1.2.1. Two modes of thought
One fruitful starting point for this multidisciplinary story arc is the work of psychologist Jerome Bruner (1986, 1987). Science communication, applied linguistics, and postmodern organizational theory all draw from (or cannot avoid acknowledging) Bruner, particularly his cognitive distinction between two modes of thought: logico-scientific (paradigmatic hereafter) thinking and narrative thinking. Bruner considered these two modes of thought complementary yet irreducible to one another – “to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought” (Bruner, 1986, p. 11). Put differently, in the words of an oft-cited paper in science communication — “the plural of the word anecdote is not data.” (Kernaghan & Kuruvilla, 1982, p. 703). Paradigmatic modes, in other words, harbor skepticism for narrative ways of knowing. This distinction is crucial within Western academia, as it underlies tensions between truth and resonance, accuracy and plausibility, and rigor and creativity. It therefore inscribes the ostensibly incommensurable onto-epistemological commitments between researchers across “hard” and “soft” disciplines.
First, paradigmatic thinking aims to fulfill the ideal of a formal mathematical system of description and explanation. This means it relies on onto-epistemological practices such as categorization and generalization and replicability. At a gross level, the paradigmatic mode seeks to establish general causes and therefore employs procedures to assure verifiable reference and to test empirical truth. This does not, however, preclude imagination from such ways of thought. “The imaginative application of the paradigmatic mode leads to good theory, tight analysis, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypothesis” (Bruner, 1986, p. 13). That is, one cannot distinguish paradigmatic and narrative thinking through the presence or absence of imagination, but rather only through differing constraints each mode places upon the activity of imagination.
Narrative thinking, on the other hand, aims not for truth but resonance. In the narrative mode, good stories are believable, though not necessarily true. It deals with “human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course” (Bruner, 1986, p. 13). This places narrative thinking squarely within the domain of Weick’s (1995) notion of sensemaking, mostly because sensemaking is retrospective, constructive, and trades in plausibility rather than truth. The narrative mode, therefore, seeks affective resonance between bodies while the paradigmatic mode seeks to transcend the particular by reaching for higher orders of abstraction. In this way, stories in the narrative mode trade in emotion, while thinking in the paradigmatic mode trades through a heartlessness to logic, going where one’s premises and conclusions and observations lead. The paradigmatic mode verifies by appealing to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The narrative mode establishes not truth, but verisimilitude (p. 11). Bruner calls these “different natural kinds” (ibid.) – natural kinds driven by different fundamental questions.
“Perhaps Richard Rorty is right in characterizing the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy (which, on the whole, he rejects) as preoccupied with the epistemological question of how to know truth—which he contrasts with the broader question of how we come to endow experience with meaning, which is the question that preoccupies the poet and the storyteller” (p. 12-13).
And, as the next section will argue and foreshadow, this tension between truth, experience, and meaning drives these three disciplines under storied interrogation.
1.2.1. Two modes of thought — three disciplines
While Boje (2001a, 2011, 2014) draws heavily from Weick’s sensemaking (1995) when outlining his antenarrative way of thinking, we also see the most apparent resistance to Bruner’s cognitive model compared to STEM and applied linguistics. I suspect this is partly because Boje draws from indigenous scholarship more transparently and thoroughly than STEM or applied linguistics. Indigenous scholarship, in other words, generally rejects Cartesian binaries between body and mind, between animate and inanimate objects, and anthropological distinctions between figure and ground (Archibald & Parent, 2021; Chan, 2019) and would therefore be incommensurable not only to Bruner’s bifurcation of thinking, but to cognitive models of reality in general. Boje (2014), for example, in a table surveying definition of storytelling, casts Bruner (1990) as one who “aspires to be one of the ‘story grammarians’ who study minimal structure necessary to create story.” While Boje himself ascribes a similar minimal definition to antenarrative, the dismissive tone through which he describes Bruner’s narrative paradigm is striking. Such a stance marks a stark departure from the reverence of Bruner in applied linguistics and science communication. This likely represents Boje’s anarchic departure from positivist epistemological stances of STEM scholars[1] (Katz, 2013) and the empiricist anxieties among narrative inquiry scholars in applied linguistics (Ghanbar et al., 2024).
On the other hand, Bruner appears to be wholeheartedly embraced by education and applied linguistics scholars as evidenced by repeated citations of paradigmatic and narrative modes within literature reviews or methodological discussions of narrative inquiry (e.g. Allen et al., 2025; Barkhuizen, 2011, 2013; Benson, 2014; Clandinin et al., 2011; de Fina & Tseng, 2017). One could trace the oft-cited divergence of narrative analysis, and analysis of narrative, in fact, to narrative and paradigmatic modes of thought respectively[2].
