Telling Stories

Abstract The role of anecdote-telling in philosophy is analyzed. The primary point of it, to expose language regularities, is distinguished from its role as a tool for making philosophical judgments. The standard method of exposing these regularities—listener reactions to the anecdotes—is justified against opponents who claim that the standard methods of establishing results in lexical semantics are not appropriate or not successful at this. It is also argued that the fictional nature of anecdote-telling should not be analyzed in standard modal terms or in terms of a pretense operator or via suspension-of-belief states of mind. Some puzzles about anecdote-telling in philosophy are also tamed.