Humans, rightly, take stories seriously

Making things up is essential for knowledge and human societies

Photo by Steven Libralon on Unsplash

We are often told that the responsible attitude is to only rely on facts and data. Emotions and stories, on the other hand, are only relevant for personal and limited situations. What this ignores is that facts and data, themselves, are not foundational and that human knowledge is built out of pictures, theories and models.

This means that we do not know the world directly as we can only build abstracted representations of the world and then compare these to reality in various ways. It was noted in the comments on my most recent post (by Sean) that narratives or stories are another type of representation or model of the world. As such, stories are an important part of how we, as humans, understand, know and act in the world. Given they are one of the first ways in which we build and communicate abstract representations of the world, they are often foundational to knowledge development.

Serious play

As all of us who have interacted with little children know, they spend a lot of energy playing and making up stories about themselves, the people around them, their toys, and their environment. (It might look like a little kid sitting in a cardboard box but is really an astronaut exploring the solar system!) Notably, children take these stories very seriously and act as though their story is true, while rarely confusing the story for reality.

This behaviour isn’t just cute and fun, but lays patterns of conceptualising and interacting with the world that, I would argue, are foundational to how we build knowledge. By incorporating the objects around them into a story, children are in effect building narrative models of reality. They then experiment with the internal dynamics and consistency of these models as they play with the interactions with reality. Learning when and where make-believe stories fail within the world they live in, and where they succeed, is good practice for the process of testing theories against reality.

We often think of childhood play and stories as a stage that we grow out of, yet we humans clearly spend much of our lives creating and telling similar stories. Sometimes they are fictional and are purely there to entertain or amuse. Sometimes they are fictional stories that reveal something true about the world. But sometimes we take our stories so seriously we treat them, like children, as if they are real.

For example, there are the stories (that are sometimes even true) about human lives that hold families together. Or there are corporate narratives and visions that tie a whole company into a shared purpose. And then there are the universally applicable, but ultimately artificial, entities like legal systems or money. None of these are things that strictly exist until we create them and treat them seriously, but then they become real as they structure how we interact with and understand the world. Some of these abstracted, and created, representations of things we impose upon the world are useful, some are true, and some are both.

Let’s look at one example. Take a law that has been agreed by a parliament or a ruler. Once it is decreed as official, we take it to describe a rule about what people under a certain jurisdiction can and cannot do. However, in reality, it is only sometimes a genuine limitation on action. The law will only limit actions if it is accepted by a sufficiently large group of people so that there is genuine enforcement (by whatever means) or a widespread agreement to adhere to it voluntarily. Each of these can only happen if we treat the law as if it holds in reality, even if the physical or moral laws of the universe say nothing about it.

It is rational to take stories this seriously

Importantly, this process by which we ‘make things up’ and then treat them as genuine descriptions of reality is not irrational or a flaw in human behaviour. Stories like this are sometimes so important for human and social behaviour that they become real. At other times, they form a crucial role in how we build knowledge, typically as they explain reality so well we can’t make sense of it without them.

Money, for example, is a good example of the first type of story. It is entirely fictitious in the sense that there is no reason why one piece of paper or plastic is worth much more than another just because it has different marks on it. Yet it is a powerful fiction that enables the entire global economy and society to function and it is irrational to not accept it. Taking stories like these as real is necessary for functional human social dynamics.

Scientific practice is built on the second kind of story. New scientific hypotheses or theories are, at their heart, new stories that we are telling about the world. The scientific method dictates that we should first take them seriously enough to see whether they match with what happens in reality. And, if that happens, we will often then accept that these stories are, in fact, accurate descriptions of reality.

An example might make this clearer. In the 1850s and 1860s, when trying to understand the patterns of plant propagation, Gregor Mendel postulated that there were discrete ‘factors’ or ‘characters’ that plants propagated. Some were dominant while others were recessive and this explained the pattern or hereditary characteristics, like flower colour. While these ‘made up’ ideas explained his data very well, they seemed fanciful and unconvincing to his peers. He didn’t have a good enough story to situate them in and so it wasn’t until 35 years later that his ideas were taken seriously and people realised they explained reality very well. Under the new name of ‘genes’, his ‘made up’ ideas now form the basis of modern biology.

Stories help us build knowledge

As argued, human knowledge is made up of abstracted representations of the world. That means we all carry around simplified versions of reality in our minds with which we make sense of the world. Sometimes these simplified versions of reality are scientific theories, sometimes they are maps, and sometimes they are principles or pictures. In all cases, they are some kind of made up story that, usually for good reasons, we take seriously as descriptions of the world. Some of these stories are sung, some have been repeated around campfires for thousands of years and some are written in complex mathematics or computer code.

This means that there isn’t really a sharp distinction between fact and story. Both for building knowledge and making good decisions, it isn’t helpful to try to draw a clear line between them. Instead, we should interrogate all of our stories (and theories, principles and maps) to decide whether they are accurate descriptions of reality, and identify which contexts they are accurate in. Many stories describe some aspect of our world, or us humans, somewhat well; but no stories are universally and always accurate.