact, provided gradual change in membership over time forever, all private golf clubs will eternally be assessed at 1975 property values, because there will never be a change in ownership.

When I design an episode of Hi-Phi Nation, I try to find stories that have features that make them prime for public philosophy. They all contain a conflict, a conflict that leads to the misfortune of some subject in the story. The conflict arises precisely because particular stakeholders in the story make a contentious philosophical assumption, an assumption that academic philosophers have said many interesting and nuanced things about. Gladwell stumbled onto a great example concerning identity across time, and I’ve tried to do this so far on Hi-Phi Nation on topics ranging from just war theory, to addiction and free will, to the aesthetics of cover songs. You would be surprised at how many stories can fit the ideas you want to convey to the public.

Once you have found the right story for your piece, be it a talk, podcast, or essay, the next step is to engineer your narrative structure. A very straightforward use of the story in a public-facing piece has the following structure:

The horizontal line represents the story told in chronological order to completion, and the curve represents an exploration, even a defended opinion, about the philosophical issues that the story raises. Essentially, you simply concatenate the story with the philosophy.

A simple line and curve structure suffices when you have the perfect story. But the structure will not always suffice, nor is it particularly artful. After the first season of Hi-Phi Nation, I had a professional editor, Julia Barton, who edits Revisionist History, listen to the entire first season of the show to give me notes about how I could improve structure to maximize engagement in future seasons.

The key word here is “weaving.” Consider this one improvement on the line and curve structure.

In this structure, you cut off a story when the stakes are high, the fortune for the protagonist is low, and the listener is left wanting to know the final outcome of the conflict. The curve consisted in the use of philosophy to help understand the conflict and how we got to where we were, and then offers alternative philosophical views and arguments that could possibly make the outcome of the story different. When the academic discussion is over, the story continues with the reveal of what happens in the story, sometimes consistent and sometimes inconsistent with what might be the true philosophical position (if there is one). This structure uses the conflict of the story to raise the intellectual questions, and exploits narrative suspense or “need to know” to hold attention so the listeners would want to know about the intellectual issues and how it helps them understand what happens next in the story. It also leaves the listener with a sense of justice, or injustice, depending on how the story ends, consistent with the philosophical view that is presented as convincing in the episode.

One key to structuring a story-driven piece of philosophy is recognizing that specialized academic writing in philosophy also has a general schema corresponding to Vonnegut’s structure for stories. Whereas narrative storytelling follows the structure of change in fortune over time, academic writing requires its producer to engineer their work as contributing to a change in epistemic position over time.

For example, consider this classic structure, where an author takes a certain well-received philosophical view, subjects it to scathing criticism, leading to its rejection. The author then postulates a new alternative we had not considered as a view that should now be accepted.

Analytic philosophy is also replete with what you might call the “Chisholming” structure, after the philosopher Roderick Chisholm. This is where a philosopher seeks necessary and sufficient conditions for some term or concept. She begins with something we think we know, for instance a formulation for the definition of free will, or lying, or why its okay to kill one to save five in one context but not another. The author then offers a series of decisive counterexamples. The counterexamples lead to revisions that also seem plausible and known, but are then subject again to counterexample. The process cycles until, at the end, we have a victorious definition of our term. This is illustrated in the following:

Vonnegut’s structure for storytelling and the structure of philosophy writing yields two possible ways to integrate narratives and philosophy. We can use the philosophical structure, which is increase or decrease in epistemic position over time, to contextualize, characterize, and explain the changing fortune over time in a story. Or alternatively, we can use the change in fortune over time in a story to characterize, illustrate, or explain an increase or decrease in our epistemic position over time. In the unabridged version of this piece, I present a diagrammatic analysis of how Alison Gopnik does this masterfully in her Atlantic piece “How David Hume helped me solve my Midlife Crisis”.

Let me end with a few more diagrams that have worked in my two seasons producing Hi-Phi Nation. These diagrams work for audio and some are variations of the wonderful diagrams for radio-reporters at Transom.org.

This is known as the “e” structure. You begin the story in the middle of a story (the black arrow), where a particular action or event is compelling, puzzling, and relevant to the intellectual issue you want to discuss. The piece then takes a turn, or the black curve, where history, philosophy, or other intellectual issues get presented, giving the listener intellectual and historical context that explains how we got to where the story starts. The story then begins again back in time, where the chronology of the story mirrors the fact that it has been given intellectual context. The story then unfolds chronologically from that point to completion. Rob Rosenthal at Transom calls this the “e” type structure and you will find it a lot in radio reporting.

Finally, we have this intricate diagram:

The horizontal lines represent a story, in fact different stories depending on vertical placement, and the diagonal lines represent the philosophy. The idea behind this structure is that you might want to exhibit the breadth and significance of a philosophical issue by showing how it intersects not just with one interesting story, but many. Take for example a story about how Panera Bread sued White City Shopping Center on the grounds that the shopping center was in violation of a lease agreement prohibiting it from leasing to another sandwich place in the plaza. White City leased the space to Qdoba, and Panera argued that burritos, tacos, and quesadillas are sandwiches. This is a very popular story in my intro classes. If I were making an episode about this story, I’d tell it to the point where we get to the legal dispute, we take a dive into the philosophical question about semantics and concepts, including the particular concepts of “sandwich” and “burrito”. We then rejoin the story and talk about the judge’s decision in the case. We then talk about three other stories in legal history, where the same kind of semantic issues arose, and judges or governments made conflicting judgments about matters of categorization. We then dive back into the philosophical issues about what is supposed to settle semantic and categorization issues, and how legal philosophers believe we should address such issues in law. We finally return back to our original story to find out if the Panera Bread, and the Qdoba, are still there, perhaps interviewing some customers about their food and whether they think burritos are sandwiches.

I hope this will be helpful for those philosophers interested in making engaging public philosophy, and I hope all of you listen to how I executed these strategies in the first two season of Hi-Phi Nation, and use them as teaching tools. Season 3 is coming soon!