A Companion to Public Philosophy

25Public Philosophy Through Narrative

BARRY LAM

1 Storytelling and the Problem of Vagueness

After my friend CH got his first tenure‐track job in philosophy, he found himself with a “bourgeois longing” for a nice hi‐fidelity stereo system. He didn’t want to listen to music any longer on a cheap boombox. This was long before smart speakers and mobile devices. So, he went to a local specialty audio store and asked the clerk to walk him through various amplifiers, speakers, record and CD players, and so forth. Toward the end of the purchase, in what was sure to be a hefty bill, the one item that bothered CH was the price of the speaker wire.

“Is it really necessary for me to pay $50 for speaker wire?” CH asked the clerk.

“Well,” the clerk said, “I have this $5 speaker wire I could sell to you. It might not be as good. Let me change out the wires and let’s see if you can hear a difference.”

The clerk proceeded to insert the cheaper wire into banana clips and run it from the amplifier to the speakers for a side‐by‐side comparison with the thick‐gauge, $50 copper wire.

“I don’t hear any difference,” CH reported.

“Okay, we’ll try different genres of music at different volumes.”

After many minutes of close listening comparing the same audio played through two different wires, CH confirmed that he could hear no difference whatsoever between the $5 and $50 speaker wire.

“All right, that settles it then,” said the clerk.

“Right, of course,” said CH, “I’ll take the $50 speaker wire.”