We Know We’re Telling Tall Tales Because Our Mouths are Moving

Pragmatism, objectivity, and the spectrum of stories we tell

All the world’s a stage. I’m the good shepherd and I lay down my life for my sheep. Words are just crumbs that fall from the feast of the mind. The conscience is a compass.

Those are some famous metaphors. But why don’t we think of metaphors as mere lies?

Mysteriously, we’ve adapted to make sense of even the most farfetched comparisons. We see how one thing can be like something else in certain respects because we can think in abstract terms, and we can entertain figures of speech. We can treat different things as identical for the sake of argument, setting aside our background knowledge that really they’re not the same.

Our Bizarre Attachment to Fictions

Building on that capacity for basic abstract thought, we appreciate fictional stories. Again, far from treating stories as just lies, we use them for entertainment and instruction. What’s astonishing here, though, is just how precious such falsehoods can be. We can know that a story is fiction, that the events described never happened, and yet we can identify with the characters to such an extent that the descriptions trigger our emotions. A fiction can anger, sadden, or arouse you. Due to the brain’s modularity, one side of our brain can set aside another.

Think of the Harry Potter, Star Wars, or Marvel movie franchises, and how excited the fans are when these movies are released or how furious they can be when the movie studios drop the ball and mess up the stories. Or think of the profound literature by Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, or JD Salinger that punches you in the gut despite your understanding that the plots are just made up and that the characters never lived. Recall the tearjerker genres that are infamous for playing with our emotions.

Why do we care so much about stories that never happened? Why are we so emotionally attached to abstractions and to known falsehoods? Why do we invest emotionally and intellectually in stories that we call “fictions” even though technically we could just as easily regard them as lies, as sets of public statements the author knows are false?

Perhaps we’re able to be so cavalier because we presume that the field of fiction is only carved out from the greater discourse of nonfiction. Ordinarily, we assume, we don’t lie and most of what we say is truthful, meaning that we intend, for the most part at least, to get the facts right. Fiction is only a sideshow next to the bulk of human communication.

The Fiction in Ordinary “Nonfiction”

Yet how can we be sure that our trust in nonfiction isn’t based on just another self-deception? We suspend our disbelief when entertaining a fictional narrative, in that we set aside our background knowledge that the story is technically a pack of lies. Maybe we do something similar when interpreting nonfiction. At a minimum, the difference would be that the background knowledge in the second case is more buried, requiring philosophical analysis to recognize the dubious nature of so-called “truth.”

After all, what are we doing when we talk about anything? We’re using words that are labels for concepts, and every concept is a generalization that simplifies and that therefore falsifies. Moreover, each concept is packed with subjective and normative meanings which we impose on the plain facts.

Most concepts in natural language have a how-to, instrumental aspect: these concepts are defined often implicitly according to a pragmatic perspective which construes the subject matter in terms of its usefulness or relevance to creatures like us. A concept is a map of the terrain, which makes the category or conception an anthropocentric tool.

Thus, when we think at all, we’re presupposing the worthiness of the goal that determines the conceptual map’s purpose. Thoughts formed from such subjective, so-called “natural language” concepts are only true for us, meaning that without us to filter and to evaluate the facts, there would be no such filtered truth. These thoughts aren’t true in any purely nonfictional, nonhuman sense.

Indeed, a human symbol might as well relate to its referent purely by magic, for all the nonliving world is concerned with what we’re saying about it. “Cat,” for instance, is a label not just for a type of animal, but for how we think of that species. The word’s meaning consists of the referent (the set of cats) and the associated intension or conception (what philosophers call “narrow content”). We think of cats as pets (as slaves or companions), and that conception, in turn, derives typically from our interests and goals. We mean to use cats as though they were our pets.

This is an extreme case of subjectivity because by domesticating cats we insert ourselves into the meaning of what it is to be a member of that species. We distinguish between domesticated and wild cats, but even the notion of a wild animal is defined anthropocentrically: wild animals are conceived of negatively precisely because they’re not pacified and under human control.

Pragmatism and Objectivity

Concepts formulated in artificial language like physics or mathematics may be more abstract and precise, but they’re not less pragmatic. Once again, the point of talking, measuring, or theorizing is to use the knowledge to achieve certain goals. Scientific concepts, too, are tools.

We think of a tool like a hammer or a screwdriver as interacting physically with the world in an intelligently designed way. The hammer is designed to pound a nail into wood to help build something useful like a house. Scientific methods themselves are tools designed to bypass the biases that flourish in our politics, religions, personalities, and so forth. We discovered that we tend to distort the facts to exploit each other socially, so with science we could test our assumptions to discount our useless guesses on more neutral grounds. Science, we assumed, would therefore eliminate such distortions, and supply us with objective knowledge.

But “objectivity” is still ironic. When we’re being objective, we’re suspending our belief rather than our disbelief (as in our dealings with fiction). With fiction, we pretend we care whereas deep down we don’t (because we know the story is false). Yet with objective nonfiction, we pretend we don’t care much about the outcome, whereas we do care because we assume the events are real and they could impact our life.

Thus, if the objective world seems cold, indifferent, and implacable, that’s only a projection of how we must depersonalize ourselves to arrive at this knowledge by following rigorous scientific or academic procedures. We follow the rules of some institution, setting aside our emotions in applying strict logic and skepticism, so the world that’s understood objectively seems to be following — heartlessly and amorally — what we construe to be “natural laws.”

Can we imagine a perfectly objective statement, one the nonhuman world would make about itself, as it were, or is that kind of objectivity or reality-based use of mind and language nonsensical? The philosopher Immanuel Kant would have called this possibility “noumenal” in that it would apply strictly to the things themselves rather than to how they seem to beings with a certain mentality. If every thought and use of language derives from some living species, and the rest of the world isn’t alive or governed by a living thing (such as a god), the notion of objective, noumenal knowledge seems indeed oxymoronic.

