'A Form of Knowledge'

A reader asks why “Anecdotal Evidence”? I don’t have a definitive answer. When I covered courts as a newspaper reporter I would hear lawyers and judges casually disparage anecdotal evidence, as opposed to physical evidence or sworn testimony. In other words, it was less reliable, likelier to be dubious or fictional, and thus more like literature. The OED bolsters this understanding in its definition of anecdote: “a short account of an amusing, interesting, or telling incident or experience; sometimes with implications of superficiality or unreliability.” 

You and I dwell every day in the realm of anecdotal evidence. You go to the grocery, witness a shoplifter being taken away, and you go home and tell your spouse. We’re surrounded by anecdotes, assuming we’re paying attention, and as humans we instinctively share such stories, even with strangers. They form part of the civil contract. Anecdotes overlap significantly with what we usually prize as “good gossip,” another ingredient of the social glue. Dr. Johnson tells us in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775):

 

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

 

Another source was “Anecdote and Storyteller,” an essay by Irving Howe posthumously collected in A Critic’s Notebook (1994). Howe defines an anecdote as a “brief, unelaborated, often humorous account of a single incident, taken to be piquant in its own right.” And goes on: “One of its attractions is that in times of dislocation, the anecdote holds out the possibility that human beings may still connect, perhaps only briefly, through memory and story.” In the Spring 1992 issue of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein’s essay is titled “Merely Anecdotal.” He enjoys anecdotes and takes them seriously:

 

“If anecdotes are a form of knowledge -- about the zaniness of human behavior, about the shocking stupidity as well as the startling intelligence of people, about our irrationality, our unpredictability, our hopeless comicality -- then it is a form of knowledge that is cumulative and yet without end. If anecdotes teach anything at all, it is probably that it is best never to think we know the last word about any human heart, not even our own.”

 

[“Merely Anecdotal” is collected in Epstein’s 1995 essay collection With My Trousers Rolled.]