This understanding of paradigmatic versus narrative modes of thought maps well onto the Katz-Krzywinski-Cairo debate discussed in Section 2.1.1. STEM scholars appear locked within a paradigmatic mode of thinking, beholden to articulating the natural world in as much generalizable order, truth, and detail as possible, while many STS scholars and science communicators embrace a narrative mode of thought, using a series of ethnographic observations to coil and uncoil the discursive production of facts, or to tell public stories that move non-scientific audiences into scientific thought and action. In this way, if STEM represents rock, STS and science communication are the geologists—the geologists that want to deeply understand the story of the rock, and who want to ardently communicate the importance of the rock to other audiences.
Readers may have questions about concepts introduced within this section. These concepts will be explored in greater detail below. This preamble simply signals the influence of Bruner’s distinction to all three disciplines – a promissory note for future callbacks to these two proposed modes of thought and its entailing problematics.
Ontogenetic Reflection
Listening to this makes me realize a temporal dimension of reading. I don’t maintain a hierarchy of notes that provides predominance to one theory or idea or privileges one reading over another in a kind of nested organized list, but rather I find that a recency bias coupled with Deleuzian lines of flight emerging from a deep rhizome of previous readings often leads to both:
- A recency bias in terms of the scholars that are pushing my thinking in new directions, but also
- The tenuousness of that influence as I continue to explore new concepts.
Elizabeth St. Pierre of post-qualitative inquiry fame often discusses the importance of reading broadly and of not bolting oneself to theories or concepts, but rather freely allowing the depth of one’s reading to contribute to the temporary assembly of new concepts. But as I think about these two modes of thought now, I’m less moved by Bruner’s distinction and more intrigued with Deleuze’s notion of the fold as characterized through Michel Foucault and his analysis of the interior-exterior relationship between sophistry and philosophy. I will paste a previous free-write of this below.
To make sense of this apparent tension between science and storytelling, it can be helpful to return to the philosophy of ancient Greece, namely Plato’s understanding of philosophy versus sophistry. In short, philosophy concerns itself with logical argument and an articulation of the true and good, while sophistry performs the trappings of philosophy but also relies heavily on emotional appeals and the repetition of discourses in order to provide a simulation of truth. At least, this is the story as philosophers seem to tell it.
Foucault, in On the Will to Know, discusses Plato and his attempt to expel sophistry from the realm of philosophy. Foucault argues that philosophy did not succeed in erasing sophistry but rather inscribed an interiority-exteriority boundary between the two. Within the interior, philosophy exists in a decontextualized, abstract truth-seeking practice as conditioned by rational argument. Sophistry, on the other hand, exists in an exterior, operating by distinct logics of truth, namely a ratification of statements through repetition, which makes sophistic discourse more material than philosophical discourse and also allowing for sophistic discourse to accumulate ontological weight over time and space.
This relationship between the abstract interior and material exterior, the logical interior and the resonant exterior, also strikingly parallels a mapping of science as an interior and storytelling as an exterior. We see this interior-exterior relationship expressed by Latour, who ascribes different labels, namely the interior as the truth-seeking practice of science (the technogram) and the exterior as the the socio-material practice of science as characterized by grant-seeking, by promoting one’s research in a story form through journal articles or conference presentations (the sociogram). However, Latour goes on to say that this interior-exterior relation, or what he calls an inside-outside relation, are not two hermeneutically sealed domains but are always inverting and taking in the characteristics of one into the practices of the other.
This makes apparent a connection to Deleuze’s notion of the fold. In his lectures reflecting on the life and work of Foucault, Deleuze talks about the importance of the fold as a discursive interaction that is constantly inverting the relationship between the interior and the exterior. The boundaries are therefore not only porous but also pliable. This paper will therefore adopt a theoretical framing that attempts to look at the interactive practices of scientists and science communicators as always existing and moving within this interior-exterior boundary of science and storytelling through a practice of folding.
In short, I don’t disagree or feel particularly embarrassed by this paradigmatic preamble, but I also do think that there is more complication and more disruption to be had by involving more diverse theorists on the matter. And I’m sure that you as a reader are currently ejecting your own antenarrative lines of flight as your theorist de jour whispers into your ear, providing you very readings readings of this relationship between story, philosophy, and knowledge. And I hope to hear all about it in the comments below.
But until next time, cheers!
[1] This is further unpacked in Section 2.2.
[2] This receives further attention in Sections 3.1.1. and 5.1.2.
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