Presumably, the natural facts of how the universe evolves somehow take care of themselves, but in speaking or theorizing about these facts, we’re inevitably being only human or mammalian. Implicitly or explicitly, we’re using our personal biases or our scientific institutions to do something with the facts. Even a nonfictional statement’s meaningfulness is a human conceit. The objective facts aren’t concerned with our tools, meanings, or intentions.

We life-obsessed, power-hungry primates then relate to those facts like oil and water. Of course, we imagine that we bridge that divide with “intentionality,” with the semantic meaningfulness of our signs or symbols. But the alleged directedness of a symbol like “cat” towards the set of cats is as magical as any prehistoric superstition. That as-if meaningfulness is a figment of our imagination which nevertheless has a real-world, cultural impact on deluded fans of abstraction like us, just as an untreated mental illness can drive the victim to go on a shooting rampage. Delusions, dysfunctions, and insanities are real, too.

The Spectrum of Fictions

Notice also that the resort to more sophisticated abstractions in science and mathematics, which are supposedly more objective than ordinary, folk conceptions, has the unpleasant effect of rendering the latter fictive by comparison. If the real world is what scientists say it is, then it’s not how we intuitively conceive of it. Therefore, all intuitive conceptions are roughly as deceptive as fictional narratives.

I say “deceptive” and not just “erroneous” because we late-modernists know better. Whereas prehistoric people trusted in their intuitions and projected them onto the world at every turn, we know now that things aren’t as they seem at first glance. Really, as far as our species can tell, there are fermions and bosons and black holes and quantum uncertainty and spacetime and dark matter and natural selection of species and genetic manipulations and neural excitations and billions upon billions of stars.

Juxtaposed with the alienness of that outer wilderness, what kind of arrogance leads us to assume that our intuitive conceptions could ever be literally, straightforwardly true, that the essence of natural facts would ever just submit to our small-minded prejudices?

Again, we ignore all these doubts when we read the newspaper, chat about what we did at work, or listen to a scientific lecture, just as we ignore our doubts about fiction for the entertainment value. The difference is that in the case of nonfiction, most of us lack the sobering recognition because we haven’t thought so philosophically about the human enterprise, whereas the status of fiction is less hidden. Still, when we do reflect on the matter, it seems obvious that noumenal knowledge is impossible, that the nonliving world can’t speak for itself, so all speaking (and thinking and theorizing) on this planet must be fundamentally subjective, purposeful, and merely humanistic.

Thus, we deceive ourselves in our attachments both to fictions and to nonfictions. The difference between the two genres isn’t as profound as we typically assume because the use of symbols for the purpose of communicating what we take to be literal truth is based on a confusion or on unconscious self-deceit. The business of obtaining so-called objective knowledge puffs up our brand as a species. Supposedly, we’re the serious creatures, the people decoding the universe; we’re not just confused animals tricking themselves into making stuff up or expressing their instincts.

But the deepest truth that’s available to us is philosophical and therefore humiliating. That truth is anticlimactic, deconstructive, and subversive.

• Fictions are stories we tell to amuse us or to instruct by way of analogy.
• Mundane nonfictions, including scientific models, are stories we tell to empower us and to sustain the delusions that make us happy, that keep the peace, and that facilitate historic progress.
• Philosophical nonfictions are stories we tell to reckon with how absurd the world looks when we learn to see through religious fictions and the most comforting mundane nonfictions (the civil religions, social conventions, and received wisdom).

To know or to understand something is to falsify it in the way that’s typical for the human collective. Our broadest form of falsification, known euphemistically as “interpretation” is what we might as well call “humanization.” We can’t help but treat the world from our standpoint as the species we are, and that subjective standpoint, too, is understood only with partial representations that necessarily falsify. We treat the world as we do, but the world itself — both within us and without us — is untreated, unspoken, untheorized, ineffable.

Philosophy as the Ideal Story

What, then, is the nature of philosophical truth? Is there any nonfiction at all or are there just variations of storytelling? On a pragmatic view of truth, the latter is the case. The best that clever, social mammals like us can do to make sense of the world and to flourish or to cope with alienation is to tell stories with abstractions. We use simplified mental maps and the organizational device of linguistic labeling to spin a noetic web. Spiders live in their silken shelters, turtles dwell within their shells, and we withdraw, too, not just to the artificial refuges we physically build but to the mental landscapes we imagine which motivate all such constructions.

The difference between our ordinary thoughts which take social conventions for granted, and our philosophical doubts is that the latter are closer to what the ideal, more informed, and broad-minded observer would say. Truth is supposed to be a relation between symbols and facts, and symbols are necessarily used by living things that stand apart from the facts in the act of trying to understand them. In that case, even the most ideal representation of the facts would be a shading, a construal, an interpretation which is only arbitrarily (magically or “intentionally”) related to the facts unless that representation is also used to impact the world of facts.

The only real connection between symbols and facts is the former’s empowerment of the symbol-user at the latter’s expense. Only if your interpretation or theory enables you to do something systematically with the facts would you be mapping anything rather than just speaking gibberish or expressing sheer confusion or lunacy. There is an external world, and we relate to it by mapping, humanizing, and shortchanging it, the latter three being practically equivalent.

Straightforward fictions help us pass the time pleasurably; scientific maps empower us with technology; and philosophical maps inspire us to carry on despite science’s disenchantment of nature and its humiliation of organized religions. The ideal, enlightened, transhuman observer, then, would be busy re-engineering nature and consoling itself only with honourable fictions, namely with those that don’t wholly deceive the storyteller.