Narrative as Evidence

Narrative as evidence is Flyvbjerg's methodological claim that case-based, first-person accounts are not anecdote to be superseded by statistical aggregation but evidence of a categorically different kind, best suited to phenomena that resist abstraction. The epistemic paradigm classifies narrative as preliminary — interesting illustrations awaiting the real work of quantitative generalization. Flyvbjerg's career-long argument is that for phronetic phenomena, narrative is not preliminary but terminal: it is the form of evidence adequate to the phenomenon, and the attempt to abstract it into generalizable regularities destroys precisely the features that made it informative. Segal's You On AI — with its confessions, its specific cases, its author's willingness to render his own experience with contextual honesty — is, on this framework, the richest available evidence about what AI is doing to human work.