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Narrative Paradigm

Walter Fisher's theory that humans judge value-laden arguments by narrative rationality — narrative coherence (does the story hang together?) and fidelity (does it ring true against experience?) — rather than by formal-logical soundness.

Core Idea

The narrative paradigm is Walter Fisher's theory that humans are storytelling beings (Homo narrans) who judge value-laden arguments by narrative rationality rather than formal logic. It rests on two claims: the paradigm-shift claim, that the rational-world paradigm misdescribes how people evaluate moral arguments; and the narrative-rationality claim, that they judge by narrative coherence (does the story hang together internally?) and narrative fidelity (does it ring true against their own experience and values?). Its vulnerability is the compelling-but-false story.

Scope of Application

Bounded to the human-communication substrate where an audience evaluates a story by coherence and fidelity.

  • Argumentation theory — the home: positioned against the Toulmin/Perelman tradition.
  • Trial advocacy — jurors judging competing "stories of the case" by coherence and fit.
  • Leadership communication — the change story that must hang together and ring true.
  • Marketing and branding — brand stories failing on coherence or fidelity.
  • Political and health communication — competing campaign and illness narratives.

Clarity

Naming the paradigm gives the critic a way to diagnose why a value-laden argument persuades that formal logic cannot supply. Because narrative rationality decomposes into two separable checks, a critic can locate a breakdown precisely — a story internally airtight but out of step with the audience fails on fidelity, not coherence. It also makes the evaluative standard itself visible as a choice, letting the analyst ask which standard an audience is actually applying.

Manages Complexity

An open, ill-posed question — is this argument any good, and why does it win? — compresses into two operable checks: coherence, traced by internal consistency, and fidelity, compared against the audience's sense of how the world works. Read for a given audience, they yield a small branch structure and make rival accounts comparable on a common standard. A second compression turns on which evaluative standard the audience applies, and the criteria flag the compelling-but-false danger directly.

Abstract Reasoning

The paradigm licenses an interventionist-comparative move (score rival accounts for an audience, predict which prevails), a diagnostic move (localize a failure to coherence or fidelity, which dictates the remedy), boundary-drawing moves (require both criteria; read which evaluative standard the audience applies), and a critical-caution move (predict the failure regime where a coherent, surface-faithful story is false, since the criteria reward fit, not truth).

Knowledge Transfer

Within rhetoric and persuasion the paradigm transfers as mechanism — the two-criterion check, comparative move, and compelling-but-false caution carry across law, leadership, marketing, and politics, all human-persuasion contexts sharing audience, story, and standard. Beyond human persuasion it has nothing to evaluate. What travels is the parents it decomposes into — narrative and narrative_persuasion; the branded theory is the argumentation-theoretic evaluation framework built atop them, sibling to the Toulmin model.

Relationships to Other Abstractions

Local relationship map for Narrative ParadigmParents appear above the current abstraction, mutual partners to the right, and children below. Node labels state whether each abstraction is prime or domain-specific; colors identify relation types.Narrative ParadigmDOMAINPrime abstraction: Narrative — presupposesNarrativePRIME

Current abstraction Narrative Paradigm Domain-specific

Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on

  • Narrative Paradigm presupposes Narrative Prime

    The Narrative Paradigm presupposes narrative because its coherence-and-fidelity standard evaluates arguments as sequenced meaning-bearing stories rather than as bare propositions.

Hierarchy path (1) — routes to 1 parentless root

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space

Narrative Paradigm sits in a crowded region of the domain-specific corpus (26th percentile for distinctiveness): several abstractions share nearly its structure, so a description that fits it tends to fit its neighbors too.

Family — Persuasion & Rhetorical Influence (13 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-07-12