Philosophy of narrative
Principles
Stories are useful, not true.
Somewhere along the way we drifted off-course and found ourselves looking to stories for truth. Stories were never meant to store truth: they are meant to house possibility.
Stories are the language of change.
Change is constant — and sometimes contrived. We must first imagine change before we can produce it, and if it requires a collective effort we must communicate it. The construction of a story — beginning, middle, end — is the description of change, and story is the language we communicate it in.
Thought is in service to action.
Thought is not an end in and of itself. Thought — and stories, which are constructed in thought — are in service to action, or movement.
Literature is the most powerful technology ever invented.
Nothing humankind has achieved would have been possible without literature. Full credit: Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks and Storythinking.
References +
Influences
Bennett, Max. A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI and the Five Breakthroughs that Made Our Brains, 2022.
Cartwright, Nancy and Robin Le Poidevin. “Fables and Models” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1991.
Fernbach, Philip and Steven Sloman. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, 2017.
Fletcher, Angus. Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories, 2022.
Fletcher, Angus. Storythinking: the New Science of Narrative Intelligence, 2023.
Frigg, Roman. Models and Theories, 2023.
Granatella, Mariagrazia. “The Role of Mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics : A Fundamental Cognitive System” in Athens Institute for Education and Research Conference Paper Series, 2012.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2011.
Mäkelä, Maria and Hanna Meretoja. “Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom” in Poetics Today, June 2022.
Nersessian, Nancy. “Cognitive Science, Mental Models, and Thought Experiments”, in The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, 2017.
Rabins, Michael J. and C. Edwin Harris, Jr. “The Ethics of Modelling” in Control Engineering Practice, 1997.
Trench, W. F. “Mimesis in Aristotle’s Poetics” in Hermathena, 1933.