Skillfully Confronting the Unknown: Personally Transformative Experiences and Narratively Inflected Practical Knowledge

Is it possible to skillfully navigate personally transformative choices? While normative decision theory describes skillful planning rationality, L.A. Paul argues that personally transformative choices resist adjudication by these methods. This may suggest that we can’t distinguish between skillful and unskillful ways of approaching our transformative choices—that every such choice is a leap in the dark. However, I argue that there are more or less skillful ways of approaching personally transformative decision-making and that skillful transformative choice is narratively-inflected practical knowledge.