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.